Before Kong Was King: Competing Methods in Hollywood Underscore

NATHAN PLATTE

doi:10.1017/S1752196314000224

Before Kong Was King: Competing Methods in Hollywood Underscore

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2014

NATHAN PLATTE

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Abstract

In many histories of American film music, Max Steiner's score for King Kong (1933) marks a new era by establishing norms in original, symphonic underscoring that would dominate Hollywood for decades. Kong's reign, however, eclipses diverse approaches to underscoring practiced at studios before and after its release. In this study, I compare the methods of Max Steiner at RKO and Nathaniel Finston at Paramount to show how both influenced film music implementation and discourse in the years leading up to Kong. Steeped in the practices of silent cinema, Finston championed collaborative scoring and the use of preexistent music in films like Fighting Caravans (1931). Steiner preferred to compose alone and placed music strategically to delineate narrative space in films, as in Symphony of Six Million (1932), a technique he adapted for mediating exotic encounters in island adventure films preceding Kong. Although press accounts and production materials show that Steiner and Finston's methods proved resilient in subsequent years, Kong's canonic status has marginalized Finston's role and threatens to misdirect appraisals of Steiner's other work. Considering Finston's practices at Paramount alongside Steiner's pre-Kong scores at RKO illuminates the limitations of using only Kong as a model, and shows that Finston's perspective on film scoring in the early 1930s provides a corrective balance for understanding film musicians’ work before and after Kong.

Type: Research Article
Information: Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 8 , Special Issue 3: Music and Sound in American Cinema, 1927–56 , August 2014 , pp. 311 - 337

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196314000224 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © The Society for American Music 2014

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Footnotes

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the AMS Midwest Chapter Meeting at Oakland University (Rochester, MI) in April 2011, and the Society for American Music Conference in Charlotte, NC in March 2012. I would like to thank Kathryn Kalinak, Sally Bick, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for the suggestions they offered at various stages of the project. I am especially grateful for the assistance and insights of Warren Sherk, manager of Special Collections at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Allison Robbins, who helpfully pointed me in the direction of Nathaniel Finston's personal papers at the University of Wyoming. I am also grateful for the prompt and resourceful aid provided by the staff of the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Last but not least, I owe a great debt to James Wierzbicki, with whom I discussed many of these ideas in their formative stages. Although I only appreciated the connection much later, I would also like to thank James for beginning his book, Film Music: A History, with an anecdote about the unsung Nathaniel Finston.

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