Enter the National Arts Club, a Victorian Gothic Revival brownstone off Manhattan’s Gramercy Park; climb four winding flights of stairs; pass the Pastel Society of America; and there will be the offices of director Wes Anderson’s longtime music supervisor, Randall Poster. And though in summer 2023 Hollywood is at a strike-induced standstill, Poster, creative director of Premier Music — the advertising-focused music supervision agency — is as busy as ever.
(Update: A tentative deal has been reached between screenwriters and the studios, streaming services and production companies.)
Poster’s film projects in the next several months include music supervision for the fall’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (with Anderson), Priscilla (with Sofia Coppola), Killers of the Flower Moon (with frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese), as well as Joker: Folie á Deux (with Todd Phillips) and Hit Man (with Richard Linklater).
And that’s just his day job. Amid the pandemic, an unlikely new passion became a calling when Poster started the Birdsong Project, enlisting his diverse group of artist friends to create music inspired by or incorporating birdsong in an effort to benefit avian life. The result: For the Birds, a 20-album box set containing 172 new pieces of music and 70 works of poetry (all proceeds go to the National Audubon Society) and has led to a growing global community that’s still evolving under his leadership, one in which he hopes the music industry will take a real interest.
How has the strike affected your business?
There are some movies I’m working on that we can’t get finished because we can’t get the main actors to do [automated dialogue replacement]. And then there are movies that were meant to start in the fall that are pushing. I think everyone’s unclear about how it’s going to play out. I don’t really talk to a lot of other music supervisors, but for people who are just scraping by in music supervision, the shutdown of shows is brutal. In terms of music departments, there has been constriction at the streamers, but I’m not sure that was borne out of the strike, at least to this point. But in the short term, I’m busy. And our company, in terms of doing a lot of advertising work, thankfully, that has been very active.
Even in the music industry, I think few understand very well what a music supervisor actually does. How would you explain it?
I view my work as a filmmaker, not just a person who deals with the music — using music to best tell a story, to compensate where the story needs a bit of help and having a really candid and fluid relationship with directors and producers. People always say to me, “Oh, Randy Poster’s the guy who picks the music for the Wes Anderson movies” — but I don’t pick the music. I don’t want to be the one who does. Directors pick. I may present, we may have a conversation borne out of months of musical dialogue, but ideally, it’s the director’s medium. When people come out of the movies I work on and say, “Oh, the music was the best part,” that’s not really a victory. When people say, “I don’t really even remember the music,” sometimes that’s the best service you can do to the film — that it feels like the fabric of the movie.
What does a normal day of work look like for you?
Making sure rights are coming in; working on scenes of a movie and putting different songs up to it; making calls to record companies and publishers to see if I can narrow a price differential in terms of what we have to pay and what they’re asking us to pay; reaching out to artists and managers to see if people are interested in recording new music; looking at cues that are coming in from the composer on the movie; putting together a playlist for a director — like when starting a project, using the music to establish a dialogue. Describing what music is doing is very difficult, and words don’t necessarily mean the same things to different people, but if you can relate to songs, it gives you a sense of tempo, vibe, instrumentation they like. And then getting feedback from directors and editors: “This is working. This isn’t. Is there too much music in the movie? Is there not enough?” Sometimes it’s my role to protect the silences.
Has the catalog sales boom affected your bottom line?
When certain catalogs were held by the artist or the artist’s camp, there was a little more flexibility. If a company pays $500 million for an asset, they can’t license something at what they would say is a sort of embarrassing rate. Like, “We’re only licensing this for $10,000 a use; it’s going to take us 200 years to recoup our investment.” On the other hand, I always feel, especially with older catalogs, a movie use is going to open up a new audience to that artist, whether it’s “Oh, that’s Rod Stewart?” or “Wow, I had an idea of what Janis Joplin was like, but I’m surprised by this.”
Does it feel less personal than working with publishers and songwriters?
I wish things were more human and less corporate, but I’ve seen it throughout my whole career. You used to have 12 companies you’d license music from, and then two companies would merge and they’d cut half the staff. They’d have the catalog, but no one would know whom to talk to. A lot of times, what we have to do is convince these companies they actually own something or help them make a connection. That can also be fun — the detective work that goes into figuring out who owns the rights to something. I just wish the music companies had more of an understanding of the process of filmmaking. Oftentimes, it’s not just needing the price to be right — it’s also getting a timely answer. Name the price; just give me an answer.
On the flip side of that, the synch business is so huge. Do you get pitched often?
Yeah, people are pitching nonstop. There are people whom I respect and trust, and my response is always I want to listen to anything you think is great, but I just want to find the right music. This is going to sound horrible, but I don’t do anybody any favors. I’ll do you a favor in life as my friend, but I will not put music in a movie because I’m connected to somebody. I certainly do file things away for the future. I may love a song but not have the right movie for it. At the moment, I’m working on things in the ’20s, the ’50s — period pieces.
How do you seek out new music?
Every way — through social media, through traditional music press, recommendations. I have two daughters who are very into music. Artists lead you to artists a lot. I’ve been very reluctant to use an algorithm to find music. Probably at certain points I’d benefit from that, but I like to discover it myself.
Speaking of discovery, how did you get the idea for the Birdsong Project?
I’m a New York City kid; I’m not really a nature boy. But during the pandemic, we were all somewhat soothed by the way nature seemed to be doing its thing, unperturbed by the virus, and a lot of my friends were noticing there were so many birds. A friend I work with, Rebecca Reagan, who lives in California and is much more involved in nature causes, was like, “You should get all your musician friends to create music around birdsong. That would be a great way to joyfully draw people’s attention not only to the beauty and variety of birds but also the crises facing birds. It would be a nonpolitical way to draw people to protect the birds.” For the most part, I’ve found, no one wants to see birds die. It’s a way to bring together people in community, which seems to be so difficult otherwise. The response from artists was very positive, and it just kept going.
What do you get out of it that you don’t from your day job?
I’m usually the person who has to be a very strong editorial hand in getting what we need for a movie. Here, I just said [to artists], “Thank you.” It was very much a broad invitation to do what they feel. I didn’t really give notes, other than maybe, “Hey, this is beautiful. Can it be nine minutes versus 23 minutes?” It was liberating. I had to allow a certain kind of randomness versus how you sequence music for a movie.
What are your ambitions for the project with respect to the music industry?
I would like to see us adopted by the music community like they have the TJ Martell Foundation. But that may be a longer road. So we’re just working away. The label Erase Tapes has 10 artists on the compilation, so in 2024, they’re going to do a Birdsong album by taking their artists and remixing them, and I’d like to do collaborations with other labels so it spreads. That way I’m not the record company — we work with your artists, we curate with you. I think we’ll be ready in 2025 to hopefully do a big Birdsong concert maybe in Central Park.
At this point in your career, you’re a bit of a music supervision legend. How do you advise young people who want to do what you do?
I encourage them to find their contemporaries who want to make movies and throw in. It has never been easier to make movies. I wanted to work on movies where that one kid in the movie theater thinks, “I want to do this” — Wes and I were that kid. Do whatever you need to do to create and be creative. When people ask me the difference between how I work now and how I worked 25 years ago — well, I probably cry a little bit less, in the sense that when a director does not choose a song I feel is so right, I have more of a balanced [reaction]. I still am up for battles, though. And hopefully, people want to work with me because I’m not just a rubber stamp. We have to fight for every cue.
