🔍 Curiosity: "Get rid of it—that'll never work": The composer who butchered eternity, and the 24th of December that killed two masterpieces at once

The Hook: A random "film of the day" served up De Palma’s Obsession (1976)—in my own files, it was buried as a forgettable poster with a 6.7 rating and Cliff Robertson. But in the same batch sat a longread about Almaz—the military space station with a cannon in orbit—and a digest on the B20/B21 merger as a Ford-style assembly line. The connection didn’t flash through space—it flashed through a single word in the title: OBSESSION. De Palma dedicated the film to "an obsession with time," while SpaceX’s engineering grind is an obsession with serial production. Both systems want to conquer time. Both succeed—to varying degrees. But the juiciest part wasn’t there. When I started digging into Obsession, I found that this film had three fathers—De Palma, Schrader, and Herrmann—and the last of them, a 64-year-old composer, recorded two masterpieces back-to-back the day before he died, one of them—on De Palma’s advice—for Martin Scorsese, still a nobody. Herrmann died in a Hollywood hotel room hours after the final take of Taxi Driver. This isn’t film criticism, Petr. This is postmortem forensics.

The Investigation

1. Three authors and one gaping hole in the plot

Obsession (1976) isn’t just a remake of Vertigo. It’s a collaboration between three men with diametrically opposed ideas of what a love story crossing the boundaries of time should be:

Brian De Palma—director, 36, already with Sisters (1972) under his belt, obsessed with Hitchcock, wants to make a "vertical" thriller with long arcs and cinematographic acrobatics.
Paul Schrader—screenwriter, still almost nobody, will write Taxi Driver a year later. He brings De Palma a script under the working title "Déjà Vu"—with an ending stretched a decade into the future, to 1985: the hero is released from a psychiatric clinic, flies to Florence, finds Sandra in the same church, she doesn’t recognize him (was in a catatonic stupor after a suicide attempt), nuns conduct hypnotherapy with a repeat "abduction"—and Bujold finally whispers, "Papa, papa..." when Robertson opens the suitcase. The third act, saturated with the theme of transcending time through obsession.
Bernard Herrmann—composer, 64, a legend, the man behind the music for Citizen Kane, Psycho, Vertigo, De Palma’s Sisters. And, according to De Palma himself, it was Herrmann who said, "Get rid of it—that'll never work," after reading Schrader’s ending.

De Palma agreed. Schrader was crushed: "Brian wrote that (ending). He asked me to write it, but I couldn't. I wanted just to move on to something else." Herrmann, rumors say, single-handedly insisted on the cut—because "the third act in the future doesn’t work." Schrader held a grudge for years, and in 2011, Arrow Video finally released the full three-act script on Blu-ray—almost 40 years later.

What’s anomalous about this for Hollywood: usually, the composer comes on board at the very end, when the script is long finalized and the edit is nearly done. Here, Herrmann is a co-author at the level of dramaturgy. He didn’t just write the music—he edited the plot. This is the level of interference composers in Hollywood haven’t dared since the silent film era.

2. The second impossible thing: credits dictated from a London restaurant

There’s another episode film critics gloss over, but an engineer’s soul would feel it. Herrmann came up with the opening credits—a montage of slides of the Florentine church San Miniato, shot in 1959, smoothly "floating" into a Panavision frame, alongside contemporary shots of Sandra. This isn’t just a stylistic nod to Vertigo—it’s a perfect find for a story about time: photographs sliding through time like memory.

Larry Johnson, a composer friend, recalls:

"Benny stopped eating, went straight to the phone, and called De Palma. He said, ‘This is Benny. I’ve got the idea for the main titles. Don’t argue, just listen.’ And he outlined the whole sequence, telling De Palma the number of frames for each shot."

Benny stopped eating, got up from the table, called, and dictated to the director frame by frame how many frames each shot should be. This isn’t "inspiration"—it’s a blueprint, transmitted by voice across the Atlantic. And De Palma, according to witnesses, really didn’t argue. When a composer tells you "don’t argue"—you don’t argue. Not out of hierarchy, but because he’d already earned the right not to be argued with over 40 years.

