After 35 years as a composer for TV and film, Laura Karpman is at an age when many are considering retirement. But she’s having way too much fun and success to give it even a passing thought. In fact, she’s just coming off perhaps her most prolific and celebrated year to date, when she not only boasted more than a half-dozen projects but converted two of them into major award nominations. Her musical score for the Cord Jefferson feature “American Fiction” starring Jeffrey Wright landed Karpman her first Academy Award nomination. And her score for the documentary feature from director Stephen Kijak, “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed” produced her eighth Emmy nomination (she’s won once). “I’m really, really busy right now,” she says with a knock-on-wood smile. “It’s a very good time.” Watch the exclusive video interview with Karpman above.
It’s worthy of note that both “American Fiction” and the Rock Hudson doc feature jazzy scores to help the filmmakers tell their stories. “All That Heaven Allowed” paints a fascinating but bittersweet portrait of the film icon’s life as a closeted gay man who would become the first major entertainment figure to die of complications from AIDS. “I did both films back to back,” she says. “Both scores obviously have a lot in common. But in the case of ‘All That Heaven Allowed,’ there needed to be themes that embraced aspects of Rock’s life.” The different pieces of music, being released as a soundtrack album on August 9, celebrate Hudson’s coming to Hollywood from a small town, being embraced as a star, living in the gay closet and partying hearty, his romances and escapades, and finally shift to a more dramatic focus as his illness takes hold. The music helps tell the actor’s story as much as do the interviews and film clips – hence, the Emmy nomination.
Karpman is thrilled to have a hand in a project that’s on the cusp of what she sees as a trend discussing life in the queer closet. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot late, what it meant, what it means, the thing of it, how it still affects gay life now,” she emphasizes. “I think it does more than people think – certainly people in my generation. I love what’s happening with younger people in terms of really discovering the rainbow of gender identities. It’s very freeing, but it’s also really, really important to know queer history. This documentary does a great job of laying out at least one corner of it. It’s a period piece about a specific time, but there are also issues that I think relate to a lot of things that people are thinking about self-identity. Rock Hudson became an advocate even though he maybe hadn’t meant to. By virtue of the fact he came out and admitted he had AIDS, he basically changed the trajectory of the disease because then Hollywood got involved.”
In terms of jazz becoming an emerging force in film scoring, it’s a natural fit for Karpman, who has played it her whole life and grew up learning classic music and jazz “completely simultaneously. For me, they were never separate, and I think jazz has been a substantial part of my work over the years.” That career has been an enormously successful one, and Karpman has been privileged to give back, founding the Alliance for Women Film Composers and fighting sexism in an end of the industry that doesn’t always open its doors to her gender. Yes, she insists, discrimination still exists.
“I think it takes a long time for people to see film composers or, in any male-dominated field, to see women and other underrepresented groups as having substantive careers,” Karpman stresses. “It has gotten way, way better, as evidenced just by me. Yes, 2023 was super-busy for me. I’ve had other equally busy years, but I’ve never had the kind of visibility that I had last year and the kind of team behind me that I had last year. So I think that we are seeing substantive changes, and that’s good. And I think when you see women represented across all fields and it starts to become more normalized, that’s when we’ll start to see real numbers shifting. The numbers are changing, but very, very slowly and somewhat incrementally.”
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