The Searchers soundtrack CD
BYU Film Music Archives, 2015
Although it received not a single Oscar nomination when it was originally released in 1956, The Searchers was an instant commercial success, alternately frightening, amusing, and impressing moviegoers as only a John Ford western could. Soon after, the film came to be seen as the ultimate pairing of the director and his frequent star and collaborator, John Wayne. Many years later, in 1989, it's reputation as an irreproachable masterpiece of the American western genre was officially cemented when the film was selected for preservation by the newly born National Film Registry.
The film's score, from Warner Bros. powerhouse composer Max Steiner, had achieved a similar status over the years, hailed by film music fans as one of Steiner's best and earning two separate CD releases from the non-profit BYU Film Music Archives.
Curated since its inception in 1995 by James V. D'Arc, the BYU houses an immense collection of papers, scores, and studio recordings from Max Steiner, his contemporary Hugo Friedhofer, and a few other composers of the golden era of film scoring. Hoping to bring these treasures of film music history to more ears than the students and researchers on-site at the univeristy, D'Arc formed the BYU FMA label that same year. Their very first CD offering? Steiner's score to The Searchers.
After twenty years and many advancements in audio restoration since that initial CD release, the label decided to revisit Steiner's score by way of a newly remastered CD. This second release was no mere reissue— it was rebuilt from the ground up. New liner notes. A new package design. And, most importantly, an all-new digital re-working of the musical elements from the vintage acentates, which sought to correct previous defects in the sound quality while retaining the ambience of the period sound.
As is often the case, I began my process by focusing on the cover design. While the overall direction of the new CD would follow the new look for BYU (established on previous releases Since You Went Away and Those Calloways), Craig Spaulding, the album's executive producer, was keen on using the rarely seen British poster for the film. The poster used artwork similar to that of the familiar U.S. one sheet (used on the original BYU soundtrack album), but the illustration was much more dramtic, with its heavily stylized figures posing before a deep, red sunset sky. BYU was able to provide a high resolution scan of the original poster, leaving me with a richly detailed image with some minor fold marks and some type obscuring the sky. I retouched those away and intensified the contrast and colors, letting the red sunset go a little deeper and oppressive.
The British poster used an approximation of the more familiar U.S. title retreatment with smoother, more light-hearted typography. I preferred the latter, which had a rough-hewn, agrressive edge. I found a good example of the rougher U.S. logotype on a vintage lobby card, scanned it in hi-res, and carefully traced each letter in Adobe Illustrator. The newly drawn letters were then exported to Photoshop, shaded to match the illustrative style of the poster art, and aged to appear suitably vintage.
The disc label was designed to correspond with previous BYU releases, each of which featured a color portrait of one of the film's stars and logos that knocked out all printed colors to reveal the unprinted disc surface. While The Searchers was shot in Technicolor VistaVision, the color stills we had access to were grainy and muted and proved insufficient.
Looking elsewhere, I found a black-and-white publicity still of John Wayne's Ethan Edwards that was workable for colorization. (Shown far left in the above.) The only hiccup was Wayne must have moved very sightly at the moment the shot was taken, resulting in his face and eyes dropping out of focus. Since this would have been even more noticeable when colorize, I swapped Wayne's head in the photo for another publicity still (above middle).
