The lights of the once-palatial Million Dollar Theater on Broadway (old Los Angeles’ “Great White Way”) are dimmed. The grand marquee that for decades proclaimed the greatest stars of Mexican cinema and vaudeville now simply says, “Go Dodgers!” The inlaid sidewalk plaques devoted to stars like Cantinflas, María Félix, Pedro Infante, Germán Valdés, and Blanca Estela Pavón have faded away. All that’s left are ghosts.
But it’s late October, that magical time when the spirits of the dead return to join the living — as they did for a consecutive pair of performances presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Los Angeles Opera on Halloween weekend.
At Walt Disney Concert Hall from Oct. 25 to 27, Gustavo Dudamel, in partnership with composer John Williams, conducted a program devoted to the “Época de Oro del cine mexicano” (Golden age of Mexican cinema). The same weekend, at the historic 1927 United Theater on Broadway, LA Opera presented a fright-night screening of the little-known 1931 Spanish-language version of Dracula, accompanied by a newly commissioned orchestral score composed by two-time Academy Award winner Gustavo Santaolalla, who joined the LA Opera Orchestra on guitar and ronroco.
To fully understand the significance of this moment, you need to know a little Los Angeles history. During the 1920s and ’30s, Broadway was the city’s center for entertainment, highlighted by a string of lavish, architecturally thematic movie palaces: the Versailles fantasy of the Los Angeles Theatre, the French Baroque of the Orpheum, the Moorish folly of the United Artists/Alameda, and — the most expensive of them all — the Million Dollar, the first movie theater to proclaim such an extravagant price tag.
But as the entertainment geography of L.A. shifted to Hollywood, Broadway’s prominence faded. Over time, the street was adopted by the Hispanic community and transformed into a thriving commercial center with a distinctly Mexican flavor. Gift shops blared mariachi music, lavish storefronts featured rainbow gowns for quinceañera celebrations, and the movie palaces, though faded, survived by showing Mexican films. But then the Broadway neighborhood was crippled by the influx of drugs, crime, and homelessness.
The ground shifted as a city-sponsored revitalization movement began, setting in motion a tidal wave of downtown real estate speculation and gentrification that ultimately priced out the Hispanic shop owners. Today, Broadway pulses to a Gen X vibe. There are blocks of new and converted apartments, a Trader Joe’s, and a Whole Foods. Big-draw pop music concerts are staged regularly at the Orpheum; the Los Angeles Theatre is a favorite movie location; UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance and LA Opera present events at the United Theater. Everything old is new again.
Los Amigos Gustavo Dudamel y John Williams
Throughout his tenure as music and artistic director of the LA Phil, Gustavo Dudamel has made a point of programming concerts, festivals, and commissions highlighting Latin America. At the same time, he has formed a deep relationship with John Williams, one that is currently being celebrated in a series of “spotlight concerts.” This most recent program, featuring music and extensive film clips from the golden ages of Hollywood and Mexican cinema, was their first co-curatorial offering.
Professor, lecturer, screenwriter, and cinematographer Juan Arturo Brennan, an expert on Mexican cinema, places the latter period as roughly between 1936 and 1956. “It was indeed a golden age from the industrial point of view and also in terms of box office earnings,” he wrote in a program essay for the LA Phil. “Lots of films were shot in those two decades, and a few blockbusters emerged from Mexican studios.”
During his preconcert talk on Oct. 25, conductor and musicologist Geoffrey Pope made a point of how closely the evolution of movie technology and movie scoring were linked. “As synchronized sound technology evolved,” he said, “so did the art of the orchestral music score and eventually the full-scale movie musical. Around the world, major composers embraced the movies. This was certainly true in Mexico, where serious scores composed by Silvestre Revueltas vied with the new popular Mexican genre of the singing caballeros, ‘la comedia ranchera.’”
Pope continued: “Revueltas was ideally suited to the task of creating symphonically scaled music for films. Born in Mexico, he studied and conducted in the United States, participated in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists, and studied in Paris with the famous composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. A synthesis of all these influences can be heard in his scores.”
