Small, who died in 2003, is unquestionably best known for his paranoia thriller scores—Klute, The Parallax View, Marathon Man—and for good reason. He came on the scene at a time when suspicions of conspiracy haunted the United States, and in scoring some of the defining films of that fraught time, he was able to put the national mood into music.

Small bottled the uniquely 1970s feeling of distrusting government, of men in suits lurking in the shadows, of the pervasive but unpredictable threat of sudden assassination. He didn’t just conjure a shallow sense of unease or terror—he wrote music from a more complicated psychology of paranoia, of neuroticism, of soured patriotism.

But beyond the subgenre he helped shape, his great gift as a film composer was always finding a deeper reality or motivation, of getting inside characters’ minds and under their skin to turn out music that surprised while at the same time illuminating the story being told. As director Alan J. Pakula said of Small, “the music was really a co-dramatist of the film.”

Michael Lewis Small was born on May 30th, 1939, in New York City. He grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, the only child of Edith Kaufman, a homemaker, and Jack Small—a would-be theater actor who found work as the general manager for the Shubert Organization in the 1950s, booking shows, producing hits such as High Button Shoes, and becoming friends with luminaries like Jerome Robbins, Phil Silvers, and Jule Styne.

“When I was four, I could pick out the tunes from Showboat,” said Small. “I dreamed of being a Broadway composer.” He also began writing music at that age, and he wrote his first musical for his high school when he was 16. “Michael grew up going to opening nights,” says Lynn Small, his wife of 42 years. “He had theater in his blood, and he thought that musical theater would be where he would end up.”

Small took piano lessons as a kid and was heavily into jazz, playing in trios in high school and college—but he had little interest in learning music at the conservatory level. “He disliked the confinement of theory,” says Lynn. “He felt that theory was after-the-fact, and he didn’t want to follow anybody else, anything else. He had a lot of new ideas.”

Small listened to new music by composers like Philip Glass and John Adams, but he didn’t want to study music because, Lynn believes, “he felt that somehow he’d get into a groove that wasn’t really his voice.” Instead, he studied English literature at Williams College and then Harvard, mostly as a backup plan to become a teacher if theater didn’t pan out. At Williams he wrote underscore for dramatic plays as well as an original musical every year, and he met Lynn (née Goldberg) in 1960 when she got a part in The Happier Hunting Ground, a show about the funeral industry that Small wrote with Charles Webb (who went on to author The Graduate).

Recalling what drew her to Small, Lynn says: “He was delightful. He was funny. He was smart. He was very playful. He could be serious, but he was also very childlike. Not childish at all—childlike. He was full of wonder about things. He was a lot of fun. But music was always his whole life.”

Jack Small died suddenly in 1962, and with no more financial support Michael dropped out of Harvard. One of his father’s theater friends, Harold Rome, introduced Michael to Broadway veteran Lehman Engle, who ran a theater workshop for young writers at BMI. Small was accepted on the power of Happier Hunting Ground, joining a cadre with future stars, including A Chorus Line lyricist Edward Kleban and Broadway record producer Thomas Z. Shepard. He started writing music for student films at the School of Visual Arts New York City; his first was a piece for tape manipulation and piano that incorporated pots and pans.

Lynn had encouraged him to find young filmmakers and score their films, and he spent several years writing music “just for the love of it.” He also began scoring commercials, which became a lifelong affair. Those were really his film scoring school, says Lynn, “because he would convince whoever was hiring him that they needed a string section or a horn section. That’s how he learned to do it, and that also, I think, made him very fast at it.”

At one of BMI’s annual showcases, Edward Pressman, a young movie producer, heard Small’s music and offered him his first real film assignment: the 1968 sex farce Out of It, starring Midnight Cowboy’s Jon Voight. “I fell into film scoring by accident,” Small said later, “and it really fired my imagination to work with an orchestra, far more than writing showtunes.” “He felt that what was happening in theater became very formulaic,” Lynn reflects. “Again, he was always after the new.”

