Composer David Bradley Answers Questions RE Live Music for Silent Cinema @ Zeitgeist

Dear Moviegoers,

The following interview, conducted as a Q&A, picks at the brain of composer David Bradley, who has been providing live scoring for famous silent film classics for the past many months at Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge in New Orleans.

A curious encyclopedia of inspired talent and movie music references, David gives profundity with passionate play. I loved this correspondence, and I hope y'all will too.

Catch David Bradley's live silent film musical performances, Sundays at Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge:

Do you pre-write your scores before a performance, or are they conjured live?

DB: Both.

Organists and pianists who performed solo to silent films during the silent era improvised. They were never reading sheet music. Unless they were playing with an orchestra. Silent movie pianists and organists must be able to improvise. Fats Waller got his start as a silent movie organist. Gaylord Carter is the most well known silent organist and he outlived all of them. He quit law school because he was making too much money playing theatre organ to movies. 

Carter was close friends with Harold Lloyd. His improvised organ scores are featured in many DVD and Blu Ray releases including Safety Last! and Phantom of the Opera. For Phantom, Carter would include excerpts from the opera 'Faust' in his improvisation, which is appropriate because 'Faust' is the only opera which is featured in the Phantom movie.

Carl Davis was the greatest modern composer for silents who sadly passed away in 2023. For Phantom, Davis composed a brilliant full symphonic score with pipe organ which draws heavily from the opera 'Faust.' On the Phantom DVD, they include both the improvised organ score by Gaylord Carter and the full symphonic score with pipe organ by Carl Davis. The greatest, most recent silent score by far is Christopher Young’s Nosferatu from 2024. Hopefully on the likely upcoming 4K UHD release of Nosferatu (1922) they will include Young’s beautiful score. It’s even better than anything by Carl Davis. I think it’s a masterpiece. The greatest score to a silent of all time. And it came out in 2024. So people who say all new music is terrible are not digging deep enough. Nosferatu (2024) by Young is a brilliant piece of classical music.

Christopher Young may be the greatest composer alive. Young is really the king of horror. He composed Hellraiser 1 & 2, Nightmare On Elm Street 2, Tales From The Hood, Drag Me To Hell, Sinister, he’s composed almost a hundred horror movies. He makes a bad horror movie good. He’s the king of horror.

You would think it’s Danny Elfman with the Burton movies but really I don’t consider Tim Burton a horror director. He’s a fantasy director. Danny Elfman’s only horror score and Tim Burton’s only true horror movie is Sleepy Hollow. I studied the Sleepy Hollow score for Phantom. It’s great. Not as good as Nosferatu by Christopher Young. I was going to transcribe Young’s 2024 score note-for-note for solo piano and do Nosferatu with Zetigeist but Broadside outdoor movie theatre in mid city does Nosferatu every year with a great improv band so we didn’t want to compete with them around Halloween cause it’s a small town.

Phantom is just as good as Nosferatu but the editing is a hot mess because the original 1925 version was almost an hour longer than the rereleased 90 minute “talkie” version from 1929. Whoever edited the 1929 version of Phantom should have been banned from editing another movie. The editing is terrible. Whereas the editing on Nosferatu is perfect.

But the better performance goes to LON CHANEY hands down, I mean, come on. Lon Chaney single handedly invented monster makeup and really invented the universal monster franchise. His Phantom is not only the greatest horror performance, but one of the greatest, if not THE greatest pantomime acting performance of all time. But I love Young’s score so much, I’m so obsessed with it, that I just wanted to make a note for note transcription that turns the pipe organ/orchestra score into a solo piano score.

What made you want to do silent film live music accompaniments?

DB: Hearing Young’s Nosferatu for the first time, and syncing it with the 1922 film made me fall in love with silent films and classical music in a deeper way than I ever imagined. And it made me excited to hear such a masterpiece that came out only a couple years ago.

There are musical masters that are still with us. Young is a master. He’s up there with John Williams and Nino Rota. John William’s score for 1979 Dracula is too beautiful and not scary. Drag Me To Hell is a masterpiece of a horror score by Young. John Williams would not know what to do with Drag Me To Hell or Evil Dead 2. John Williams music is too beautiful for horror. Horror must have dissonance and surprise. John Williams is classically derivative, predictable, sometimes sickly sweet & precious, but still… beautiful. Not a right fit for horror.

