Who’s Right?

On a television show, the composer and the music editor make up the core of the music team. A very common practice is to pair a first time composer with a very experienced music editor. Once I got a couple of decades behind me, I have often been the one called in to help a first time film or television composer learn the specifics of the trade. But the very first time I worked with a first time composer was also the very first time I was ever the music editor on a primetime television show.

The composer hired to start the series was an accomplished rock musician from the eighties. A real talent and a real musician who had simply never scored television. What overwhelmed him, I think, was the sudden realization of how much music he was going to have to write, and how quickly. So he went out and bought a pile of equipment to help him write more efficiently. Somewhere in the music store he found a keyboard with a feature he could not wait to show me the next time I came by his studio.

The keyboard had a setting where you could press a single note and it would play an entire preprogrammed little song. Press a different note and it would play a different but similar song. So you could hold one note for a few seconds, move to another, and string these ditties together while only playing a few single notes on the keyboard. He was thrilled. He pressed one key and said, “See, I can write an entire piece of music with a single finger.” I did my best not to show how unimpressed I was.

It was my job to take the music he had turned in and play it for the producers for approval. That included Chris Nelson, the producer who had taken a real chance on me and convinced me to become a music editor. After the first few pieces, Chris turned to me and asked, “Is he just pressing start on some cheesy Casio keyboard demo? Because that’s what it sounds like.” That was, in fact, exactly what he was doing. I knew it was exactly what he was doing. And I had no idea what to say. I didn’t want to throw the composer under the bus. I also didn’t want to lie to my boss, the man who had given me this shot. Both telling him and not telling somehow felt dirty, like I was betraying someone who trusted me. So I said, “I’m not sure. Let me check” to buy myself a little time.

My entire career up to that point had been spent on the composer’s side, as a composer’s assistant. Everything I understood about what composers had a right to expect from a good music editor was about protecting the composer. Making his life easier. Making sure he was represented well to the producers. When you saw the sausage getting made, you didn’t go and tell everyone about it. But this time I hadn’t been hired by the composer. I had been hired by the producer. Chris had watched me work, knew I understood how composers think, and brought me in to guide this one. So I genuinely didn’t know where my loyalty was supposed to sit. I was tearing myself up trying to honor my instinctive loyalty to the composer and my very real loyalty to Chris, who was giving me a chance and trusting me with it.

When the meeting ended, I got in my car to drive back to the composer’s studio, and I called my father to lay out the dilemma. This wasn’t a music problem. It wasn’t a storytelling problem. It was a political problem. It was the first time I found myself deep in the treacherous minefield of Hollywood politics.

My father asked me one question. “Who’s right?”

“The producer is right,” I said.

“Then why are you calling me? You know what to do.”

I had spent the whole drive trying to game out how everyone would react. I was so afraid of upsetting either side that I had frozen. And my father’s question was so simple that it undid all of it.

I want to be careful here, because “Who’s right” wasn’t a moral question, no one was doing anything unethical. It was just who I thought was correct. I was paralyzed, trapped in some elaborate loyalty test trying to work out whose “side” I was on, a question I honestly didn’t know how to answer. This new narrative replaced that with a simple question that I could answer easily.

The political read was not a fantasy. It was just as real as the simpler question my dad had asked. There genuinely was a political way to play that moment but that narrative was a dead end for me. I didn’t have a course forward that I was comfortable with. I’m not making some cliché claim that doing the right thing gets you the best outcome. At that moment, I honestly couldn’t even have told you what the best outcome would be. What my father handed me was not the truest story. It wasn’t some moralistic high ground. It was just the easiest narrative for me to live inside. It was the one narrative that lit up a clear path with nothing left to agonize over. I suddenly knew what to do. My heart stopped racing, not because I had found the “right” answer, but because I had finally found a simple question I could actually answer.

When I got to the composer’s studio, he was eager to hear how it had gone. I told him exactly what had happened. I told him I had no interest in throwing him under the bus or making waves, but that I wasn’t going to lie to the producer for him. It was his first television show too, and I could see him getting upset as I talked. Fortunately for both of us, it wasn’t the first time I had been in a room where the music got rejected. So I said, “Either way, they don’t like this direction. So let’s not answer them with words. Let’s answer with better music. If I walk in next week with a completely new direction, no one is going to be asking about the one we threw away.”

I wish this story ended with me showing up the following week with his brilliant new idea, the producers falling in love with it, and the composer going on to a long and celebrated television career. That is not what happened. What happened is that he came to realize being a television composer is a very different job from being a rock star, and a new composer was brought in to replace him.

I thought that the second time around they would bring in some grizzled veteran who had done it a thousand times, just to be safe. They didn’t, which, of course, shows how little I actually understood about all of the politics at play at the time. They brought in a young guy who had scored a few independent films and one short lived nine episode series on the Sci-Fi Channel. His name was Brian Tyler. This was his first primetime network drama too. And he absolutely crushed it. He went on to score TV shows like Transformers Prime, Sleepy Hollow, and Yellowstone, and to become one of the highest grossing box office composers in the world, scoring the entire Fast and Furious franchise, Iron Man 3, Avengers: Age of Ultron along with a long list of Hollywood blockbusters.

Everything I agonized over in that car got decided without me. The politics I was so frightened of navigating sorted themselves out. The safe political move I assumed the producers would make, they didn’t make. All of it happened way above my pay grade.

A story isn’t a list of facts. It isn’t a simple statement of what happened. It’s a narrative with a perspective. I was telling myself a true story about a bunch of facts that were true. There was a delicate political game at play. But that story wasn’t helpful to me. I was telling myself a fraught and complicated political story where I didn’t know whose side I was supposed to be on. But I already knew whose side I was on in the musical story.

When we are stuck and can’t decide how to move forward we have a tendency to focus on the facts that we think are important. Sometimes that can be completely debilitating. Who I thought was right musically was actually not very important. My opinion as the music editor was almost irrelevant. But those were the facts that were useful helping me craft a narrative where I knew what to do next. And because it was based on the questions that I knew I could answer, that let me sleep that night on what has often been called the best pillow, a clear conscience.