The soundtrack of their lives

Marilyn and Alan Bergman have written some of the most enduring movie songs, and teamwork has kept them together for more than 50 years, they tell Siobhán Longas they prepare for two Irish concerts.

We live in times that venerate the transient and the ephemeral, and nowhere is that more tangible than in the world of music, where The X Factor and Pop Idol hog the headlines with tales of three-minute wonders, preened and primped for a marketplace well-versed in chewing them up and spitting them out faster than you can say "My name is Simon Cowell".

We're living Andy Warhol's prescient dream where (almost) everybody is enjoying their 15 minutes of fame. All fine and dandy, you might say, but what about our appetite for songs that lodge deep in the memory? What of the music that lodges imperceptibly in the brain, insinuating itself into our consciousness once triggered by some association? For this writer, The Way We Were sidles into front-seat occupancy whenever I hear reminiscences of "the good old days", and with the speed of a bullet, but it's Gladys Knight's rendition of Try To Remember/The Way We Were, recorded live in 1974, and not Barbra Streisand's version that appears in my rear-view mirror.

Musically ambitious, lyrically breathtaking, this is a song that cuts dead our penchant for sentimentality ('Can it be that it was all so simple then/Or has time rewritten every line?'), opting instead for (an admittedly warm-hearted) analysis of that hoary old chestnut: was life so much better before? Most probably not, the song suggests. It's simply that "what's too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget". Insights like that don't come 10 a penny - but they're a hell of a lot cheaper than a year in therapy all the same.

Alan and Marilyn Bergman are the people responsible for writing those lyrics, and hundreds more (probably as many as 1,000, Alan admits). Brooklyn-born and raised, they've written the words to countless songs for film, theatre and television. They've bagged three Academy Awards for The Windmills Of Your Mind in 1968, The Way We Were in 1973 and the score for Yentl in 1984. In 1983, they were nominated for no less than three Academy Awards for Best Song, one of which was It Might Be You from Tootsie. Along the way there have been Golden Globes and Grammys too. Alan and Marilyn Bergman are the kind of people who don't let the grass grow under their feet.

Fifty-one years of marriage and songwriting have resulted in the Bergmans' speech patterns intertwining like the roots of a Californian redwood. They have few enough peers when it comes to the enjoyment of such successful (and evidently contented) personal and professional lives. The writers Joan Didion and the late John Gregory Dunne were inseparable, their personalities infused with one another's thoughts and instincts, and they too shared many writing credits. Maeve Binchy and Gordon Snell share an office, but pursue highly individual writing careers.

Marilyn Bergman warms to the question of their marathon partnership with relish. Despite years in LA, she still retains a distinct Brooklyn accent, which colours her speech with those thick, lugubrious vowels and dropped "R"s that are the hallmark of anyone from the far side of New York's East River.

"We settled into a process very early in our relationship which was one of: if for one second one of us is the creator in putting forth an idea, the other one is the editor for that second, and the role switches back and forth constantly."

Alan Bergman enters the room and, as if by osmosis, chimes in with impeccable timing: "Pitching and catching, editor and creator, back and forth." Alan is the singer of the couple. Usually, he and Marilyn have the benefit of the composer's score to work with, a scaffold on which to hang their lyric. He's the one who test-drives the words as they evolve, but inevitably, they admit, their writing is influenced by the skill of the artist who will ultimately perform their song. When you're writing for Barbra Streisand, no holds are barred, they both declare - almost in unison.

"If you're writing for Frank Sinatra, he's as much a character in a drama as anything else, so you tailor to that voice," Marilyn explains. "Not so much the singing voice, as the personality, the character. With Barbra Streisand, you want to be sure that you're taking advantage of the full range of that voice."

"And the intelligence," Alan adds with the kind of split-second timing that would be the envy of any self-respecting double act. "She has great musical instincts." Marilyn continues: "When somebody has the equipment that she has, it would be foolish not to write for it, to take advantage of it."

The Bergmans have worked with many of the great Hollywood composers, including Marvin Hamlisch, Michel Legrand, Henry Mancini, John Williams and Quincy Jones. Words are there, poised on the tips of the notes, they suggest, waiting to be unpicked, to be chipped away. Unlike the songwriters who defined the popular music of the 1950s from the bowels of New York's famed Brill Building (Neil Sedaka, Carole King, Gerry Goffin et al), Alan and Marilyn Bergman were always drawn to the dramatic role that a song can fulfil in a movie, in a theatre or on television. They see their role as one of propagating a seed that's set by the director who can share with them his/her vision of what a song might accomplish in moving the plot forward.

Sydney Pollak, Norman Jewison, Mark Rydell and Barbra Streisand are all directors with sharp musical sensibilities, the originators of some of their most satisfying commissions.

Marilyn conjures a translucent image of the job of work they undertook when they wrote The Windmills Of Your Mind for The Thomas Crown Affair, starring Steve McQueen. "Norman Jewison told us he wanted that song for a glider sequence, where Steve McQueen is flying, indicating a restless, edgy anxiety. He had masterminded a complicated robbery." Alan continues the story: "He was a bored playboy, and he was obviously not having fun. His character was very grim and anxious." What emerged from the Bergmans' writing was a circular, revolving theme that somehow captured McQueen's spiralling psychological trip.

The 1960s and 1970s were a time when songs were central to a film's plotline, and not simply tagged on at the end to fulfil its merchandising requirements. Alan Bergman concedes that that golden age of songwriting for the movies is largely over. For example, he offers, knowing that Ray Charles would be the vocalist on In The Heat Of The Night naturally gave the couple wonderful leeway to write for a brilliant voice.

"These songs were an extension of the screenplay," Alan muses, "and the directors knew what the function and intention of the song was. We did In The Heat Of The Night with Norman Jewison and Quincy Jones, and Norman wanted every one of what we would call "source songs" - that is, songs that you hear on the radio, from an identifiable source - to be original, because he felt that songs are very evocative of where you were when you first heard them. He felt that using source songs would take the audience out of the drama, so he wanted original songs, with no prior associations for the audience."

Alan and Marilyn Bergman are unabashed creatures of the golden age of movies and musicals, whose Saturday morning excursions to the movie theatre in their childhood left them with an abiding love of the interplay of music and drama. Alan's mentor was the great Savannah songwriter, Johnny Mercer, who wrote such classics as Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive and Moon River.

Ironically, though, the Bergmans don't get so many requests from emerging songwriters to mentor them these days, largely because the emphasis has shifted from craftsmanship to making a fast buck.

"I don't know that there's the kind of veneration that we had for the songwriters who came before us," Marilyn offers. "Writers whose songs today are part of the literature of popular music. Why did a Gershwin song sound as fresh when we heard it 30 years after it was written? Why do people still want to sing those songs? Those were the primers we studied. I don't know that that exists these days."

Alan adds: "there's no sense of history. Their intent in writing songs is to make money. They ask us how to write a hit, but we don't know how to do that! If you talk to young film students, they know every frame of an Eisenstein film, they can talk to you about the literature of film. Young songwriters don't appear to have a sense of history. When you don't know what came before you, how can you know where you're going?"

Marilyn and Alan Bergman will join the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and Big Band, with special guests Jacqui Dankworth and Fred Johanson, for a night of orchestral arrangements of movie and television themes, Swingin'

At The Movies, arranged and conducted by Brian Byrne, tomorrow, INEC, Killarney; Friday, The Helix, DCU Alan Bergman's solo debut, Lyrically, is out now on Verve records.