I think Christopher Young would have made the Harry Potter films more scary. I’m SURE John Williams digs Hellraiser, dude. Hellraiser is an opera. But watch a “BAD” horror movie with a Christopher Young score. He did like a hundred. If the movie doesn’t scare you, at least Young’s score will. I told myself, I must be a part of this. I must try to be as good as Young’s Nosferatu. TRY. Hellraiser 1 & 2, Freddy 2, Drag Me To Hell, Nosferatu are masterpieces of anxiety, fright and dread.

Young scores are peak horror. Freddy 2 now has more of a cult following and much of that is due to Christopher Young’s brilliant orchestral score. Which was a departure from the all synthesizer score from the first Freddy by Charles Bernstein which is also brilliant. Bernstein also wrote the score for Cujo (1983). Freddy 1 and Halloween are the most iconic synthesizer scores I think. Also any early John Carpenter score. The Fog (1980) is brilliant. John Carpenter is a genius. Just as a composer alone he’s a genius in minimalism. The only director who compares to Carpenter in composing his own scores to his own films is Charlie Chaplin. That’s the only other director who did that really.

Let me know if I’m wrong.

Favorite three silent movies and why

DB: Peter Pan (1924), Phantom of the Opera (1925), Sunrise (1927)
I’ve played piano to all three and the performances hit people on an emotional level.

Peter Pan was basically produced by the author himself JM Barrie. Pan features the original Nana the Dog costume from the original London stage play. It’s the closest thing to seeing the original London production of Peter Pan. It’s by far the most faithful and thrilling adaptation of Peter Pan. I grew up with Hook (1992) so I steal from the John Williams Hook score for 1924 Pan.

Hook is great. BUT I’m not a fan of Rufio the character. The actor who played Rufio however did a fine job. “RU FEE OOOOOOOH THAT IS SO DANGEROUS!” I know every line. The ugly CGI in the 2003 Peter Pan was terrible. That one does not age well.

I think early 2000s fantasy movies suffered from just ripping off terrible excessive CGI from Lord Of The Rings, Harry Potter, and Pirates of the Caribbean movies. My favorite fantasy movie by far is Return To Oz (1985) I think Walt Disney, Salvador Dali, and L Frank Baum would have loved it. It’s the greatest character design (true to the books) a brilliant performance by Fairuza Balk, and the greatest terrifying special effects with claymation masters Will Vinton studios of the California Raisins fame. Check out The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985) the only Will Venton claymation feature.

Return to Oz though is the greatest introduction to horror for kids. The claymation special effects are better than any of the Rings, Potter or Caribbean fantasy movies. Practical effects take forever but they’re just always better than CGI.

I love all the Aardman British clay stuff. Shawn The Sheep. Brilliant silent British comedy for preschoolers. Basically Charlie Chaplin & Keaton for preschoolers. Shawn The Sheep is Chaplin. Everything Aardman does is good. If it’s going to take forever making something with clay, then it has to be good. I think that’s why everything they do is good.

Favorite three film composers and why

DB: The king of horror Mr Pinhead himself: Christopher Young, Carl Davis, the king of modern silent scores, Gaylord Carter, the greatest silent movie organist.

I studied these three obsessively for Phantom and they just became my top 3 just from working on Phantom. A lot of people have never seen the original Phantom and I wanted to do something scary and operatic. People don’t understand that writing a 90 minute piece for orchestra to a 90 minute silent movie is insanely hard, because it’s continuous music. I don’t know how Davis did it. He was really great at time management. Some of his silent scores were 2 1/2 hours of continuous classical music for orchestra. Insane. John Williams didn’t do that. Carl Davis did. He passed away in 2023 but in 2024 he came back from the dead thanks to Pinhead Christopher Young’s Nosferatu, the king of horror.

Is it easier to do one genre of silent cinema over another?

DB: No.

What do you like most about performing at Zeitgeist in New Orleans, or performing for New Orleans cinephiles in general?

DB: New Orleans is a loving and forgiving audience, so it’s good to try something weird in New Orleans before you try to break into other cities.

It’s hard to be weird nowadays. I decided to speak Lon Chaney’s lines during Phantom and I thought everyone would think I’m insane and leave. It worked, but I don’t think I’m gonna do that again. I don’t think I would do that at a show in Los Angeles or New York. But in New Orleans I feel free to do something weird and theatrical because New Orleans is a town of insane weirdos.

I want to focus on the piano though. Not be a voice actor and try to play the opera 'Faust' at the same time.

Harold Lloyd vs Buster Keaton vs Charlie Chaplin: Who wins in a slapstick fight?

DB: Fatty Arbuckle.

Sincerely Yours in Moviegoing,

⚜️🍿

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