Not since Kanye and Drake played the Coliseum together six months ago has there been a coming together of forces quite so opposite on a stage in Los Angeles, or maybe anywhere. We’re speaking, of course, of the combined performance by the UCLA and USC marching bands (mentioned here in alphabetical order — no favoritism) that climaxed the official opening of the Hollywood Bowl’s summer season Friday night.

It takes a lot to overshadow Gwen Stefani, the LA Phil, Gwen Stefani with the LA Phil, a pair of world-class ballet dancers, Branford Marsalis performing the film music of John Williams, and Williams making a surprise appearance to conduct his own world-premiere piece. But the combined army of the USC and UCLA bands nearly managed to do it with what was billed as a historic, first-time-ever collab, performed in the service of stretching Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” out to nearly 10 minutes as fireworks went off over the bandshell.

This “Tusk squared” climax was the cherry on top of an evening dedicated to celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Bowl. (It’s actually the 101st, but 2021 was still a little too pandemic-y to throw a proper party.) It actually was a night fit for a centenarian, with a June-gloom marine layer putting the lie to the venue’s eternal promise of nights “under the stars” but more than enough star power on stage in a well-thought-out, something-for-every-Bowl-er lineup.

The proceedings started off with “Centennial Overture” and the unannounced cameo by Williams, or, as he is regarded among many longtime Bowl season ticketholders, God. “Our dear friend John Williams — maybe you know him — has written an overture especially for our celebration,” Dudamel. “John first performed here 40 years ago in 1978. Back then, he wasn’t conducting his own music, but we convinced him to do it. In fact, it doesn’t make much sense if I conduct the overture. John, are you here? Please welcome, the greatest…” The just-under-six-minute piece that followed under Williams’ baton almost could have been written in support of a millennium instead a centennial — the Millennium Falcon, that is.

Williams’ music also made for another highlight of the evening’s first half, as the composer’s perhaps under-heralded facility for jazz styles came to the fore in a 13-minute excerpt from his “Catch Me If You Can” score, with saxophone great Marsalis as the principal instrumentalist throughout the piece and prominent turns from principal LA Phil percussionist Matthew Howard on vibraphone and frequent Marsalis collaborator Eric Revis on double bass.

Two more traditional classical pieces preceded the intermission, with Roberto Bolle (the American Ballet Theatre’s principal dancer from 2009-19) and Tiler Peck (a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, also since 2009) poetically executed eight minutes of sublime George Balanchine ballet choreography, as the Philharmonic played excerpts from Stravinsky’s “Apollo.” Another young performer was spotlighted in front of the august orchestra as the first act ended with Spanish violinist María Dueñas stirring up the wine-soaked audience with Ravel’s “Tzigane.”

The second act immediately took a turn for the contemporary with DJ Novena Carmel, currently of KCRW “Morning Becomes Eclectic” fame, being joined by sisterly dance trio Let It Happen to get down with James Brown and other beats. Let It Happen would return at the end of the night, doing a good deal more choreography during “Hollaback Girl” while the pyrotechnics went off and Stefani exited for a costume change, to slip into something more martial.

Before she emerged for the final time in royal red, Stefani hit the stage for her seven-song set in a hyperbolically frilly pink dress that opened up in the front to reveal matching tights — something closer to what she might wear to the Met than anything belying her O.C. roots. Speaking of which, Stefani had some congratulations to offer some Gwen-a-likes in the crowd. “I can see people that are wearing my outfits (from) the Met Ball, which is incredible. I know that took a lot of time to make that dress. You guys look amazing.”

Many past opening nights at the Bowl have had rock bands performing in front of the Phil, or the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, like Steely Dan, the Moody Blues and Journey; other solo performers to join up with the orchestras for a first-night extravaganza have included John Legend and Diana Ross. It might have seemed like a good bet that Stefani would bring her band along, and maybe even her dancers; they’re obviously in practice, as Stefani just did a co-headlining set at Crypto-dot-com Arena in January as part of the Super Bowl Festival, where she again proved herself one of the superior show-women of modern pop. But for Friday’s extravaganza, aside from three backup singers, she had her musicians stay home and relied solely on the backing of the Phil, with arrangements by Derek Hodge. This inevitably raised the question of just how suited her pop hits are for pure orchestration.

