July 02, 2004

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Pitch perfect

by Marge Speidel

It's a long way from a fourth-grade flutist who played perfectly on key to a musical composer for a major motion picture. But that's the road that former Palo Altan Deborah Lurie took.

When the credits for "Sleepover" rolled, they will say "Music by Deborah Lurie." For Lurie, it means having made it to the big leagues -- the first time she has written the music for a film from a major studio (MGM).

Slated for release July 9, the movie is about four best friends, who, desperate to improve their social status, enter into an all-night scavenger hunt against the popular clique in their high school. Lurie was involved in writing parts for a 50-piece orchestra and co-writing a pop love song, "Remember," with Gabriel Mann.

Lurie credited director Joe Nussbaum with giving her this new challenge.

"The hardest thing for anybody in this industry is to get their first big break," Lurie said in a recent telephone interview. "I got it because my closest friend in college was Joe. This is his feature film debut. I scored all of his student films in college and he fought for me to be his composer."

Lean years and hard work led up to her break, including training within the local school district.

"The Palo Alto schools produce lots of actors and musicians and some parents were horrified at the earning prospects for their children. My parents even joked about helping form a support group for parents of students pursuing the arts," Lurie said.

Lurie credited her instructors at Gunn High School, teacher and choir director Bill Liberatore and drama teacher Jim Shelby, for preparing her to launch her career.

"My teachers there will be my mentors for life, whether they know it or not."

Liberatore worked with Lurie starting in elementary school when she acted in various productions and also played piano. Shelby gave her an important composing assignment in her senior year at Gunn when she wrote music for a student production of "Midsummer's Night Dream."

"My pivotal moment at Gunn was when they had an Advanced Placement in Music Theory course, studying the mathematical language behind the theory of music. Our really great jazz players at Gunn were math and physics wizards. I figured out that I had been thinking of music theoretically since I was a child," Lurie said.

Liberatore, who taught the music theory class, remembered Lurie as exceptional.

"Part of the course is training students to hear the notes. She would get every example correct in every exercise. Even though she was not shy and had acted in Children's Theatre, she had been too modest to tell me that she had perfect pitch (the ability to identify the pitch of a tone by ear)."

After that, Liberatore used her as a pitch pipe for student choirs.

In addition to having perfect pitch, Lurie has a condition called synesthesia, whereby the sound of a note causes her to visualize a certain color.

"It was years before I knew that not everyone saw the color yellow when they heard the note A," she said. "It's difficult to say how it affects my music because the color associations have always been there. It's not something I think about while I'm writing or listening to music."

Lurie's parents, Mark and Judy Lurie of Portola Valley, played music games in her early childhood. That showed up in the fourth grade, when she began playing the flute and her music teacher guessed that she had perfect pitch. Nevertheless, at Gunn Lu was still more of a theater person than a musician.

"But after composing music for two plays in my senior year, I knew that would be my passion."

Lurie quickly withdrew her applications to liberal arts colleges and applied to the USC School of Music. Jose Bowen, a member of the Stanford faculty and her piano teacher, gave her a crash course in academic music faster than she thought possible.

"I flew to USC to apply, told them everything he had told me to say, and was accepted on the spot."

After years of scoring short and independent films -- many of them produced by former USC classmates -- she began to get jobs on bigger films. She was offered a two-film deal, apprenticing on the orchestration for "Barney's Great Adventure" and "X Files."

Miramax is one of the big studios she works for now.

"They call me in for films where they need new or replacement music," she said. "Sometimes it's for a troubled movie, as 'View From the Top' was. The composer had written the score about a year before and was on to other things. I was brought in to do about half of the music."

Other credits include being the choir arranger for "X-Men 2" and assisting on the music production for "Bubble Boy" and "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle." She also produced and arranged the music for "The Pussycat Dolls," a cabaret show about a dance troupe that started playing at the Roxie Theatre on Sunset Boulevard about two years ago with stars that included Carmen Electra, Gwen Stefani and Charlize Theron. Yet another passion for the past seven years has been working with rock and pop groups.

"I love producing and arranging for them," she said. "I do it in between films. They often hire an arranger to put live strings on top of their rock recording."

Lurie arranged strings for Hoobastank's "The Reason," which has been a No. 1 hit on pop charts recently. Fellow Palo Altan Brett Simon, who attended Gunn with Lurie, directed the video for "The Reason."

Of her various musical endeavors, Lurie likes film scoring the best.

"It's by far the most difficult thing I do, but the most fulfilling and exciting. One thing I like is that it's collaboration, like doing theater. It has that 'behind the scenes' feeling and a constant dialogue with the director, trying to figure out the best way to do it. I'm involved long after the filming, working off video copies of film at my home studio."

One mark of her success is that she now has an agent with whom she is happy.

"After years of doing independent projects and not being treated so well, I'm now with an agent who represents some of the top film composers, even though I'm one of their most rookie clients. I can finally say 'Have your people call my people,' something I have waited 10 years for!"
Editor's Note: Jim Shelby is a Palo Alto Weekly film critic.

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