“It’s a landmark organ of that era,” he explains.īarr says he’ll use the new recording stage primarily for his own projects. Ladd Thomas, who played the instrument on many occasions at Fox, including for Jerry Goldsmith’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” and John Williams’ “Home Alone” scores, says he’s thrilled that audiences will hear it again. “Nathan’s studio will be able to reproduce scores that have not been possible for more than 30 years pure organ or, more likely, orchestra and organ.” “Today, some type of MIDI keyboard is often used with many electronic manipulations to make the sounds of the pipe organ,” notes Richard Neidich, chairman of the board of the American Theatre Organ Society.
The organ will make its 21st-century debut for movie audiences in Barr’s score for the Universal adventure film “The House With a Clock in Its Walls,” slated for a Sept. Cobbin says he was “in awe of the colors, the timbres, the possibilities of such a magnificent instrument” and praises Barr for his vision and commitment to building an acoustic stage. The console has three keyboards and is connected to a nearby upright piano - a 1929 Wurlitzer model that was once part of the Portland, Ore., Paramount Theatre - making pure piano sounds possible too.īarr called in one of the world’s most respected recording engineers, Peter Cobbin (formerly director of engineering at London’s Abbey Road studio), to tweak and hone the acoustics of the room. “The whole point was to give one person, sitting at the organ, maximum ability to complement a silent film,” Barr explains. “The way it speaks out of the chambers, with nothing impeding the sound, into a room with really fine acoustics, makes it the ideal studio instrument,” he says.īecause it was manufactured near the end of the silent-movie era, the organ was designed to provide the performer with a wide range of sounds - from simulating orchestral instruments (strings, woodwinds, brass) to percussion (drums, marimba, chimes) and even sound effects (sirens, fire bells, horses’ hooves, birdcalls). Herman calls the clarity of the instrument unparalleled. “Ken Crome obviously had to restore everything, but it’s one of the cleanest and most beautiful theater-organ restorations I’ve ever seen.” “This is a very special instrument,” he tells Variety.
Pasadena theater organist Mark Herman agrees. This has got to be one of the most well-kept, beautiful Wurlitzers left in the world.” Yet, he adds, Fox maintained the organ so well that “you rarely see pipework that looks so extraordinary. The restoration process has taken four years and likely cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (Barr declines to say).
A theater organ is not just the visible, horseshoe-shaped console with keyboards and pedals it’s also 1,500 pipes requiring three chambers of their own, plus sub-chambers to house and quiet the noisier mechanical aspects of vintage versions (a 1928 story in Music Trade Review called the Fox organ a Wurlitzer Orchestral-Cathedral model).īarr found a building in Tarzana he could turn into a recording studio, rebuilt specifically to house the Wurlitzer: The 8,000-square-foot Bandrika Studios (named after the fictional country in Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes,” a Barr favorite) has a 1,500-square-foot recording stage that can accommodate 50 to 60 musicians. The composer had long considered adding a small scoring stage to his home studio, but the Wurlitzer demanded a much larger space.
“He had worked on it as a kid and, as many people did, hated when the studio dismantled and sold it,” says Barr. Crome and his father had maintained the instrument for decades, dating back to the 1950s.
When Barr bought the instrument, it had been acquired by Ken Crome, an organ expert. Installed at Fox in 1928, the organ was designed to accompany silent films but remained in use until 1997, when the studio sold it.