Michael Small, Film Music’s Prince of Paranoia

For about five minutes in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, the lights go down on our movie and we’re shown another—an increasingly deranged propaganda short designed to suss out whether someone is Parallax material. That is to say, an assassin. This stunning experimental short film is accompanied—driven, even—by a dangerously catchy piece by the film’s composer, Michael Small.

It starts out like a ’70s folk-rock tune, an oboe melody rambling down a country road of acoustic guitar. It could almost be the instrumental of a Carpenters song, with a male voice—reportedly Small’s own—humming along. As the imagery turns overtly patriotic, the music does too, with flag-waving brass harmonies and snare drums. Then the film gives way to an epileptic barrage of violent, sexual, and racist images juxtaposed with the calm country photos. The music morphs into a cross between Burt Bacharach–style light pop and acid rock, lit with wailing organ and electric guitar, as it underscores pictures of Nazis, Thor, BDSM men with their asses out, red meat, the White House, the KKK, breasts, bullets, and graves. Finally, the music returns to that reassuring male voice humming over Americana strings and photos of a smiling boy, a pastoral countryside, and the founding fathers. The Parallax Test concludes on the word “Happiness.”

“It’s one of the best-edited sequences in cinematic history,” says Sam Esmail, who used several pieces of Small’s film music in Mr. Robot and Homecoming, his small-screen nods to ’70s paranoia thrillers. “It is relentless in its anxiety, but because the music is melodic, it’s also seductive.”

When Small died in 2003, at the age of sixty-four from prostate cancer, obituaries noted he was best known for his work in thrillers. Walter Hill, who hired Small to score his 1978 car-chase noir, The Driver, told me he was “a little disappointed that he seemed to get referred to as ‘a composer on thrillers’—which I thought kind of trivialized him, in a sense. But he was so clearly not one of the blood-and-thunder guys. There was a real special elevation, I guess I would call it, that he brought.” Hill wanted an “out-of-the-box” score for his film, and he got it. Small’s music is absent from the actual car chases, but it lends an emotionally ambiguous, slightly eerie air to the taciturn main character. In the end, the director had to fight the studio to keep Small’s work in. “I remember somebody saying to me, ‘Well, the score’s no fun,’” Hill says, laughing. “But [Small] knew that I was trying to do something a little different with genre material.”

Michael Small did so much more than suspense films. He scored everything from neowesterns to romantic comedies to Jaws: The Revenge—as well as a Terrence Malick–produced documentary about Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Antarctica expedition. But much like Pakula, culturally Small remains stuck in the amber of this unique subgenre of films about paranoia. “He didn’t mind that,” says his widow, Lynn Small, “as long as they didn’t insist on him writing something he’d already written.”

But directors often did. When John Schlesinger hired Small to score his 1976 thriller Marathon Man, starring Dustin Hoffman as an everyman caught in the middle of a diamond-trafficking scheme run by an aging Nazi (Laurence Olivier), he specifically requested echoes of Parallax View. “I asked him to really rip himself off,” Schlesinger told Music from the Movies. “Didn’t that take away from the originality of the film?” the interviewer asked. “It probably does,” said Schlesinger, “but sometimes you want to keep doing something that works terribly well the first time.”

To be fair, the Marathon Man score is substantively unique aside from some clear Parallax moments (Olivier’s character is associated with another dark anthem and minor ninth keyboard motif), and it’s a creative triumph—perhaps Small’s most famous score. Another bespoke work for a chamber-sized ensemble, it uses queasy string chords, fluttering electronics, and an angular main theme that almost sounds like he turned the Special Information Tone—the sound that used to play when you phoned a number that was “no longer in service”—into a melody. “He gets to the nerve center of what the movie’s about, and he crafts a vocabulary that’s made to measure for each movie,” says pianist Mike Lang, who played on that score. “He finds the music that is a perfect fit for that movie, and it’s hard to imagine something else.”

