"Graduate, with Honours, American College of Hard Knocks" with post-graduate studies at "Nose to the Grindstone University." So composer, vocalist, band member, dachshund owner and straight talker Danny Elfman describes himself. To most though, he is the extraordinary mind behind many of the seminal film and television scores of the last twenty years - Beetlejuice, The Simpsons, Edward Scissorhands, Batman, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Darkman, To Die For, Good Will Hunting, Desperate Housewives, Spiderman, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Milk, and Terminator Salvation being only a handful. From gothic orchestrals to rock to electronica to choral music to jazz, Danny has an unbounded gift for transmuting the emotions and aesthetics of a work of celluloid into music. His talent has attracted some of Hollywood’s biggest names – Tim Burton, Sam Raimi, Brian DePalma, Emilo Estevez, Warren Beatty, the Hughes brothers, and a wife in the form of Bridget Fonda – and has won him an Emmy, four Oscar nominations and countless other accolades to date. And all this from a self-taught musician still frowned upon by the formally educated film composer elite.

    While Danny has created his own folklore around a joke that he was born in Amarillo, Texas, the truth is Daniel Robert ‘Danny’ Elfman was born May 29, 1953 in Los Angeles, California. His father, Milton, was a teacher, his mother, Blossom, a novelist and winner of an Emmy for a TV movie. Danny grew up in a multi-cultural neighbourhood. He spent his childhood in the local movie theatre and developed a passion for the music of film composers Bernard Herrmann, Nino Rota, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Franz Waxman. Dropping out of high school, he followed his brother Richard to France, where he learnt to breathe fire as a street performer and joined Le Grand Magic Circus, an avant-garde musical theater group. Moving onto Africa, Danny travelled through Ghana, Mali, and Upper Volta, discovering new musical styles, including the Ghanaian ‘highlife’ genre which is characterized by jazzy horns and multiple guitars. Incapacitated for much of his year long stay by a bout of malaria, he returned to the US and got his first big break, yet again thanks to his brother, director Richard Elfman.

Oingo Boingo
Late 1972, Richard founded a musical theater and comedy troupe called ‘The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo’ which saw up to 15 musicians on stage playing over 30 instruments. In 1980, Richard made a film based on the band's stage performance, with Danny playing the part of Satan and composing his first film score. Forbidden Zone was a cult smash and launched Richard and Danny in the fields of movie making and music respectively. With Richard’s interest switching to film, Danny took over leadership of the band, greatly aiding its evolution into new wave Ska octet, Oingo Boingo.
While never quite achieving the commercial success once predicated for them, Oingo Boingo attracted a wide following in and around LA with their three-piece horn section, darkly comedic lyrics and Danny’s part-razzmatazz part-mordant vocals. They featured on a number of soundtracks in the 1980s, including Fast Times at Ridgemont High with ‘Goodbye, Goodbye’. Their best-known song, ‘Weird Science’, was written for the John Hughes movie of the same name (get your Kelly LeBrock fix here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDe5Ckt4joQ)
Releasing five albums, the band eventually split in 1995. Asked during a 2007 phone-in interview on XETRA-FM if there was talk of a band reunion, Danny said there was absolutely no possibility due to him having suffered irreparable hearing loss as a result of his live performances with a rock band.

Tim Burton
In the early 80s, a young student called Tim Burton attended a gig by one of his favourite local bands, Oingo Boingo. Lead singer and future director struck up a friendship which saw Tim invite Danny to write the score for his first feature film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure. Despite nerves at his lack of formal training, Danny worked alongside Oingo Boingo guitarist and arranger Steve Bartek to create a super-wired soundtrack in tune with the zany man-child qualities of leading man, Paul Reubens.

    For Danny, hearing his score played by a full orchestra for the first time proved a ‘thrilling experience’. Meanwhile, he and Tim established a creative rapport which would see their careers inextricably linked. In 1989, this union resulted in the Wagnerian grandeur of Danny’s Grammy award winning, highly popular score for Batman. A few years later, Edward Scissorhands captured a contrasting but equally evocative beauty in an icy orchestral score influenced by Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky’s ballet music. Imitated in TV commercials (‘Beware the Judderman when the moon is fat…’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TUOPeNJCK8), the soundtrack was most recently adapted into a ballet by British composer Terry Davis.

    Burton has said of his relationship with Elfman: "We don't even have to talk about the music. We don't even have to intellectualize – which is good for both of us, we're both similar that way. We're very lucky to connect" (Breskin, 1997). For Danny and Tim, this blending of minds achieved a magnum opus in the form of the 1993 stock animation release The Nightmare Before Christmas. Scoring a truly enchanting musical, Danny also voiced a number of characters including lead, Jack Skellington, the ‘Clown with the tear-away face’, and the voice of ‘Barrel’. There could not have been a more perfect medium for the composer. In his own words, "For me, writing something in the spirit of Halloween is like Mother Teresa writing on charity and sacrifice. It's just second nature to me.”

