In a high-ceilinged, pine-paneled, black-draperied room packed with sound-recording and video-playback equipment, a movie scene comes to life on a large monitor.
Bright vertical bands in shades of green float left to right across the TV screen. One . . . two . . . , a round flash of light whitens the monitor, neatly blanking out most of actor Fred Gwynne's serious-sorrowful face.And on that cue, the music - Mick Muhlfriedel's music - begins: A lone bass plunking a stuttering line followed by a breathy solo trumpet, thumping percussion, zylophone chimes, woodwinds, flutes and strings.
The music fades. Sound engineer Tim Boyle leans far over his control panel to grab a white phone. He wants, he says, the cellos and woodwinds to play louder.
The musicians, sight-reading the score under Muhlfriedel's baton, are just a room away in another spacious pine room, one draped in white. Technicians and observers situated here and there in black-backed director's chairs behind Boyle can see the young composer-conductor on a small video monitor.
The film clip and the music start several times. Muhlfriedel and his overseer on this occasion, David Newman, sprint between rooms intermittently to witness a playback and to consult.
The orchestra plays; Boyle records.
"Bingo," the engineer finally exclaims, again seizing the phone. "It's in the can."
Chatting with Australian colleague Roger Mason afterward, Muhlfriedel is still exhilarated, quick to smile.
For on this occasion - as a student, or "fellow," of the Sundance Institute's fourth annual Film Composers Laboratory - he made his debut as a composer for orchestra and as a conductor. Two minutes of his music has been recorded and added to a clip from the movie "Disorganized Crime."
Quite an experience.
"I feel much better than I did an hour ago," the Los Angeles musician says with a grin.
Mason, on the other hand, admits he's on pins and needles. His turn before the orchestra musicians and the microphones is yet to come.
The two men and six other promising young composers were invited to this year's lab at Robert Redford's Sundance Resort. There, during an intensive 2 1/2-week course, they worked with, and their efforts were critiqued by, Newman ("Sunrise," "Throw Mama From the Train") and other contemporary film composers, including Bruce Broughton ("Silverado," "Jacknife"), James Newton Howard ("Everybody's All American"), Danny Elfman ("Batman"), Michael Kamen ("Licence to Kill" and "Lethal Weapon") and Alan Silvestri ("Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and "The Abyss").
Newman is artistic director for the film composers laboratory and music director of the Sundance Film Institute. If he's as active the rest of the year as he was during the recording session, Newman is one busy man.
"This only takes about one-fiftieth of my year," he says of his Sundance work.
That one-fiftieth apparently includes listening to 200 blind-audition tapes from hopeful applicants. He and others pare that down to about 20 to 25, and with the guest composers select eight Sundance fellows.
Newman and his team also recruit a top-notch staff of musicians and technical experts who help give these budding composers the best of all possible programs, a "master class" in their chosen field.
For the goal of Sundance is to help build a cadre of capable film composers for the future. The institute seeks out young people who are already proficient composing musicians "and provides them with a realistic, professional experience," Newman says.
And the mountain location isn't bad, either.
"It's beautiful," says Muhlfriedel. "One of the drawbacks is to be caged up working and not to get out. I will tomorrow - I hear there's a beautiful waterfall up there. . . ."
"It is a great setting," Newman says, and besides, "all the scheduling, meals and housing are taken care of, we drive them around, we eat together and screen films together - they don't have to worry about anything but composing."
Well, almost anything.
Muhlfriedel and Mason are exploring film composing after tenures with rock bands, and they say everyone interested in the field seems to know about Sundance. Those applicants accepted by the institute know they'll have access to information and experiences that would otherwise take years to accumulate and are introduced to major composers they might otherwise never meet.
"We get criticized by some of the best, get to know what's in their minds, what works and what doesn't," Muhlfriedel says.
"Basically they told us we stink," Mason laughs.
Not all of the working guest composers slice and dice the hopefuls.