Looking back thirty years later, Small said Out of It was definitely an early work, but also “a great deal of fun because it had a George Martin / Beatles-like quality in which I combined some rock ‘n’ roll elements with classical elements. I even did some reversed flutes and slowed down drum effects.” Another inspiration was the music of the French New Wave, in films like Jules and Jim. “I guess the score could best be described as extremely obtuse, upbeat circus music,” said Small. He enlisted a Juilliard student group to perform his hybrid score—the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, whose members included future film composers Michael Kamen and Mark Snow.

Small learned more of the technical ropes of film scoring and orchestration by studying with Meyer Kupferman, a prolific, experimental composer who dabbled in film (Blast of Silence) and ran the music department at Sarah Lawrence College. (Interestingly, Kupferman died one day after his young apprentice in November 2003.)

Small immediately sparked to cinema, especially because it was such an exciting time marked by the New Wave and European composers like Georges Delerue and Nino Rota. He also loved Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone, both daring auteurs of the art form. Luckily, right away he found an equally adventurous filmmaker in Pakula.

They met through editor Carl Lerner, who consulted on Out of It and recommended Small to Pakula on his next assignment: Klute. “Alan took a real chance on me,” Small told Soundtrack Magazine in 1990. “That basically changed my life.” They became the 70s’ answer to Hitchcock and Herrmann, and much like Herrmann fused his unique knack for psychological terror with Hitchcock’s suspenseful direction, Small and Pakula were kindred spirits who shared a fascination with the human psyche.

The director also had a rare respect for music, and although he used it sparingly in his films, it was always integral. “The score can say things that nothing else can say,” Pakula told Music from the Movies in 1998. “It can in some ways make you feel inside a character. That’s my favorite use of it. ... On an emotional level, you understand the film better because of the music. Not just feel it more, but you understand it more.”

Klute’s chamber score made distinct use of xylophone tone rows, a ghostly female vocal, and other unorthodox sounds to not only goose fear but supply critical subtext and become “that extra voice” in a film that is rightly recognized as a masterpiece. It kicked off Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy,” followed by The Parallax View and All The President’s Men. (Pakula hired composer David Shire instead of Small for the latter, a fellow Broadway-trained New Yorker. “His bond with Alan seemed like a permanent one,” Shire says, “so I was truly surprised when Alan called me for the assignment. But though I wondered why, I never questioned him about it, content to just have the gig.”)

The Parallax View was one of many Small scores to rely on an anthem and the sound of patriotism through a dark and twisted prism. “Anthems have a mysterious power to move you, almost in spite of yourself,” he said. “Therefore, in a certain way, the film is exploring conspiracy as skewered, inverted loyalty.” The film also featured a stunning montage, a propagandistic short film within the film designed to vet potential assassins, set to a demented tone poem by Small that plunges from pastoral folk to psychedelic rock and back again.

“That, to me, is the pinnacle of what a paranoid thriller strives to do,” says Sam Esmail, creator of the shows Mr. Robot and Homecoming. “It doesn’t pull punches. There’s no other movie that taps into that anxiety that I think Parallax View does. There’s a weird IV drip of paranoia that you get while watching that movie, and a lot of it has to do with Small’s score. It’s seductive, while still giving you this tremendous anxiety. It’s actually really beautiful. And you can tell the movie is somewhat arranged by the music.”

Those two scores marked Small as the “paranoia guy,” and director John Schlesinger recruited him to evoke a similar musical phobia for Marathon Man—probably Small’s most famous score. “I asked him to really rip himself off,” Schlesinger admitted to Music from the Movies. “Didn’t that take away from the originality of the film?” the interviewer asked. “It probably does,” said Schlesinger, “but sometimes you want to keep doing something that works terribly well the first time.”

But Marathon Man is substantively unique, aside from some clear Parallax-inspired moments, and it’s a true masterwork, using queasy string chords, fluttering electronics, and an angular main theme that almost sounds like Small turned the Special Information Tone—what used to sound whenever you phoned a number that was “no longer in service”—into a melody.

“He gets to the nerve center of what the movie’s about, and he crafts a vocabulary that’s made to measure for each movie,” says pianist Mike Lang, who played on that 1976 score. “He finds the music that is a perfect fit for that movie, and it’s hard to imagine something else.”

