Q: How did you meet Charles and Ray?

Bernstein: Okay, you know, I would look . . . if I were you I'd look up this date, because I'm never sure of it. If I'm not mistaken, I think it was as early as 1954. And, uh, Charles and Ray had developed a relationship with Billy Wilder for whom they were doing some work on The Spirit of St. Louis, I believe was the film, and Billy Wilder had a relationship with Franz Waxman, a very exalted composer of his time. And, um, Ray and Charles had at that time made a film called Communications Primer I believe, although I don't know for sure, I think it was one of their first such ventures, and they had apparently asked Waxman about this or Billy Wilder and or Waxman about a composer and I would have imagined that Waxman would have considered himself not a candidate for this kind of a thing. And, um, some . . . Waxman very kindly recommended me, even though I, we did not know each other that well, but I think he was casting about for some young person, you know, who might do a thing like that. And I was terribly thrilled because actually I had heard of Ray and Charles, being a New Yorker, and so remembered the plywood chair so well and, you know, Ray and Charles were sort of hero figures to me, so I was all thrilled, needless to say. It was really funny. And I went up to . . . I met them at the house in Pacific Palisades, went up to the house and met them up there. And it's funny, looking back at it now, for those of us who knew Charles and remember that Charles had a very special way of speaking. He . . . . Charles, always gave you the feeling he was thinking. He was very slow speaking and my first impression . . . I don't know. I expected, you know, someone who was going to be very glib and brilliant, instant, you know, instant brilliance. And Charles, of course, was not like that all: Charles was a very quiet, thoughtful person. And so that was sort of, I was sort of stunned, you know surprised, by that, whereas later on, and it didn't take very long to realize that hidden in this, you know, kind of what appeared to be slow and halting speech, was real genius. So that was 1954 and the first film was Communications Primer.

Q: And how did that process work?

Bernstein: Well, you know, at that time, at that time . . . there are a couple of interesting things. In the first place, for the first few years that we worked together, starting from that point on, everything took place at Pacific Palisades. Everything. I never saw the Washington place until many years later. But originally all the work was done up there. And if you remember--I am racing ahead a bit--but if you remember the House . . . the divertissement I wrote for the House film, the studio, that is the other building on the property, was perceived as a workshop. And it was there that, I believe, they did everything. The process originally, I think . . . that the . . . . My memory of Communications Primer was that the film was sort of put together by the time I saw it. And I don't think that we had at that time yet worked out anything more sophisticated than listening to Ray and Charles talk about it, which usually was pretty inspiring. And as I remember, in that case, I did discuss with them the fact that, well, I didn't have to discuss it with them, we had a small budget so it had to be a small orchestra, It was a quintet, I think, it was a woodwind quintet, as I remember. And that was agreeable, and I just wrote it. We just decided where shall we have music--there; we shall have music--here. We decided on some place . . . and we decided on five or six places. And, as I said, that was 19 . . . I think it was '54, the beginning of a very, very, long relationship. Later on we developed more sophisticated ways of working.

Q: What are you thinking of when you say that-- to yourself?

Bernstein: You mean when I say "more sophisticated ways"?

Q: Yes.