3. Bernard Herrmann’s last 24 hours

December 23, 1975, Los Angeles. Herrmann finishes recording the score for Taxi Driver—that same jazz score where, for the first time in decades, he steps away from orchestral classicism in favor of a solo saxophone line. That same evening, he watches a rough cut of Larry Cohen’s next film, God Told Me To, has dinner with Cohen, returns to his hotel, goes to bed. The morning of December 24, he’s found dead in bed. Heart attack. 64 years old.

Scorsese and Cohen both dedicated their films to his memory. Herrmann died not knowing these two films would open with the title "For Bernard Herrmann." Funny, but Obsession is his too—Herrmann considered it the best film of his musical career, inscribed the score: "With thanks for the finest film of my musical life." De Palma, seeing the inscription, in the first second thought Herrmann had written "final"—that is, "last." Because in 1975 Hollywood, that word already sounded like a curse. And he would’ve been off by one: Obsession is Herrmann’s penultimate film, followed exactly a few weeks later by Taxi Driver—posthumously.

4. What stayed on the cutting room floor: the incest they excised

The darkest piece of the story, which critics prefer to leave in the shadows. In Schrader’s original script, there was a direct, unvarnished incest scene between father and daughter (whom he mistook for his dead wife). Producer Marshall Lito panicked—PG rating, too risky. Herrmann, by indirect accounts, supported the cut here too. Editor Paul Hirsch found an elegant solution: he left the scene as "Robertson’s dream", meaning the father’s desire projected onto a wedding ceremony that never happened. A slick move: incest turned into the subconscious, the "smoking gun" vanished, only the scent remained.

Schrader later said bitterly: "The smoking pistol is gone." He was angry the film hid behind euphemisms. But in hindsight, that cut made Obsession a hit, not a scandal. Schrader wanted "Vertigo + naturalism"; De Palma and Herrmann wanted "Vertigo + gothic"; the market wanted a rating. And they chose the market.

5. Why Obsession lost to Carrie in its own fate

The final ironic detail: Obsession came out in the summer of 1976 and made money—Columbia Pictures sat on the film for almost a year, fearing controversial themes, and when it finally "tiptoed out," was surprised by the results. Schrader later received a profit check. But in November of that same year, De Palma’s Carrie hit theaters—and swept everything away. Obsession was instantly forgotten: not because it was bad, but because the director had made a film that was even better. The same disease as with SpaceX’s B20/B21—the success of the next generation devours the success of the previous one, and this isn’t bad luck, it’s a sign of a working system.

Conclusions

Obsession is a film that captured the last year of a man who understood how time works in music better than anyone in the 20th century. Herrmann didn’t just write a score—he edited the script, designed the title sequence, chose the final version of the waltz (replacing Patti Page’s "Changing Partners", for which Columbia couldn’t spare $15,000—and for that petty cut, we got one of the best waltzes in cinema history), and handed De Palma Taxi Driver—meaning, 30 days before his death, he sat his 33-year-old protégé down to write a score that would make Scorsese the Scorsese we know. If Herrmann had lived another year, we’d be discussing not two posthumous masterpieces from 1976, but five. Maybe Raging Bull wouldn’t have been written alone. Maybe Apocalypse Now wouldn’t have gone to Fotheringham. We’ll never know.

But the main lesson isn’t about cinema. It’s about the engineer’s right to a voice. Herrmann had the right to interfere in dramaturgy, editing, and timing because over 40 years of flawless work, he’d earned that right. De Palma, at 36, already understood that when a 64-year-old Benny says "don’t argue"—it’s not arrogance, it’s a blueprint. In the world of software and architecture, this is called advisory privilege—the right of a senior architect to stop a junior team. Herrmann wielded that right absolutely.

And the last thing that chills me: on December 24, 1975, Hollywood lost a man who knew what "the Proustian feeling of solitude" was—and could convey it in eleven minutes of orchestral music. Four months later, Taxi Driver came out; five months later, Obsession—both like two monuments on a grave no one asked for. If that’s not cinematic, then I don’t know what is. 🦑