Rejected from his school orchestra, Danny Elfman went on to score over 100 films
As a boy Danny Elfman was turned away from his elementary school orchestra for showing no feel for music. Years later, with no formal training, he wrote the Batman score, the Simpsons theme and Jack Skellington's singing voice, after a detour through street theatre, busking in Africa and a new wave band.
Elfman was born in Los Angeles on 29 May 1953 and grew up in Baldwin Hills, spending hours at the local cinema, where sci-fi and horror films introduced him to composers like Bernard Herrmann. He cared more about science than music until a new high-school crowd in the late 1960s steered him toward early jazz and Stravinsky. He dropped out, followed his brother Richard to France to play violin with an avant-garde troupe, then spent ten months busking across Africa and collecting West African percussion until illness sent him home. He has admitted inventing a false birthplace in Texas out of boredom.
Richard then made him musical director of his street troupe, the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, arranging 1920s and 1930s jazz for up to 15 players and building instruments such as a celeste of tuned beer cans. Taking over in 1976, Danny slimmed it to eight members by 1979 and turned it into the new wave band Oingo Boingo, whose Weird Science was a hit. Hearing damage and film commitments led him to retire it in 1995 with five sold-out shows ending on Halloween.
Tim Burton and Paul Reubens, both fans of the band, hired him for Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985. He worried about his lack of training, but with help from guitarist Steve Bartek on orchestration he delivered, and called hearing a full orchestra play his music for the first time among his greatest thrills. His Grammy-winning Batman in 1989 moved him into dark, dense romantic writing, and he has scored all but three of Burton's major studio films, voicing Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Other directors followed, from Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films to Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting, and he earned four Oscar nominations. He has also written concert works, starting with Serenada Schizophrana at Carnegie Hall in 2005.
Source: Danny Elfman
