In Conversation

Even With Two Oscars, Randy Newman Is Still “Definitely a Dissident”

The Marriage Story composer talks about his honor from the New York Film Critics Circle, the habit that drives him to despair, and our “nuts” president.

By Jordan Hoffman

January 6, 2020

Randy Newman at his home in Los Angeles.

Randy Newman is different things to different people. His widest audience, surely, is for penning and performing songs associated with Pixar films. Some kids who were barely walking when they first heard “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” are now showing Toy Story to children of their own.

Then come the Newman die-hards, fans of his piano-based singer-songwriter albums, which feature bouncy satire (“I Love L.A.,” “Short People,” “Rednecks”); moony, gorgeous ballads (“Marie,” “Every Time It Rains,” “Living Without You”); and, when the two combine, songs that truly have no equal anywhere under the sun (“Sail Away,” “Louisiana 1927,” “Dixie Flyer”). A number of his tunes were also major hits for other artists too (“You Can Leave Your Hat On,” “Mama Told Me Not to Come”).

But in between these two careers lies his work as a composer of film scores, for which he’s being given a special award of recognition by the New York Film Critics Circle on Tuesday night. For this year’s Marriage Story, he teamed up for a second time with Noah Baumbach, and it seems a safe bet he’ll end up with an Academy Award nomination.

He’s got two Oscars on his shelf already, for original songs from Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story 3. He’s had eight nominations for score (Ragtime, The Natural, Pleasantville) but has yet to win.

Newman’s Hollywood connections run deep, with three famous composer uncles (Uncle Alfred wrote the 20th Century Fox fanfare, the closest thing to Hollywood’s national anthem) and cousins Thomas and David Newman, who are tremendously successful in the field too. But no one else can mix childlike sweetness with world-weary bile quite like Randy Newman.

We spoke a few days before the Golden Globe Awards. (Marriage Story’s score was nominated but did not win.) He was prone to chuckling over the phone, despite recovering from hip surgery. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Vanity Fair: Randy, last time I saw you it was a concert in Central Park in 2000, when it was pouring rain.

Randy Newman: Ugh, I remember that.

I was worried you were going to get electrocuted.

I was hoping to get electrocuted.

I see you have a slew of tour dates planned for Australia and Europe soon.

It may not happen. I had a hip operation, and I thought I was going to get better, but I'm not. And I’m losing feeling in three fingers on my left hand. Not that I ever had a great left hand in the first place, but it’s hard to play.

Oh no. Well, I hope you can still make the trip. I couldn’t help but notice that a slew of them are in the Netherlands and Belgium. They love Randy Newman in the Low Countries! What’s the story?

They do [love me there]. I think it’s because they had radio stations run by political parties, and I was played on the very left-wing stations. I think they thought I didn’t like America. Of course, I love America, actually, and always have. I mean, I’m definitely a dissident, but there’s always such a simplistic view.

Less than 24 hours ago, our president launched a unilateral attack on Iran. I couldn’t help but think of your song “Political Science.” Does that song come to your mind from time to time?

I think about it when something like this happens. I mean, I never thought we’d get close to having that song be the truth. I always thought, you know, the guy in the song was nuts! But this guy is nuts!

To be clear, “this guy” is Trump.

Yeah! Remember how hesitant all celebrities were to talk about politics, you know, maybe 30 years ago? Twenty years ago? Well now I’m just blabbing away like I know what the hell I’m talking about.

You’ve just been given a special award by the New York Film Critics Circle, the oldest critics group anywhere, for your contributions to film music. You are only the second composer to be recognized since the group’s founding in 1935, after Ennio Morricone.

I’m really very honored to receive it. I’m enough of a snob to appreciate it more than almost any recognition I’ve ever gotten.

And it comes the year of Marriage Story, your second collaboration with Noah Baumbach after The Meyerowitz Stories. So clearly you like the guy.

You have to like the director you’re working with. I don’t work with anyone if I can’t stand to be in the same room with them. He is a good guy and was appreciative of what I could do. His instincts about music keep getting better.

How different is the process on a movie like Marriage Story, which is performance-driven, compared to something like The Paper, which has more of a reliance on plot and sequences?

What Baumbach preferred was I write something for a scene, then I’d send it to him on piano and he’d lay it in. Sometimes he’d lay it in somewhere else, and I’d even disagree, but all pictures are different. Toy Story is wildly different. But that last Toy Story had about eight minutes of real strong emotion; they are not afraid at all to do that.

Marriage Story quickly took over the internet with memes, people taking images from the big fight scene where he bangs the wall and putting joke captions underneath. Have you seen them?

No. [Laughing] I haven’t seen them. But I am sure some of them are pretty funny. Can’t be a bad thing.

It’s a good picture! It’s one of the best pictures I’ve done.

If I were to rank the movies you’ve been involved in, yeah, it’s in the top five for sure.

I would too. Awakenings might…well, no, that’s not a better picture, no.

