The Phonographic Memory of Marc Shaiman

Marc Shaiman is a renowned composer, lyricist, arranger, and music producer known for his prolific work across film, television, and theater. In this episode, Alec and Marc discuss his career, as well as his new memoir, Never Mind The Happy. Shaiman's work in film includes “When Harry Met Sally”, “Sister Act”, “City Slickers”, “A Few Good Men”, “Sleepless in Seattle”, “The American President”, and the first “South Park” movie. Shaiman has written and arranged music for countless artists such as Harry Connick Jr., Mariah Carey, Billy Crystal, and Bette Midler. Shaiman earned widespread acclaim for co-writing the hit Broadway musical “Hairspray” alongside his co-lyricist Scott Wittman. Shaiman and Wittman went on to co-create musicals “Catch Me If You Can”, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, “Some Like It Hot”, and “Smash”. Marc Shaiman has been nominated for seven Academy Awards, two BAFTA awards, and has won a Tony, two Emmys, and two Grammys. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:41Alec Baldwin?

  This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio.

• 1:57Alec Baldwin?

  It is a skill that feels like a gift from the divine to write an unforgettable song, one that gets stuck in your head or makes you want to dance, is a talent that should be exalted. Now imagine it's your life's work for 50 years.

• 2:27Alec Baldwin?

  That's "You Can't Stop the Beat", from the 2002 Broadway cast recording of "Hairspray", written by my guest today, composer and lyricist Mark Shaiman.

• 2:41Alec Baldwin?

  Shaiman is a two-time Emmy, Grammy, and BAFTA winner, as well as a Tony Award recipient. He's also been nominated for seven Academy Awards. His five-decade career began at just 16 years of age. His work as a composer, lyricist, arranger, and producer spans film, television, and theater. In addition to the hit musical "Hairspray", Shaiman is known for co-creating the musicals "Catch Me If You Can", "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", and "Some Like It Hot". His film scores include smash hits like "The Addams Family", "City Slickers", "Sister Act", "Sleepless in Seattle", and the first "South Park" movie. Perhaps most famously,

• 3:26Alec Baldwin?

  Mark Shaiman was also a frequent collaborator with the late Rob Reiner. For Reiner, he penned the scores of classic films like "When Harry Met Sally", "Misery", "A Few Good Men", "The American President", and many others. As someone who set out to work in the theater, I was curious how Shaiman and Reiner's paths crossed between New York and LA.

• 3:50Speaker 05

  I was lucky enough to work up at "Saturday Night Live", freelance, for, you know, after the original cast left and Paul Shaffer was, you know, the funny Jewish guy at the piano. And then he wasn't there for a few years, and so I started getting that call to go up there. And so I met Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Christopher Guest. I worked there previous years, but I worked there a lot that year that they came on that one year, and really hit it off with them all. And Billy Crystal asked me to go out on the road with him. And I would play for his act, even though it was a comic act. He would sing as Sammy Davis Jr., he would sing as other things. And also, I would underscore some of his monologues.

• 4:32Speaker 05

  And so Rob Reiner came to see that and kinda heard me underscoring, even though there's comedic, but he heard that. And then Billy was making When Harry Met Sally and asked Rob, what are you gonna do for the music? And Rob said, I need a guy who knows like every song from the American songbook. And Billy was like, have I got a guy for you. Cause Billy is a real mensch like that. And I went and met Rob and I brought him my Rogers and Hart songbook because after reading the script, I knew that the song, if they asked me, I could write a book, ends with the lyric, then the world discovers as my book ends, how to make two lovers from friends, which seemed perfect for When Harry Met Sally.

• 5:17Speaker 05

  And Rob said, you're hired. And that began a lifelong relationship.

• 5:24Alec Baldwin?

  What did you like about, what did you prefer about working with him?

• 5:27Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I often think about the fact that once you've established that you have the talent to do that, and I know that Rob would say the same thing, it's about the hang. I'm sure you understand and know that, you know? Once everyone knows that, you know, you got the job and you can do what you can do, it's the pleasure of hanging out with the people that you're with. And so, you know, Rob and I was always a great hang. When he would come over to listen to what I was doing, we would sit in kibbutz for hours and then eventually get around to the music. That's what I mostly think of when I think of him is just the time together laughing.

• 6:06Alec Baldwin?

  When you were producing music with him and scoring music for his films, was a lot of that work done at Warner's? Is that where Castle Rock had their equipment, so to speak? Where would you go?

• 6:15Speaker 05

  We went everywhere. You know, that's about just whatever recording studio is available at the time you're recording. When Harry Met Sally was the first one and that one I was just arranging and orchestrating existing music, helping to choose the records or the songs and deciding whether to use the recordings or create our own. At the same time, Rob's friend Bobby Columbia, who used to be the drummer for Blood, Sweat and Tears, Bobby Columbia had become an executive at CBS, Columbia Records. And he said, I've got this kid named Harry Connick Jr. who, who sounds like he'd be perfect for this. So I was sent up to Seattle where Harry was doing a gig with just this trio. This is before he was.

• 6:57Alec Baldwin?

  Blew up.

• 6:58Speaker 05

  You know, because the movie is what made that happen. And I think we both kind of felt this probably the same way, like, well, who's this guy? Who needs, like, we both thought, I'm the young whippersnapper at the piano and figuring it out. And the first session, when he came down to LA with his trio, I had worked it out with Rob, you know, what song, what tempo, what key it had to be in because it had to segue into another record or whatever. And that first meeting, that first session, Harry was a little like, don't tell me how to, you know, play or what to play. I'm not just coloring in the lines that you've drawn. I mean, it was just a subtext all day.

• 7:38Alec Baldwin?

