Creating music in 21st-century Hollywood, as a composer for an Emmy-winning cable series put it, “feels like an underground, a real pimp situation.” He talked about long hours, low pay, and working under a martinet “lead composer”—his boss—who delegated the actual work of writing and recording. “One time he had a meltdown because the director was coming to hear what he had come up with and he didn’t have anything to play him,” the composer went on, “because my computer had all the music on it and it was on the fritz!” He laughed—c’est la guerre. But the irritation and dismay were palpable. Another Hollywood composer summed up the widespread feeling among the men and women who do the day-to-day work of bending melody, harmony, and rhythm to match pictures on a movie or television screen: “There’s no contract, there’s no union. You’re completely beholden to working with someone who’s completely unethical or not.”
“The ultimate perquisite of a composer’s life,” said Henry Mancini, “is being able to make a living doing what you truly love to do: create music.” Mancini, who scored such films as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Pink Panther, and Victor/Victoria, winning four Oscars along the way, belongs to an all-time pantheon of film composers that includes Bernard Herrmann, John Williams, and, more recently, Hans Zimmer. We don’t talk about film composers much, but their work is essential to the cinematic experience. Try to imagine Psycho without Herrmann’s stabbing violins or Inception without Zimmer’s gut-rattling BRAAAM. As the director James Cameron once put it, “The score is the heart and soul of a film.”
Lately, in the streaming era, composers themselves are talking more and more about making a living. With an increasing share of their work moving to streaming, film composers are seeing their royalty earnings dwindle to “pennies on the dollar,” as more than three dozen of them put it last August in an open letter to ASCAP, BMI, and the other performance-royalty organizations, or PROs, that collect and distribute revenues to songwriters. “This raises serious concerns for the future financial outlook for all composers,” the letter declared.
Worse still, some streamers, most notably Netflix, are defaulting to work agreements that cut out royalties entirely. Such agreements are known as buyouts—work-for-hire deals that offer a lump payment and no back end—and they deprive the composer of any share in the ongoing success of a hit series or movie. In 2019, a group of award-winning composers—including Carter Burwell (who has written the score for nearly every Coen brothers movie), Joel Beckerman (CBS This Morning), John Powell (the Jason Bourne franchise), and Pinar Toprak (Captain Marvel)—launched Your Music, Your Future, an initiative aimed at raising awareness about buyouts. So far, nearly 19,000 people have signed on.
As these new financial pressures mount, they are exposing cracks in the system of film composing itself. There’s rising disenchantment with a system in which paying dues has come to resemble abasement, with aspiring composers working on the cheap without benefits, security, or the leverage of a composer’s union—if only one existed. (Once upon a time it did. The Composers and Lyricists Guild of America, founded in the 1950s, disbanded after a 1971 strike.)
Much of the resentment traces back to film composing’s biggest open secret: Many of its brightest stars do not, in fact, write the music they are celebrated and remunerated for. That work, or a good bit of it, is delegated to others. Sometimes those others are credited as “additional composers,” but often they are gig workers, effectively, who receive modest pay and no credit. Such shadow contributors are known as “ghost composers,” and the debate over how name-brand music directors get paid is haunted by their existence.
Last summer, Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit against Disney for opening Black Widow simultaneously in theaters and on its streaming platform—a decision she claimed cost her millions in box office royalties—revealed widespread anxiety about compensation in rapidly digitizing Hollywood. (The suit was settled last September; terms were not disclosed.) Likewise, composers have been nervous as they see venerable ways of doing things change; the new economics of streaming are threatening what is essentially a quasi-feudal system. Composers might not all be happy about that system, but they worry it will be replaced with something more dire.
“There’s a secretiveness to it all that’s strange,” one composer told me on condition of anonymity. “There’s the world everyone sees—and then you look under the hood.”
Many of the people contacted for this story—composers, lawyers, music supervisors—requested anonymity, fearful that they might jeopardize career opportunities by speaking openly about how their business works. The vibe is “The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.” Which is perhaps why a series of tweets the veteran composer Joe Kraemer (Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation) posted last year ricocheted throughout the composing community. “I can count the number of mainstream Hollywood composers that I KNOW write all their music themselves on one hand, John Williams being the most famous example,” Kraemer wrote. “Everyone else is a team leader, a figurehead for a team of composers.”
Williams has described his methodology, which is not all that different from the way Brahms would have done it: “While composing, I’m scribbling with a pen and throwing pages all over the room.” He makes music with the most traditional of tools: a Steinway and staff paper. His orchestrations are, as he has said, “articulated down to the last harp.” Williams is the image of the composer as solitary artist that most of us hold in our heads. He is an industry paragon. It’s even said that directors sometimes work around his music rather than the other way around.
