Photo by Oscar Linares

Super Sized Score

Composer Steve Horowitz’s music is featured in one of 2004’s most talked about documentaries

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock’s hit documentary, Super Size Me, is one of the most-talked about films of the year. A tongue-in-cheek look at the legal, financial and physical costs of America’s hunger for fast food, the film deals with a somewhat serious topic in a very comical way. Creating music for such a project would seem a challenge. How do you convey seriousness while also keeping the tone light and entertaining? Spurlock didn’t have to search far for the right composer for the job. His longtime collaborator, composer Steve Horowitz, was just a phone call away. Spurlock and Horowitz had been working together for over four years on other projects, including the MTV reality show, I Bet You Will. Initially hesitant about doing music for a film with almost no budget, Horowitz agreed to score it. The film became one of the first breakout hits at the Sundance Film Festival in January of this year and has gone on to significant box office success. At press time, the film was in the Top Ten and had grossed $8 million. A soundtrack CD is now set for release.

This is all good news for Horowitz, who has steadily built an impressive yet improbable career composing for a wide variety of projects. At the California Institute of the Arts, he studied under electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnik. He then went on to do a great deal of work in chamber and concert music, eventually branching out to write music for film, television, cartoons and video games. He has composed original songs for the children’s series Blue’s Clues and Dora the Explorer; he is a Grammy winner for his production work on the 1996 bluegrass album, True Life Blues, the Songs of Bill Monroe; he is a Webby winner for his music and sound design with Nickelodeon Online; and he is a composer/bassist for his own band, The Code International. Horowitz, who recently signed with agent Brice Gaeta (bgaeta@bwcsagency.com), talked to Playback about his work on Super Size Me.

You’ve worked with Super Size director Morgan for a few years now. How would you describe your relationship?

I work with a lot of different producers, especially through my work with the audio department at Nickelodeon Online. But my work with Morgan has been steady since I’ve moved to New York, and our connection has been extremely strong. It’s been a blast. We did 50 episodes of I Bet You Will for MTV. I did 185 one to one-and-a-half minute cuts for that show. That’s a huge amount of music.

What did you think of the Super Size Me project when he first approached you?

He asked me to score it. But he told me the pay was all on percentages because they produced it themselves. I almost passed on it. I have this thing about doing freebies. I’ve been doing this a long time, and even if I do small films for filmmakers, such as from NYU, they should pay something. They’re going to respect it more. But since it was Morgan, I agreed. And I’m glad I did.

Did he let you run with what you wanted to do musically?

No. The working process for us always starts with talking about the music ahead of time. Morgan’s got really specific stuff that he likes.

What did he want to achieve with the music?

We looked at the picture and decided what marks I should try and hit. As you know, one of the story lines is what’s happening to Morgan as he goes on this all-McDonald’s food diet. The other part of the story is a really in-depth, thoughtful documentary about obesity and fast food. So, there were a couple of things we wanted to hit right off the bat. One was a main theme for him when he’s ordering food or eating food at McDonald’s. We looked at pictures and I just heard this thing in my head and I started singing it to him. Then I went and did sketches of the idea and one of them became the main eating theme and the other became his "going to the doctor" theme.

The film walks a fine line between being serious and being funny. How did you treat that musically?

In the film, Morgan starts to get sick and his body starts doing really weird things. It was quite disturbiing. My first impulse was to underscore it with some really creepy music. I played it for Morgan and he thought it was pretty interesting but maybe a little exteme, so I backed off from there. It was just leading people too much. For a documentary, you don’t want to be too manipulative. So I underscored the seriousness with something totally goofy.

What did you end up with?

Well, in the earlier stages of the film, I was acting as sort of a music supervisor and using all this pop music in the film in different places. One of the things that kept hitting me was doo-wop. So I started thinking of this weird Martin Denny doo-wop sort of sound.

How did you record the music?

Initially, it was all synthesized because we didn’t have the budget for live recording. But once the film got accepted into Sundance, we didn’t have a lot of time because we thought the film might get bought out there, so I started replacing the synth stuff with live musicians. So the score is about about half and half.

Even for you, who has worked on a lot of different projects, this must have been fun.

When I first saw rough cuts of the film, I was totally sold, and I was so glad I was doing it. Because this is not only a socially important film, but it was cool. It was like Bowling for Columbine meets Jackass. It’s entertaining but it’s thought-provoking.

BY ERIK PHILBROOK