In the wake of the #MeToo movement that toppled Harvey Weinstein and made the entertainment industry tremble, an up-and-coming musician named Nomi Abadi vowed to expose one of Hollywood’s last dirty secrets: the toxic, abusive work conditions that run rampant behind the closed doors of soundtrack composing studios.
Abadi, a former child piano prodigy turned singer and composer, was a sexual abuse survivor and knew of many others in a part of the industry where men still vastly outnumber women and much of the work goes on unregulated at all hours of the day and night.
She was also aware of other hidden indignities that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of composers’ assistants – men as well as women – went through every day: punishingly long hours for little pay; the refusal of many composers to share credit, or royalties, even when an assistant had done all the work on a musical theme; and a frequent blurring of personal and professional boundaries.
#MeToo had somehow missed all of it.
She knew of assistants – who despite the name are highly qualified musicians, many with advanced degrees in scoring and composition – being forced to clean toilets, babysit, close porn websites left open on composers’ work computers, watch uncomfortably as their bosses ranted or drank themselves into a stupor, and worse.
“Every woman who goes into composing has been through it on some level,” Abadi said.
The Guardian spoke to more than a dozen industry veterans who, while they requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions, confirmed these stories and told many others of their own. Like the director of music at a gaming company who looked for employees on Tinder and tried to hook up with them. Or the composer who sexted with a girlfriend while an assistant sat at the same computer screen. Or another composer who liked to mess with the thermostat when nobody was looking and then took perverse pleasure in blowing up at his assistants about the studio being too hot or too cold.
“Emotionally, physically and mentally, you get immersed in their narcissism,” one survivor said of her years working in the Hollywood system. “Most of the time you don’t dare tell anybody. You feel shame, or you feel you deserve it, or you just put up with it.”
A reckoning felt overdue, so in the summer of 2019 Abadi pitched the idea of a panel on women’s safety in the workplace to GameSoundCon, an annual conference bringing together composers and sound designers in the computer gaming industry. But the answer, at first, was no.
Then events caught up with Abadi’s thinking. A game designer named Nathalie Lawhead accused a well-known composer of rape, and a voice actor followed up by accusing the same composer of sending her a video of him masturbating. (The composer has denied the rape allegation and was never charged. He did not respond to Guardian requests for comment.)
The claims rocked the industry, and GameSoundCon was now extremely interested in having Abadi host two lunchtime panels on sexual abuse. Hundreds of people showed up, giving Abadi the momentum she needed to launch a new non-profit organization demanding greater accountability in the workplace, the Female Composer Safety League (FCSL).
“We wanted to create a place where survivors can tell their stories and not get fired. We’re told to celebrate the fact that women composers have jumped past being 5% of the industry,” she said, referencing a recent study. “But, of that 5%, how many have faced sexual harassment and trauma to get there? We don’t have that data, because we don’t have their voices.”
The idea has since helped spawn a movement, as a new generation of composers – more tech-savvy, more diverse and less uniformly male – has grown increasingly resistant to building a career at any cost. Beyond the hundreds of members the FCSL has attracted, an unaffiliated group of Hollywood composers called Teammates has produced a manual for assistants to help them navigate the challenges of the job and regularly advises aspiring young professionals on identifying healthy work practices.
The emphasis of this new movement is not to go public with horror stories and disgrace specific individuals, necessarily. Rather, it is to model good behavior, encourage others to do the same and change the industry from the ground up. As one composer who experienced multiple abuses as an assistant put it: “The best thing we can do is to make it to the other side, establish our own careers and treat people differently from the way we were treated.”
‘There are no boundaries’
It is hardly a new insight that musical talent can give rise to big egos, or that those egos are apt to bruise the people around them. The award-winning movie Tár, in which Cate Blanchett plays a prominent orchestral conductor facing a comeuppance over her personal demons, is a fresh iteration of an often told story – the temperamental, self-centered artist who believes using and abusing people is justified by her (or, more usually, his) undisputed brilliance.
Music is also a sphere in which young performers and composers tend to look to their teachers and bosses as mentors. This can give rise to all sorts of power abuses, especially in the cut-throat entertainment world where everybody is hustling for the next job and proteges can quickly bloom into serious competitive threats.
Still, those who have been through the Hollywood composing mill say the system has also become dysfunctional in unique and underappreciated ways. First, there is little or no regulation. Most assistants can be fired at will and work on hourly salaries with no benefits. If abuses occur, they have nobody to complain to, because the composers themselves mostly work freelance, and even the music production supervisors who hire the composers tend to be independent of any studio or corporate structure. So there is no human resources office to turn to; and composers, unlike instrumentalists in Hollywood, have no union.