The Williams approach, as Kraemer noted, is exceedingly rare these days. As the Hollywood composer I spoke with put it, “The name brands have had people write their music for 20-plus years.” A veteran Hollywood music supervisor described how it works. “The composers have six or seven projects on the go at any point,” he said, referring to lead composers working in television. “The leader sets the ‘tonal palette’ to get them going. And then the minions do the actual writing.” Let’s say you’re one of these minions—an additional composer or a studio assistant who is allowed to write—and you’re working on the score of a tentpole movie with a major film-music studio. You’re assigned a number of “cues”: bits of the score that you will compose to accompany specific scenes. The lead composer—whose name will go on the final product—has worked up the overall direction. Zimmer calls it “the sketch.” As Devo founder turned film composer Mark Mothersbaugh (Rugrats, The Lego Movie, and four Wes Anderson films) once described it, “You give them themes, you do a rough mock-up, and then those people fine-tune it all.” In some ways, it’s a system that resembles the assembly-line studios of contemporary artists such as Mark Kostabi and Jeff Koons.
As a fine-tuner, you write the actual music for your assigned cues and submit demos to the lead composer’s studio. Then comes a process of feedback and approval, followed by the actual recording—which could mean an orchestra. To put film scoring into culinary terms, the cues you’ve written go into a soup (the score) created by many fellow sous chefs (additional composers) working under an executive chef (the lead composer). Part of the idiosyncratic beauty of a Hollywood film score, as the Hollywood composer I spoke to phrased it, is its “cool collaborative aspect, a handed-down-the-line feel.” When the team clicks, there is a shared sense of energy and enterprise. For many young composers, it’s what draws them to Hollywood as opposed to Carnegie Hall.
If their contributions end up being credited (usually as “additional composer”) and the pay is decent, the participants can be quite happy. They can pay the rent. They might someday rise to the level of lead composer, as did John Powell, Henry Gregson-Williams, and Lorne Balfe, brilliant film scorers all, coming out of Zimmer’s behemoth Remote Control studio in Santa Monica. (The minions there are sometimes referred to as “Zimlings.”)
And then there are the ghost composers. As much as ghost composing is virtually unknown among the moviegoing public, it enjoys a long tradition as an entry-level rite of passage. One of the gods of film scoring, Ennio Morricone, was a ghost composer before earning his first credit on a feature in 1961. “I’ve been a ghost myself (on really big movies),” Zimmer has noted. Occasionally, the issue of ghost composing pops up in the media, as when, in 2014, the deaf Japanese composer Mamoru Samuragochi, a so-called “digital-age Beethoven,” was found to have employed a ghost composer for 18 years. It was regarded as a scandal.
On the message boards of VI Control, an online composer community, the conversation inevitably veers toward ghost composing. “When I saw the ‘composer’’s site with ‘his’ reel populated by the stuff I did 100% on it I wanted to puke out of shame for that person,” a poster called AudioLoco wrote last year. Another poster alluded to big-name composers accepting industry awards for music they didn’t write. Ghost and additional composers speak of moments of almost comical awkwardness, as when a director, reviewing the score, marvels at a beautiful passage and exclaims to the name-brand guy who did not, in fact, write it, “Oh, we’re so lucky to have you!” The awkwardness is compounded when the actual, unacknowledged composer is sitting in the room. It’s part of the frustration that ghost and additional composers feel: The world has no clue what they do. “You’re not just arranging,” the Hollywood composer said. “You’re writing.”
The issue of payment can cause frustration too. The composer on the Emmy Award–winning series told me that he got $150 up front per cue, the length of which can vary. He might spend as many as 10 hours on each one. “When you break it down, it’s like minimum wage,” he said. The fee for a cue can also fluctuate greatly depending on the project and the lead composer; one ghostwriter on big movies mentioned getting $1,500 per minute of music. When it comes to royalties, the veteran Hollywood-music person told me, the standard split with the lead composer is 50-50 per cue, even if the additional or ghost composer does all the work. (After all, the lead composer is putting a roof over everybody’s head.) In certain studios, if the lead composer does anything on the cue—suggests that the tambourine be lowered in the mix, for instance—the lead composer’s share can increase to 75 percent. And if the cue comes back from the studio, network, or streamer with a “note” (a requested change), then the lead composer can take 100 percent. It is thought that this motivates the minions to deliver flawless cues.
Two years ago, Nadia Wheaton, a composer and music-production coordinator, posted a soul-baring account on her website of her frustrations as an aspiring Hollywood film scorer. Despite some notable successes, she found herself making painful budget decisions, such as whether to spend money on gas or on food. She wrote about the specter of homelessness and about studio assistants being paid $12 an hour with no overtime. “It felt like some of our idols were just there to exploit new talent,” she wrote. Wheaton ultimately left Hollywood and turned her focus toward video game music.