The best movie you’ve been involved in is Avalon.

I think it is Toy Story, the first one.

No. It’s Avalon.

Avalon had a good score.

Good? It’s fantastic! And The Natural too! Come on! But okay, Toy Story, I know you still perform “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” in concert, and for people who are a little younger this is their Proustian Express to childhood, you know, one note and they start to cry. What songs are like that for you?

“What’d I Say” by Ray Charles.

But that doesn’t get me emotional. That just gets me excited, as much as when I was a kid.

There are some George Jones songs, like “The Door”…some of George Jones’s songs remind me of having a broken heart, and it’s just great.

One of the first big movie scores you did was Ragtime for Miloš Forman. He had only been living in the United States for about 10 years at the time.

I became friends with him, which is not the norm with me. We were once at a party and he told me that I looked like Beethoven. So I said, “Well, let’s do a biography, and we can call it I Can’t Hear You.”

He then called Variety and told them we were making this picture, and it got printed. “Newman and Forman to make Beethoven biography I Can’t Hear You.” He was a funny and entertaining guy. And when I recorded the score, he wasn’t there. That’s never occurred again.

We mentioned Avalon before. You worked with Barry Levinson a few times.

A really good guy. It’s funny, I’ve often said bad things about directors over the years. I’ve said things like, “I wouldn’t invite them to my house,” things like that. But now I’m thinking Forman was a good guy, Levinson’s a good guy, and Baumbach is too. So what the hell?

Mike Nichols once told somebody that with what I’ve said about directors, he didn’t know how I ever got a job. He may have been right.

How about working with Penny Marshall on Awakenings, good experience?

Not great. She was difficult because, well…creative people have a right to change their minds. I’m ready for that. But this was difficult. I liked her personally, though.

She was really famous. Like, TV famous. I was with her one time in the Village in New York. It was 2 or 3 in the morning. I don’t know what the hell we were doing. And I said, “How are we going to get a ride? There’s no way we can get a ride.” She didn’t say anything. Then a cab driver pulls over and shouts, “Laverne!!” We just got in and got home.

But as a director, difficult to work with. But it’s a good score. However we got it done, we did it. That’s a real good score.

Do people ever bug you in public?

They don’t recognize me. Unless I’ve just been on TV.

Speaking of competition, your score of Marriage Story is a contender, as is your cousin Thomas Newman’s score for 1917. [Both were nominated for Golden Globes but lost to Hildur Guðnadóttir for Joker.] If it should be Newman vs. Newman for the Oscars, how does that make the family feel?

I’d vote for myself, and he’d vote for himself, and we’ll see. If I don’t win, I’d like to see him win it. And I assume he—well, I don’t know how he feels!

You’d like him to get the silver medal.

Silver medal would be fine! But it’s a really great score.

Do the two of you talk shop? Your styles are very different, but you are both film composers in Hollywood.

Yes, when we see one another. I saw him just the other night, actually. We didn’t talk shop, but we talked about keyboards and piano playing. It’s something he’s vastly superior to me at; he’s a tremendous pianist. He can play anything.

Are there other composers you get excited about?

Certainly John Williams. And Alan Silvestri. I like James Newton Howard. Tom. And his brother, David [Newman] too. David does these really hard pictures. Like Doctor Zoo 6, with comedy (hopefully) and action. They are the hardest pictures in the world to do, and he does them very well.

Wait, Doctor what?

I made that up. He does the big comedies, Pets 4 or whatever. He does them really well. [David Newman’s credits include Galaxy Quest, Ice Age, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, and Girls Trip.]

Do you go to the movies much?

I really don’t. I probably should. And Tom was saying this, too, the other night, we should both see more movies. I watch a lot of sports on television. I’ve wasted so much time doing that. It almost drives me to despair.

Hold on a second, watching sports on television is, for some, almost an act of self-care. It can be almost spiritual, and certainly relaxing.

How much more relaxed do you wanna get? All the Bowl games. And the NFL playoffs are coming up…

Who are your teams? L.A. teams?

I don’t have any. I like to see individuals do well. I like to see [LeBron] James score 40 points and get 20 rebounds.

I do like the Clippers. If I had to pick a team, it would be the Clippers. And my wife is such a Dodgers fan that I’m a Dodgers fan too.

One of the stranger credits to your name is as co-screenwriter for the 1986 comedy Three Amigos with Steve Martin and Lorne Michaels. What was that like?

It was two guys plus Steve at the word processor, so he had final say. There’s a scene where he wrote, “A bell tolls a loud ding.” So Lorne and I say, “Excuse me, you can’t toll a ding, you have to do better.”

He says, “It’s a stage direction, what does it matter?” And we fought about it for 20 minutes. In the final script any time that bell would ring, Steve would write, “The bell tolled seven dings.”

They’re making it into a musical. They’re gonna try.

Would you be involved?

Yeah, I think so.

Jordan Hoffman

Contributing Editor