In all but the largest studios, writing music is a highly isolated activity, in which teams sit with their banks of equipment and a lead composer on whom they depend for just about everything, from hours to pay to the chores they are expected to do beyond strictly musical assignments.
“You’re one on one with these composers, working until two or three in the morning. There are no boundaries,” said one advocate for change, a violinist who worked for years on Hollywood soundtracks and now works behind the scenes to help assistants in bad situations. “They become your employer, your mother and father, your bankroll, your healthcare, your connection to everything. You feel you have to do whatever they want. They might say, ‘Go pick up my socks, or my dry cleaning.’ And all of a sudden they’re touching you.”
It does not help that women were all but barred from being composers of any kind until the mid-20th century – a New York Times music critic once dismissed them as “whistling hens” – and arguably continue to face greater gender barriers in Hollywood than actors or directors. A woman was not credited with a movie score until Suzanne Ciani in 1981, more than half a century after women started directing in the silent era.
Even today, women say they are too often sexualized in composing and recording studios and that it’s difficult to be taken seriously when producers, conductors and other powerful figures greet them with a “hey, sexy” or “who’s your daddy?” Many producers say they are committed to hiring more female composers, but that does not always work out in practice.
“It’s that line I was once told about men being hired for their potential and women for their experience,” said Karina Pardus, an FCSL board member who now works outside Hollywood as a podcast composer and piano teacher. “Because women are rarely given chances to gain that experience, they are often overlooked.”
‘Everyone’s fighting for scraps’
Another factor feeding the dysfunction has been dramatic structural change in the industry over the past two decades. Composers have many more work opportunities now thanks to the explosion of the gaming industry, which has developed its own musical subculture, and a proliferation of scripted dramas, documentaries and other content commissioned by Netflix, Hulu and the other streaming services. But money has become much tighter.
A film composer used to be able to count on multiple revenue sources: first the original fee for a movie, then royalties from the theatrical run, then overseas sales, DVDs and television syndication. Streaming has largely put an end to that – one industry insider estimated a 75% drop in revenue for composers over the past decade.
An elite studio composer like John Williams or Hans Zimmer can still command a sizable fee and a budget large enough to commission full orchestral recordings reminiscent of Hollywood’s golden age. But many other working composers – especially on lower-budget movies and TV shows – are forced to cut corners, whether that’s by recycling unused recordings from past projects, or hiring smaller ensembles, or finding cheaper musicians overseas, or using more digitally generated sounds that blur the lines between composing and audio design.
The financial pressure inevitably falls hardest on assistants. Composers not necessarily endowed with strong financial or managerial skills will commonly say yes to multiple projects, hoping they can figure out how to get them all done as they go. They then pile the bulk of that work on their team, because it’s not physically possible to do more than a fraction of it themselves.
As deadlines near and pressures increase, human fallibilities are often stretched to breaking point. In more extreme cases, detailed by those who spoke to the Guardian, that can mean composers drinking and passing out, or taking drugs, or becoming volatile and abusive, or disappearing for days at a time, or becoming sexually inappropriate, or promising an assistant writing credit on a particular score segment (“cue-sheet credit”, as the industry calls it) only to take it away again.
“Everyone’s fighting for scraps,” one industry veteran said. “As a composer you typically receive your fee in a single bundle, and it’s up to you to hire musicians, a mixer, an engineer, rent a studio and so on. What remains goes in your pocket. And it’s never enough. That’s why you end up hiring kids fresh out of college, because you can pay them less and treat them worse. I believe that’s the root of a lot of these things.”
The stories of inappropriate or manipulative behavior told by former assistants are many and varied. Sexual abuse rarely happens out of the blue, survivors say, but builds slowly. It might start with a composer leaving half-naked pictures of women lying around, or announcing: “If you want to work with me, you’ll need to deal with my weird shit.” Composers will justify other forms of abuse in similar terms, with lines recalled verbatim like: “I’m an artist, what did you expect?” Or: “I don’t do boundaries.”
Often, basic human dignity is on the line. Several former assistants told stories of being denied permission to make family trips – in one case for months, when an assistant’s parent was dying – or being assigned repetitive, menial, seemingly meaningless tasks. “I was organizing cables and plastic boxes in his closet for a month,” one said.