  This is not Arthur Murray.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So I remember driving home and I think I even called Rob and said, gee, Mondays with the orchestra, it's, we can't have that kind of like, big discussions about everything with an orchestra sitting there. You know, the clock, you just can't have that. I was petrified of what was gonna happen. Meanwhile, it was, that song, I Could Write a Book, was gonna be the first thing we were gonna record. They had filmed the scene, this is where Harry and Sally are at a New Year's Eve celebration, and they start dancing and they kind of realize there's a chemistry there. And so I had said, this is a perfect spot for that song and let's make sure that lyric

• 8:21Speaker 05

  about make two lovers of friends falls right at that perfect moment. And, and I had orchestrated and I had, you know, adored Nelson Riddle's orchestrations for Frank Sinatra. You know, that was my. You know, the king. And so I created a Frank Sinatra, Nelson Riddle style orchestration for this one moment. And then Harry was behind me. I can't see him. But I I count in the orchestra. And he starts singing and whatever had happened the previous Friday between us. Dissipated immediately. We were just fell in love. It was like. He was singing like Frank Sinatra and I was doing my best Nelson Riddle. And it was just. And it was just.

• 9:05Alec Baldwin?

  Together again for the first time.

• 9:07Speaker 05

  So so then we made that record. So then Bobby Columbia said. Hey, guys, a lot of the records that we used in the movie, thank God for us. They couldn't get the rights to use for soundtrack. It's actually mostly Ella Fitzgerald, whoever negotiated her deals back in the day. Made it very different about using in a movie and using it on a record. So he said. How about you guys just make your own record, kind of inspired by the music from When Harry Met Sally? Here's a couple of dollars. So Harry and I went off to New York and we recorded the album, which. Blew up.

• 9:42Alec Baldwin?

  All Sinatra standards.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  No, it was just all the songs that were in the movie, some of them Sinatra, one of them, the biggest one being It Had To Be You. And that made Harry Connick Jr. A star. And it made both of us suddenly the co producers of a of a platinum plus album. And it just. That's how it all started. And at the same time. I was working with Bette Midler. So that was Beaches and the same kind of thing happened there, an album where I was arranging and orchestrating. Blew up and I suddenly had these two albums and these two movies and then. Bam, it just started one after another.

• 10:19Alec Baldwin?

  I'm shooting Ghost of Mississippi with Rob and Rob was, you know, the actress director. As people mention all the time, and I'll never forget, he says to me, "You mind if I put the camera in the back of the church? I'm gonna put the camera in the courtroom, I'm gonna put it way in the back, shoot a big master of all you guys doing, and you got your big speech. Would you do it one more time for me? Maybe do it twice, it was like a three-page or two-and-a-page monologue, court summation. And I'm gonna put the camera in the back, and you mind if we do that? Do like maybe two takes? I go, "Yeah, that sounds great." And he goes, "You see what I mean? You got a great piece of dialogue, a speech, you do it over and over again, 'cause you know, your next movie, you're gonna say one line the whole day, it's gonna be, 'Get down, everybody get down.'" So when you have real dialogue, you know, you really like it.

• 11:01Alec Baldwin?

  And then he says to, Diane Ladd comes to work one day, I'll never forget this, and we worshiped her, worshiped, she was a doll. And she sits down, she goes, "Now, Rob, why would I give him the gun? It makes no sense, Rob. I wouldn't just hand him the raffle, this piece of evidence that her husband had hidden, he was the judge in the case." So Rob sits down with Diane Ladd on a piece of furniture on the set, and talks to her for like forty-five minutes. He turns to her and he goes, "Would you give me a minute and I leave?" And he talks to her, and when it's over, he walks, he goes, "We're gonna have to do this sooner or later. Might as well get it out of the way sooner." You know what I mean? Like, she had to go through her process, regardless of how many gears she was grinding to a halt. And he was, I was amazed how patient he was. I didn't expect him to be that patient, 'cause he seemed so intense.

• 11:45Speaker 05

  That actually surprises me, 'cause the one thing I would never say that he was patient.

• 11:50Alec Baldwin?

  He was with Diane Ladd, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 05

  When you say he was an actor's director, so, I know when he would come over to me, Misery was the next movie, and now I was really composing my own music. And he would always like what he heard, but sometimes he would say, "Can it go here and there?", and he would sing a note, and it took a few movies for me to finally say to him, "Rob, if you're gonna keep singing, giving me line readings with notes, I'm gonna send you to a voice teacher to at least expand your range."

• 12:18Alec Baldwin?

  Now, when you did Misery, was I told you had some doubts about that? 'Cause it was kind of a dark movie, or?

• 12:23Speaker 05

  Well, so I had done When Harry Met Sally, I had learned how music gets put in a movie, and then Rob came to see a HBO special that Billy Crystal made, where I got to score like five minutes of it in a real cinematic fashion. And he called me the next morning and said, "Hey buddy, you wanna do my next movie? It's a psychological thriller called Misery." And I, of course I wanna say yes, I wasn't gonna say no, but I was petrified. I was like, "Why would he?" I don't know that I can do that, especially a psychological thriller. I mean, I would understand if someone thought, hey, you want to do a burlesque, some movie about vaudeville?

• 12:59Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 12:59Speaker 05

  I would get. And I had just gotten with an agent and even my agent, Richard, said to Rob, Rob, are you sure he can do this? What makes you think he can do this? And Rob said, Richard, talent is talent. And that became Richard, my agent's mantra. On all these other jobs, he started getting me where no one had heard anything I'd ever written. He would just give them the Rob Reiner, talent is talent. So I have Rob to thank for that. And then I also have Rob to thank for that. I used to smoke dope constantly.

• 13:30Alec Baldwin?

  I reference this, I read this, yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 05

  So I, you know, I smoked dope before a movie, before a meal, before sex. I think I even-

• 13:39Alec Baldwin?

  Did you smoke dope while you were composing?

• 13:41Speaker 05

  Always.

• 13:42Alec Baldwin?

  So what were the, what were you the most stoned on? What's the music that is unearthed from your deepest level of stoneness?

• 13:48Speaker 05

  Nothing, nothing that's on in a movie because I just thought I had to get stoned before I could write or arrange music. And by the second or third day of trying to write misery, and I was so petrified anyway, I couldn't wake up at 10:00 in the morning and take a few toques. I'd want to go to sleep by noon and I had to work until 10:00 at night. I mean, writing a movie score is a big, long job. So I thought, let me try one day. Can I write music without getting stoned? And I did. And then it was another day and another. And then I thought, let me get through the end of the week. And so Rob Reiner helped me quit pot, cold turkey.

