In late November 1981, a thirty-six-year-old composer raised his baton in a recording studio in Rome, Italy.
In front of him sat ninety musicians drawn from Santa Cecilia and the RAI, with a twenty-four-voice choir behind them.
He had three weeks to record almost two hours of music.
The film waiting for that music was a sword-and-sorcery adventure about a barbarian who barely spoke.
Its hero spoke so rarely that the score would have to speak for him.
The producer had wanted Ennio Morricone, the most famous film composer alive.
At one point, the money men had even dreamed of pop songs instead of a symphony.
Instead, the podium held Basil Poledouris, a name almost nobody in that room had ever heard.
His biggest credit was a gentle romance about two teenagers on a tropical island.
Nothing about him suggested anvils, war drums, or ancient gods.
Then he gave the downbeat.
Twenty-four French horns answered as one, and the floor of the studio seemed to move.
That sound became the heartbeat of Conan the Barbarian, released the following spring.
Four decades later, musicians and critics still rank its score among the greatest ever written for the screen.
This is the story of how an unknown composer forged it.
A Barbarian Waiting in Legal Limbo
Conan was born in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, in stories by Texas writer Robert E. Howard.
Howard filled the Hyborian Age with kings, thieves, sorcerers, and one Cimmerian who answered to no one.
Frank Frazetta’s painted covers in the 1960s fixed the barbarian’s image in the public imagination.
Hollywood circled the character for years, but the film rights were tangled in lawsuits and a publisher’s collapse.
Producer Edward Pressman chased those rights from 1975 and spent over one hundred thousand dollars in legal fees.
The triumph of Star Wars in 1977 finally convinced studios that heroic fantasy could fill theaters.
Pressman recruited a champion bodybuilder named Arnold Schwarzenegger, still new to leading roles.
Oliver Stone drafted a screenplay, but the cost of filming it frightened every major studio.
In 1979, Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis bought the project and handed it to his daughter Raffaella to produce.
Director John Milius rewrote the script and shot the film across Spain over five months.
Every piece was in place except the one audiences would remember longest.
The Job That Almost Went Elsewhere
De Laurentiis had his own idea about who should write the music.
He wanted Ennio Morricone, the Italian maestro behind the most famous western scores ever recorded.
Accounts also say the producer briefly contemplated a modern pop score for the film.
Milius objected, and he objected with a name of his own.
Basil Poledouris had scored Milius’s surfing drama Big Wednesday in 1978, and the two men trusted each other completely.
They had been friends since their student days at the University of Southern California.
Still, the choice puzzled the industry, because Poledouris was known for the soft lyricism of The Blue Lagoon.
Film Score Monthly later recalled that fans who loved that gentle score were openly skeptical.
A barbarian epic, they wondered, from the man who scored a tropical romance?
Milius kept lobbying until De Laurentiis gave in.
Hired Before the Cameras Rolled
Hollywood usually hires a composer after filming ends, handing him finished scenes to decorate.
Milius broke that rule completely and signed Poledouris before principal photography began.
Poledouris composed from the initial storyboards, shaping themes while the sets were still being built.
He visited the Spanish locations several times to watch the world his music would inhabit.
Sets designed by Ron Cobb mixed Dark Age cultures with the savage sweep of Frazetta’s paintings.
Composer and director traded ideas through the entire production, scene by scene and mood by mood.
Poledouris adjusted his themes as filming changed the picture in front of him.
It was the working method of a partner, not a hired hand.
But the brief Milius finally gave him was stranger than any storyboard.
Make It an Opera
According to Poledouris, Milius envisioned Conan as an opera with little or no dialogue.
The hero’s feelings, the film’s dread, and its triumphs would all ride on the music.
Poledouris ultimately composed around two hours of music for a film running just over two hours.
Milius sent him two copies of the edited film once shooting wrapped.
One copy was silent, while the other carried scenes temporarily scored with Wagner, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev.
Those borrowed masters showed the emotional temperature Milius wanted, scene by scene.
It was, by any measure, an enormous assignment.
Conan would be the first large-scale orchestral score of Poledouris’s life.
He was thirty-six years old, and nothing in his career had prepared the industry for what came next.
He began the only way he knew how.
A Bard With a Guitar
Poledouris said he started with the melodic line, building patterns of musical ideas on rhythm.
His first draft was a poem sung to a strummed guitar, imagined as a bard singing for the barbarian.
That draft grew into the Riddle of Steel, Conan’s personal theme of massive brass, strings, and percussion.