As her (or No Doubt’s) foremost ballad, “Don’t Speak” was the most obvious choice for an “evening at the pops” symphonic treatment, so there was little surprise in hearing that come up as the opening number. “The Sweet Escape” wasn’t such an obvious candidate for Dudamel-ization, and it didn’t end up being something you’d say gains something from replacing bass and drums with oboes. With “Spiderwebs,” the adaptation made some sense: it’s not such a complete leap, after all, from the horns on a record produced when No Doubt was easing out of its ska phase to the 76 (or so) trombones the LA Phil has to offer. Two more string-sweetened ballads followed — “Used to Love You,” followed by newish husband Blake Shelton coming out to reenact his duet part on “Nobody But You,” offering the evening its schmaltz quotient.

It was with “Just a Girl,” maybe surprisingly, that form met function and one of her signature songs really took on its own life without a rock band driving it — its well-recognized riff sounding like something out of a Danny Elfman score in the Philharmonic’s hands. Stefani described it as a song “that I wrote back in Anaheim at Patty and Dennis’ house” – those would be her parents — “and I wrote this song very naively. I didn’t even know that I could write a song, and I just wrote it because it was from my heart. And then all these years go by later, and I feel like this song is actually more relevant now than it’s ever been. You tell me.” In a twist, Stefani, catwalking the platform around the Pool section, exhorted the men in the crowd to sing the chorus while the women were to remain quiet. Man, they felt like a woman.

There was some comedy, both intended and unintended, when Stefani talked about how bad she is with names — all names, she swore — and said Shelton had coached her on how to remember Dudamel’s name by having her sing it to the tune of “Annie’s” “Tomorrow” as a pneumonic device. “Gus-tavo, Gus-tavo, I love you, Gus-tavo,” she sang, “you’re always a douche-a-mel. Dud-a-mel,” she quickly added, correcting herself. “Yes! It worked!” Well, it’s the enthusiasm that counts. It didn’t look like the maestro minded the mangling; at least, he appeared to be gently chuckling when the singer would razz him with irreverent asides like, “What should we do next?… Let’s do another one! Let’s do it!”

And there was plenty of that left to expend for the bananas finale, which had the saints from opposing schools go marching into the aisles and onto the stage, playing in unison with multiple collegiate conductors, but offering a study in contrast between the very different dance styles of the two universities’ cheerleaders. (For the record: USC’s were more traditional, and UCLA went for something a little bit more out of a saucy music video.)

Also joining in for the climax were members of the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (YOLA), students who get free music schooling as a result of the Philharmonic organizations’ largess, or its patrons’. As a benefit, the Bowl’s opening night will help fund some viola-back girls to realize their dreams, where someday maybe they, too, can play Stravinsky and Stefani in a single night.

One of Top Gun’s most iconic scenes so angered Paramount executives that the late filmmaker Tony Scott could have lost his job, according to the Oscar-nominated editors who worked on the 1986 classic.

The signature volleyball scene featuring a glistening Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer has remained a pop culture fascination for 36 years. To capture the magic, Scott burned an entire day on filming, something the studio did not expect for the scene, which was only a paragraph long in the script.

“That scene was scripted as a real game,” editor Chris Lebenzon says on this week’s episode of THR’s Behind the Screen podcast. “They kept score and everything — and Tony shot it like a commercial, and they were angry.”

Added fellow editor Billy Weber: “The studio was so pissed off. The head of production, Charlie McGuire, he said, ‘I’m gonna fire him’ … because he spent a whole day shooting this scene.”

Weber and Lebenzon are looking back in honor of the release of Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited sequel that set a Memorial Day record at the box office last weekend. The duo were nominated for an Academy Award for their work on Top Gun, which received a total of four nominations and won an Oscar for its love song, “Take My Breath Away,” which was performed by the band Berlin. Weber and Lebenzon reteamed with Scott on Days of Thunder and on Martin Brest’s Midnight Run.

Reflects Weber on the anger over that volleyball scene: “And then of course it turns out it’s one of the most famous scenes in a movie.”

In their conversation with Behind the Screen, the duo discuss the dog fights, adding the love scene in reshoots, and the original ending.

Excerpts from the conversation, edited for length and clarity are below.

What were the challenges of wrangling the flying footage?

