coverback

ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK

THE CHAMPMUSIC BY DAVE GRUSIN

Plus the single “IF YOU REMEMBER ME”

THE CHAMP

302 067 420 8 / 88985307572

For some reason, mankind loves to watch their fellow man pummel each other into a bloody pulp, even more so when they’re rooting for the underdog. Throw in a cute little kid and copious buckets of tears, and you have a recipe for cinematic success. The 1931 version of The Champ starred Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper as a down-and-out pugilist trying to care for his adoring son. Beery tied with Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) for the Best Actor Oscar, though it wasn’t a true tie. March had one more vote than Beery, but Academy rules at the time stated, “[I]f an achievement came within three votes of the winner, that achievement would also receive the award.” On paper, a remake of this three-hanky weeper nearly 50 years later seemed an odd fit for the oversized passions of Italian-born opera and film director Franco Zeffirelli. But as Kramer vs. Kramer also proved that year, tykes in tears could still warm the coldest of hearts.

Zeffirelli first saw the original Champ at the age of seven in his hometown of Florence. “I was shocked and disturbed by it,” he remembered in American Film, “because my mother had just died and my father was living with a new wife who didn’t want me. I was living with relatives, but really I was homeless.” “I can’t tell you the effect the movie had on me,” he told The New York Times. “I was nailed to it. I sobbed from beginning to end. For a week afterward, I walked around in a daze.”

At the end of a 14-hour day in 1977 dubbing Jesus Of Nazareth, Zeffirelli caught The Champ again on television. “The whole trauma came back,” he said in American Film, “the whole syndrome of anguish.” “While I watched,” he told The New York Times, “all the emotions that had remained dormant for nearly 50 years came flooding back. When it was over, I said to myself, ‘I consider myself a man of the multitudes, and if my heart is still open to this film, others will be, too.” MGM executive Richard Shepherd had been after Zeffirelli to make a film in the US. “I wasn’t particularly anxious to,” he said, “but I called [Shepherd] in Hollywood as soon as the movie was over. I told him what I had seen

32

THE CHAMP

Voight was allowed to improvise his lines from take to take. “He has extraordinary intuition,” Zeffirelli said in Variety. “So I let him go — it’s only film we’re wasting.” The director worked differently with Schroder, letting the scenes evolve and then filming him separately with proper cues and timing. Zeffirelli then put the rushes on videocassettes and played them “endlessly” at home “until I discover what went right or wrong.”

Zeffirelli rejected reports of fights on the set. “The stories of discord have been invented,” he told Variety. “There has not been one moment of tension with the actors.” But even Schroder was losing it by the end. “The picture’s been real nice except the last scene,” he told the New York Post. “I couldn’t cry any more, they put menthol in my eyes.”

“I think it is a damn good film and the audience will dig it,” Zeffirelli told the New York Post. “It makes people aware of certain problems, what a child means in their lives, that a child is not a toy or a poodle.” King Vidor, director of the 1931 original, attended the Hollywood premiere and praised the new director’s work. “It takes a lot of courage to remake a popular, successful movie. I think Zeffirelli succeeded marvelously.”

“If you think ‘they don’t make movies like they used to’ — relax,” said Liz Smith, “Zeffirelli just did.” The Champ “knows what kind of movie it aims to be and it sets out to accomplish only one thing — reduce the audience to tears,” said Rex Reed in the New York Daily News. “Judging from the sobbing and weeping around me, I’d say it achieves its purposes.” Women’s Wear Daily praised Voight and Dunaway, “but this movie is owned by Schroder and by Zeffirelli, who set out to prove he could make a celluloid version of tear gas. He deserves our salutary nose-blowing.” The critic for the New York Post also advised moviegoers to “please carry the large, economy-sized Kleenex. [...] I don’t know if [Voight will] win an Oscar next month. [sic] I do know he reduced a screening room full of hard cases to sob.”

The film was released in April, five days before Voight’s Oscar win for Coming Home, which helped generate interest in his new film. By the end of September, The Champ had racked up over $48 million worldwide, making it MGM’s biggest hit in 14 years. “If I, a cynical, worn-out Florentine, could be reduced to tears by that simple, sentimental

5

and how I felt. He said he would screen the movie himself. I said, ‘Call me after you do, never mind how late it is here.’ It was 6 A.M. in London when he telephoned, and he was sobbing, too. And that was the beginning of the remake of The Champ.”

Zeffirelli had filmed Romeo And Juliet and Brother Son, Sister Moon in English, but The Champ was to be his first American film. “I have been vaccinated against the fear of being a foreign director after working in England and elsewhere,” he said in Variety. “I came to the conclusion that I don’t feel like a foreigner. I don’t try to superimpose my Italian point of view on a different background. You have to bend, while maintaining an objective vision.”

Bending was required from the beginning. First there was Mother Nature. “This weather, this weather. Nobody told me Miami was like this in the summer,” Zeffirelli told Women’s Wear Daily. “It’s slowing us down. Just when they get involved in a scene, the clouds move in or it rains. It’s like interrupting sex all the time.”