• 14:27Alec Baldwin?

  God. Did you find that when you were stoned sometimes, and then you would come back and revisit it and you weren't stoned, was the music not what it might have been?

• 14:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it was Hemingway, maybe, who said, write drunk and edit sober.

• 14:42Alec Baldwin?

  Talk about Bette Midler because you have collaborations with people where they're doing shows. One thing was like Billy Crystal does his farewell on Leno. And you came in, that's on Leno's show.

• 14:54Speaker 05

  Both of Leno's farewells. There were many of them.

• 14:58Alec Baldwin?

  You're going on there. What are you doing to help contribute to the show?

• 15:01Speaker 05

  Writing the special lyrics. I mean, that's something I've done with Billy. You know, we did all those Oscar medleys, the other medleys. So for both those Leno appearances, yeah, the second one, the one that was the actual farewell, that was, we wrote for Carol Burnett and Oprah and Kim Kardashian. And it was quite a group of people who sang "So Long Farewell." We wrote new lyrics, the Sound of Music.

• 15:23Alec Baldwin?

  "Avita's ain't goodbye."

• 15:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. So that's just something Billy and I do all the, constantly. You know, the greatest one was with Bette Midler on the final Johnny Carson. I mean, that's a memory of mine that will...

• 15:37Alec Baldwin?

  You never thought you'd cry from Johnny Carson.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:40Alec Baldwin?

  But you do.

• 15:41Speaker 05

  You know, that was...

• 15:41Alec Baldwin?

  What was the song again?

• 15:42Speaker 05

  "One For My Baby, One For The Road." And that's the kind of other kind of gig that I do a lot, or did a lot, where Bette called and said, "They asked me to be the last guest. What song should I sing?" And I remember I was taking a shower after getting off the phone with her and I thought, "It's quarter to three, there's no one in the place." It's about, you're singing to a bartender who's been listening to you talk and talk, and he just wants to go home. And I thought, "It's perfect."

• 16:07Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, you're in a bar with him.

• 16:08Speaker 05

  You know, so I called Bette dripping wet, "I've got it, the perfect song." And she always says, "Yeah, what else you got?" But she came over and we worked it out.

• 16:18Speaker 06

  (singing) Quarter to three, there's no one in the place except you and me. So, set 'em up, Joe. Got a little story I think you should know.

• 16:37Speaker 05

  And we did change a few of the lyrics at the end, which was rather ballsy of us, to change Johnny Mercer lyrics. But we addressed Johnny Carson specifically in the last verse. "For all of the years, for the laughs, for the tears, for the class that you showed."

• 16:51Speaker 06

  (singing) For the tears, for the class that you showed.

• 17:02Speaker 06

  Make it one for my baby And one more for the road That long, long road

• 17:35Speaker 05

  And, you know, that moment was just, I'll never, ever forget it.

• 17:39Alec Baldwin?

  The most compelling thing about that, because I've seen that many, many times, is how attentive he is. Meaning, here's a guy who had the attention span, sometimes, not every show, if he liked you and you were an old pal, and he's right there with Dean Martin and those kinds of icons, but at other times, he had the attention span of a teetsy fly.

• 17:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:56Alec Baldwin?

  And you'd sit there, and when he's locked into her eyes, he doesn't move, he thinks he's, you'd think he's Cary Grant with Ingle Bergman.

• 18:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, and that the director kinda knew that that was maybe gonna happen because that angle that had never been used before, over Bette's shoulder of Carson watching and listening, it's so, you're just mesmerized by it, and exactly what you're saying, he's so locked in.

• 18:23Alec Baldwin?

  Composer and lyricist Mark Shaiman. If you enjoy conversations with composers whose careers began at a young age, check out my episode with Paul Williams.

• 18:35Speaker 07

  Most pop songwriters, writing for a film or a stage play, wanna have a hit. Of course, we all wanna have a hit, but because I come from an acting background, I wanna advance the story and I wanna expose something of the inner life of the character I'm writing for. That was the whole point with Kerman, is that he has a spiritual life, you know? I was never a kid that was in a gang that had a treehouse. When I walked on the set of The Muppet Show, I was with a gang that had a treehouse.

• 19:05Alec Baldwin?

  To hear more of my conversation with Paul Williams, go to here'sthething.org. After the break, Mark Shaiman talks about how he wound up living in Bette Midler's guest room at age seventeen.

• 19:27Speaker 08

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• 21:03Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. At only 16 years old, Mark Shaiman decided to leave school and begin working in the New York theater scene. This bold decision paid off handsomely. It wasn't long before Mark found himself playing at downtown theaters and eventually the stages of Saturday Night Live. Incredibly, before he'd even turned 18, Shaiman would find himself arranging music for his childhood idol. I wanted to know how he managed to kickstart his career at such a tender age.

• 21:40Speaker 05

  I went to New York with a friend.

• 21:42Alec Baldwin?

  Whitman.

• 21:43Speaker 05

  I met, well, I met Scott Whitman there, which was amazing because I just went to see a musical that was at the Actors Playhouse that used to be there in Sheridan Square called Boy Meets Boy. It was like a 1930s style musical, but about two guys. This is back in like nineteen, oh, exactly, 1976. And we ran into some other friends from New Jersey on the street and we said, oh, let's, let's step into this little place here and catch up. And there was a piano in there. And so I was 16 and full of, you know, vim and vigor. And I went to the piano and started playing and just like out of an old black and white movie, the bartender was sweeping up and he stopped and he went, hey, kid, you're good. Wait right here. And he went down to the duplex, two, two doors down, where there was a comedy group that

• 22:27Speaker 05

  was looking for a funnier piano player than who they had. And they came in and said, can you play together wherever we go from Gypsy? And I played it like it is in the musical. They said, no, no, no, can you play cheesy? I said, oh, you mean like at a bar mitzvah, like where how Steven Eadie would do it on, on Merv Griffin? Wherever we go, yeah. And they were like, that's it, you're hired. And John Michelle, the guy who was sweeping up behind the bar, he also hired me that very afternoon to play at Marie's Crisis. Because of, I guess, the way I played piano, no one could imagine that I was only 16 years old.