In addition to not wanting to be named, many who spoke to the Guardian worried about giving too many details for fear that they could be identified and find themselves blocked from career opportunities. “We’re all freelancers, so we’re really insecure,” one said. “Sometimes it feels like we’re still in high school with a bunch of cliques, worrying who’s in and who’s out.”
Some stories, though, come with names, or a document trail, or both. Lawhead, the game designer who made the rape allegation against a prominent gaming composer, detailed their disastrous relationship in a long blogpost after years of mustering up the courage to go public. “He threatened my job, and he was a ‘god’. I was a nobody,” Lawhead told the Guardian. In the end, though, they could not bear to stay silent. “I cannot live in a world where rape is rewarded, protected, and the burden of surviving and coping falls on the victim,” Lawhead wrote on Twitter in 2019.
In a gaming industry already beset by multiple abuse scandals, the allegations resonated quickly and widely. The composer vanished from social media, where he had once been very active, and he disclosed that the gaming company behind his best-known work had stopped commissioning from him.
Another example is a text exchange that has been circulating in the industry for years, in which an up-and-coming film and television composer makes graphic sexual advances to a 26-year-old assistant and jokes about firing her if she says no. The assistant makes repeated polite attempts to rebuff him (“I’m very flattered, I’m just very protective of myself is all”), but he keeps hammering away at her for almost 90 minutes. Some industry insiders now nickname the composer “Captain Pinkie” because of the explicit things he writes about wanting to do to the assistant with his pinkie finger.
(The Guardian is not naming the composer at the request of the assistant, now a successful music executive, who said she never meant the exchange to be shared beyond a small number of trusted friends. The Guardian obtained it from an unconnected third party.)
A third example concerns Tom Holkenborg, a high-profile composer who often writes under the name Junkie XL and whose film credits include Mad Max: Fury Road, Deadpool and the Sonic the Hedgehog movies. In early 2020, Holkenborg lost all four of his in-studio assistants within a few weeks, and in resignation emails obtained by the Guardian two of them say they were physically and mentally exhausted and needed to step away. When Holkenborg subsequently advertised for a new assistant on his YouTube channel, the industry group Teammates talked to people who’d worked for him and recommended its members “do not apply for this position”.
Holkenborg, through a spokesman, denied allegations that his studio had become a toxic work environment and said it was inaccurate to characterize the departures as a walkout, because different people cited different reasons for leaving. A number of the assistants ended up coming back, working either part time or remotely as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold. But none of them ever returned full time, and Holkenborg acknowledged it had been “challenging” to find replacements. Texts written by his employees show he lost at least one high-profile project, the superhero movie Black Adam, for lack of staff.
‘Tired of seeing people get hurt’
Healthy, happy composing studios certainly exist: places where composers know how to manage projects and budgets, where assistants get credit and extra money for the writing they do and still get to have lives of their own. Alison Plante, a professor of screen scoring at the Berklee College of Music who has followed the progress of her former students, said the pattern of workplace abuses in Hollywood was like a bell curve: “There are some really fantastic people and some really awful people and a bunch in the middle.”
The founder of Teammates, Kenny Wood, said he saw the bell curve as more lopsided, because the turnover rate of assistants at the bad end was much higher. “There is, unfortunately, more opportunity at the bad end,” he said. “And we’re shining a spotlight on that. I’m tired of seeing people getting hurt.”
His organization, founded at around the same time as the FCSL, has more than 3,000 members and has successfully lobbied for assistants within its network to receive a minimum wage of $25 an hour.
Wages and overtime may ultimately be less important, though, than getting credit for original work, because those credits give aspiring young composers a basis for future income through royalties and career opportunities. Establishing which composers regularly give cue-sheet credit is, Wood said, “an easy litmus test” to identify good employers.
One assistant who spent 10 years writing for a composer who gave him little or no credit said he felt angry every time he opened his royalty statements. “At one point during the pandemic, I was living off $60 a week,” he said. “One day I walked into my old boss’s fancy house and thought: ‘My labor paid for at least a third of this. What do I have to show for it?’”
Another former assistant who feels similarly cheated after years of ghostwriting for an abusive boss was recently turned down to score a show for a major streaming service because he didn’t have enough credits to his name to convince the producers he could do the job.
He recalled how, as a freshly minted music graduate from the midwest, he’d hopped in his car and come straight to California because scoring films was all he had ever wanted to do. “Now I don’t know if I ever want to write music again,” he said. “I took no joy in it by the end. This industry sucked all the joy out of me.”
This article was amended on 21 February 2023 to correct the title of the Female Composer Safety League.