Audiences first hear it as Conan’s father explains the riddle of steel to his young son.
The theme returns when the grown Conan swears vengeance for his murdered family.
Poledouris built the score on open fifths, the most primitive interval he could choose.
Thirds and sixths enter only as the story grows richer and Conan’s world widens.
One of his signatures here is slowing the final two bars before each change of music.
The score breathes like something ancient being remembered rather than performed.
And then came the theme that would open the film.
Twenty-Four Horns: The Anvil of Crom
The main theme, the Anvil of Crom, is the first sound of the film itself.
Twenty-four French horns intone the melody together, a single blazing wall of brass.
Pounding drums drive beneath them with what one scholar called incessantly driven rhythmic propulsion.
Crom was the grim god of Conan’s people, a deity who seldom answered prayers.
The anvil belonged to the forge of Conan’s father, the blacksmith who made the boy’s first sword.
The theme fuses steel, vengeance, and fate into a single musical idea.
Poledouris brings the theme back at several turning points across the film.
Each return lands harder because the audience has lived inside the melody since the first frame.
Few main themes in fantasy cinema have been imitated so often.
The Chorus That Could Not Borrow Orff
For the raid that destroys Conan’s village, Milius first dreamed of a chorus like Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.
Then John Boorman’s Excalibur reached theaters in 1981 and used Orff’s music to famous effect.
Milius changed course and asked his composer for something entirely original.
Poledouris answered with the Riders of Doom, written for the arrival of the villain and his warriors.
He finished that village-attack music in October 1981, while production was still tightening around him.
The chanting words began in English and were roughly translated into Latin.
Poledouris admitted he cared more about how the Latin sounded than what it literally meant.
He set those words to a melody adapted from the Dies irae, a thirteenth-century chant about the day of judgment.
The choice let the choir celebrate Doom while quietly mourning his victims.
The result sounds like a hymn sung by an army.
Late editing cuts then forced Poledouris to reshape the sequence’s music at the last minute.
The Machine That Kept Time
A less famous invention quietly shaped the score’s marriage to the picture.
Poledouris used Musync, an editing system invented by Robert Randles for synchronizing music to action.
Musync could adjust a composition’s tempo automatically when a beat’s position changed.
Conan became the first film ever to list the system in its credits.
For the Wheel of Pain montage, Randles prepared a long accelerando over the telephone.
The music had to swell and land on precise frames as the years of Conan’s bondage passed.
Without the system, Poledouris would have conducted and recalculated everything on the fly.
Technology served the oldest thing in the film: a story told around a fire.
Three Weeks in Rome
From late November 1981, Poledouris spent three weeks recording his score in Rome.
He personally conducted ninety players and twenty-four singers drawn from Santa Cecilia and the RAI orchestra.
His frequent collaborator Greig McRitchie handled the orchestrations, as he would for years to come.
Choir and orchestra were recorded separately and married in the mix.
The sessions captured a vast, reverberant sound that seemed larger than the film’s budget.
Then came the compromise that pained musicians for decades.
Conan the Barbarian became the last major-studio film released with a mono soundtrack.
According to Poledouris, producer Raffaella De Laurentiis balked at thirty thousand dollars for a stereo mix.
She also worried that too few theaters could even play stereo in 1982.
A score built for cathedrals went into the world through a single channel.
It hardly mattered in the end.
The Film Critics Argued About
The film premiered in Madrid on March 16, 1982, and opened across North America that May.
American critics split sharply, praising its look and action while faulting its script and violence.
One scholar later counted roughly two negative reviews for every positive one.
Audiences were kinder, and Conan opened at number one at the American box office.
Worldwide, the film earned between sixty-nine and seventy-nine million dollars against its twenty-million budget.
It made Schwarzenegger recognizable around the world almost overnight.
Poledouris earned a Saturn Award nomination for Best Music.
The score, meanwhile, had begun a second life of its own.
Frequent home-video releases pushed the film’s total earnings past three hundred million dollars by 2007.
A sequel, Conan the Destroyer, followed in 1984 with Poledouris back at the podium.
By then, the original score was no longer just accompaniment.
It had become the reason many fans returned.
The Score That Refused to Die
MCA issued a soundtrack album in 1982, and Varèse Sarabande expanded it on CD a decade later.
Yet the album held only part of the music, and the complete tapes were long believed lost.
In 2010, the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra re-recorded the complete score under conductor Nic Raine.
