Elfman, Danny

Elfman, Danny, noted composer of film soundtracks; b. Amarillo, Tex., May 29, 1953. Danny Elfman comes by his creativity honestly. His mother, Blossom Elfman, wrote a number of popular novels and won an Emmy for a TV movie. He was raised in L.A., but by their late teens, he and his brother Richard had relocated to France where Danny became a member of a theatrical group. He then spent some time in Africa, but a severe case of malaria sent him home to the U.S. His brother, in the meanwhile, had made a film called The Forbidden Zone. He asked Danny to create the score. Danny assembled a group for this purpose, which he called ’The Mystic Knights of Oingo Boingo.” After the soundtrack was complete, the group took on a life of its own. Led by Elfman, they became a new-wave band with horns, performing often strange and macabre tunes. They earned a massive following in Calif, but not much interest elsewhere. While it didn’t earn the band hits, they did land songs in many movies, including Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

However, one of the Californians who liked the band was Tim Burton. He asked Elfman to create a score for his film Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. This led to a long and fruitful relationship that found Elfman scoring the Burton films Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and Mars Attacks. Batman won him a Grammy Award in 1990 for Best Instrumental Composition. More of a collaboration, Burton’s animated The Nightmare Before Christmas featured Elfman, scoring, writing songs, and performing the singing voice of the film’s main character. When not working with Burton, he created the scores for Darkman, Dick Tracy, Good Will Hunting, Mission Impossible, and Men in Black, among many others. He scored his friend Francis Delia’s film Freeway, charging $1 for the service. He also wrote the theme music to the TV show The Simpsons, and his themes from Beetlejuice and Batman were used as themes for the subsequent cartoons based on them.

By 1995, his workload in Hollywood made continuing with the band untenable, and Oingo Boingo (by then further shortened to just Boingo) broke up. He continues to work with the band’s guitarist, Steve Bartek, who does most of Elfman’s orchestrations.

Discography

So Lo (1984); Midnight Run (1988); Beetlejuice (1988); Big Top Pee Wee (1988); Batman (1989); (composer of original motion picture score) Nightbreed (1990); The Story of Edward Scissorhands (1990); Dick Tracy (score; 1990); Darkman (1990); Edward Scissorhands (original soundtrack; 1990); Article 99 (1992); Batman Returns (1992); Dolores Claiborne (1995); Mission Impossible (score; 1996).

—Hank Bordowitz