MOVIES Silent treatment for new composers

Young composers are given a chance to showcase their talents.
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (AP) -- The image of silent-movie actress Eleanor Boardman flickers on a screen above a scoring stage at Signet Sound Studios. She's watching knights in shining armor comically fall from their horses.
Sitting in the control room, 28-year-old film composer Marcus Sjowall looks down from the black-and-white image and listens intently. An orchestra on the stage is playing the first musical notes for cue M19 of his score for the 1923 silent classic "Souls for Sale."
He grins briefly, although there's not much time to enjoy the triumph; much more work needs to be done.
"It's a nice feeling to hear music that's only been in my head come out of that ensemble," he says. "But I'm just trying to stay on top of everything and make sure it gets done right."
Sjowall is the sixth winner of Turner Classic Movies' annual Young Film Composers Competition. The contest allows composers between age 18 and 35 a chance to write music scores for silent films that originally had only live musical accompaniment in the theater.
The winner receives $10,000, earns the opportunity to have his or her score broadcast on TCM, and, perhaps most important, gets a chance to break into the exclusive world of film scoring.
Premiere
Sjowall's score for "Souls for Sale" premieres on a TCM special Tuesday at 8 p.m.
"The world of professional working film composers is a fairly closed circle," explains Katherine Evans, senior vice president of marketing for TCM, which has an extensive silent-film library.
"Film directors tend to go back to their favorites, so breaking into that business is tough. This contest helps grow up-and-coming composers in a field where there aren't many opportunities to break through."
"With film scoring, anybody with a guitar and a computer can say, 'I'm a film composer,'" notes the competition's first winner, Vivek Maddala, who has gone on to work on several independent films. "To my knowledge, this contest is the only method to recognize a composer solely on the quality of their craft."
The network's motivation isn't totally selfless, however.
"The idea really came to us when we realized we had hundreds of silent films in our library that we couldn't air on the network because they had no musical score to accompany them," says Evans. "We also wanted to find a way to reach out to younger audiences."
The entry period runs from Jan. 1 through March 31 each year (the seventh contest has already begun). Entrants select one of four 60-second film clips from a variety of genres for which they must create a brief score, with as many as 650 composers making submissions each year.
Groups of judges, drawn from the film-composing world and from past winners (such as Maddala), eventually whittle that group down to five finalists. The composers are brought to Los Angeles in August to be treated to seminars and studio tours, their trip culminating in a gala awards dinner where the winning composer is announced.
"We had to sit through this long, really nice dinner, which I really couldn't enjoy at all! I was so nervous," Sjowall recalls. Once the winner is chosen, says TCM's Senior Marketing Manager Mike Uchida, "I give him the full tape of the film, give him a check, and say, 'Get to work. This is the schedule.'"
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