"Danny Elfman...hm, sounds familiar. Is that a guy who makes music for Tim Burton?" This is the first association everyone haves when you say Daniel Robert Elfman's name. Danny is a movie composer whose works are inseparable from pop culture. How did this master of creepy and lush music become what he is? Let's see what the spotlight shows.
Danny spent his boy years religiously watching Alfred Hitchcock's movies and absorbing the scores composed by his very close associate, Bernard Herrmann, who is most famous for his compositions for Psycho and Orson Wells' Citizen Kane. He spent his schooldays isolated, but in the company of his best friend Tim Burton. Both of them had a penchant for bizarre, unusual and twisted. As it usually happens with big art figures, they didn't fit in the society. After contributing to ska band in high school, he decided to have adventure in Africa where he fetched malaria. Following his return to the States, Elfman made a decision to move to Paris, an epicenter of art and culture, where he joined an avantgarde collective Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. His brother Richard Elfman positioned him as a music director and his only function was to make sure that they don't do anything contemporary, rather reinterpretation of sections by Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and Josephine Baker - socially marginalized but damn good musicians. When Richard dived into music waters in 1976, Danny became a lead vocal in the collective. The same year he wrote his first movie score for Forbidden Zone where he also played a small part of Satan. In 1978, he shortened the name of the collective to Oingo Boingo. The collective turned the page and started experimenting with punk and 70s rock. His brother denounced him for never listening to that type of music, only Bach and Stravinsky. However, this Spotlight is not about Oingo Boingo, it is about Elfman as a movie composer so let's fast forward a little bit.
The end of crazy eighties marked a commercial success of Burton's obscure movies Bubimir and Batman, and Elfman will collaborate with him on almost everything besides Ed Wood and Sweeney Todd. You probably didn't know this, but Elfman is responsible for the intro music for The Simpsons and he only needed two days to compose it. The music changed throughout the first three seasons of the show until it became what we are used to today.
In a period of less than a decade, he composed soundtracks for more than 24 movies, including Mission:Impossible by Brian De Palma, Edward Scissorhands and Mars Attack by his best friend, Men in Black by Barry Sonnernfeld and Good Will Hunting by Gus Van Sant. Wow, those are some major works of art, right? In Nightmare Before Christmas, Elman also gave his voice to the main character Jack Skellington. In the last ten years, his name is on the credits for Milk, Chicago, Alice in Wonderland, and even Emmy Award winning show Desperate Housewives.
What? You are still reading this? You are not on Spotify, streaming Danny Elfman's soundtracks? Come on!