The two-disc set finally let listeners hear every note Poledouris had written for the film.
Two years later, Intrada Records released the original Rome sessions in a three-disc complete edition.
Collectors treated both releases like recovered treasure.
Meanwhile, the Conan theme escaped the cinema and settled into the wider culture.
Conan suites became staples of film-music concerts on both sides of the Atlantic.
In July 2006, Poledouris traveled to Úbeda, Spain, and conducted his Conan music live for the first time since 1982.
The festival stood not far from the Spanish landscapes where the film had been shot.
Crowds who had grown up on the score heard its composer raise the baton over it one final time.
Steel rusts, but a great theme never does.
Basil Poledouris: Hollywood’s Bronze Age Bard
Kansas City Roots, Messenia Blood
Basil Konstantine Poledouris was born on August 21, 1945, in Kansas City, Missouri.
His parents were Greek immigrants who had come from Messenia, in the southwestern Peloponnese.
The household kept the language, food, and faith of the old country alive in America.
That double inheritance, American ambition and Greek memory, would echo through his music for sixty years.
He grew up largely in Southern California and graduated from Garden Grove High School.
Two forces, he later said, steered him toward music.
One was a composer he never met.
The other was the sound of his own childhood church.
Between them, they built a composer.
The Choir Loft and Miklós Rózsa
The first influence was Miklós Rózsa, the Hungarian master of Hollywood’s biblical epics.
Rózsa’s scores for films like Ben-Hur proved that ancient worlds needed ancient-sounding music.
The second influence waited in the Greek Orthodox services of his childhood.
Raised in the Church, the boy sat through services enthralled by the sound of the choir.
Byzantine chant gave him his first lesson in how voices alone can shake a room.
Decades later, massed choirs would become one of his unmistakable signatures.
At seven years old, he began piano lessons.
The piano became his forge, the place where raw feeling was hammered into form.
He never lost the church’s sense that music should feel bigger than the room containing it.
Hollywood would eventually hand him rooms the size of legend.
USC: Two Friendships That Changed Everything
At the University of Southern California, Poledouris studied both filmmaking and music.
The double major was unusual, and it shaped how he thought about scores forever.
He learned to read a film the way directors read it, from inside the story.
At USC he met two young filmmakers named John Milius and Randal Kleiser.
Both friendships would define his career for the next three decades.
Several short films he scored there are still preserved in the university’s archives.
He even appeared as a background extra in episodes of the original Star Trek.
In 1970, he scored The Reversal of Richard Sun, a student film by Milius.
The pattern of his life was set early: loyal collaborators, patient craft, slow recognition.
First, though, came the wilderness years.
The Apprentice Years
The 1970s offered Poledouris work, but little of it glittered.
He scored television movies like Congratulations, It’s a Boy! in 1971.
Small features followed, including Hollywood 90028 and Extreme Close-Up in 1973.
He took the jobs that existed and treated each one as training.
Television taught him speed, economy, and how to say much with little.
Those years also taught him the industry’s indifference to unknown names.
Many talented composers never escape that tier of the business.
Poledouris escaped it the slow way, one trusted director at a time.
In 1978, one of those directors finally called with a real canvas.
Big Wednesday and The Blue Lagoon
Milius’s Big Wednesday, a surfing drama steeped in friendship and loss, arrived in 1978.
Its score let Poledouris write broadly and warmly for orchestra.
Two years later, Kleiser’s The Blue Lagoon made his gentler gift famous.
That 1980 romance, about two children growing up shipwrecked on an island, asked for pure lyricism.
Critics and listeners noticed a melodist of rare tenderness.
The Blue Lagoon became his calling card, the credit everyone mentioned first.
It also nearly typecast him as a composer of soft-focus romance.
Hollywood loves a label, and his said anything but barbarian.
Milius, fortunately, had heard the power underneath the tenderness.
Conan proved them both right within a single downbeat.
Red Dawn, RoboCop, and the Sound of Heroes
After Conan, the offers finally matched the scale of his imagination.
He scored Conan the Destroyer and Milius’s Red Dawn, both released in 1984.
In 1985, Flesh and Blood began his long collaboration with Dutch director Paul Verhoeven.
Verhoeven’s RoboCop followed in 1987, all pounding brass and mechanical menace.
RoboCop earned Poledouris a BMI Film Music Award, the industry’s nod to working composers.
Iron Eagle had already shown, in 1986, how naturally he wrote for modern hardware and young heroes.
