Remebering Basil Poledouris
Written by Justin Bielawa
November 11, 2006
That I drained life's cup to its blood-red lees
And it thrilled my every vein,
I did not frown when I laid it down
To lift it never again
- Robert E Howard
The death of Basil Poledouris is as sudden as it is tragic. I had the inkling that he was ill, after Michael Kamen faded from the film score scene in a similar matter. When one of the most obviously talented of people isn't getting work or even being heard from, bells and whistles go off. I didn't want to think too deeply on it and pushed the thought of Basil being ill from my mind. Surely, he was off gallivanting on that boat of his, living life to the fullest.
The comfort of my own lie was short lived. The news was like a kick to the gut.
I wish I could say I had met the man - I only had very brief contact with his daughter Zoe about six years ago, a fine composer in her own respect. She mentioned her admiration for her father's body of work - not because it was her father, but because as a composer herself, she admired what he could write. We all did.
Between the high epics of Big Wednesday and The Hunt for Red October and the blistering science fiction of Robocop and Starship Troopers (the last one a personal favorite), Basil was well represented in the more action oriented sound of film. To say he was good at it would be a criminal understatement; there was always this raw, unrefined quality to his work that attracted me to it. Something was very intuitive about how he composed his music, a particular sound that had a continued sense of yearning. A "call of the wild", if you will. It was because Basil wore his musical heart on his sleeve, which is really saying something about any kind of composer. Bad actors can get away with an entire career, but an audience will never buy into a composer faking emotion. Basil never lied for a second or a beat or a note. It just wasn't in him.
Like many others, my first real exposure to Basil was through his work on the two Conan movies. Conan the Barbarian remains one of my all-time favorite scores, while Conan the Destroyer is something of a step-sibling of the first. It was with these two scores that he was able to express himself at his most lyrical - in fact, he even composed some silly lyrics to the melodies to help him write the score. But be it the moving Funeral Pyre music or the music for the bacchanalia scene, Basil's music reached beyond even that on the screen.
A great example of this is during one of the more dreadful scenes in Conan the Destroyer. In a rather garish rip-off of the Kull story "Mirrors of Tuzun Thune", Conan is forced to face down a wizard and a room full of fun house mirrors. The scene is badly paced, the acting mostly wooden to the point of being comical, the sets largely uninspired. However, as a composer often must, Basil rose to the challenge and produced a hypnotic and ultimately immense cue where Conan breaks out of the wizard's spell and smashes his way to freedom.
The music reaches a heroic flavor that would be worthy of any Golden Age score. How Basil found it in such a lame, half-hearted scene will always mystify and astound me. I am eternally grateful for his understanding in what the movie - and we as fans - needed to make any emotional connection. Yes, that was his job as a composer - but few could make such musical mountains out of such cinematic molehills.
And then there was that sense of yearning in White Fang or the cruel, ironic horror of "Klendathu Drop" from Starship Troopers. The wrenching "Underwater Courtship" from The Blue Lagoon or the off-kilter title to Quigley Down Under. Basil was more than just an action writer, though he was often pigeon-holed into that style. He had a lot to say about a lot of things, and always said them profoundly. You could never confuse a Poledouris score with anything else.
By now, a lot of other people have said kinder and more personal words about Basil. People that knew him, people that loved him. It’s been brought to my attention just how great a human being he was and it is my sincerest loss never to have experienced that myself. All at once, I found out that I've taken Basil's talent for granted. However, I will always have him in mind because of his profound affect on how I listen to music.
Jostein Hakestad and I would often converse over the ever changing world of the film score and always nod and smile and say "There's always Basil", because we knew in our heart of hearts that he would come back. He never got the chance. Cancer took him from all of us, and his life passed on like errant notes on the wind.
Farewell to the King.
...Basil never lied for a second or a beat or a note. It just wasn't in him...