St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 61

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH Aug. 10, 1983 3D He Gave The Silemts A Sound Of Music Organist Loo Erwin wroto tho first original music for old Gloria Swanson film r- ooooooooooo fJl "oooooooooo gooQqoooo By Claudia Gellman Mink It was the dead of winter, January 1982, when Lee Erwin arrived at the Fox Theatre. He was there in the dark and cold to peruse its famous pipe organ, which was in the midst of restoration. Erwin greeted the dirty pipes and dusty relays as if they were old, cherished friends he hadn't seen for years.

He navigated high, treacherous passageways and climbed ladders of questionable strength in anticipation of seeing more. Then he sat down to play the organ. As he and the console rose out of the abyss like some mythical, creature coming forth from the sea, strains from Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" rushed from everywhere into the cavernous auditorium. The music stopped. Erwin turned and smiled, seemingly unaware of the overwhelming impression he had made.

"I've talked with Mary Strauss about her plans for the theater, and she's considering showing silent movies here occasionally," he said. "Maybe I'll have the opportunity to return some day to accompany one." Erwin will have his chance. Next Monday night, when the fully-restored "mighty Wurlitzer" emerges from the catacombs to accompany the 1929 silent film "Queen Kelly," he'll be at the keyboard. Erwin, a professional organist and composer for 59 of his 71 years, will be here from New York to play the music he created for the picture that starred Gloria Swanson. Erwin wrote the "Queen Kelly" score, not in 1929 but in 1968, for the film's U.S.

premiere. The movie was shown in South America in 1931, but was not seen in Europe until 1956. "Queen Kelly" had a number of problems that kept it from North American audiences for nearly 40 years. Talkies had arrived two years earlier, and fickle American audiences quickly had spurned the old technology. Expenditures had hit the $800,000 mark in those days $200,000 was a hefty budget and production had shut down before the movie had been satisfactorily completed.

And, at the time, "Queen Kelly" was considered too sexually explicit to show here. It's a tale of a demented queen, fond of wearing only a huge, white Persian cat. Other characters are her betrothed but unfaithful prince and the innocent convent girl (Gloria Swanson) he seduces. In cables Swanson sent to financial backer Joseph Kennedy during the filming of "Queen Kelly," she called writer-director Erich von Siroheim "a madman" and declared the movie's original ending which will be shown Monday evening "rank, sordid and ugly." By the 1960s, however, American audiences had grown considerably more sophisticated, and a revival of interest in silent films was afoot. Smaller, "alternative" theaters everywhere were beginning to show the old classics.

After four decades, Gloria Swanson thought the time had come to show "Queen Kelly" in the United States. In 1967, she and the New York chapter of the American Theatre Organ Society began planning the movie's premiere. Enter Lee Erwin. Few of the old scores for silent films had survived decades of disinterest and those that had survived "were simply orchestral arrangements calling for some Mozart here, some thunder or sleigh bells there," Erwin said. "They were full of hearts and flowers and all the musical cliches of the 20s that today's audiences laugh at." The American theatre Organ Society commissioned Erwin to compose a score for the film music that Erwin says was the first completely original score ever written for a silent film.

The choice made sense. Erwin was an accomplished musician and composer, and he played the instrument that was perfected for silent films the theater organ. The theater organ is a special breed of enormous pipe organ that was used in nearly every movie house across the country in the late teens and 1920s. Through an intricate network of electrical relays and switches, it can play an entire orchestral work by blending and manipulating musical ooooooo Revisited," "Exerpts from D.W. Griffith" and "The Music of Scott Joplin." Erwin has devised his own system for scoring films.

"I take home a 16mm print and live with it for a week or two, watching it over and over again," he said. "Then I go through it, carefully timing each scene, and I make out a cue sheet. I put the music together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle," Erwin said. Erwin's goal is to create scores that are universal in appeal and that will enhance and complement the movies, not detract from them. He doesn't use any of the old gimmicks in his compositions like simulating the sound of scratching pencils when someone is writing or using "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" when a cigarette is lighted.

"Those gimmicks take away what is almost a fourth dimension the imagination," he said. Erwin's reputation has taken him around the world over the last decade playing both concerts of popular music and for silent film festivals, and the assignments can be tough. He once played the organ for nine straight hours through three consecutive showings of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" at the D.W. Griffith Theatre in New York.

"That's the longest I ever sat at the organ," he said. "It was a bit tiring." Although Erwin often accompanies films on the electronic organ (that's what he plays in his third-floor Manhattan apartment), his travels have given him the opportunity to play just about every description of theater organ, from the largest one installed in a theater Radio City Music Hall to those he considers among the finest ones built for the Atlanta Fox and for the New York Paramount. (The latter is now in Wichita, Kan.) When Erwin isn't composing, recording or traveling, he plays regularly at New York's Carnegie Hall Cinema, a small theater downstairs from the famed concert hall. During the summer, it's a weekend job, but for the rest of the year it's seven days a week. When the cinema isn't running silent films, Erwin plays for 15 minutes or so before and between films, and for special events.