Silvestri, who's taken part in the Sundance symposium in each of its four years, sees himself as an encourager of talent - as a friend, passing along knowledge and insight.
Many who get into the film-composing business get "bashed," Silvestri says - by producers, directors, writers, actors, critics, the public and themselves. If they come from a band, like he did, they're used to writing songs and getting them played, and that's it.
In the film business, composers are but a part of a big project, and if they don't understand how things work, if they retain that free-and-independent point of view, "they'll feel they are being bashed."
"Bashed. That's a violent description," says Silvestri. He's a bit surprised at his choice of words, for if anything, he likes to approach his work in a playful frame of mind and with a sense of humor.
At Sundance he wants to communicate how the system works, as well as how he achieved this or that musical effect. He understands the need for mentors.
He himself had no real mentors, per se.
"I had music teachers growing up," and they were encouraging. But when asked to score his first movie - "The Doberman Gang" in 1972 - he didn't have the foggiest notion what to do next.
"I just said, `I'll do it,' then, in the privacy of my home I screamed, `I don't know how to do this!' Then I went shopping."
"My mentor was Earle Hagen's film composition book, `How to Score a Film.' " Hagen is best known for his work on "I Spy."
Silvestri went on to score the TV series "CHiPs" for 4 1/2 years and more recently such movies as "Back to the Future," "Romancing the Stone," "Predator" and the upcoming "Back to the Future 2," as well as the current feature "The Abyss."
After almost 20 years, he still enjoys his work.
"It's always new, it's always fresh. There are always new challenges, but you build an account of experience that you can draw on."
An account he can tap to help those up and coming.
Michael Kamen is as hot as hot can be these days, with two of the summer's top films on his soundtrack resume (the latest James Bond adventure and "Lethal Weapon 2"). But three or so years ago, when Newman first approached him to participate in the Sundance Composers Laboratory, he was working quietly in England.
In London, far from Hollywood, "you do tend to feel as if you're working in a vacuum." He got little feedback. But Newman contacted Kamen, told him the Sundance students had been studying his score for Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," and Kamen felt very gratified indeed.
Why Kamen is in London is a bit of a mystery itself to those who know his history, for he was a key player in the progressive late '60s-early '70s band the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, and his first solo album in the early '70s was called "New York Rock."
The New Yorker was lured to the Isles to arrange orchestral passages and help produce albums for such groups as Pink Floyd and the Eurythmics - and stayed. He now has homes in both London and New York, and his work in films has exploded. His recent credits include "Die Hard," "Mona Lisa," "Pink Floyd - The Wall," "The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen" and more than a dozen others in just the past decade.
Like Silvestri, his varied scores and work in the industry have given him a wealth of experience, and he enjoys sharing it.
"The students ask, luckily, questions I can answer. Is the music too fast, too loud, too slow, too busy?" And he can pass on inside knowledge about music and the business that otherwise the young composers would not encounter on their own for several years.
Kamen says he tries to encourage self-awareness, experimentation - and collaboration. Filmmaking, he stresses, is a collaborative art. As a rule, he likes working with directors and producers (there are exceptions). And, with his track record, if he's hired "they can be reasonably sure 95 percent of it will be what they wanted."
He also loves to collaborate with other musicians - he composed the "Lethal Weapon 2" score with friends Eric Clapton and David Sanborn, and George Harrison contributed a song. Exploring various musical fields is another joy: Kamen has composed seven ballets and is now working on a saxophone concerto for Sanborn and a guitar concerto for Clapton and is pondering something for himself.
Years Ago, Hollywood's studio system offered fertile ground for apprentice film composers, Newman says. Even some of today's top composers - John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, for example - can trace their roots to the last days of the studios, where they were given training, work, experience and contacts.
That system is history, but the Sundance Institute is trying to give vitality to a similar springboard.
Luring successful composers like Kamen, Silvestri, Elfman and Broughton to Utah was part persistence, part luck, considering their busy schedules. But their contributions and the new mentor network of which they are now a part is bound toplay a valuable role in the future of film, Newman believes.