Small was a mostly self-taught musician who came into film during the American New Wave, an era when experimental, offbeat, and surprising scores were embraced by directors like Pakula. He hated music theory, Lynn Small says, because he “felt that theory was after-the-fact. He didn’t want to follow anybody else.” Small grew up in the world of musical theater—his father was a general manager for the Schubert theaters in New York—and always assumed that’s where his future lay. He wrote musicals throughout his time at Williams College, in addition to playing piano in jazz bands. But after his father died in 1962 and he had to drop out of graduate school at Harvard, where he was studying English literature, Small wound up studying the art of film scoring with a composer named Meyer Kupferman. Broadway was becoming more and more formulaic, in Small’s opinion, and films—especially those from across the pond by Truffaut and Fellini—were becoming anything but. Small’s narratively trained mind, which had been full of tunes since he was four years old, was made for cinema.

He was part of an invasion of Broadway-bred composers into film and TV, alongside peers like Marvin Hamlisch (The Sting), David Shire (The Conversation), and the late Billy Goldenberg. (If there’s a closely related cousin to Small’s mystery film music, it’s Goldenberg’s delectably off-piste scores for Columbo.) The 1970s were an incredibly inventive decade for film scoring, before bland synthesizer scores and the romantic, symphonic style that John Williams made famous. Even Williams was doing screwy things in those pre–Star Wars years for directors like Robert Altman, including the experiment of sneaking the same tune into every corner of the in-movie world of The Long Goodbye, and composing arguably his most avant-garde, batshit score ever for Images—which smashes music performed by throat singers and struck metal sculptures against a minor-key lullaby in Altman’s story about schizophrenia.

Meanwhile, Jerry Goldsmith was using a tape loop gadget called an Echoplex to convey General Patton’s obsession with reincarnation in Patton, strumming four pianos and four harps to represent water in Chinatown, and writing a choral mass to Satan in his Oscar-winning score for The Omen. Even the legend Bernard Herrmann was doing sleazy, hazy saxophone noir for Taxi Driver. It was a wild, wonderful time for your ears at the movies.

It was in that context that Small wrote his first score, for the 1969 high school comedy Out of It, starring Jon Voight. The film’s consulting editor (Carl Lerner) recommended Small to Pakula two years later when Pakula was making Klute, the first in the director’s famous “paranoia trilogy.” They became the 1970s’ answer to Alfred Hitchcock and Herrmann—who was one of Small’s major influences—and much like how Herrmann fused his unique facility with psychological terror with Hitchcock’s suspenseful direction, Small and Pakula were kindred spirits who shared a fascination with the human psyche. The director also had a rare respect for music, Small once said, and although he used it sparingly in his films, it was always integral. “The score can say things that nothing else can say,” Pakula told Music from the Movies. “It can in some ways make you feel inside a character. That’s my favorite use of it . . . On an emotional level, you understand the film better because of the music. Not just feel it more, but you understand it more.”

For Klute, a film about an endangered call girl named Bree (Jane Fonda) and a private eye (Donald Sutherland) who’s trying to locate his missing friend, Pakula came up with the idea of having a “siren call,” which was “not only the signature of the killer,” Small said, but “also the very seductive force that Bree is putting out. So it’s her music in so many ways; it’s really scoring her inner life.” Pakula gave his composer complete freedom to use unusual percussion, a microtonal xylophone, and a breathy, “la-la” female voice to create a truly distinct soundtrack. An important scene for Small was when Bree tries to seduce Klute in her apartment to get back the tapes he recorded of her. “Suddenly his eyes look up to the skylight and he pulls away and says, ‘There’s someone on the roof,’” Small recounted, “at which point the ‘siren call’ music is played. For me at that moment, you identify that music with what she’s just been doing as well as the presence of the killer. I think that she has this chilling realization that it’s her own obsession with control and seduction that’s haunting her, literally stalking her.”

The whole score—again, sparsely placed—is uneasy and arrhythmic. There is a somewhat normal, noirish love theme for trumpet with a ’70s pop rhythm, but most of the score uses quirky, even avant-garde techniques to hide in the dark corners and rafters and cause Bree to live in fear. “It penetrates you,” Fonda said of Small’s work in a 2019 interview for the Criterion release. “It’s a movie about . . . I was going to say paranoia, but it’s not paranoia, because the fear is real. People are watching. Everyone is watching everyone.”