For Dudamel and Williams, including music from Revueltas’s films on the program was critical. One selection was the composer’s powerful portrait of conflicting cultures in his suite drawn from the 1939 score for La noche de los mayas (The night of the Mayas). It’s a piece that Dudamel and the LA Phil have often performed, its music a blend of ominous shadows, pounding percussion, and traditional folk instrumentation.
The second, even more impressive selection was the accompaniment to the complete fishing scene from the 1936 film Redes, co-directed by Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gómez Muriel, with additional cinematography by the great American photographer Paul Strand. The film is totally captivating, and Revueltas’s heroic portrait of the fishermen and their communal labor is riveting when performed in its entirety with the projected film.
Dudamel, Williams, and the concert’s narrator, film director Robert Rodriguez, presented a striking cross section of Mexican cinema throughout the program, beginning with a wonderfully edited montage that featured bold caballeros atop equally bold steeds, women of the revolution strung with bandoliers, scenes of romance, pratfall comics, and nasty villains. It was all beautifully synchronized to Ignacio Fernández Esperón’s rousing Suite México 1910.
A fine example of the “comedia ranchera” was the clip “Coplas Couplets,” starring the crooning caballeros Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante under their massive sombreros. Even more enjoyable was the tribute to the great Mario Moreno (aka Cantinflas) that climaxed with his hip-swiveling nightclub pas de deux from El bolero de Raquel (from 1957), set to a demented arrangement of Maurice Ravel’s classic. As a surprise encore, Dudamel and the orchestra accompanied a spooky montage of Mexican horror films, perfect for Día de los Muertos.
Dracula en Español
By 1931, the year that Dracula was released, Hollywood movie studios had realized the potential for reaching wider audiences by producing Spanish-language versions of their films. So by day, Bela Lugosi and company would act in the famous English version we’re all familiar with. But at night, a second, Spanish-speaking cast would arrive (led by Carlos Villarías as the Count) and recreate the exact same shots. One became a classic; the other all but faded away.
That is until last Halloween weekend, when the Spanish-language version rose from the dead, presented by LA Opera as part of its Off Grand series. The rare screening of the film was enhanced by the addition of Gustavo Santaolalla’s entirely new score.
When I spoke with Santaolalla, his first reference, surprisingly, was not to the iconic performance by Lugosi but to the new soundtrack composed for the film in 1998 by Philip Glass for the Kronos Quartet, of which Glass wrote, “I felt the score needed to evoke the feeling of the world of the 19th century — for that reason I decided a string quartet would be the most evocative and effective. I wanted to stay away from the obvious effects associated with horror films. With Kronos we were able to add depth to the emotional layers of the film.”
With this conceptualization by Glass as a jumping-off point, Santaolalla then watched the Spanish-language version for the first time. He was amazed by how little music was actually included.
“There are these long sections of dialogue and silence, when nothing happens, that are so heavy,” he observed. “I think my score, which has a number of recurrent motifs, fills in the emotion and the color that is missing, more like a modern score. The styling is quite eclectic. There are times when it reflects the lush romantic elements in the story through the strings. But there are also electric guitars, a Stroh violin [with an attached trumpet horn, played by Paul Cartwright], traditional folk instruments, and a special accordion [played by Michael Ward-Bergeman] that can sound like a tango bandoneon or recreate a Wurlitzer organ, which I use to begin the movie.”
There was another major influence, Santaolalla said, stemming directly from his childhood growing up in Argentina. “My biggest influence, when I began to work on this, was the radionovelas I listened to with my grandma when I was a little kid. They would reproduce all these sound effects. I decided to perform these live to add a special Foley element to the performance. We had two Foley performers [Leslie Bloome and Ryan Collison] who made the hoofbeat sounds of the horses match the rhythm of the music. They had a metal thunder sheet for the storm, they flapped their arms for the bats, and lots more. We also used synthesizers to add things like the wind.”
At this point, no future performances of Santaolalla’s score for Dracula have been announced. But there are lots of Halloweens to come and lots of old movie palaces around the country where it would be right at home.
