Ahead of the limited series’ finale on Wednesday night, “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” composer Julia Newman explains her journey to becoming a composer and her approach to the FX show in a video exclusively shared by TheWrap.
“The score ended up needing to capture the essence of a bygone era. You want that splendor, you want the melodrama,” Newman says in The Big Score of her approach to the FX series, which follows Truman Capote and his cadre of women.
Newman is no stranger to the world of composing — her father is Thomas Newman (“The Shawshank Redemption” and her grandfather is Alfred Newman (“All About Eve”).
“I grew up doing music my entire life,” Newman says, adding that her father gave her a key piece of advice: “If you want a career, find a way to be useful.”
With “Feud,” Newman became the first woman in her family to conduct on The Newman Stage at USC, which carries her namesake.
Watch Newman in the video below.
The second season of “Feud” is based on “Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era” by Laurence Leamer. The eight-episode limited series, directed by Gus Van Sant, chronicles how Truman Capote (Tom Hollander) surrounded himself with a coterie of society’s most elite women – rich, glamorous socialites who defined a bygone era of high society New York – whom he nicknamed “the swans.”
The group included grande dame Barbara “Babe” Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny) and Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart).
Per the synopsis, “Enchanted and captivated by these doyennes, Capote ingratiated himself into their lives, befriending them and becoming their confidante, only to ultimately betray them by writing a thinly veiled fictionalization of their lives, exposing their most intimate secrets. When an excerpt from the book, Answered Prayers, Capote’s planned magnum opus, was published in Esquire, it effectively destroyed his relationship with his swans, banished him from the high society he so loved and sent him into a spiral of self-destruction from which he would ultimately never recover.”
The finale of “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” airs on FX on Wednesday night and is streaming on Hulu the next day. Previous episodes are streaming on Hulu.
Written for television by Jon Robin Baitz, FX’s “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” was directed by Gus Van Sant, Max Winkler and Jennifer Lynch. The show is executive produced by Ryan Murphy, Alexis Martin Woodall, Baitz, Van Sant, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Naomi Watts, Eric Kovtun and Scott Robertson. It is produced by 20th Television.
