We all know the infamous theme of The Twilight Zone, but how do you go about updating and embellishing that to turn into into a full-blown, complete attraction score? Jérémie Noyer meets the master who did just that, taking us into a whole new dimension of sound aboard The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror…

The background of Richard Bellis is distinguished by its surprising diversity: child actor, touring rock ‘˜n roll music director, arranger/conductor for Las Vegas headliners, university lecturer, award-winning Hollywood composer (Stephen King’s It) and prolific Disney attraction music composer.

An heir and friend of the late Buddy Baker, Disney’s legendary musical guru (who was one of the first Disneyland and Epcot composers, musical director of the Mickey Mouse Club and composer of so many shorts and films like Winnie the Pooh and The Fox and the Hound), Richard Bellis is one of the most respected artists in the business, having created no less than the scores of Star Tours, Alien Encounter, Indiana Jones Adventure, the new China and Mexico pavillions in Epcot, The Laugh Floor at Walt Disney World or the Moteurs… Action ! Stunt Show Spectacular at Walt Disney Studios Park (and Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida) to name a only few.

Today, he’s joining us to talk about his music for the newest addition to the Walt Disney Studios Park in Paris, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.

You’re the composer of the music for the very first Tower of Terror at Disney’s Hollywood Studios park in Florida. How did that all begin?

I think I was brought on well before the site, the construction was finished. So, it must have been about a year before it actually opened, in 1993.

The attraction is based on mystery, but its music is kind of mysterious, too.

There’s this famous Marius Constant theme. This is very strange: the first note is actually a pick up. It doesn’t start on the down beat. It’s written very differently than any of us would ever imagine that theme! It’s called Etrange N. 3. And there’s also Milieu N.2. They were originally not themes for the Twilight Zone series but concert pieces that finally got used in the series and in the attraction.

It was an interesting little instrumentation, a small orchestration, something like a couple of trumpets, a couple of trombones, two or three woodwinds, two percussions and a very small string section. I think we actually got the concert orchestration and made the rest of the music around that orchestration to stay in the tone of the original music.

What material did you start from?

It was mostly from the television show. If I remember right, Jerry Goldsmith did several of the Twilight Zone and, having always been a fan of Jerry’s, I’m sure that I listened to the episodes that he did. He also did the movie, but I remember Jerry doing a lot of television music early in his career and he did several episodes like that.

This is the music we can hear, of course, during our visit in the library, watching the famous “lost episode” on tv…

We re-recorded everything. We didn’t use any of the original recordings as we always do with Disney not only for clearance purposes but because the playback systems always vary and they wanted the sound as pristine as possible at the time the attraction opened.

So, the television sequence opens with that theme and then there is some underscore I had to create. You know, there’s always a fabulous backstory with Disney. It sometimes takes people several times to go through an attraction before they actually get the backstory. They always have one because it’s the guiding vision that everybody subscribes to. This idea of an old Hollywood hotel and the elevator. All of that was a very clear story and vision. That became the underscore and the film with the family going into the hotel and the little girl appearing in the hallways. So, I had to write a piece of underscore for that.

But there’s also, at the same time, a little dance band, a little small combo that we wrote music for and that is in another room [playing at The Tip Top Club, at the top of the Tower]. You don’t see them in the film but you sometimes hear them. There’s a fiddle, a clarinet and a piano, the traditional society band.

Then, after going through the boiling room, we get into the elevator…

We had various ascents and descents. The interesting thing here is that the ascents and descents had to be different lengths because the elevators alternated and one would go two floors up and then one floor down and the other one would go one floor up and then another floor up so that they would never be on the same floor at the same time. So, the ascent might be two floors worth of timing or it might be one floor worth of timing.

And in the original one, then, the elevator moved forward to something called the Fifth Dimension, which hasn’t been re-created in the California or Paris versions. So, the Fifth Dimension was a horizontal ride in the car and we sort of re-created something similar to the opening sequence of the Twilight Zone series, with the clock ticking and various “soundscapes” more than music.

Can you tell me about the “show” floors: the hallway mirror and the ghostly corridor?

These floors are mostly based on effects. You know, the sound effects person for WDI for years and years and years has been Joe Herrington and recently, his son, Ben Herrington, has become more and more active with WDI. He’s not an employee there, he’s got his own company. But we’ve worked a lot together, notably on the Stunt Show when it went to Florida.

