Professor studies the sounds of cinema

There were two turning points in Jeff Smith’s academic career that stand out: an interview for an assistant manager position with Radio Shack and his decision to study film music.

Smith, now a communication arts professor, earned a bachelor’s degree in music from UW–Stevens Point and was seeking an answer to the question that faces everyone at one time or another: Now what?

That’s where a helpful Radio Shack manager comes in.

“He said ‘Well, I think you’d be really capable of doing the job, I’m just not sure that you really want it,’” Smith says. “I realized that I probably had betrayed too much of my own reservations about this and immediately set my sights on ‘OK, what do I really want to do?’ and I decided I wanted to go to graduate school.”

When Smith began his graduate work in film studies in the Department of Communication Arts, he didn’t want to study film music; he was drawn to the Hollywood Black List. But when it was time to decide on a subject for his dissertation, his adviser, David Bordwell, urged him to reconsider so his work would not end up a “footnote on a long list of other things.”

Bordwell said, “If you do music and film, this is kind of wide-open territory,’” Smith says.

Smith confirmed that fact by doing an independent study of existing scholarship on music and film, which he realized came to an abrupt end at 1960, the close of the golden age of Hollywood. “Once I had done that, there was no going back,” Smith says.

So Smith delved into 1960s film music, research that eventually evolved into an examination of how the soundtrack album developed into an important commodity for the film industry, which yielded his first book, “The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music.”

That effort included an almost-failed research trip to Los Angeles to examine a collection of music from the film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” at the UCLA music library. When the school did not have the materials as promised, he turned to the office of the score’s composer, Henry Mancini, for help.

“He saved my bacon,” Smith says. “I basically walked immediately out of the library to a pay phone … plunked down my change and said ‘Can you help me?’ and they said ‘Absolutely.’” Smith was able to spend six days at Mancini’s office studying his autographed score, ending his time with a one-on-one interview with the famed composer.

“I’m still kind of an Mancini expert,” Smith says. “When they brought out a postage stamp for Mancini, I got a call from a reporter.”

One of Smith’s courses is History of the Hollywood Film Score, in which students learn how directors use music to evoke mood, character and reveal plot details. “I think students sometimes discover when they revisit some of their favorite films that there was a whole dimension to this that they missed,” Smith says.

His students also learn how the use of music in movies has evolved since the golden age of Hollywood, when filmmakers used a lot of music to the 1960s, when a new generation of directors were suspicious of movie music and considered it manipulative.

“I think right now we’re in a phase where just about anything is possible, where it’s practically wall-to-wall (in some films) and movies in which there’s almost nothing, like ‘The Hurt Locker,’” Smith says.

Smith is currently working on a contribution to the forthcoming “Oxford Handbook of Music in Film and Visual Media.”

“It’s much easier to have that kind of impact in something that is growing and to be one of those who plant the flag early,” Smith says. “This is where I have to say David [Bordwell] was completely right.”

But Smith is also working on a new book that has nothing to do with music and film. He’s returning to his research interest from his first year as a graduate student with a look at how film criticism shaped the way people understood movies during the period of the Hollywood Black List, often as indirect comments on McCarthyism and investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Smith spent three years as a visiting assistant professor at New York University after earning his master’s and Ph.D. degrees at UW–Madison. From there, he moved on to Washington University in St. Louis, where he spent seven years helping build the school’s film studies program from one student declared as a major to 100 graduates.

“I remember someone asked me at the time … ‘Would you ever leave Wash U?’” Smith says. “I said ‘Probably not, but there is one job,’ and that one job was this one.”

When the offer came to come back to UW–Madison, Smith couldn’t say no.

“Being a part of this faculty, it’s not just an honor but it’s a pleasure. For me, initially, it was a little bit weird to walk down these halls and say ‘I’m part of this fraternity now,’” Smith says. “To be a part of this program, knowing its history, knowing its importance to my own professional development … it’s great to be back.”