Zeffirelli also went eight weeks without a male and female lead. Ryan O’Neal was originally slated to star but left because of “artistic differences.” The New York Daily News reported, “Ryan quit in a huff” when Zeffirelli refused to hire O’Neal’s 12-year-old son Griffin to play opposite him. (O’Neal got his own boxing movie of sorts when he starred with Barbra Streisand in The Main Event.) Robert Redford also expressed interest but demanded too many script changes. Zeffirelli eventually cast Jon Voight and Faye Dunaway as his ex-wife.

But the real star of the film was seven-year-old, Staten Island-born Ricky Schroder, who knocked out 600 contenders for the role. Liz Smith called Schroder the “Shirley Temple-Margaret O’Brien of our time — a regular little tear-duct factory. If salt water could solve the energy crisis, all Uncle Sam would have to do is turn Ricky loose.” But Schroder kept his newfound celebrity in check. “I’m not gonna be a hotshot ’cause there’s nobody better than Jackie Cooper,” he told Newsweek. The 55-year-old Cooper gave the new child star his own bit of advice from the trenches — “I hope he’s got a lot of strength. If he hasn’t developed something at age 12 that they want, and then something at age 16, he could end up not yet out of high school and feeling like a failure.”

4

7

tale,” Zeffirelli wrote in his autobiography, “then so would millions of other people.” Helping reduce that cynical, worn-out Florentine to tears was Dave Grusin’s memorable score.

Grusin said in our interview that working with Zeffirelli “was quite an experience. I knew who he was and his background. After I got over the surprise that he was going to be the director of this remake of this old American film, I thought it was very interesting. He had a whole musical side to him.” Grusin tried to compose “not thinking about the musical stuff [Zeffirelli] was bringing to the party but it must have had a little bit of effect on it.”

The biggest challenge was finding the right tone for the main theme [track 2]. Set against the silhouettes of horses and jockeys riding through the Florida mist, a plaintive oboe solo brings on the dawn resting on a bed of strings. A French horn answers until the harp glissandos into a lush full orchestra rendition of the theme. After Grusin recorded the theme, he went into the booth to listen to the playback and found Zeffirelli crying. “If he got moved by it enough,” Grusin says, “then I knew we were safe, in terms of the choice of the cue. If he cried, then it worked for him.” Grusin friends Alan and Marilyn Bergman later added lyrics to the main theme under the title “What Matters Most.” Grusin notes that the tune has had “a nice longevity as a song,” recently serving as the centerpiece of What Matters Most: Barbra Streisand Sings the Songs of Alan and Marilyn Bergman in 2011. “T.J.’s Theme” [track 8], a sad melody for flute solo that captures the boy’s loneliness, memorably merges with the main theme as T.J. (Schroder) and Billy (Voight) embrace in the stands of the empty racetrack after Billy has been released from jail.

The score allowed for a wide variety of musical styles. The bossa nova of “A Cha-Cha-Do Brazil” [track 3] accompanies Billy’s outdoor training sequence, while the R&B inflections of “Nothing But a Groove” [track 5] play from the car radio as Billy drives T.J. to spend time with Annie (Dunaway). Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik [track 4] underscores T.J.’s uncomfortable isolation abandoned in a new world of wealth aboard Annie’s yacht. The lounge quartet behind “Salon Du Miami” [track 10] provides a smooth background to Dunaway’s fashion show, and Grusin gets funky with it as Billy trains during the “Gym Montage” [track 7].

6

At the time, Grusin’s “split career” included his label GRP Records, which he had recently started with Larry Rosen. “We were making jazz records with unknowns and there wasn’t a lot of income,” Grusin says. “In fact, the film scores financed my part of the record label.” Though he liked to be involved in the mixing, mastering, and ordering of the soundtrack album — “even when they weren’t on our label” — Grusin’s memory is foggy on The Champ. “We may not have had our hands on that one.” When asked why the Marvin Hamlisch-Carole Bayer Sager song “If You Remember Me” opens the album, Grusin laughed and admitted, “I don’t remember. I don’t remember you at all.”

Grusin says “it was a wonderful experience” working with Zeffirelli, one that brought the composer his second Oscar nomination. “If you’re writing film,” he says, “it’s a pretty obscure place to be, even if you get a credit on screen. The public isn’t too much aware of who you are. But that nomination really helps and I think it helps the rest of the career too in terms of people may not know who you are but they’ve heard the name. I think it helped a lot. It’s not helping much these days — nobody’s calling much.” But Grusin “can’t not be involved in music,” so he tours with guitarist Lee Ritenour, “playing jazz and having a great time — except for the airplanes.”

“Film music is film music,” Grusin told the New York Daily News. “I think sometimes it’s an accident that it works at all.” Nearly 40 years after the release of The Champ, the combination of a father, a son, and memorable film music proves that wringing tears from an audience is no accident.

