It took Lalo Schifrin all of three minutes to write his famed theme — set to an unusual 5/4 time signature — for the TV series “Mission: Impossible.”
“Orchestration’s not the problem for me,” he says. “It’s like writing a letter. When you write a letter, you don’t have to think what grammar or what syntaxes you’re going to use, you just write a letter. And that’s the way it came.”
But Schifrin, now 83 and living in Groucho Marx’s former Beverly Hills home, spun a different tale while touring in Europe in the late 1960s.
“I was in Vienna and at a press conference and one lady asked me why I wrote ‘Mission: Impossible’ in 5/4 ... I said, ‘Everybody knows that there have been beams from outer space coming because of interplanetary flights. The people in outer space have five legs and couldn’t dance to our music, so I wrote this for them.’”
“The lady believed it,” says Schifrin with a laugh, “and all the magazines in Vienna published it ... my European agent called me and said, ‘What are you trying to do?!’”
The fifth installment of the “Mission: Impossible” film franchise is now in theaters, and Schifrin’s score is as integral to the flicks as Tom Cruise’s arsenal of shades.
“Bruce Geller, who was the producer of the series, put together the pilot and came to me and said, ‘I want you to write something exciting, something that when people are in the living room and go into the kitchen to have a soft drink, and they hear it, they will know what it is. I want it to be identifiable, recognizable and a signature.’ And this is what I did.”
Schifrin’s path to becoming one of the most-sought-after composers in Hollywood started in Argentina, where he grew up with his mother and late father, concertmaster of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Buenos Aires.
“I had no idea what jazz was. I grew up in a classical music family,” he says.
Juan Perón, then president of Argentina, forbade the import of American records, but a young Schifrin, whose interest in jazz was growing, befriended an American merchant marine who snuck in records for the musician.
“I was breaking the law. Even in the summer, I had to put on an overcoat and put the records under the belly and covered them with my belt.”
He’d sit with his collection of Charlie Parker tunes and “copy and learn from the records.”
The studying paid off. Schifrin went on to study at the Paris Conservatory before returning to Argentina to form his own jazz orchestra. In 1960, Dizzy Gillespie tapped the young man to play in his NYC-based quintet. Schifrin had his first Hollywood film assignment with “Rhino!” in 1963. Four years later, he wrote “Mission: Impossible,” a career-changer for Schifrin, who went on to write scores for films like “Cool Hand Luke” and “Dirty Harry” and TV series including “Starsky and Hutch” and “Mannix.” Schifrin earned six Oscar nominations, and the “Mission: Impossible” theme won him a Grammy.
“I could say that, yes, it changed my career because it became so popular, which I did not expect,” he says. “I’m really lucky and really glad and I thank God and everybody who helped me ... very few television shows extended their life to motion pictures.”
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