• 23:01Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, so your talent at the piano obscured your age, you believe?

• 23:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, if you see pictures of me, I, I look.

• 23:06Alec Baldwin?

  You have a very boyish face when you were younger, can imagine you were very boyish.

• 23:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know, I was like, I was a pimple on two legs.

• 23:12Alec Baldwin?

  I remember that.

• 23:14Speaker 05

  So, but, but John Michelle hired me, never asked me how old I was. And when I turned 17 that October, I lied and said, it's my birthday and I'm turning 18. So I have been here, well, I shouldn't have been. They didn't seem to care, but I was lying. I was only turning 17. That New Year's Eve, they lowered me from the balcony in a diaper. And that's when I thought, maybe it's time to move on to another job. But that was my start at Marie's Crisis.

• 23:43Alec Baldwin?

  Where'd you go from there?

• 23:45Speaker 05

  I was very lucky, my fairy tale, I just adored Bette Midler. When Boogie Woogie Beagle Boy came on the radio when I was like 13 and a kid in New Jersey, I became obsessed with her, truly obsessed, like posters on the wall, lifting money from my father's wallet and cutting school to go see her in concert on Broadway. And then Scott Whitman, who was the director of that comedy act, I started staying at his apartment to play for the act on the weekends and he lived across the hall from one of Bette Midler's backup singers, who were called the Harleets. And they wanted to do their own act and there I was across the hall and I was at 17 at that point and I would work for free and I was right there and I knew the kind of harmonies they wanted from my

• 24:30Speaker 05

  Were they Bar Mitzvah tunes? No. No, no, no, no, these are, you know, Legit. Yeah, legit. So I became their musical director, then Bette said, girls, I'm doing another tour. I'll let you do a whole opening act if you come back and also be my backup singers. So I was flown to LA and after having the fantasy of running down an aisle to Bette Midler when I went to see her in concert saying, oh, Miss Midler, I knew every note of every song of every arrangement on every record, please let me play for you. I was flown to LA, I taught Bette's band the Harleets material and then in walks Bette Midler. And I'm just like a year and a half away from having her posters on the wall and I'm watching her rehearse and she calls out a song to the band that she wants to do from

• 25:13Speaker 05

  her third album, but the music isn't on their music stands and one of the Harleets goes over to Bette and says, You see him back there? You know it. And Bette called out. It's your Eve Harrington moment. Yeah, very. And Bette said, do you know how to play no gesturing? And I got to actually walk up to a stage and say, oh, Miss Midler, I know every note of every song of every arrangement on every record, please let me play for you. So my dream came true, I hadn't even turned 18. And you're 17. Yeah. And, and because she's a frugal gal, she said, you know, stick around, I could use you. But instead of putting me in a hotel, she put me in her guest room of her rented house that she was staying at. So I, and it wasn't even In LA. It wasn't even a guest house in the backyard. It was in LA. LA. I was living. With Bette Midler, suddenly.

• 25:56Alec Baldwin?

  From Marie's Crisis to Bette Midler's House.

• 25:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, which was, it was sort of the same material. Only the right person was singing it.

• 26:05Alec Baldwin?

  Better piano.

• 26:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:06Alec Baldwin?

  What is it about her that you sustain? I mean, obviously, people have these batteries, these linkages between people. And you have this profound relationship with her. What was it about her that you admired the most?

• 26:18Speaker 05

  Well, I just love the way she performs, as anyone who's seen her does, you know, the fact that she does it all, that she can be so funny and then heartbreaking, and how she can turn it on a dime, how she can change. You know, she's just so in command, and she's just the greatest.

• 26:33Alec Baldwin?

  She's the opposite of what my friend said about Chicago. My friend said that a famous actress came in, she did the piece to play Roxy in Chicago. And in that cycle of famous dames that came and did the show. And he said she walks in and she leaves and everyone's sitting there quietly, and he turns to me and goes, "She can't sing, she can't dance, she can't act, she's a star."

• 26:55Speaker 05

  Well, that can also be the taste.

• 26:56Alec Baldwin?

  Which is Bette is the opposite, she can sing and dance and act.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  Yes. And we have a similar personality of, you know, like the title of my book, Never Mind the Happy. That comes from my mother. One New Year's Day, my sister said, "Ma, I want to be the first to wish you a happy and healthy New Year." And my mother defined Judaism when she said, "Never mind the happy."

• 27:19Speaker 05

  So that's in my blood.

• 27:20Alec Baldwin?

  Where'd you grow up again? New Jersey?

• 27:22Speaker 05

  In New Jersey, right over there, yeah.

• 27:23Alec Baldwin?

  Over there.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  And so Bette had had a similar, her father was a similar kind of personality. And we both just clicked that way and argue that way, you know, we have a real brother sister relationship.

• 27:37Alec Baldwin?

  Was she right a lot of the time? Or did she rely on you being right most of the time?

• 27:42Speaker 05

  Well, you know, her taste is impeccable, but like I mentioned before, she's always saying, "What else you got?" She's just always second guessing.

• 27:50Alec Baldwin?

  Was it cover every bass?

• 27:51Speaker 05

  Even that night on the Johnny Carson Show on the final one, she asked the band that afternoon, "What's his favorite song?" And they all said, "Here's That Rainy Day." And I could see the wheels turning in her. Even then, she was still doubting, "Should we really do One For My Baby?" And sure enough, during that show, she starts singing Here's That Rainy Day with him. And he starts singing it with her, which is a whole other magical moment. But I'm backstage at the piano, because the next thing that's going to happen is One For My Baby. And I have a little TV monitor on the piano. And I'm having this schizoid conversation in my head. On the one hand, I'm going, this is magical. What's happening between Bet and Johnny Carson? And he's singing and he's singing in key. And gee, the piano player's not coming in. Should I join in?

