Interview
Composer Logan Nelson Captures Elizabeth Taylor In His Score For ELIZABETH TAYLOR: THE LOST TAPES
The HBO Original documentary ELIZABETH TAYLOR: THE LOST TAPES, directed by award-winning filmmaker Nanette Burstein (“Hillary,” “The Kid Stays in the Picture”), debuted on Saturday, August 3rd on HBO and streaming on MAX. An official selection of the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, the film had its world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR: THE LOST TAPES allows Elizabeth Taylor’s own voice to narrate her story, inviting audiences to rediscover not just a mega star of Hollywood’s Golden Age but a complex woman who navigated lifelong fame, personal identity, and public scrutiny on a global stage from early childhood. Through newly recovered interviews with Taylor and unprecedented access to the movie star’s personal archive, the film reveals the complex inner life and vulnerability of the Hollywood legend while also challenging audiences to recontextualize her achievements and her legacy.
In 1964, at the height of her fame, Elizabeth Taylor sat down with journalist Richard Meryman for a candid, extensive interview. Drawing from 40 hours of the newly unearthed audio interviews and extraordinary access to personal photos, home movies, archival interviews, and news footage, illustrated with clips from the iconic roles that mirror her real-life challenges and triumphs, ELIZABETH TAYLOR: THE LOST TAPES provides the most intimate portrait of the actress to date. Modest, bawdy, charming, honest, at times frustrated, Taylor comes to life as she discusses her film debut in 1943’s “Lassie Come Home,” her struggle to free herself from the limitations of ingénue roles, her benchmark roles in “Giant,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and “Butterfield 8,” for which she won her first of two Academy Awards®, and the excesses of shooting the troubled epic 1963 film “Cleopatra.” Taylor also speaks unguardedly about her marriages and children, her close friendships with Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, and Roddy McDowall, and her fifth marriage to Richard Burton, with whom she would star in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” winning her second Academy Award®. Peeling back the layers of one of cinema’s most enduring icons, the conversations reveal a woman at odds with her screen image, yearning for respect and agency, while forever under the microscope of scrutinizing press and the public.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR: THE LOST TAPES offers an unprecedented window into the life of a woman who defied the era’s expectations, ultimately found peace within herself, and who cemented her legacy by turning the tables on her own fame by becoming a fierce activist and advocate for the LGBTQ community.
Alongside Elizabeth Taylor, the documentary features the voices of actors Roddy McDowall, Debbie Reynolds, Richard Burton, George Hamilton, producer Sam Marx, agents Marion Rosenberg and John Heyman, longtime assistant and co-Trustee Tim Mendelson, and friends Liz Smith and Doris Brynner.
We recently had an in-depth conversation with score composer, Logan Nelson. His orchestral composition beautifully captures the spirit of Elizabeth Taylor. By blending elements of classic Hollywood with contemporary composition techniques, Nelson has created a musical portrait that complements the documentary’s exploration of Elizabeth Taylor’s life. The music often echoes the golden age of Hollywood, capturing the glitz and glamour associated with Taylor’s career.
WAMG: You were named best young international composer at the World Soundtrack Awards. When you were younger, did you play in the school band or orchestra?
Logan Nelson: My first instrument was piano when I was six years old. Neither of my parents are musical or really artistic in any way. My mom specifically, she had always wanted to play piano, and so she said, I’ll give a little keyboard to my kid. The arrangement was I had to practice a certain amount of minutes every day and so I started doing that, and I didn’t really like it at first. During my practice time, I would make up little melodies and just kind of mess around and do my own thing. And then.
And then during my piano lessons, and I eventually started practicing, I would play these ideas to my piano teacher, and she was very supportive of it and started teaching me a little bit of music theory and a little bit of how to notate it. A lot of the early composition stuff came from not wanting to practice piano. I played viola as well, and so I played in the orchestra, and I did that in grade school and middle and high school and at the same time, though, I was really interested in film.
In middle school, there was a school project where I had to make a documentary about something, and it was just a little short thing. It was kind of during making this documentary where I discovered film music and that’s a part of the filmmaking process, so I was able to connect my interests of music and movies. This is like a dream job. I have to do this. My parents were supportive, too. When I was doing that documentary project, I was trying to figure this out.