“A lot of people have come out of that system feeling that they were abused and not wanting to do it anymore,” the composer Carter Burwell told me when I went to see him at his home studio on Long Island’s East End. “But then some people come out, hang up their own shingle, and become a successful film composer. So it’s a sink-or-swim situation.”
Burwell, who is 67, has a sagelike aura. He graduated from Harvard and was playing in downtown Manhattan post-punk bands when Joel and Ethan Coen asked him to score their 1984 film, Blood Simple. He has since been nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, and BAFTAs, and has won a Primetime Emmy for his work, which has ranged from the infernal yodels of Raising Arizona to the somber tones of Fargo. The day I visited, he was working in his studio, a low-key, go-it-alone operation far removed from, say, Zimmer’s Remote Control, which boasts an army of studio assistants and collaborators.
Burwell built this studio inside a modernist house drenched with sunlight and set amid a dramatic dunescape with forever views of the Atlantic. “I would not have been able to buy this house if it weren’t for the performance royalties for Twilight,” he told me. “It’s as simple as that.” He said that Your Music, Your Future was established to remind young composers that they need not give up their royalties. ASCAP president Paul Williams—the Grammy- and Oscar-winning songwriter who gave us The Muppet Movie’s eternally wistful anthem, “The Rainbow Connection”—emphasized the you-never-knowness of working as a composer. “The Love Boat—we thought it wasn’t going to last four weeks,” he told me, “and it went on for 11 years!… It is those hits that really help to pay the bills, and I am very happy I never gave up my ongoing royalties.”
The royalty system goes back to 1914, when the composer Victor Herbert, having sued a restaurant for using his music without permission, won a Supreme Court decision entitling him to ongoing payments. Herbert then went on to cofound the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers: ASCAP. “It was very highly structured, and it made a predictable business model,” Burwell said.
For most composers the rule of thumb is that the up-front fee paid by a studio or streamer goes into the production: It covers your time, any studio fees, and the musicians you hire. The back-end royalties, which you receive in exchange for forking over your copyright, represent your income—the steady drip that can continue for years. According to music-law experts Todd and Jeff Brabec, a composer can earn more than $200,000 over the course of five years from a typical film and considerably more from a box office hit.
“Half the income that the composer used to get comes from royalties,” the Hollywood composer told me, “and now streaming is throwing that way off-balance.” The open letter to the PROs said that streaming releases ultimately pay just 5 to 10 percent as much as comparably budgeted theatrical projects. “Netflix presents itself as a tech company, not an entertainment company,” Burwell said, echoing a broadly held sentiment. “They don’t feel obliged to follow the norms of the entertainment industry at all.”
According to Nielsen, which last year began reporting improved streaming-ratings numbers, American viewers opt for streaming offerings on television about a third of the time, a percentage that is growing exponentially. Last fall, when The New York Times asked Zimmer if he was worried about streaming cutting into his studio’s revenue, he responded tartly, “I stopped being worried about it because it’s already happened.”
Last October, Netflix sent three of its music executives to the Society of Composers and Lyricists’s annual meeting, held online. “We’re trying to find the best way to pay composers,” Amy Dunning, Netflix’s vice president of music creative and production, told the group. The executives suggested that the problem of distributing royalties lay with the PROs and said that composers who don’t want to take buyouts can simply reject that clause when negotiating their contracts—something many early-career composers are understandably hesitant to do. The buyout model was described as a work in progress that would evolve as Netflix continues to navigate the “innovation curve.” Such talk sounds odd coming from a company whose 2020 revenue reportedly clocked in at $24.9 billion; it’s well past the shaky start-up phase. According to a veteran Los Angeles music lawyer who specializes in digital, the streamers pay 1 percent of their total revenue to ASCAP, BMI, and other PROs. (Netflix declined to make their executives available for comment in this story.)
Composers understandably see their work as having contributed to the streamers’ remarkable success and believe they should benefit from it. When I talked to Kris Bowers, the 32-year-old Juilliard-trained jazz pianist and producer who scored the Netflix megahit Bridgerton, he said, “We’re not having a conversation about actors not getting back end. Our music is a representation of ourselves, even if it’s not actually us on that screen.”
With back-end royalties dwindling or cut out of the equation entirely, there’s a growing feeling of disgruntlement in the vast community of additional and ghost composers who fuel the Hollywood-music studios. Zimmer’s Remote Control studio is perhaps the most cited avatar of the hyper-collaborative system that has taken root in blockbuster-focused Hollywood as deadlines tighten, pressures mount, and digital editing forces scorers to aim at moving targets: Scenes can be tweaked ad infinitum before reaching “picture lock.” A website devoted to Zimmer credits the many collaborators who make up the Remote Control “team.” There are 66 composers, 74 cocomposers, 28 arrangers, 72 additional arrangers, and 23 credited with “additional music.” Sixteen more people in various capacities round out the list, bringing the total to 279. If Zimmer can’t get a cue right, one composer told me, “he has 60 people behind him willing to give it a shot.”