• 28:36Speaker 05

  The other part of my brain is going, she's spoiling. She's, she's, she knows if this moment happens, she's not gonna have to sing the song that we've planned. And I'm like, no, no, no. I should, I should start banging away to make it stop or something. But I'm a piano player. I'm an accompanist. I start joining. And so I actually got to play for Johnny Carson singing Here's That Rainy Day. And luckily, they came back and said, okay, we're still set for the, the big ballad at the end. So it all worked out. But she's always wondering what else? What else could it be?

• 29:05Alec Baldwin?

  You did a, um, a piece with Peter Allen.

• 29:07Speaker 05

  I did.

• 29:08Alec Baldwin?

  We're gonna describe that in a minute. But when I was in college in GW in Washington for the first three years, one woman I dated, she really got me turned on to a lot of, you know, what would be pretty eclectic music for somebody from my background, who was smoking pot in the woods in Massapeak, where I listened to Beatles, Zeppelin Stones, Who? You know, British Invasion, rock and roller in my mind, you know, Clapton and Moody Blues and so forth. And she turned me on to Peter Allen. And it's live with Peter Allen and, you know, Boss Skaggs, I never heard of, and they turned me on him, who I love. And it always takes me back to Hugh Jackman. And here he's playing Wolverine and all the psychotic craziness and murderers and superheroes. And he plays Peter Allen on Broadway.

• 29:48Speaker 05

  I know, that was amazing, yeah.

• 29:50Alec Baldwin?

  It is breathtaking. Describe how you met him and how you were involved with him.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  There was another out of the blue. I got a phone call from Craig Zaden and Neil Maron. Craig was gonna direct. Peter Allen was doing a Broadway concert called Up in One. That was basically just a concert, but it had a kind of a story of his life through line. And they had heard about me from this cabaret in Bet Midler Circuit. And they called me out of the blue and said, you wanna be Peter Allen's musical director for the show? I was, that time I was ripe old age of 19. And I was, that was my first Broadway gig. You mentioned Clapton, I have to tell you, I have a Rob Reiner-Clapton story. On the movie, uh, The Story of Us, with Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer. Rob said, "Buddy, Eric Clapton's gonna write songs for the movie,

• 30:37Speaker 05

  but would you still help figure out how to turn those songs into The Underscore?" And I was like, "Work with Clapton? Okay." Let me get back to you. Yeah. But, and when you talked about Rob patience and impatience, at the one scoring session, there's a song that Clapton wrote that runs throughout the movie, but in the end titles, we did like a full record version of it. So it had a string section, and I had this one evocative chord, a very film noir chord over, it seemed to fit the lyric and the chord that Clapton had written, but it's what we call a C minor major seventh chord. But the first time the strings played it, it sounded a little odd, because it can be almost discordant, let's say. Yes. And Rob immediately went, "What's that?" And you know, he starts rubbing that one side of his head,

• 31:21Speaker 05

  that would, only like one side of his head would sweat. And he's, "What's that?" I said, "Just let me work with the strings for just a minute to get the right balance." And so I'm working for a few, ten, twenty seconds more, and he's still like, "Wha- what is that? What is that?" And I'm still trying to get my nice chord in there. And then Eric Clapton strolled out to the conductor's stand and said, "You know, Mark, those chords at measure thirty-three, I think they're just too attractive." And I, I had to tell the whole orchestra, I said, "I was just told to get over it in the nicest way I've ever possibly heard, the classiest way to, they're just too attractive." Which was true, it just meant it's calling your ear too much to it. You're calling too much attention to... Leaping out. Yeah.

• 32:05Speaker 05

  Also, they, him and Rob came over the house once to work out stuff. I was also working on the South Park movie at the same time, and I had- We need to talk about that. Intense deadlines, I had to finish what I was writing to get to the orchestrator. And Rob and Eric Clapton were just talking, and then Eric Clapton had his guitar out, and I could tell he kinda wanted to just sit and jam with me. But I had to get back to the South Park and I actually sure I had to tell them both to get lost. So my big chance to jam with Eric Clapton, I threw it away.

• 32:34Alec Baldwin?

  Well, speaking of the South Park movie, which I am the president of the Film Actors Guild, FAG, the big banner of my business.

• 32:42Speaker 05

  That was the second movie, yes.

• 32:43Alec Baldwin?

  Was that, oh, that was the Team America?

• 32:46Speaker 05

  Team America, which I got, I got fired from.

• 32:49Alec Baldwin?

  You got fired? Why?

• 32:50Speaker 05

  Well, I'd done South Park, Bigger, Longer and Uncut and had the greatest, greatest experience of my life.

• 32:55Alec Baldwin?

  With the two of them?

• 32:56Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, and Trey Parker is, you know, that word that gets thrown around, genius. He is a genius. He can do it all, right? Music, lyrics, act, write, direct. And, and extremely open and collaborative. So when I got involved through Scott Rudin on the, on the South Park movie, I suddenly was the oldest, like professor who would help Trey realize his vision of, of creating a musical. And that, that was just the greatest year maybe I'd ever had in the movies. And then, so they, you know, a few years later, he asked me to do Team America. And in the same way, never came to listen to what I was writing, didn't even come to the orchestra sessions, he just trusted me.

• 33:40Speaker 05

  But then, like on the third, after the third day of the recording sessions, the music editor played him what I'd been recording. And he didn't like it. He said, oh, it's too specific to the movie. I want it to be like wallpaper music that they, he felt like those Top Gun movies just kinda got library music. You know, that was just being like rolled out, that wasn't specific enough to the movie.

• 34:02Alec Baldwin?

  Elevator music.