For the most part, Small didn’t mind being so closely affiliated with one genre. “One gets typecast in this business,” he reflected in 1998. “However, I must say I find the ‘conspiracy’ genre one of my favorites. The intrigue of it, the topicality of the political dimension can be so intense and involving, it really lends itself to music so well.”

Most of his best remembered scores are for thrillers or horror films—Child’s Play, The Stepford Wives, Audrey Rose—and the only downside to becoming linked with the genre of fear was when he got asked to plagiarize himself. “His big bugaboo,” says Lynn, “was that sometimes when a new film was shown to him, they would lay in a track of his because they wanted that sound. It was very difficult for him to get past that, and to get them past that.” Listen to the 1983 score for The Star Chamber, starring Michael Douglas, and you’ll hear a director unwilling to loosen his grip on the Parallax View temp score.

But then you had filmmakers like Arthur Penn, who had Small create an entirely bespoke score for his 1975 neo-noir Night Moves, starring Gene Hackman. Since much of the film takes place in the Florida Keys, across the water from Cuba, Small wrote a jazz score with a Latin flavor. “I think it’s a very dark film, and I find it very disturbing,” Small said in a 1975 interview with Millimeter magazine. “It left me feeling like someone had just jumped on me. I wrote that score from the point of the ending; that was the moment that the music could take the film to one final place. I thought that there had to be a certain irony and texture to the scene. What I tried to do was pick the film up emotionally by using a suddenly upbeat version of the theme. I know that Arthur was delighted. We never really discussed that specifically, but I knew that it was going to work. I like to take little risks like that; I lay it out and say, ‘Well, it’s going to be a samba.’”

And it wasn’t all chills and thrills. Small wrote a tender, very Jewish score for Girlfriends, Claudia Weill’s 1978 coming-of-age story about a young woman in New York that heavily inspired the work of Greta Gerwig and Lena Dunham. He also scored the bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron featuring a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, which Small recognized as being “a Fellini movie but nobody knew it,” he said in 1995. “So I began trying this kind of circusy music.”

Director Walter Hill wanted an off-center, unexpected score for his car chase movie, The Driver, so he went to the king. “You don’t associate Michael’s work with strongly melodic ideas,” says Hill. “It’s the tone. I was looking for a kind of simplicity that would set moods, but with odd sounds—with non-traditional sounds. And I thought that he wrote a very good score. He was so clearly not one of the kind of blood and thunder guys. There was a real special elevation, I guess I would call it, that he brought to it.”

When Pakula moved away from thrillers, he often brought Small with him: a travelogue romance in Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing; a pastoral western in Comes a Horseman, and dramas about difficult human relationships in See You in the Morning and Consenting Adults. “The great thing with Michael,” said Pakula, “is he takes your vision and makes it his own, giving it an added dimension. I love surprises and Michael always gives you surprises.”

Small’s heyday coincided with an exciting, experimental time in Hollywood. Auteur directors were making highly individual films, and they didn’t want cookie-cutter symphonic scores. The more leisurely post-production schedule gave Small enough time, he said, “to fail before I succeed.” In the days before synth mockups, directors had to have much more faith in their composers, and that faith often led to more risk-taking. Small would find what felt was the high point in the film and compose out from there, attempting to write a genuinely cohesive piece of music for the entire narrative rather than a collection of disparate cues.

He thought conceptually, psychologically, looking for both the internal rhythm unique to each picture as well as what the film was really about. “I might not always write a theme which is a character’s music,” he told Millimeter. “I try to figure out what the film is about, and films are always about something other than the plot and characters.”

Another fruitful relationship was with director Bob Rafelson, beginning in 1981 with the erotic noir remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. “I didn’t hire Michael because he wrote great thriller music,” Rafelson told the New York Times in 2003. “I hired him because he could write soaring, beautiful romantic melodies, and Postman is a perfect example of that.”

Small said Rafelson was “very dear to me as a man and as an artist. His films are very deep. I find there are many levels to his films. They’re not always the most commercial films, in that they are not ingratiating to an audience and sometimes have a more realized subtext than main theme.” The director equally appreciated Small’s multifaceted talents and trusted his range on a broad spectrum of projects—from the period jazz score for Poodle Springs to the symphonic epic for Mountains of the Moon, infused with both African and Victorian English elements.

