by Joanne Johnson / Humor Editor
T a l k i n g C o m e d y . c o m |
Rupert Holmes' mother and father
met when Holmes' father was serving in the UK as a US Infantry bandleader.
The couple started a family together in England. After spending his early
years across the Atlantic Holmes' family moved to Nyack, New York. In
elementary school Holmes began to follow in his fathers' musical footsteps
by taking up the clarinet… as he grew the keyboard and many other
musical instruments were added to his musical repertoire.
Music was not the only influence on Holmes' early life. As a young boy
Holmes would spend his Sunday nights listening to CBS radio, the last
of the New York stations to keep alive the radio dramas of a dying era.
As Suspense and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar emanated from
the radio's speakers, young Rupert would sit in the dark room and let
his mind run wild creating all the images needed to go along with the
radio program he was immersed in. As far as Holmes was concerned radio
was the perfect medium because for him NOT seeing WAS believing. But radio
was the perfect medium for yet another reason… Radio gave Holmes
his first chance to create in the entertainment industry. For with radio
Holmes could play the role of co-creator with the talents behind the scenes
that brought his favorite radio dramas to life. It was on these Sunday
nights that Holmes' love for writing was born.
“All my life I've wanted to tell stories and write music,” says
Rupert Holmes of the two desires that have been the driving forces of
his creativity down through the years. “I tried to find a way to
do both at the same time by writing songs.” So when it came time
for Holmes to go off to college he headed off to Syracuse on a music scholarship.
But he became homesick and transferred to the Manhattan School of Music
to study clarinet and composition. Soon Holmes began getting session work
as a studio musician in Manhattan.
Holmes can recall overhearing a record producer, back in the days when
Holmes was first starting out, talking with someone over the phone and
saying about Holmes… “I've got this kid and he does all the
arrangements for me. He does all the vocals on the recording sessions.
He does all the copy. He plays half the instruments. He fills out the
copyright forms. He does the lead sheets. And I'm paying him 35 bucks
a song.” But Holmes was so excited, just to be getting the chance
to work in the field, that he remembers thinking at the time… “He's
paying me 35 bucks a song and I don't know what I'm doing, it's incredible.”
Although Holmes was having success in the industry he found he was not
creating the style of music that was his true passion and soon became
frustrated with being a session musician. This frustration would later
inspire him to write the song Studio Musician, which Barry Manilow
popularized in his live concerts.
Then one day Holmes tried to escape the intense summer heat of Manhattan's
city streets by ducking into a cool, dark movie theater. As the feature
for the day, the James Bond Film You Only Live Twice, began to
unfold on the giant screen that wound around Holmes' eyes … his ears
were engulfed by what seemed like eight hundred violins descending dramatically
from a stratospheric B above high C. Total bliss fell over Holmes as he
listened there in the darkness of the theater. Wouldn't it be wonderful,
thought Holmes as he listened, if someday someone asked him to score a
movie. Then Holmes thought… why do I have to wait for a movie studio
to ask me to compose a motion picture theme song I could write theme songs
right now for movies that have never been made. Of course, Holmes thought
further, if I'm going to write theme songs for movies that have never
been made why stop there? … What if the song itself WAS the movie?
After
Holmes completed three demo songs Epoch Records would offer him the chance
to record an album finally making it possible for Holmes to begin capturing
the sounds he had been envisioning in his head rather than the sounds
the 'industry heads' were insisting on. His first album Widescreen
gave birth to Holmes' trademark pop story songs in his mini-movie style
… intricate stories told in 2 - 3 minute rhyme and set to music.
If you closed your eyes, as you listened, you could see a whole movie
unfolding right in front of you. Several lyrics from this period were
so intricate that they've been included in both hard and soft cover editions
of Ellery Queen. A foretaste of the mystery novel that would eventually
come from the pen of Rupert Holmes.
A copy of Holmes' album Widescreen made it into the hands of Barbra
Streisand and as they say … the rest is history. For that would lead
to an offer to write many of the songs for, as well as arrange and co-produce,
Streisand's next album Lazy Afternoon… Which would lead Holmes
to penning a couple of songs for the soundtrack of Streisand's movie A
Star is Born. Offers to score entire movie soundtracks would eventually
follow. In '86 Holmes would find himself the first individual in theatrical
history to solely receive Tony Awards for Best Book, Music and Lyrics
(for The Mystery of Edwin Drood). “It was my first attempt
at anything for Broadway and it succeeded,” recalls Holmes. “The
scale of it was infinite… awesome.”
