Kris Bowers is one of the busiest multihyphenates working in Hollywood. This year, the Emmy-nominated Bridgerton composer returned to Shondaland and Netflix’s hit costume drama to compose its prequel series, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story; he also composed the score for two Disney properties, the feature film Haunted Mansion and the Marvel series Secret Invasion. On top of those projects, Bowers created original music for Warner Bros.’ The Color Purple and reunited with Ava DuVernay to compose the music for her Neon drama Origin. (Bowers earned an Emmy nom for writing the music for DuVernay’s 2019 limited series When They See Us.)
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Beyond his musical duties, Bowers also reteamed with director Ben Proudfoot, with whom he shared a 2022 Oscar nomination for the documentary short A Concerto Is a Conversation. The pair’s latest doc short is Searchlight’s The Last Repair Shop, a touching portrait of the craftspeople at a Los Angeles warehouse who maintain more than 80,000 musical instruments offered to public school students each year.
Of the three projects Bowers is representing this awards season, The Last Repair Shop is his most personal. The Los Angeles native grew up playing on those very instruments that the school district provided free of charge to students. “When I was in middle school, I played saxophone,” recalls Bowers, who notes that his parents weren’t sure he’d stick with the instrument — he later focused on piano — and thus encouraged him to take advantage of a free one through the school. “I remember very vividly [being in] the music room and an instrument having an issue, and it being sent away [to be repaired],” he notes. “ I always imagined it being some factory, a place with, like, hundreds of people working [on instruments and churning them] in and out.”
It was A Concerto Is a Conversation producer Jeremy Lambert who first approached Bowers and Proudfoot with an article about the repair shop that would be the subject of their next project. Rather than the hundreds of people Bowers envisioned working away to care for and protect the thousands of instruments within the L.A. school system’s music programs, the shop employs just 10 people — four of whom are featured in The Last Repair Shop, providing their own histories on camera as they detail their dedicated work as custodians of the school instruments.
“To see the amount of personal touch and care was really striking to me,” Bowers says of the film’s subjects. “I was also really taken aback that they were open and vulnerable about their own personal lives. It was really amazing … that music helped them move through a lot of difficult things in their lives.”
Like his previous short, which features conversations between Bowers and his jazz pianist grandfather and highlights the power of music to build a bridge across generations, The Last Repair Shop also connects the care that goes into keeping the instruments in top shape with the students who take advantage of the program. “Because I had that experience as a kid, I was like, ‘We have to interview the kids.’ My initial instinct was that they’ll maybe talk about some aspect as to why they like their instrument,” says Bowers. But he once again was surprised by the vulnerability of his onscreen subjects.
“It was such an important reminder of the depths of the realities that those kids are going through,” he says. “I was blown away that they were so open and vulnerable and at the same time how they spoke about experiences with so much light and warmth. I think there’s a wisdom that kids have when it comes to dealing with tough things.”
While The Last Repair Shop continues Bowers’ cinematic exploration of the ways in which music brings people together, the theme of connective musical tissue also played major roles in his work on The Color Purple and Origin.
For Blitz Bazawule’s movie musical, an adaptation of the 2005 Broadway show based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel, Bowers was tasked with creating an original score that would act as the thematic glue between the movie’s dramatic moments and musical numbers. While the film’s central female characters — Celie (Fantasia Barrino), Sofia (Danielle Brooks) and Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson) — dominate the musical performances, Bowers worked to find themes for the characters “not necessarily represented by the songs who could be represented by the score.”
That included Mister, Celie’s abusive husband, played by Colman Domingo. “Blitz and I talked a lot about how this film wanted to give context to why he is the way he is,” explains Bowers. “The original Mister is just a bad guy. But we talked about knowing people, especially of that generation, who are that way because of how life has treated them — hurt people hurt people.” For Mister’s theme, Bowers incorporated the banjo — which the character plays in the film — as “an underlying, eerie texture that represents the twisted internal world for him.” While characters like Celie, whose emotions are so overwhelming she has no choice but to sing out loud, Mister is unable to express himself similarly. “A lot of the score is carrying the internal [feelings] of these characters in a way that’s different from the songs,” says Bowers.
He took a similar approach to Origin, which follows Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabelle Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) as she sets out to write her 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The book connects the experiences of Black Americans living in the Jim Crow-era South, Jewish Europeans under Nazi persecution and the Dalit — the lowest class of the Indian caste system — to make a larger thesis about the subjugation of minorities to bolster the power of dominating social groups.
“Ava wanted to make sure that even though we needed to honor the different cultures represented in the film, we couldn’t have it feel like a siloed experience where we visit each of these places and have the score completely change,” says Bowers. To find commonality between each of those groups, he studied music created in those eras — including songs written during the Holocaust in concentration camps as well as Dalit musical traditions — and incorporated themes inspired by those cultural melodies throughout the film. The ability to modify the scale of those themes was also vital to Origin’s core message that humanity can transcend the limits of a caste system, says Bowers: “The connection between these very disparate, big ideas and the music reminds us that this is an intimate concept.”
This story first appeared in a December standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