Zimmer is arguably Hollywood’s top film scorer, a visionary innovator who once played keyboards in the Buggles and who happens to be extremely intelligent and ultracharming. He is a regular presence on VI Control, where he is also the number one topic: Is he overrated? Is he a genius? Does he actually compose? “It’s almost like he’s a sound designer with notes,” one poster said. Zimmer, who is 64, is probably best known for that epic BRAAAM: an unforgettable sonic rumble that became so imitated that Zimmer himself professed to be tired of it. In 2013, after Zimmer did an interview with Vulture about Inception, a ghost composer named Mike Zarin came forward to claim that he was, in fact, the author of BRAAAM, venting his frustration to IndieWire: “Seeing someone on the inside, who knows exactly how everything happened, outright lying, that bothered me.” (Zimmer declined to speak for this story.)
Zimmer is sometimes asked to address the issue of authorship. “I make them partners in the project,” he said of his team last fall, when Dune was released. “I try to give them credit.” For him, cinema is a communal experience and so is creating the music for it. “I try to be fair,” he has said, “but sometimes it’s just not possible”—there are complications involving the run time of end credits, the maddening bureaucracy of cue sheets. (One composer I spoke with said that the perception in the industry is that Zimmer is doing better with giving credit than he had been in the past.)
ASCAP award–winning composer Deborah Lurie, who wrote the luminous score of the 2010 film Dear John and has worked as an arranger with Katy Perry, confirmed that credit can be complicated. But for her, “collaboration is not the issue. I think that the issue is honesty, is secrets.” Gifted with perfect pitch and impeccable chops, Lurie began her career more than two decades ago, working with the ubiquitous Danny Elfman (Batman, Men in Black, Fifty Shades of Grey), whom she described as one of the good guys in the business, “hands on with his music”—that is, he works closely with his additional composers. (In the conversations I had, certain composers tended to come up in this “good guy” category, such as Mothersbaugh, who is generous and assiduous about sharing credit, and Powell, who is known for boosting assistants up the ladder.) She soon became one of the most successful women composers in Hollywood, a field that is, perhaps needless to say, dominated by men. (In 2020, the Grammy-nominated pianist and composer Nomi Abadi founded the Female Composer Safety League, an organization dedicated to the empowerment of women working in the industry. As one music executive told The Hollywood Reporter last year, “Sexual harassment in composing is pretty widespread.”)
When I spoke with Lurie, she referred to what she called “the paradigm,” meaning the golden image of what a Hollywood composer is. Lurie had always aspired to this ideal—Mancini, Williams, and their ilk—but found her old-school, go-it-alone ethos increasingly difficult to sustain in streaming-era Hollywood. “Here I was, a bleeding-heart, totally emotional artist who just thought about the movie 24/7,” she said. She didn’t want to be a “brand” or a figurehead or be told, as she was, to just “phone it in.” A couple of years ago, Lurie decided to take a breather from the business.
She argues that transparency is what’s needed, a Hollywood-music culture that can emerge from the shadows and be frank about what it is. “I’m not trying to turn back the clock,” Lurie insisted. “I’m trying to figure out how to make things proudly be what they are.” In such a world, star composers would be open about the fact that they are delegators, ghost composers would get credit, assistants wouldn’t feel hopeless, and everyone would be fairly compensated. More than three decades ago, Mancini noted, “With the new technology that keeps entering the media, film composers are constantly being placed in new learning situations.” There is, admittedly, a bit of plus ça change to it all. Yet Lurie articulated what many in the composing community say among themselves: “There was a business that I loved and I thought it was my life and now, as things changed—not so much.”
Even so, there’s hope that things will improve; happy endings, after all, are what Hollywood is about.
Some of the change will come from the inside. As Joe Kraemer vowed on Twitter last year, throwing a challenge to his fellow composers, “I promise not to hire an ‘assistant’ who is really a ghostwriter.” Zimmer has admitted, “I think we need to be fairer.” Speaking to the financial side, so disrupted by streaming, the Hollywood composer told me, “In 10 years the market will figure out how this works.” Focusing on the artistic side, Lurie—who keeps getting calls to compose music for Hollywood and has been considering getting back into the game—struck a similar chord of optimism. “I want to believe that there’s still a demand for artists that live and breathe one project at a time, the kind of projects that require human musicians and things that essentially only humans can do,” she said. “If there’s still a love for that, if people want to leave a movie humming the theme, there has to be a business model that reemerges. And I have a vision that there will be a new interest in that ultrahuman, painstaking kind of music work again.”
Otherwise, as the Hollywood composer said, waiting in his home studio for the next gig, “How are composers going to survive?”
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