• 34:04Speaker 05

  And so I had the most awkward meeting of my life where they were like, we want you to start over, but we need it in 10 days. Do you think you can do it? And not only did I not know if I could physically do it, but emotionally, I was so devastated. I was like, if I have to, okay, but I think I'd rather just crawl into a hole and maybe get someone else to do it. Which they did, which didn't make Scott Rudin very happy. And Scott Rudin put me under house arrest and I had to stay in my house in LA for a full month until other people came in, wrote new music, it got recorded in case I was needed to be brought back in.

• 34:43Alec Baldwin?

  In case they came to their senses.

• 34:44Speaker 05

  I wasn't allowed to leave Los Angeles and I was prisoner of the house. So that was devastating, having just had the most glorious experience with them. But that's, you know, show business, that's the, a lot of the point of my book.

• 34:57Alec Baldwin?

  It's like Chinatown.

• 34:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:59Alec Baldwin?

  Like Chinatown. What they give them, they say, you got 10 days.

• 35:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:02Alec Baldwin?

  And he writes the score, one of the most legendary scores in 10 days.

• 35:03Speaker 05

  Only I was the guy who they fired and got, I wasn't Jerry Goldsmith.

• 35:08Alec Baldwin?

  You weren't Jerry Goldsmith.

• 35:09Speaker 05

  Who wrote it in 10 days. Yeah, maybe I could have pulled it off, but I was just devastated and I just didn't think I could.

• 35:16Alec Baldwin?

  Let me ask you this, because I made films and I made, you know, bigger studio films and starred in those films.

• 35:21Speaker 05

  I've seen them.

• 35:22Alec Baldwin?

  Well, I don't assume that at all, but, uh, music can make such a profound.

• 35:27Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 35:28Alec Baldwin?

  Or what I want to go is, fellas, if the music isn't anything, cut it.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:32Alec Baldwin?

  No music.

• 35:33Speaker 05

  Jerry Goldsmith, uh, had a quote that he used to say to them, "Fellas, I could put makeup on the corpse, but I can't make it breathe."

• 35:40Alec Baldwin?

  Right. And don't you feel, do you feel that sometimes people are saying to you, "I want more music here," you know, whatever?

• 35:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I had all sorts of experiences like that, but yes, you know, the music, a movie without music, it's just, it's, you know, even the greatest movies you could watch, and if you watch them without music, there's just.

• 36:00Alec Baldwin?

  It's naked.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  It's naked, yeah, it's dry. And then the art is knowing where and when not to put music and, you know, how much.

• 36:08Alec Baldwin?

  Are you usually right about that, or the director, or both, or the editor?

• 36:11Speaker 05

  It's a collaboration. I, I talk in the book about how on Sleepless in Seattle, there were two spots that I thought really should have music. And Nora Ephron was like, "I don't think so, but, you know, go with your instinct and write it." And when we went to record the music, at that point, she, her personality had changed over a few weeks. And, um, I was seeing another side of her. And at the recording sessions, when I recorded those two pieces of music, she, when we were finished, she said, "It's very nice music, Mark. I just wish I had somewhere in the movie to use it."

• 36:45Alec Baldwin?

  Jonathan Demme once said to me, we were shooting, he goes, "That's a great idea," he said, "just not for this movie."

• 36:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, there you go.

• 36:51Alec Baldwin?

  Thank you, Jonathan.

• 36:52Speaker 05

  So those are two spots in that movie that doesn't have music, that my agent says, sometimes he teaches film score classes, and he uses those two moments to give to the students to say, "Here are two moments that really could use music, but don't have it." So write music there, and that way, when you send it off to a producer and all, they get to see a movie they know, that, you know, they're already seeing movie stars and they're hearing music on there. So I'm very happy for those students who are getting to write the music that I wanted.

• 37:19Alec Baldwin?

  Are you someone who, your proximity to the film business and your intimate relationship with the film business on this deep, deep level of writing this music, and then when you're away from that, you don't watch movies, you don't watch TV, or do you watch programming?

• 37:33Speaker 05

  No, I watch.

• 37:34Alec Baldwin?

  What do you watch?

• 37:35Speaker 05

  Well, I married a avid sports man, so now I watch football and I watch basketball.

• 37:40Alec Baldwin?

  Is that what he is, an avid sports man?

• 37:42Speaker 05

  What would you call an avid sports fan?

• 37:45Alec Baldwin?

  Fan, let's say fan, not man, fan.

• 37:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I watch sport. If my father was alive, he wouldn't believe that. When I think of when I used to walk into the house and he'd be watching football with his friends, and I would just quickly go into my little room with my piano. I had no interest in football or anything, but now I go to Knicks games.

• 38:03Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, he's a sports nut?

• 38:05Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 38:06Alec Baldwin?

  What is he like?

• 38:07Speaker 05

  Everything, anything that involves a sphere, being thrown or kicked.

• 38:11Alec Baldwin?

  Violence.

• 38:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, he just, he loves it all. It's a real odd couple.

• 38:16Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 05

  And, you know, I did-

• 38:18Alec Baldwin?

  You take one look at him, he's like a villain in a Bond film, this guy. He's so good-looking and so built.

• 38:24Speaker 05

  And I've really learned to love it. I really do love watching it all.

• 38:29Alec Baldwin?

  Composer and lyricist Mark Shaiman. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend, and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Mark Shaiman tells us which of Rob Reiner's films he will always stop to watch on TV, and why it's the most meaningful of his 14 scores for the late director.

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• 40:43Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. Mark Shaiman has written and arranged music for countless artists such as Mariah Carey, Bette Midler, Harry Connick Jr., and Billy Crystal. Whether for late-night TV, award shows, concerts, or a Christmas album, Shaiman adapts to the task at hand. I was curious, as a musician, what differences he found between working with actors, singers, and comedians.