Bernstein: Okay. Fairly early on . . . fairly early on Ray and Charles--and I daresay Ray had a very big hand in this because there was a lot of color in it and things with color I always associated with Ray--they developed what . . . well, let me put it this way. In feature films there's a . . . we have a person called a music editor, and they, in those days, would make logs of the film itself describing in words--accurate to a tenth of a second--every . . . all the events that transpired in the film. As a composer you would use this when you were writing the music. Now, Ray and Charles developed a charting system, which was visual, because they were great visual people . . . I mean, visual aids . . . and they were charts which, in effect, visually showed you the shape of the film. So that they'd measure off a segment so that . . . it was kind of like a ruler, you know, so many inches per . . . for so many seconds and so on and so forth. And using various colored pencils they started to make segments, a segment you know, and there'd be a, let's say, it could be a red line over the entire segment indicating that this was, so to speak, of a piece. And if, within the piece, there were subplots, so to speak, a different colored pencil would show you the subplots within the big segment. Eventually we got . . . I suppose, we reached the height of some sort of crude sophistication, I don't know, the words don't go together, but crude by what's available today mechanically. We did Toccata for Toy Trains because at that point . . . . Toccata for Toy Trains was done in a, in a very, very different way. I think it's the only film--no, it is one of maybe three or four films, come to think of it, we did that way, in which the picture, the film, the images were cut back to music. So that in the . . . in Toccata for Toy Trains, uh, we had a scenario. It was like a, you know, a little script of events, an events script. They didn't indicate times . . . they didn't indicate the length of the times, but they did indicate what the events were. For instance, people coming to the train--they were going to meet people coming on the train; the train sets off; the train is going through the countryside; the train . . . a lot of cars are racing the train; they come to a crossing. And so on and so forth, right through. And, and this was given to me as a scenario and we talked about it, you see we, there was a great deal of verbal communication, tremendous amount of verbal communication. And as I say, in those early days, it was always at the house at Pacific Palisades, in this . . . in the alcove with the sort of . . . upholstered alcove. And we'd all sit in there, and there was a curious admixture of business and, kind of, social intercourse going on, so it never seemed, the work never seemed sort of clinical, you know, because it was always part of social interaction somehow. In Toccata for Toy Trains we decided, sort of in a very rough way, about how many movements there are, so to speak. And without pinning anything down, approximate lengths and an overall length. And then I went away and wrote this piece, the "Toccata for Toy Trains," just as a piece of music. There was no film--the film didn't exist. I was shown the toys, you know, all the toys, the trains so, you know, so they felt familiar to me. They were very familiar to me. I remember Charles sort of, Charles and Ray sort of gleefully telling me that this entire thing was to be shot on a four-foot table, which it was, by the way. When the film came finally, when the music came . . . that's what we did, yeah: we went to the office with the music track. And Charles . . . . We colored--we were back to the colored pencils. And Charles said--right on the tracks, you know, to put different colored pencils . . . strong beats, weak beats, strong beats, weak beats. By strong beat, you know, where does something happen that attracts our attention, you know, rhythmically. And so we colored, we colored the actual music tape itself, the actual tape with colored pencils on the frames where the strong beats and the weak beats were . . . and . . . so that Charles . . . when . . . and Ray . . . when all the people that were working on the film--I think Parke Meek was involved in that--when they, when they looked at the film they could cut the film knowing that an image was going to hit on a either a strong or a weak beat. Not that they did that a lot. I mean it's not . . . I mean the film, Toccata for Toy Trains, is hardly what we would call in our trade, "Mickey Mouse." in the sense, you know, of . . . you know, dotting every i rhythmically. But that kind of thing was very important to Ray and Charles and that was the one time we really dotted every i on the tape. That was the only time we did anything as complicated or as specific as that. But I think, if I remember correctly, Tops was another fairly improvisatory cutting of a . . . of a film with music, sort of at the same time. I think there was some improvisation involved there. On one occasion . . . let me think. Powers of Ten, now, which by the way I am told is installed as sort of permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian. Did you know that?

Q: I [had heard] that. [I didn't know they were still doing that.] I've never seen it . . . seen it there.

Bernstein: I've never seen it [there] either, but apparently there is some particular area devoted to this Powers of Ten situa . . .

Q: 'Cause a number of people have said, Oh, you know we saw it. And you know, it was going on while Ray was alive, so I assume it's fine. And it's one of the few places, I think, that is still showing it in 35. That's one of the things I want to check out. [The film version of Powers of Ten is no longer shown at the Smithsonian. However, the Eames Office recently gave the Smithsonian a brand new copy of the tape Powers of Ten for their Powers of Ten(tm) Theater.]
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Bernstein: Now, we made two versions of that. There were two versions of that: one was sort of a sketch for the other. And I think there was one version--and I don't know whether it exists any more--there was one version which was . . . which what I did was totally improvisatory. I improvised music on a very crude, early electronic organ, right to the film. And it was an improvisatory, rather than a sit and-write-the-notes-down, process. That was the only time we did that.

Q: How did that turn out? Were you guys satisfied with it?

Bernstein: I . . . . Actually, my memory of it is a bit vague. But I . . . I think, my memory of it is, actually that Ray and Charles were considerably more pleased with it than I was. And, uh . . . oh, I mean there was, there were no dramas over it. But I do think that that had a lot to do with our redoing it, eventually, because I wanted to do more with the music.

Q: Do you have a preference between the two versions of Powers of Ten?

Bernstein: Ah, well, obviously I like the second one. [with laughter]

[Interview ©1996 Lucia Eames Demetrios dba Eames Office (created for Eames Video Oral History Project)]

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DAa-21 Int Bernstein (F 6/2/96)
©1996 Lucia Dewey Eames dba Eames Office