Surprisingly perhaps, Tim has protested, “I am not a dark person and I don't consider myself dark,” while, in contrast, when asked why his music is always very dark, Danny answered, “Light hurts my eyes.” (AOL Interview with Danny Elfman). Ironically it was during the filming of Nightmare that the differences between the two men became most apparent. Through a number of 1995 interviews, Danny had expressed his huge disappointment with the dub of his score to Batman Returns. Creative tensions on set led to fallouts, with one scoring session resulting in the exchange – Danny: "Tim, when was the last time I decked ya?" Tim: "When was our last meeting?" As a result, despite previously indicating that he would be involved, Danny did not score Tim’s next film, Ed Wood; the only other time this occurred being Sweeney Todd, Tim’s adaptation of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical.

It seems telling that Danny would go on to compare his and Tim’s relationship to a marriage because, while at the time he stated that ‘marriages break up’, there was also room for reconciliation. By the time filming started on Mars Attacks in 1996, all was resolved. The first time Danny had been seduced by a soundtrack in his youth was hearing Bernard Herrmann’s score to The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951). Tim's SF spoof provided the perfect vehicle for Danny to pay homage to that spectral sound, in particular the eerie wail of the Theremin.
Come 1995, Danny and Tim’s working relationship was well and truly repaired, as evidenced by the composer playing such a pivotal role in the sticky sweet manic Technicolorama, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Danny became the voice of everyone’s favourite small orange men, the Umpalumpas. Singing on the film’s five songs, he manipulated his vocals and played with the audio to harmonise high and low pitched vocals. More recently, he fused his love of the macabre with a passion for jazz, playing Bonejangles in The Corpse Bride (2005). And in joining forces again for the 2010 release of what promises to be a cinematic extravaganza, Alice in Wonderland, it seems that director and composer have smoked the peace pipe and are revelling in a whole new night-bred Fantasia.

Sam Raimi

While Danny managed to salvage his creative partnership with Tim, it has been an equally rocky road as regards his working with the director Sam Raimi. Having watched Evil Dead II, Danny became a fan of the director both professionally and personally. Over a twenty year period, Danny worked alongside Sam on Darkman (1990), Army of Darkness (1993), A Simple Plan (1998), Spider-Man (2001), Spider-Man 2 (2004), and Spider-Man 3 (2007). But it was while scoring the third instalment of the Spider-Man franchise that tensions came to a head and Danny quit the project. “(Sam) was actually even easier than Tim Burton to work with and we'd never had a disagreement,” (chud.com 2006) he explained at the time, adding, “He was there, but he was not the Sam that I knew…I don't know who it was, but it wasn't Sam. It was as close to  living out Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as I've ever experienced.”

    And yet, as with Burton, it seems that time heals. Despite insisting “I would sooner go back to bussing tables,” than work with Sam again, earlier this year Sony announced that Elfman will score Spider-Man 4. Presumably the real Sam snatched back his body or Danny learnt to live in peace with the alien.

Musical Influences
Alongside these colourful working relationships, Danny is also famous for scoring such memorable TV theme tunes as The Simpsons and Desperate Housewives. In addition, he has created musical landscapes for a number of computer games, including the title track for Fable, and the soundtracks to Lego Batman: The Video Game and Wanted: Weapons of Fate.

     February 2005, at Carnegie Hall, Danny added a new dimension to his musical accomplishments with the world premier of Serenada Schizophrana, his first orchestral composition written for the concert hall. Created with a large orchestra in mind, Serenada Schizophrana was composed of six movements and featured electronics, two pianos, and eight female voices (sound bites at http://www.serenadaschizophrana.com). The composition went on to receive worldwide exposure in the soundtrack to the IMAX film Deep Sea 3D, narrated by Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet.
“The composer of this piece has an ear for symphonic colours and how to balance them,” wrote Bernard Holland of Serenada Schizophrana in the New York Times. These ‘colours’ have been assembled from a rich blend of musical influences, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Orff and Bartók, and Duke Ellington alongside more recent artists, Harry Partch, Philip Glass and Lou Harrison. Add in a love for Ghanaian Highlife, choral music, jazz, eastern European folk, and you have a truly eclectic composer, a maverick.

With the 2009 releases of Terminator Salvation (trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYc3vOmof_8), the latest offering in the ever popular science fiction mythos, and the in-vogue steampunk stylings of 9 (trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnoJecu9e7c), and 2010’s Alice in Wonderland (trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeWsZ2b_pK4)  and The Wolf Man (trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N2lZwOQdMI), Danny has emerged as one of the great musical composers of modern media - and proof that training alone is not enough. A true genius knows how to shape the strange, the dark, and the lost into something beautiful.

TRIVIA
-    When Danny’s name appears as composer in the main titles of a film, the music gets louder or livens up.
-    He has been nominated for four academy awards but has never won one.
-    Danny’s only Grammy was for his theme to Batman (1989.)
-    He has composed comic book scores for Dick Tracy (1990), Darkman (1990), Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), Men in Black (1997), Men in Black II (2002), Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004), Hulk (2003), Spider-Man 3 (2007), Wanted (2008), and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008).
-    In 1996, he composed the score to Freeway, which was directed by a high school friend. Danny was paid a dollar.