• 41:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, the thing that makes me think of is I did Sister Act and Whoopi Goldberg. You would maybe say that what you're saying about Billy, you know. And when and then when we got together to sing, it turns out she started singing like like a white folk singer. She was singing like that. I was like, really? Not what you would expect to come out of Whoopi Goldberg. But I I put together two friends, Charlotte Crossley and Jennifer Lewis, who are very funny girls who are both harlots with Bette Midler and are gregarious, funny, great girls. And I knew, well, I I kind of figured if I put them together with Whoopi and we rehearse the songs for Sister Act with her,

• 41:54Speaker 05

  we'll just laugh and we'll laugh and we'll have a good time and then she'll just forget about being nervous about singing. And that's exactly what happened. We had a great time and when by the time it was time to record and film, Whoopi didn't give a fuck anymore about like all the other things that she might have been thinking of. We were just laughing. We were just had such a good time. And of course, you record a lot of takes and you take a note from track one and you take a note from track four, but that's a whole other thing. But but yeah, it's it's really a matter of, yeah, coaxing sometimes. So whoever you work with at the Ansonia, eh. Now, your first sojourn into Broadway was what? Well, I wanted to write Broadway shows when I was in my twenties and but couldn't get a break.

• 42:38Speaker 05

  And me, my co lyricist and at that time, life partner, Scott Whitman, we were trying to write shows, but we just couldn't get in there. And it was the time of the big British musicals and Les Mis. And then my movie career fell on my lap and we were suddenly living in LA for a year. But then luckily. Movies before Broadway? Yeah, I mean, I wanted to be Broadway and then the movies fell on my lap. And then the entire nineties, I was scoring one movie after another. And that was the other reason why the South Park movie was the greatest gig ever, because not only was it unto itself the greatest gig, it suddenly put my name back in the mouths of the Broadway crowd and a woman named Margot Lyon had just gotten the rights to Hairspray.

• 43:23Speaker 05

  The John Waters film. And everyone she went to, they said, who do you think should I should get to do the score for Hairspray? And everyone had just come from the South Park movie and said, you gotta get Mark Shaiman, you gotta get Mark Shaiman. So that movie led me to the absolute dream come true, which was writing Hairspray. And because Scott had moved to LA with me, and I had really torn him away from the theatrical community of New York. And I was scoring one movie after another, and Scott didn't have much to do. Scott is quoted as saying, in LA, he learned how to drink and drive. So when Margot said, you know, I, would you like to write the music for Hairspray? He's like, yes. And she said, who would you like to write the lyrics? I said, well, me and my partner Scott.

• 44:06Speaker 05

  And I won't do it unless it's me and my partner Scott. And they acquiesced. Well, she said, well, I don't know you guys as lyricists. I don't, and I said, well, the South Park movie, it says additional music and lyrics. But, you know, music by was what most people had ever seen. And, and she didn't, and also she was scared of, I think, of hiring a couple. You're like, what happens if they fight? But yeah, so luckily she, she, she said, you know, would you write some songs on spec for me to hear? And I was like, sure. And so Scott and I immediately started working and we, the four songs we wrote are Good Morning Baltimore, Welcome to the Sixties, Big Blonde and Beautiful, and I Know Where

• 44:46Speaker 05

  I've Been, which are still now kind of the four tent poles of that musical, which is, shows you what a fairy tale it was. In that usually the first songs you write for a show get discarded along the way as you start to discover what's needed. But the first four songs we wrote are still like those strong. The planks. Ones, yeah. And then that just became just the greatest dream come true. What was after that? Well, we wrote a musical with Marty Short. Marty Short, Fame Becomes Me. Which was a one man show, but with a cast. And I was on stage with him. And that was a thrill, although it was tough. Cause it was a kind of inside baseball kind of thing about how Broadway was full of all

• 45:30Speaker 05

  these one person shows. And so Marty was spoofing the idea that he had a one person show in him for all the trials and tribulations of his life, because he's the happiest man on earth, so it's not really true. And then Catch Me If You Can was the next one Scott and I did. Which, you know.

• 45:46Alec Baldwin?

  Was based on the film?

• 45:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:48Alec Baldwin?

  Who comes ringing your door? Does Spielberg ring the bell or somebody else?

• 45:51Speaker 05

  In that, in this case, Scott and I were, we went to the drama bookstore to get a copy of Stage Door. Someone had asked us to, if we would be interested in writing a musical of Stage Door, which is the old Katherine Hepburn movie, The Cala Lizar in Bloom.

• 46:05Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 46:05Speaker 05

  I hope all your readers and listeners will now.

• 46:08Alec Baldwin?

  You nailed it as far as I'm concerned.

• 46:09Speaker 05

  Google Stage Door and Katherine Hepburn.

• 46:11Alec Baldwin?

  What, you have a Tony and an Oscar? You just can do anything.

• 46:13Speaker 05

  So, we went to get that play, but there, there was a coffee table book out elsewhere in the drama bookstore of Catch Me If You Can, about the making of it. And Scott looked at that and the pictures of Pan Am stewardesses and Leonardo DiCaprio and all the different disguises.

• 46:28Alec Baldwin?

  Very evocative.

• 46:29Speaker 05

  And he said, I'd rather write a musical of that. And because I knew Steven Spielberg only through Marty's short Christmas parties, one year he brought his clarinet and I played Hanukkah Oh Hanukkah while him and Kate Couch or he played the clarinet and she danced. So I felt like I had worked with him. So I asked Marty to give me like a phone number or email or whatever. And I just wrote Steven Spielberg directly. I said, we have this idea to do a musical of Catch Me If You Can. So I completely didn't go through agents or lawyers. I just went straight to the man and he, we got the rights.

• 47:08Alec Baldwin?

  And how did that go?

• 47:10Speaker 05

  It, it, it didn't have a long run. It gets done all the time now. I go to see it. We had this idea that it was Frank Jr. Was putting on his life as if it was a television variety show from like 1964, which was still the peak time of like show business on TV where Sinatra and Judy Garland, where it wasn't cheesy yet. It wasn't like, you know, the bad seventies. You know.

• 47:33Alec Baldwin?

  Undeniable.

• 47:33Speaker 05

  Radio Bunch, variety kind of shows.

