“For once I ended up contributing to the script”: The Oscar-winning musician who co-wrote ‘Three Amigos’
There are plenty of acting dynasties in Hollywood that can lay claim to being the greatest ever, but when it comes to music, there’s no family out there who can ever dream of holding a candle to the mind-blowing number of accolades accrued by the Newman clan.
Alfred Newman is famed for being one of the most accomplished composers in the history of cinema, something that was reflected in a staggering nine Academy Award wins from 45 nominations, but music was clearly in the blood, considering the paths several of his closest relatives ended up taking.
His son David Newman scored an Oscar nod of his own for scoring Disney’s animated Anastasia, while brother Thomas is a regular collaborator of Sam Mendes and Steven Soderbergh, who left his sibling in the dust with a whopping 15 nominations, although he’s still waiting on that elusive win.
Alfred’s brother Lionel secured one win from 11 nominations for Hello, Dolly!, while the third member of the first Newman generation also got in on the act when Emil was shortlisted for 1942’s Sun Valley Serenade, with nephew Randy inevitably getting into the family business and carving out a hugely successful career of his own as both a film composer and recording artist.
Arguably best known for his decades-spanning association with Pixar, Randy has been rewarded with a pair of Oscars from 22 nominations for his work on Monsters Inc and Toy Story 3, both in the ‘Best Original Song’ category for ‘If I Didn’t Have You’ and ‘We Belong Together’ respectively.
All told, the Newmans have 12 Oscars from a combined 76 nominations, but what stands out as an anomaly is that Randy has one solitary screenwriting credit to his name, which came when he penned 1986 cult classic Three Amigos alongside Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels and Steve Martin, one of the sketch comedy show’s most prolific hosts.
Sticking to his day job, Randy contributed ‘The Ballad of the Three Amigos’, ‘My Little Buttercup’, and ‘Blue Shadows on the Trail’ to the soundtrack, but even though he wasn’t the composer of the film – an honour that went to Elmer Bernstein – he still managed to pull double duty anyway be receiving a writing credit for working closely with Martin on the rapid-fire gags that defined Three Amigos.
As he explained to Uncut, Randy was completely aware that it wasn’t an arena he was too familiar with, but it certainly sounds as though he was an intrinsic part of the process. “For once, I also ended up contributing to the script,” he admitted, even if he tried to bestow most of the credit upon Martin and Michaels.
Still, he described the making of Three Amigos as “a very collaborative process,” one that involved all three of them “chipping in with ideas and developing other people’s jokes,” even if he can’t recall with 100% certainty which ones written by him made it into the final cut. Either way, it’s a curious footnote for a career that’s yielded two Oscars, three Emmys, and seven Grammys, with the riotous comedic caper standing tall as the one and only screenplay he’s ever helped to write.