Sometimes it just works.— Jim Lochner

Art Direction for Varèse Sarabande Records: Bill PitzonkaMastered by Chas Ferry and Daren Chadwick • Assistant Mastering Engineer: Cody Thompson

Varèse would like to thank everyone at Sony Music Entertainment

1. If You Remember Me Performed by Chris Thompson (2:56) (Marvin Hamlisch / Carole Bayer Sager)

2. Main Title (2:33) 3. A Cha-Cha-Do Brazil (1:55)

4. Serenade In G. K. 525 Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (5:05) (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)

5. Nothing But A Groove (3:26) 6. Find Our Way (2:50)

7. Gym Montage (1:15) 8. T.J.’s Theme (2:24)

9. Theme From The Champ (2:31)

10. Salon Du Miami (2:42)

11. Visiting Hours (2:57) 12. Gone (4:14)

Music Composed and Conducted by

DAVE GRUSINExecutive Producer: Richard Perry

Reissue Produced by Cary E. Mansfield, Bryon Davis and Bill PitzonkaMusic Production Supervision:

Michael Barackman and Michael SolomonMGM Production Supervisor: Harry Lajewski

Recorded by Aaron Rochin • Mixed by Larry Emerine Engineered by Stephen Marcussen and Gabe Veltri

Recorded at MGM Studios Culver City, CAMixed at Studio 55, Los Angeles, CA

“If You Remember Me” Produced by Richard Perry Engineer: Dennis Kirk • Remix Engineer: Bill Schnee

Additional Engineering: Gabe Veltri • Recorded at Studio 55, LA Additional Recording at Celebration Recording Studios, NYC

TH

E C

HA

MP

OR

IGIN

AL M

OTIO

N P

ICTU

RE

SO

UN

DTR

AC

KV

AR

ÈS

E S

AR

AB

AN

DE

302 067 420 8

Originally released as Planet Records P 9001, 1979 Artwork C2016 Varèse Sarabande Records, LLC P1979 RCA Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment / Manufactured for

Varèse Sarabande Records by Sony Music Entertainment / 25 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010-8601 WARNING: All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws. / 88985307572

Varèse Sarabande Records, LLC, 9100 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 455E, Beverly Hills, CA 90212. / Printed in the U.S.A. Distributed by Universal Music Distribution, 2220 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, CA 90404.

www.VareseSarabande.com

TH

E C

HA

MP

OR

IGIN

AL M

OTIO

N P

ICTU

RE

SO

UN

DTR

AC

KV

AR

ÈS

E S

AR

AB

AN

DE

302 067 420 8

“If You Remember Me” was written by Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager especially for the film,

The Champ. Though the movie did not accord an opportunity to use a song with lyrics, everyone involved

enthusiastically agreed that “If You Remember Me” perfectly captured the powerful mood and impact

of the film — particularly the grandstand reunion sequence. In fact, Franco Zeffirelli, Dyson Lovell,

and MGM felt so strongly about the song that they used it as the only music playing behind the coming attractions preview clip shown in theatres throughout

America. In keeping with that spirit of specialness, and because of the song’s own importance,

“If You Remember Me” is presented here.

DISC - 12cm PRINT TO 23mmA1746-04FLAT: 120mm x 120mmFINISHED 120mm x 120mm02/03/10

IMAGE AREA 116 mm to 23 mm

MIRROR BAND If your design does not include a white flood, please be aware that there is a mirror band that contains a barcode and other identification numbers. Printing over the mirror band will affect the overall look of your design. Depending on the product CD, DVD or Blu-ray, the mirror band and non reflective disc will vary between 46 mm and 24 mm.

15 m

m

23 m

m

24 m

m

46 m

m

116

mm

There is a 1/16 Safety Zone around center spec limitfor text and logos if printing over blank disc.

Typ

e S

afe

Sent to Sony Music 11-14-13

Artwo

rk C2016 Va

rèse Sara

bande Records, LLC. / P

1979 RCA Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment / Manufactured for Varèse Sarabande Records by S

ony Mus

ic Ente

rtainm

ent /

25

Mad

ison

Aven

ue, N

ew Y

ork,

NY

1001

0-86

01

Three Pantone colors: Pantone Black Pantone 7409

White Flood

302 067 420 8 88985307572

ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK

THE CHAMPMUSIC BY DAVE GRUSIN

Plus the single “IF YOU REMEMBER ME”

1. If You Remember Me Performed by Chris Thompson (2:56) (Marvin Hamlisch / Carole Bayer Sager)

2. Main Title (2:33) 3. A Cha-Cha-Do Brazil (1:55)

4. Serenade In G. K. 525 Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (5:05) (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)

5. Nothing But A Groove (3:26) 6. Find Our Way (2:50)

7. Gym Montage (1:15) 8. T.J.’s Theme (2:24)

9. Theme From The Champ (2:31)

10. Salon Du Miami (2:42)

11. Visiting Hours (2:57) 12. Gone (4:14)