People often ask me what prompted me to want to go into film music. Here in this blog post is my first mentor, family friend Gaylord Carter playing the music from Disney’s Haunted Mansion and (further down) in his last performance. I spent many evenings watching him “score” the greatest silent films of all time, including the film score he debuted in 1926, “Ben Hur.” I can think of no other experience as exciting and inspiring for a young pre-teenager who already loved music.
I think you’ll love this clip. Gaylord playing the wonderful Morton Pipe Organ at Lorin Whitney Studios in Glendale. I saw him play this organ often, for DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, for all the Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd films, Chaplin’s City Lights, The Kid, Modern Times and other masterpieces, The Mark of Zorro, Phantom of the Opera, even Birth of A Nation. Many years later, I was fortunate enough to record music for Disney attractions in this very studio with Disney Imagineers led by Marc Davis on several Disney attractions and to compose original scores for approximately thirty motion picture trailers for Disney. Fun stuff for a kid that got to go to opening week of Disneyland.
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A very early photo of the grand Morton Pipe Organ as seen from the both at the old Whitney Studios
Carter composed much of the music he played to accompany films, and drew heavily on classical pieces. Film reels were distributed, he said, with thematic cue sheets for the organist or pianist, indicating whether the picture was a comedy or drama or cowboy picture, and including a few bars of suggested music for major scenes.
“The first time through, I’d have to wing it,” he said. “But if there was a bugle call or a steamboat whistle, at least I’d know it was coming.”
Born in Weisbaden, Germany, Aug. 3, 1905, Carter immigrated to Wichita, Kan., where his father became a church organist and his mother taught piano.
“I got my training by absorption when I was a child,” he once told The Times, adding that he did take six months of piano lessons and six months of organ lessons.
In 1922, when Carter was 16, the family moved to Los Angeles. Then a student at Lincoln High School in Lincoln Heights, the teenager got into theater accompaniment for silent films for lack of a dime.
Unable to afford a ticket to see a movie at his neighborhood theater, he asked if he could play the music for it. He was hired and watched many movies as he played.
Later, at the Seville Theater in Inglewood, Carter was accompanying “The Kid,” a comedy starring Harold Lloyd, when the star himself came in to see how the film was doing. Lloyd was so impressed with Carter’s playing that he made him his personal organist and recommended him for a position at the prestigious Million Dollar Theater at Third Street and Broadway.
Performing from the age of 10 until about five years before his death in 2000, Carter played in churches, in cavernous movie palaces, on radio, on television, and again in the theaters as silents enjoyed a resurgence. He left, as he put it, “a little legacy” in the 1980s when Paramount asked him to score a dozen silent film classics for home video.
Thank you Gaylord, for your inspiration!