Once Holmes started writing for the theater
he realized the importance of writing defined characters and capturing
characters' voices rather than just writing jokes. “Because of the
limitations of theater … you've got to have different characters,”
says Holmes. “You can't have a play where everybody onstage is the
same person they just look different. One is a shrieking man and one is
a shrieking woman and one is a shrieking old woman and one is a shrieking
dog. You can't do it. So by the time I wrote Remember WENN (the
AMC TV series about the Golden Days of Radio) all my humor was coming
out of the characters.”
Holmes
says when filming Remember WENN he would often be asked to replace
one of the main characters in a scene with someone else from the cast
because of scheduling conflicts. And he'd usually have to throw out the
scene and write a whole new one. “The scenes would only work with
the characters for whom they'd been written. And I felt by season two
like a stenographer. I would just say, OK, these are the people in the
station that afternoon, this is their dilemma, and it was all I could
do to keep up with what they said. I knew them so well THEY were writing
the series.”
“And I
got that way with Where the Truth Lies as well. I knew her. By
the second chapter she was writing the book…” say Holmes of
the protagonist who uncovers the truth in his first novel Where the
Truth Lies. In Holmes book K. O'Connor, a 26 year old female journalist
who specializes in penetrating celebrity interviews, is working on an
as-told-to autobiographical book on the lives of one of the most famous
comedy teams of the 1950s Vince Collins & Lanny Morris. While working
on the book O'Connor becomes involved … maybe a little too involved
for her own good … with both members of the legendary comedy team,
one of whom may be a murderer.
One
approach Holmes employs is writing his characters into a corner and then
letting them write themselves out of it. “Every time I'm sort of
in a crossroads or a speed bump in a story I look up and I say well what
would they do, what would they really do? Not what am I going to write…
what am I going to have them do… what would these people do? You
know who this person is now. This is what they've got to deal with. What
would they do?”
“They're
doing the work,” says Holmes, of the characters he writes about.
“The only work that I'm doing is… the blessed fact that between
my touch typing course in high school and the fact that I'm a musician,
a keyboard player and a clarinetist… so I type even faster than I
talk. I'm very proud of that. I type so fast. And I have to because the
characters are living in real time and I've got to keep up with them.
It's a miracle they even give me a royalty,” Holmes jokes.
One of the points Holmes tries to make in Where the Truth Lies
is that the facts aren't always the same thing as the truth. And after
reading Holmes' first novel from cover to cover I must agree with his
point. For although the FACT is Holmes never set out to write a comedy…
the TRUTH is you will definitely find yourself enjoying many a silent
smirk of humorous recognition and quite a few hearty laughs as you journey
through the pages that lie between the covers of Where The Truth Lies.
“I get nervous if three paragraphs go
by without some quip of some sort,” says Holmes of the comedy he's
sprinkled into the pages of Where the Truth Lies. “It's not
really supposed to be a comedy book. It's not a satire on anything. It's
not Christopher Buckley. It's just that hopefully what seems like a very
witty woman is telling a story that involves two people who are professional
comedians. So theoretically somewhere in there there's going to be quite
a bit of comedy.” As for whether there'll be comedy in his next novel
Holmes quips, “I've applied to the humor commission for a license
to have humor in the book. I haven't been given permission so far. I'm
awaiting their verdict…”
Now with his first novel completed and the writing of his second one well
underway what does the future hold for Rupert Holmes. I'll just close
with a few lines Rupert Holmes' penned for the liner notes of his 1994
CD Scenario… “For me, the most memorable adventures are
still the perils that we face daily in life and love, from the mundane
to the meaningful. Where the comedy is often at our own expense, but where
the drama, even if painful, reminds us that we are living and feeling
here in the real time, with the ever-recurring possibility that this latest
chapter will end with new understanding, hope… and perhaps even happiness.”
Read our Theater Section Interview
about Rupert Holmes' play 'Say Goodnight Gracie'
www.TalkingComedy.com
For more information on Rupert Holmes visit
www.RupertHolmes.com
To find out more about 'Where the Truth Lies' visit
www.RandomHouse.com
Photo Credits:
Illustrations by J.C. Johnson;
'Where The Truth Lies' book jacket courtesy Random House; Photos of
Rupert Holmes courtesy RupertHolmes.com
TalkingComedy.com
|
CLICK HERE to
Return to the MAIN INDEX of TALKINGCOMEDY.com
|
Web Design by...
For questions or comments on this site, please contact the Webmaster