• 47:35Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 47:36Speaker 05

  But we couldn't transplant it on stage. We never quite figured it out with our collaborators who we all adore, but we just didn't quite. The souffle didn't completely rise. I mean, I'm very proud of the score. I love it very much and it gets done all the time now and I do go to see it. Scott says when we go to see us sometimes it's like a football coach bringing us into the locker room after the game and showing us footage of the game with a laser pointer going, that's where you went wrong. If we got a chance to do it again, I think I would know how to like fix it, make it even better, but it's still good.

• 48:08Alec Baldwin?

  Who directed?

• 48:10Speaker 05

  Jack O'Brien.

• 48:10Alec Baldwin?

  Right. But the question also is, what I'm told, I don't know this as intimately maybe as you do, but my friends I think said to me, somebody said to me, that there's only four new musicals on Broadway this year. What's, you know, wither the Broadway musical, the new Broadway musical, because they're gonna have four in that, every show that's on is gonna get nominated.

• 48:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:29Alec Baldwin?

  They got four slots.

• 48:30Speaker 05

  If only I was, had, because we did Some Like It Hot, what was it, three years ago? And we were just at the beginning of coming out of COVID. And although we smelled like a hit, everyone thought we were this big hit and we ran for a year, but it should have run for years and years and years, but it's so expensive now.

• 48:48Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah. That's your critique of, because I would ask you, what's your critique of Broadway now?

• 48:52Speaker 05

  Well, the last two shows I've done, people were really enjoying them, but we couldn't make enough money to pay what it cost, the weekly, the money is just the math as.

• 49:03Alec Baldwin?

  I wonder why they can't find a way to bring that down.

• 49:06Speaker 05

  I don't know, and it's only gonna keep getting worse, because if you talk to the actors or the stage crew, they're like, you know, and the orchestra and they're like, yeah, you understand why they're fighting for what they want in the next deal. But somehow it's just, just blown up out of proportion that there is no kind of middle. You know, if you look at classic musicals, they only ran for like a year and a half, like The Music Man or whatever. It wasn't like now where they have to, if they don't run for 10 years, it's considered a flop.

• 49:34Alec Baldwin?

  Right. Everyone's chasing that ring.

• 49:36Speaker 05

  It's just, it's just impossible. So not many get to grab that brass ring the way that you could back in the day.

• 49:43Alec Baldwin?

  Who are people out there that you admire?

• 49:45Speaker 05

  Alfred Newman, you know, John Williams.

• 49:47Alec Baldwin?

  Any contemporaries? I mean, who's somebody now that you like? You think their work is good?

• 49:52Speaker 05

  There's a great guy, there's, the last time I was nominated for an Oscar, I lost to Ludwig Gornson.

• 49:57Alec Baldwin?

  For what?

• 49:58Speaker 05

  He had written for Black Panther and I had written for Mary Poppins Returns and I kinda thought maybe.

• 50:03Alec Baldwin?

  Black Panther, Mary Poppins.

• 50:05Speaker 05

  I thought, you know, it was my, it was my, it was my seventh nomination. I thought, this might be like my Susan Lucci moment. But Ludwig won. But he's a sweet guy and he he's brilliant. He just did sinners. He so he's someone I very much admire and he's also so sweet and so nice and just such a great guy.

• 50:24Alec Baldwin?

  So there are pieces in the classical repertoire that I just weep. A sense organ symphony, whatever. There's the melodic thing, a Dvorak, New World, whatever. Because I'm a classical nut. Or the pieces you've written. Or the pieces you've been involved. Or the movies and scenes where the picture and the music match, which bring you to tears. Like, they're really powerful to you.

• 50:45Speaker 05

  The one that, and obviously now more than ever, is The American President with Rob Reiner. And God knows, because of what's happened in America. All these things converge to make that piece of music I got to write for that movie. Very, very meaningful to me and I'm. I'll try not to start weeping, but um. It was a beautiful movie and I got to write music that was just full of the respect that one used to have for the American president.

• 51:17Alec Baldwin?

  The dignity.

• 51:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And it worked so well and it's one movie of mine that I could, if I channel hop across it, I'll stick with it. Michael Douglas was phenomenal.

• 51:30Alec Baldwin?

  Phenomenal.

• 51:31Speaker 05

  So, yeah, so the music for that one is meaningful to me on so many levels, so. And I did, you know, I did a concert last year in San Diego and I'm at the piano and kibitzing with the audience, but for that one piece, I did get up and conduct the orchestra, which is a very hard thing to do. Conducting an orchestra and making them go at the speed that you want. That's a real talent that I don't really have because I'm an accompanist. So I let, I let them lead, which you can't do because suddenly it gets much slower. But I was conducting it to the film, the main title. So I had to keep them going. And now, of course. I mean, I was, I'm lucky that I had this moment with Rob in Sedona. There's a Sedona Film Festival.

• 52:16Speaker 05

  And I was an honorary one night and Rob was the honorary the next night. And for the Rob night, they showed this beautiful pristine print of the American president, which I had seen on TV a lot, but I, I'd never seen it up on the screen again. And it had been maybe 20 years. So I just watched this beautiful movie and got to hear this music I got to write for it and was so grateful to Rob Reiner for everything.

• 52:42Speaker 05

  And especially this movie and especially what it's about and what was had just started happening with Trump and it just all bubbled up. So my job was to then go to the mic and introduce Rob. You know, the audience knew me from the night before and it was my job to introduce Rob. And I was, you know, I had a whole bunch of jokes I was gonna crack. And I got up there at the mic and just started sobbing, just absolute couldn't get a word out, just stamping my feet. All I tried to say was I'm so grateful to Rob Reiner and and so the tears had to just completely speak for me.

• 53:29Alec Baldwin?

  My thanks to composer Mark Shaiman. I'll leave you with a piece of Shaiman's score from Rob Reiner's "The American President." I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.

• 55:23Speaker 13

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• 55:50Speaker 11

  This is Colin Cowherd from the Colin Cowherd Podcast. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. All starts with a great deal on an off-road Ready Tacoma or a half-ton Tundra. Two of Toyota's most capable and longest-lasting trucks. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. For a great deal today to a great value tomorrow, shop Toyota.com. Toyota, let's go places.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at OnDeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.