He was very active in doing the new sound effects for Tower of Terror and the one with the Protools [a professional sound mixing system] rig who actually mixed everything onboard the vehicle. The ghostly corridor is in fact a combination of Twilight Zone instrumentation and tonality with a bit of Herrmann’s Psycho rhythms, you know. Not really screetching violins but a little of that taste with the tonality and instrumentation of Twilight Zone.

And then are… the drops!

In the first one, it was a single cue because it was a single drop. The California one that I rode on recently is several drops: down and back up and back down, and the ride varies from time to time which makes it a little bit interesting! The most interesting difference between the two was that we, of course, recorded the original music on tape and there was really no way other than a cassette machine with the music played back in the elevator shaft.

In California and in Paris, the music is actually onboard the vehicle. That was something, technically, to provide the music in these conditions! We actually took a protools rig on board the vehicle, strapped it down and did the vehicle mixing onboard the vehicle in California, which we could never do, of course, in Florida. The only thing we could do with the first one was take the plunge and the WDI guys were letting their pencils float in the air! But it’s so much more effective, I think, with the music onboard the vehicle! I remember the first attraction where the music was that way was the Indiana Jones Adventure attraction in Disneyland, for which I did the music, too. This one was just an extension of that.

Anything in the elevator is a combination of acoustic and synthetic (originally, it was merely a synth drop), mostly on the ascent. Once you drop and then you start to ascent, there is this train-like sound coming that takes you back up to the top. I don’t think anybody hears the drop because of the screaming!

You didn’t write the music for the lobby, I guess.

No. That was sort of a needle drop of period pieces. My music starts with the television presentation in the library.

Which version of the Tower do you prefer?

I think the California/Paris one is much more effective. The activity in the vehicle, the more drops thing is terrific. Everything is just better. The library, I think, is better, and the boiler room is fabulous, even though there’s no music in there, just sound effects, that are great.

It was lovely to revisit those things when I worked on the new version, and in some cases, to be able to re-mix, having more knowledge and more time to go back and re-mix things that we recorded years and years ago.

There’s also an impressive version of the attraction at Tokyo DisneySea.

Yes! I wanted to do that! But it was actually done by Joel McNeely. Apparently, it’s based on an entirely different backstory because Japanese visitors have little knowledge of the Twilight Zone series. That’s the reason why I was anxious to do it…

You’re also a film music composer and a television composer. How do you see your work on attraction music regarding those two?

First, there’s the question of credits. The fact that there is no credit there is fine because, actually, there’s very little credit for any of the people who put in hundreds or thousands of hours creating these attractions. As far as the working conditions, my work is actually appreciated. Bruce Broughton (CinéMagique, Honey, I Shrunk the Audience) and I have talked about this and are in agreement: we love working for Disney.

From my point of view, they respect my input and my work generally more than the film and television business. You may have heard about the controversy with Elliot Goldenthal’s score and the score of 300 [300 composer was suspected of having plagerized one of Goldenthal's score, JN], and it had to happen. I don’t know anything about how it happened, but I know that, for years, directors and producers have fallen in love with temp tracks (preliminary soundtracks edited before the composer comes on board using other films’ scores to guide the composer in his creating the actual score of the film, JN) and have asked composers to come as close to the temp as they possibly can.

That happens in film and television a lot but it doesn’t happen at Disney. They only go for the real thing. If they want something in the spirit of Randy Newman, they get Randy Newman. It’s always original music.

At WDI, you’re much more a part of the creative team. Your input is welcomed from, as I said at the beginning of this interview, a year beforehand. And on the project I’m working on now, I feel like I’m an equal member of the creative team and that’s fabulous! So, you understand I actually prefer the attraction music, the theme park music. And it’s where I get budget as well.

You know what happens with television music and much of film music, everything except the A-list pictures: the budgets have all come down. So, now you’re trying to make just as much music as you did before with a lot less time and a lot less money. When I get through an electronic score, something that I’ve done all of the music and all of the parts on, I have to realize that I’ve just been the best bass player, the best fiddle player, the best drumer on the session, and that’s not good.

The product is always better when it’s touched by other people. Being isolated is not good. With Disney, the budgets are realistic and, as they say, they know that it’s gonna run for 15 or 20 years. So, we take our time to do the best music possible!

• Listen to Richard Bellis music and discover “The Emerging Film Composer”, his book on the film music business at www.richardbellis.com.