Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music by Burt Bacharach

Author:Burt Bacharach [Bacharach, Burt]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Music, Composers & Musicians, Nonfiction, Retail, Bert Bacharach, Songwriters
ISBN: 9780062206060
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2013-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter

15

Lost Horizon

Angie and I had bought a beach house down in Del Mar, not far from San Diego, so I could be near the racetrack there during the racing season. That was where I was spending most of my time when the producer Ross Hunter told me he was going to remake Lost Horizon, a film Frank Capra had done in 1937. Hunter had a script by Larry Kramer, who had been nominated for an Academy Award for writing Women in Love, and a $12 million budget. Because Hunter was going to remake Lost Horizon as a musical, he asked Hal and me if we would come up with the songs for it and we said yes.

Just like the original, the remake was the story of a group of travelers whose plane crash-lands in a paradise known as Shangri-La, where no one ever gets old. It took Hal and me a long time to write the songs and then Ross Hunter decided to invite the press to a sound stage at Columbia Pictures so I could present the songs to them. He asked me to sit at the piano and sing. It was ludicrous because my voice is quite limited and I should have known I couldn’t sing all those songs, but somehow I managed to get through it.

I had to answer questions from the press, and when I was asked about the movie by a reporter from the New York Times, I said, “The idea of the picture is very close to me. Imagine. Somewhere in Tibet in the middle of those mountains is a place called Shangri-La. Where you can live forever—almost. And you can stay healthy! And there is love! And peace! It’s exactly what everybody wants today.”

As it turned out, Lost Horizon was a movie nobody wanted. Nobody wanted to see it or listen to the songs Hal and I had written for it, and the experience of working on that picture was so bad that it nearly ended my career. To begin with, the movie should never have been remade as a musical. The idea was absurd. Unlike what we had done with Promises, Promises, Hal and I couldn’t take what we had written to Boston or Washington to find out which songs worked and which didn’t. If a song didn’t work in a film, it would cost millions of dollars to rewrite and reshoot the scene.

I saw some of the rushes, and even though they were shooting the picture on the back lot at Warner Bros., some of it looked really beautiful. They used dummy singers while they were filming so I had to coach the actors when it came time for them to do their vocals. Sally Kellerman, Bobby Van, and George Kennedy could sing but we had to use other people’s voices for Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann, and Olivia Hussey.

Not only was I writing the songs for Lost Horizon, I was also doing the background score, which was nonstop music. I just couldn’t write it all and I was hating the work so I farmed some of it out.

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