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![At that time, most film scores weren’t thought of as popular music. They were considered musical accompaniment, with little value apart from the picture. But Mancini had something else in mind. He wanted to make popular music - and he did. Weaving into Breakfast at Tiffany’s self-contained jazz themes of ideal radio-playing (and album-selling) length, he became the first film composer to score big with the buying public. Not only did he reconceive and rerecord cues especially for the soundtrack album, Mancini advertised his catchy melody throughout the picture. He made “Moon River” a major thematic recurrence in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which only helped the tune, and the album, climb their way to the top of the charts. After Audrey saw the film with the finished score, she wrote:
Dear Henry,
I have just seen our picture - Breakfast at Tiffany’s - this time with your score. A movie without music is a little bit like an aeroplane without fuel. However beautifully the job is done, we are still on the ground and in a world of reality. Your music has lifted us all up and sent us searing. Everything we cannot say with words or show with actions you have expressed for us. You have done this with so much imagination, fun and beauty. You are the hippest of cats - and the most sensitive of composers!
Thank you, dear Hank.
Lots of Love,
Audrey.
Too bad that Marty Rackin, who had reservations with Mancini from the word go, completely disagreed. (…) When they got to the hotel [after the screening of the film], Marty Rackin was the first to speak. ”I love the picture, fellas,” he said, taping out his cigar on an ashtray, “but the fucking song has to go.” He was standing in front of the fireplace, with one long arm stretched across the mantle. They were all seated before him. No one spoke. “The song had been an issue for Rackin for some time,” said Shepherd. “It wasn’t about Audrey’s voice, it was something else. He wanted to use the music of a guy like Gordon Jenkins, whose album Manhattan Tower had been a bestseller a few years earlier. But by that point we were all against it. After the screening in San Francisco, the only thing I wanted to change was the Mickey Rooney stuff. (…) That night, in Rackin’s suite, it was obvious to all of us that he was way off base about ‘Moon River’. Having been a studio head myself, I can only say that I think you’re often inclined, instinctively, to comment, even when you don’t have anything to say. Rackin was in that position.”
In Warren Harris’s biography of Hepburn, Mancini says, “Audrey shot right up out of her chair and said, ‘Over my dead body!’ Mel had to put his hand on her arm to restrain her. That’s the closest I ever saw her losing control.” But Mancini was mistaken; hostility, it’s safe to say, was not in Audrey Hepburn’s repertoire. What’s more likely is that she protested silently or with a few tacful phrases, especially if Blake Edwards, who set the tone for the group, was himself keeping it all inside. “I looked over at Blake,” Mancini reports in his autobiography. “I saw his face. The blood was rising to the top of his head, like that thermometer when I put a match under it. He looked like he was going to burst. Audrey moved in her chair as if she were going to get up and say something. They made a slight move toward Marty, as if they were thinking about lynching him.” Clearly, Mancini’s accounts are at odds.
It turns out it was Shepherd who saved the song. “I said, ‘You’ll cut that song over my dead body!’ And Rackin heard that. The issue was resolved that night.”
The song stayed. Swell music, fade out, the end.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/beed3d134d1a8d986dbc9ee2a5d6a1e4/tumblr_mmpdvwpUBs1r96uqyo1_250.jpg)
