This undated publicity still shows musical director Morris Stoloff and composer Dimitri Tiomkin, pencil in hand, probably at a desk in Stoloff’s office on the Columbia lot in Hollywood reviewing a music score. The inches-thick stack of pages might be Tiomkin’s handwritten music sketches for Lost Horizon. The neighboring Album Lara is music by Agustín Lara published in México in 1934. In mid-1930s Los Angeles, it’s not unusual that both gentlemen are wearing a suit and tie and one is smoking a cigarette even during the photo shoot. Venetian blinds shield the strong Southern California sunlight, itself the reason motion pictures were made in Hollywood and its environs. The cast iron radiator heater barely visible against the wall on the left brought warmth to those chilly—by L.A. standards—winter mornings and evenings. A second photograph taken the same day can be viewed below.

Beginning with sound films, the musical director was the highest-ranking musician in the film studio hierarchy and the person “responsible for providing musical production support to every film the studio released.” At Columbia Pictures in 1936, Morris Stoloff succeeded Howard Jackson as head of the music department and would soon sign William Grant Still, composer of the Afro-American Symphony (1931), as his assistant musical director. Stoloff, a violinist and a protégé of William Andrew Clark Jr., founder and supporter of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, studied with Leopold Auer and for nine years was first violinist of the Philharmonic. From 1936 to 1962 at Columbia, Stoloff ran the music department from budgeting and scheduling to composing, fitting to picture, and recording for films that would number in the hundreds.

In the fall of 1936, the film More Than a Secretary first brought Tiomkin and Stoloff together in their roles as composer and musical director. A trio of Frank Capra-directed films followed, beginning with his “masterpiece of beauty and imagination,” Lost Horizon, You Can’t Take It With You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The Howard Hawks film Only Angels Have Wings would be their last collaboration.

The Hollywood social circle for musicians would bring Tiomkin and Stoloff together in social settings such as the wedding anniversary of Mischa Bakaleinikoff in 1937. Both would be familiar guests as nominees and winners at the annual Academy Awards ceremony.

Tiomkin and Stoloff would go on to serve on the Hollywood committee of the Southern California Symphony Association to promote interest in the Los Angeles Philharmonic Sunday informal concert series featuring “lighter symphonic fare” in 1942. The Hollywood committee brought together prominent motion picture professionals. Among them Bing Crosby, Ernst Lubitsch, Basil Rathbone, Edward G. Robinson, King Vidor, Ida Koverman, Louis B. Mayer’s executive secretary; and Donald Gledhill, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences executive secretary; along with numerous musicians, Constantin Bakaleinikoff (brother of Mischa), Leo Forbstein, Charles Previn (a relative of Andre), Miklos Rozsa, Paul Smith, Meredith Willson, and Victor Young.

Decades after their initial collaboration both Tiomkin and Stoloff continued their support of music in Southern California as members of the honorary committee for a memorial tribute to composer Ernest Bloch under the auspices of the University of Judaism in 1960.

A related publicity photograph depicts Tiomkin and Stoloff at the piano where the composer demonstrates his music score.

Dimitri Tiomkin with Morris Stoloff, circa 1936

Sources

“James Howard Has Been Accepted As Pupil By Stoloff,” in “Social and Fraternal News,” Visalia Times-Delta, September 12, 1935.

“Film Studios Break Precedent-Randol, Still Sign Contracts,” California Eagle, June 5, 1936.

“W. Grant Still Gets Big Job In Hollywood,” The Call, June 12, 1936.

“Bakaleinikoff’s Fete Anniversary,” Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1937.

“Sunday Symphony Series Planned,” Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, November 20, 1942.

“Southland Musicians Set Memorial Tribute,” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1960.

“Morris Stoloff,” spaceagepop.com