Quotes

I treated every project that I've ever worked on--and some of them have been fairly miserable--with the greatest of respect. My question to myself, always, in any work I've done, was that my contribution had to be equal to or greater than anyone else's individual contribution. That's always been the way I've approached it. This is also the way I treated it, budget-wise: never wasting money, even if I wasn't paying for it. I treated it with a great deal of respect, first of all because the medium, to me, deserved it; and secondly, because the cooperation of all the people involved in order to get a film mounted is important.

I usually go to the theater to see the films that I've scored just to see if what I've accomplished came out the way it should be for the effect on the audience. The first night The Haunted Palace (1963) came out, I went to a small theater on Hollywood Boulevard, and I was sitting toward the back, and in front of me was sitting a little girl and what looked like her parents on either side. And I don't know if there was too much theme, but about the last time Vincent Price walks down the hall and while he was doing that the theme came in again . . . to me, like a classic Frankenstein (1931) type of romantic theme, with Tchaikovskian overtones . . . and there's no dialogue, and it's about the third time you've heard that theme, and the little girl said out loud, "Oh, that music!" Well, that made my evening because she meant it in a kind of excruciatingly electrifying or exotic way.