His heroic themes never sneered at their subjects.
He wrote as if courage were a plain fact of life, not a pose.
That sincerity became his trademark in an increasingly ironic decade.
Television, though, would hand him his proudest laurel.
Lonesome Dove and the Emmy
In 1989, Poledouris scored Lonesome Dove, the four-part western miniseries adapted from Larry McMurtry’s novel.
His music gave the cattle drive the gravity of an American odyssey.
The score won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition for a limited series or special.
It remains one of the most honored television scores of its era.
The Emmy joined a growing shelf of BMI honors for his film and television work.
He had worked in television throughout the decade, including The Twilight Zone and the miniseries Amerika.
Success, by all accounts, changed neither his manner nor his work ethic.
Almost everyone has a piece of television music that still feels like home.
For millions of viewers, his Lonesome Dove themes became exactly that kind of keepsake.
The 1990s would test his range in opposite directions at once.
Hymns for Submarines and Whales
In 1990, The Hunt for Red October sent his music beneath the North Atlantic.
He gave the Soviet crew a full choir singing a hymn of his own invention.
The Red October score won another BMI Film Music Award.
That same year, Quigley Down Under began his fruitful partnership with director Simon Wincer.
Wincer’s Free Willy, in 1993, asked for something entirely different: wonder.
His theme for the orca carried the film’s heart without a word of dialogue.
Free Willy won him yet another BMI Film Music Award.
He returned for the sequel, Free Willy 2, in 1995.
Few composers could move from nuclear submarines to a boy and a whale without losing themselves.
Poledouris sounded like himself in both worlds, which was the whole secret.
The Tradition of the Games
In 1996, his music opened the Olympic Games in Atlanta.
He composed The Tradition of the Games for the opening ceremony’s tribute to the athletes of ancient Greece.
Silhouetted dancers honored the goddesses of victory as his score filled the stadium.
The boy from the choir loft had come home to the oldest Greek story of all.
BMI honored the piece with a special recognition award.
His Conan music also lived at Universal Studios, in a live sword-and-sorcery stage spectacular.
Another of his works, American Journeys, circled Disneyland visitors in a 360-degree film.
His own base was Blowtorch Flats, his professional studio in Venice, California.
From that modest room, entire worlds kept sailing out.
Starship Troopers and the Later Years
Verhoeven called again in 1997, and Starship Troopers demanded the biggest canvas yet.
Poledouris wrote that score for a ninety-six-piece orchestra, matching the film’s outsized machinery of war.
A year later, his Les Misérables score turned to nineteenth-century Paris and Victor Hugo’s conscience.
For Love of the Game, in 1999, traded battlefields for a baseball diamond and late-career grace.
The range looks impossible on paper and effortless in his filmography.
The pace of the 2000s was quieter, with fewer but chosen projects.
He had nothing left to prove to the industry that once doubted him.
What remained was the music itself, and the people still discovering it.
His final years would bring one last journey back to Spain.
Vashon Island and the Last Baton
Poledouris spent the last four years of his life on Vashon Island, in Washington state.
The island’s quiet suited a man who had spent decades inside orchestral thunder.
In July 2006, he crossed the Atlantic for the film-music festival at Úbeda, Spain.
There he conducted Conan the Barbarian himself, before an orchestra and an adoring crowd.
It was the only concert he ever conducted, and Spain had been the film’s second home.
Basil Poledouris died in Los Angeles on November 8, 2006, at the age of sixty-one.
Twenty years on, his themes headline film-music concerts around the world.
In 2022, the Los Angeles Film Orchestra filled Walt Disney Concert Hall for the fortieth anniversary of Conan.
The program honored Conan alongside The Blue Lagoon, The Hunt for Red October, and Free Willy.
New listeners keep arriving, drawn by a sound that refuses to feel old.
His horns still sound when heroes rise.
Return to Rome, then, in the last days of November 1981.
The choir has taken its places, and ninety musicians are watching one raised hand.
Outside that room, the composer is a rumor at best: the Blue Lagoon man, Milius’s friend.
Inside it, for three weeks, he is the undisputed king of the Hyborian Age.
He cannot know about Prague re-recordings, Emmy shelves, or a concert hall in Los Angeles forty years later.
He cannot know that strangers will one day weep at the sound of his horns.
He knows only the next cue, and the next, and the work still to be done.
So he gives the downbeat, and twenty-four horns answer like a forge door swinging open.
And it rings for everyone who ever needed courage set to music.
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