“I go to Michael for two different reasons,” Rafelson said in 1998: “Number one, he has gifts as a movie music composer, regardless of the genre. He has personally a delicious and somewhat elegant, if satiric sense of humor. When I need that in a given movie, I turn to him for that kind of music as well. I also go to Michael because he has the clearest, most articulate, most informing sense of my work on a movie. ... He can, for me, make my work clear for me from a total outsider’s perspective. He’s about to work, he’s only seen the picture one time, and that conversation is the one that I find the most informative, it’s the bedrock of all future discussion.”

Small never stopped scoring commercials—he brought his dramatic and earworm instincts to serve everything from American Express to Diet Coke to Pampers diapers—and he never left New York. That may be one of the reasons Hollywood never actively courted him, and why high quality offers tapered off in the 1980s and ’90s.

Some of his biggest catches were artistic disappointments—like Jaws 4: The Revenge—even if Small imbued all of his scores with wit and musical integrity. “When I’m working on these films, I’m simply entertaining,” he said in 1975, “and if I violate that, I’m violating a film that’s trying to be entertaining. The difference is that one film will want the music of a character, while another film will want the fantasy that the character represents.”

He was never nominated for an Oscar, and even the loyal Pakula went to other composers for his biggest hits (Sophie’s Choice, Presumed Innocent). “I don’t think he ever totally understood why that happened,” says Lynn. “He was hurt.” Because he didn’t have the kind of blockbuster alliance of a Steven Spielberg, or a hugely popular film that asked for a lyrical, unforgettable tune, his brilliant work mostly remained in the background, under the surface—essential but ignored.

By the 1980s Hollywood had moved on from the kind of individualistic, chamber scores that he specialized in, opting for a safer, more streamlined approach. And as much as Small liked synthesizers and electronics, their invasion into the scoring process flattened out some of the risk-taking (as well as compressing deadlines). “He loved writing at the piano,” says Lynn, “and he felt he couldn’t anymore. He really felt the vibration of the piano is a whole different feeling in your body than with a synthesizer. He missed that.”

When Small’s career started, film was a director’s medium and the process was artisanal, as he said in an interview with the magazine OnWriting in 1995. “The director would say: ‘I want you to have as much time as you need.’ And you’d have thirteen weeks, for example, to work on a film. I think now you’re under the gun before you even start. The dates are set in a movie, and because of the preview process something inevitably gets behind schedule. I haven’t been on a film in the last five years that the post-production isn’t late or in some state of just total panic about its schedule. The preview process has undermined, I think, the power of a director to trust the composer.”

The back end of his career saw Small scoring documentaries, miniseries, and TV movies. “The whole industry started changing,” says Lynn. “Some composers worked with a whole stable of writers, and, of course, Michael never worked that way.”

In the new millennium, after scoring a series of TV mysteries based on the Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout, Michael Small died on November 25th, 2003 from prostate cancer. He was 64. He is survived by his wife and two sons—Jonathan Small, a journalist and host of the podcast Write About Now, and David Kennet, a holistic nutritionist and vocal sound healer—as well as 2 grandchildren.

With this website, Michael Small’s family is determined to keep his music and story alive. There are so many scores—for films, TV, and commercials—that have never been released, and many of the released scores have been stuck in the “best kept secret” silo of a select few. It’s only a matter of time before more cinephiles and music lovers discover the rich fathoms of his unique body of work.

Recent appreciations in the Criterion Collection’s releases of Klute and The Parallax View have emphasized what a singular talent Small was, as well as a vital contributor to those films’ unnerving effects.

Says Sam Esmail: “You think of somebody like Bernard Herrmann, who’s been ripped off so many times... I don’t feel that way with Michael Small. He still feels pretty singular and unique. And I don't really feel that other scores, or other composers, are attempting to do what he’s doing. And so, it actually still feels pretty fresh now, even though it was composed 50 some years ago.”

That extra voice, Michael Small’s voice, still carries.

—Tim Greiving