Erwin considers playing for live audiences "the most interesting phase of my career in many ways, because dealing with the public firsthand is much better than through another medium." He especially enjoys having people come up to talk with him after shows. Erwin says he's delighted with the response of his audiences to the theater organ. "The movie-going public is so young. They can't believe the sound the first time they hear it," he said. "The theater organ is so powerful, like a lot of the music they hear, but it's all coming from one instrument.

They think it's some sort of crazy synthesizer, which, of course, in a way it is." Claudia Gellman Mink Is a freelance writer. Theatre. directions over my earphones to take up the slack. Some of the things I heard weren't printable," Erwin quipped. But by the early '60s, Erwin sensed the obvious: The days of live music on radio and television were drawing to a close.

Although his work on the Godfrey show had left him little time for other interests, he had become active in in fact he was a charter member of the American Theatre Organ Society, a group founded in the 1950s to salvage, restore and play the instrument that had thrilled him as a young man. When the "Queen Kelly" project came along in 1967, Erwin was ready for it. Since "Queen Kelly," Erwin has written scores for dozens of silent films from the works of D.W. Griffith and Alfred Hitchcock to Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin. Erwin spent about six years composing scores for all of Buster Keaton's movies, and over the last year he has written music for about a dozen Douglas Fairbank Sr.

films. Erwin says the Keaton films, with his scores, are now showing all over the world, even in China. The Fairbanks films will be shown in England this fall by the British Broadcasting Company. Erwin's music has been published and recorded. His records, primarily on the Angel label, include "Excerpts from Silent Films," "Moon River LUXURY Huckleberry With A Credit Card Lee Erwin at the console of the tones to imitate just about every instrument and sound effect.

The theater organ was a practical alternative to employing an orchestra where either space or funds or both were at a premium. The American premiere of "Queen Kelly" with Erwin playing the score he had written and Swanson making a guest appearance inspired the two artists to take off on a six-month tour of the eastern United States with a retrospective of Swanson's career. During that time, Erwin and Swanson developed a friendship that lasted until Swanson's death on April 4 of this year, just one month before her 84th birthday. Composing the score for "Queen Kelly" gave Erwin's career a new direction and at the same time brought him full circle back to his earliest love the theater organ. peso what John McEnroe has done for body English.) At first I thought his buying was linked to a deprived childhood.

I figured he had never had a toy for Christmas and amused himself by racing cockroaches or smelling oilcloth. Wrong. He came from a family who celebrated Christmas from October to February. Then I figured he was going through his mid-life crisis substituting back-scratchers and outhouses with funny sayings on them for back street indiscretions. But he wasn't that slow.

If you think he sentences all this stuff to a drawer when he gets home, never to be seen again, you are in error. All of it occupies a space on anything that can accommodate it. It's a living monument to his vulnerability and to dust I wouldn't tell him this for the world, but he has something I envy and would love to have a bit of the child in him that can still find joy in a ceramic armadillo with a smile on his and a mound of jelly beans in his back. SECOND organ built for New York's Valencia At the age of 12, Erwin was already playing the organ in a small theater in his native Huntsville, Ala. Two years later, in 1926, he began his classical organ studies at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.

As the silent film era sang its swan song, he took a part-time job playing in a theater on the outskirts of Cincinnati. Some of his fellow classical music students turned up their noses at the theater organ. Many musicians resented being replaced by a one-man band, and they called the instrument vulgar, gimmicky and dull-sounding. But Erwin loved both the movies and popular music, and he respected the giant instrument that tied them together. Even after the talkies took over the silver screen, he continued playing the theater organ during intermissions at Cincinnati theaters.

After graduating from the conservatory, Erwin spent two years studying organ and composition in Paris where he also worked as an assistant organist at the American Cathedral. When he returned to the United States, Erwin moved into the nation's most popular entertainment medium live radio. By the late '30s he had his own music show on WLW, the NBC affiliate in Cincinnati. The program, called "Moon River," was a dreamy mix of poetry, "pretty" pipe organ music and romantic songs performed by rising stars such as Doris Day and Rosemary Clooney. In 1944, Erwin joined the music staff of CBS where he shifted from the unwieldly pipe organ to the compact electronic organ.

His main assignment at CBS for 22 years was the "Arthur Godfrey Show," which Erwin found pretty hectic. "It wasn't at all unusual for Godfrey to give us a title' and tell us to come up with a song for tomorrow's show," he said. At one time or another, Erwin also played for most of the soap operas on CBS and NBC radio and television. He recalls that "the organ was often used as a buffer on soap operas to cover up goofs. Actors might mess up the timing of a show by adding or skipping lines.

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