I thought, what do people put in movies? And they, despite not being in the arts, had a huge soundtrack collection, and they said, here are all these albums from Hans Zimmer and John Williams, and you should start listening to these. I was listening to them and trying to figure out what to put in my documentary, but at the same time, I fell in love with that style of music, and I just started listening to scores all the time, and it was so much fun.
Photo Credit: Lauren Desberg
WAMG: My mother loved Elizabeth Taylor. Her favorite movie was Cleopatra, which has an amazing score. How much did you know about the actress prior to the project and composing your terrific score?
LN: Through my love of film and studying film, I went to USC. I studied film music, but I also studied film. I had a decent film education and I remember in classes, watching Cleopatra and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and a bunch of these movies, so I really only knew of her acting work, and I didn’t really know a lot about her personally or her relationships or the drama.
For me, it was a fresh, discovery portrayal of everything, watching her tell the story. The first time I watched the film, it was very emotional for me by the end of it. I cry every time, just hearing her tell her story and there’s a line at the end where she just talks about how she was single for the first time and that she’s doing all her philanthropic work, and it’s so emotional hearing her talk about all of that. I watched the film and I was really inspired by it immediately.
WAMG: So many instruments make up the melodies for your documentary. There’s woodwinds and these jazz elements at the very beginning. And then it transforms into these ethereal types of dreamlike, fantasy cues. All the tracks go along so well with every part of her life. The very simple and pretty piano motifs, but the one that struck me the most is how radically different they are when it moves into the relationship with Michael Todd, because all of a sudden it becomes very seductive and kind of a smooth cue. Can you talk about that one specifically?
LN: It was interesting how they cut the film in which they used these scenes of her movies and different points of her life and at the beginning, it’s so fun and naive, and it’s very sparkly and all these “harp Glissandi”, and it’s fun, and then you start to see some of the darkness brewing and the music is reflecting that. But then we get to this period in the middle where it’s very jazz influenced and I think a lot of that comes down to probably Mike Todd and the fun that he brought to the relationship and how crazy he was as a person and just super eccentric and wild.
They’re shooting around the world and he’s on trains and boats and planes and everything, and I kind of had to match his personality in a lot of ways with the music, very percussive, very momentous, especially when they’re filming that and then afterwards you start to see the interviews of him talking about her and buying her all the diamonds. There’s a glamorous kind of jazzy, seductive, diamonds thing that’s going on with their relationship, which makes it especially sad when he’s the one who dies. I think he was really the person that was meant for her, so it’s very sad.
WAMG: I loved your score during that whole part. Did you have a lot of back and forth, a lot of direction from the filmmakers, how they wanted it to sound?
LN: For this one, I had a lot of flexibility, actually, which is not the most common thing. I think they knew they wanted strong melodies and very thematic, orchestral music that was inspired by this era. Some of the jazz elements incorporated throughout. When I sent in the first draft, the director said this is great. I think it was a very smooth relationship, honestly, and that doesn’t always happen, but it was great.
I was worried a little bit, trying to figure out the balance between all of these old scores and then the jazz elements and it’s really her voice in the end. It’s what I had to default to, she’s the one telling the story and it’s her perspective. The music has to reinforce that perspective and underline some of these darker notes of what she’s feeling during these seemingly exciting happy moments. We were really focused on getting under the surface and having music bring her voice so people could see this other perspective of what she was going through.
Photograph by The Elizabeth Taylor Estate/HBO
WAMG: Did you have a conversation with the music supervisor because there’s some great songs in there as well and your score is also a vocal part of the movie. Did you have a lot to do with choosing the songs, because it’s seamless between the various eras.
LN: That was the challenge, because they already had these songs licensed and set up, and so those were in place. It was very difficult at certain points to get out of a song and into the score. There’s a point where Eddie Fisher is singing on stage, and then we had to transition that singing into the score. There were so many extremely difficult transitions that you normally don’t have to deal with in scoring like this, but even for clips of Cleopatra, you would see parts of Cleopatra and you’d be hearing the score for Cleopatra, and then all of a sudden it’s Elizabeth Taylor talking and reflecting on it and I had to take the Cleopatra score by Alex North and keep it kind of in the Cleopatra world, but kind of different. But to do that, I had to study Cleopatra and study all of these other scores and figure out what they were doing so I could transition out of it in a smooth way. It was really fun to study all these old scores and pieces and learn from them and take little pieces to extrapolate on. But it was very hard.