Small became Pakula’s go-to composer, and went on to score nine of the director’s films across a variety of genres—including the travelogue romance Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing; the 1989 domestic drama See You in the Morning, with Jeff Bridges; and Pakula’s 1978 take on the western, Comes a Horseman. For that film, in stark contrast to his thriller work, Small wrote ambling, genial music for guitar and harmonica and an uplifting Americana theme to paint the image of horses riding across magnificent Arizona vistas. The emotional highlight of the score comes when Richard Farnsworth lies on his deathbed telling Fonda that his riding days are over, and Small’s score sympathizes with an absolutely gorgeous theme for baroque-style acoustic guitar joined by ascending string chords.

For some reason, Pakula went to other composers for his two biggest hits: the Oscar-nominated All the President’s Men and Sophie’s Choice. “I admired his work [and] envied his relationship with Pakula,” says David Shire, who scored All the President’s Men, the third in Pakula’s paranoia trilogy. “His bond with Alan seemed like a permanent one, so I was truly surprised when Alan called me.” “I don’t think he ever totally understood why that happened,” Lynn Small says. “He was hurt.”

Beyond his work with Pakula, Small lent his singular talents to the 1972 boys’ school mystery Child’s Play, directed by Sidney Lumet, and to The Stepford Wives in 1975. He wrote a Latin-flavored, jazzy noir score for the 1975 Gene Hackman mystery Night Moves, after Terrence Malick (a fan of Small’s) recommended him to director Arthur Penn. One of Small’s other longtime directors was Bob Rafelson, a partnership that yielded the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. But he never hit the jackpot with a blockbuster director the way John Williams did with Steven Spielberg, for example. (His Williams-style score for Jaws: The Revenge served a picture painfully inferior to the original.) He never received an Oscar nomination, and as the 1970s ended he was offered fewer and fewer films of quality. The New Wave crested, and the style and pace of filmmaking changed, as did the desire for out-of-the-box scores. Synths and Wagnerian-style symphonic music both edged out eccentric chamber-style scoring, temp tracks and test screenings ironed out all of the unexpected idiosyncrasies in film music, and Small found himself in Hollywood’s rearview mirror.

He continued to score films until his death, but his post-1980 résumé is mostly full of low-budget duds, Pakula’s forgotten films, and anonymous miniseries. Perhaps his career didn’t really catch fire because he never left New York, where he stayed busy scoring hundreds of commercials (for everything from American Express to Alka Seltzer). Perhaps it was because he never had a signature “hit” score or popular earworm tune. Even though Small was a talented melodist, his best-known work as a composer was distinguished by its subtlety and strangeness. If he’s remembered at all, it’s for under-your-skin music rather than the stuck-in-your-head kind. He easily could have written a sweeping love theme like Marvin Hamlisch did for Sophie’s Choice (which earned Hamlisch an Oscar nomination), but films like Parallax View were best served by his special gift for neurotic, albeit seductive, fear.

Small’s work “pulled off atmospheric without being background music,” says Esmail. “He was able to create that sense of suspense, but not fade into the background. It was just a character unto itself. Weirdly, unlike somebody like Bernard Herrmann who’s been ripped off so many times . . . I don’t feel that way with Michael Small. He still feels pretty singular and unique. I don’t really feel that other scores, or other composers, are attempting to do what he’s doing. And so it actually still feels pretty fresh now, even though it was composed fifty-some years ago.”

Herrmann experienced a late-career rebirth when young filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma sought him out in the ’70s. Shire got another bow in 2007 when David Fincher requested a Conversation-style score for Zodiac, and Hamlisch got a similar opportunity when Steven Soderbergh hired him to score the throwback comedy The Informant!, in a nod to Hamlisch’s work on Bananas back in the ’70s. No such dice for Small.

He was so good, it seems, at hiding in the dark corners of cinema, crawling into the audience’s nervous system, that his work has never really come to light. But Small’s music is richly layered, psychologically complex, and often deliciously beautiful—and it deserves a major renaissance.

Michael Small, Film Music’s Prince of Paranoia

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