WAMG: What was it like to have your film premiere at the Cannes Film Festival? Was that just like, oh, my gosh, my score is in this documentary and here we are at Cannes.
LN: (Laughs) Cannes is the best festival in the world for film. That was the biggest honor, of course, to have it there and the editor and the director and I, we all went up on stage and announced the film together and it was just received so well. Elizabeth Taylor is such an icon of Hollywood and the industry and she had been to Cannes so many times. She had such a history of being there and to then have followed her footsteps with the film was just really special.
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And it was really cool, too, because the estate of Elizabeth Taylor was involved with the production of this as well, so her grandsons were producers on it and they were there as well at the screening. Afterwards, they came up to me and they were, “thank you for doing such an honor to my grandmother. I think the score really reflected her and she would have been proud of it.”
Out of any moment, that was the most touching compliment that I could have received. Even more than an audience, because when you do these films about specific people, you just want to show them in a good light and how they would have wanted to be portrayed. For the family to feel like that she was portrayed in a good way was really special.
Photo Credit: Lauren Desberg
WAMG: That’s a great story. That really is.
You did another documentary NOTHING LASTS FOREVER about diamonds. The Hollywood Reporter said your score was ”like mining that genre and sometimes spritely kick of a heist film.” Do you have a preference? Do you like jumping from a tv series on Apple TV to doing these documentaries to doing just a flat out film score?
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/nothing-lasts-forever-review-1235090066
LN: Yes and it keeps me sane, because you go so deep into one of these projects and you really just kind of obsess about it and write it. You kind of need to separate and go in a different direction for a little bit to have new ideas and oftentimes you’re working on a couple of these at the same time and so it’s difficult to. If they’re too close together, it’s difficult to differentiate and have unique, exciting ideas or get excited about each one.
Whereas if you’re working on the Elizabeth Taylor documentary, if I’m really excited to write some orchestral music or study some jazz today, I can work on that. And if I’m working on “The Morning Show”, that’s just a more percussive, modern kind of score, and that’s completely different. I can just go wherever I’m feeling, and it always gives me better ideas.
WAMG: You worked on season two and three of “The Morning Show” with Carter Burwell. Are you working on season four?
LN: We haven’t started yet. They’re still shooting, so hopefully it works out and we’re brought back. But they just started production on it.
WAMG: There were a lot of unanswered questions from season three.
LN: The characters just continue to grow and change so much, and it’s such a quickly evolving show that you’re like, we were in Italy in season two, and now we’re in space in season three.
WAMG: I want to ask you one last thing about your beautiful piece of classical music, “Lavender Echoes”. It’s on YouTube. It’s got some beautiful strings to it. It’s so different from tv and film and documentaries. It’s classical music for all intents and purposes. The strings are just amazing. Are you going to try to keep with that?
LN: I love doing that kind of stuff. I want to do more of it. That was a project where I could just do whatever I wanted and I could record with whoever I wanted to and record wherever I wanted to. We recorded at Abbey Road for that which I had never been to, and I really wanted to go, and I want these musicians. I kind of just really got to make it however I wanted it to be and there’s often so many limitations on film projects or constraints or different things that they want and need and notes and everything, so to do what I wanted to do for a second was really fun and exciting and fulfilling. I would completely do something different now because there’s so many other things I want to explore. I feel like they’ll probably be another similar type of album soon with other musicians.
WAMG: Cannes Film Festival. Check. Abbey Road. Check. What’s next?
LN: I’ve done a bunch of really exciting documentary projects mostly. There’s one that just came out on Hulu called Mastermind, which is about the first woman who pioneered the psychoanalysis of serial killers. She kind of got inside their heads and figured out what made them do what they did so then she could help the FBI track them down and find them. That was a completely different project, too. That was a very synthy, kind of eighties style score. That kept me in a completely other direction than Elizabeth Taylor.
And then there’s another docu series about the Stanford Prison Experiment coming to National Geographic. That’ll be sometime this fall.
https://deadline.com/2024/04/nat-geo-the-stanford-prison-experiment-docuseries-1235887966
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