Billy Weber: They went to Northern Nevada where there’s a Navy flying school and that’s where they shot 90 percent of the airplane footage [writer’s note: there was also aerial footage]. When the pilots who had to do the flying read the script, they told Tony, “This reads really great. But of course we can’t do anything that’s written here.” He said, “What do you mean?” And they said, “The planes don’t do this.” And so Tony called and told us what they told him. And we said, “Well, go shoot and see what happens.” And it was incredibly boring because the cameras were on the ground and the planes were way up high in the air and they couldn’t get near them because you couldn’t shoot from a helicopter because they’d just get blown right out of the sky. Tony called and we talked about it. We had just seen the first day’s dailies, and we said, “You can’t get closer to the plane. Do you think there’s any way that their planes can get closer to you?” They found a hill that they could get up to with vehicles and camera trucks and they showed the pilot where they were talking about shooting from and said, “Could you fly right over this?” So that’s where they started to shoot a lot of the flying footage.

On Labor Day weekend, they had just finished shooting the bulk of the movie, and Tony and Chris and I went into the cutting room for that whole weekend and went through all of the airplane dailies, looking at every foot of film, probably 100,000 feet. Every time we came to a shot that looked halfway usable, Tony would say, “OK, let’s use that for the scene where Cruise first gets there,” and then we’d see another shot, we’d say, “This would be great before his plane goes down.” We broke up all of that flying footage for all those different scenes.

Chris Lebenzon: There was the first scene, then there was the Jester scene. There was Viper, there was Goose’s death. And then the MiG engagement at the end. We cut just the aerial stuff together without any [shots of the actors in the aircrafts] and put music on and it looked great, but it had no story.

Weber: And no closeups in the cockpits.

Lebenzon: Then they shot great-looking [shots of the actors with helmets on a gimble], but when it came in, it had no dialogue. Maybe there wasn’t really a script yet. So we put that in these really great-looking aerial scenes that meant nothing. And it still meant nothing, but it all looked good. (Laughs.)

Weber: Months later, we brought the pilots into the cutting room and said, “Well, what could they say right here when this action is going on?” And they gave us ideas of things to say that would be believable and not sound stupid, but also help an audience know what’s going on. They were very helpful. 

Lebenzon: The term, “I got a MiG on my six.” We all know it’s behind us, but we didn’t know what that meant at the time. And nobody else did. And there was other educating language that you learned by listening to it and then demonstrating it with [shots of] the plane. That was the only way you knew what was happening. Say something and show it. It went through a lot of iterations, Tom came in and recorded some [dialogue] in [Weber’s] room. The actors and the pilots were there a lot. [Editor’s note: In these shots, the actors were wearing helmets so the editors were able to use any dialogue.] Correct me if I’m wrong, Bill, I think you got this call. Wasn’t the studio really mad because they couldn’t see Tom Cruise’s face?

Weber: Yeah. Very mad. 

Lebenzon: But it basically saved us to be able to tell the narrative. 

Did you have a lot of footage to work with? It sounded like it was pretty limited. 

Weber: We probably had 200,000 feet for the whole movie. 

Lebenzon: I mean, the ground story, they didn’t give Tony another camera. He had one camera. And there wasn’t even that much coverage. A couple scenes were reshot like… well, the end for one, what three times? The one that ended in the club with Kelly [McGinnis] and she puts the coin in the jukebox. That, that was originally on a carrier, that scene at the end. It didn’t work. 

Weber: We weren’t bringing Kelly back at the end of the movie, is why. And then that all changed. 

So you’re saying in one of the endings he wasn’t reunited with Kelly?

Lebenzon: That’s right.  … And then they shot [the dialogue scene in] Goose’s room — when Maverick apologizes and says, “I can fix this” — to make Tom more likable, because remember the sentiment was he was too arrogant, which is exactly what Val Kilmer’s Iceman says about him.

Weber: And then they went to Chicago to shoot two new scenes, much later, almost when we were finishing the mix — the scene [between Cruise and McGillis] in the elevator.

Lebenzon: And the love scene to “Take My Breath Away.”

So at that point, they wanted to expand the love story?

Lebenzon: It was the exhibitors that wanted to extend the love story. We were basically done with the movie, and they had a screening in New York for exhibitors that went very well and a screening on the West Coast for exhibitors that went very well. And they did one in Chicago that didn’t do very well. And the Chicago exhibitors came out saying, “We wish there was more of a love story.” Boom. We shot those two scenes. 

Tom was shooting Color of Money by that time. How did they handle continuity?

Lebenzon: He had to be wet (because his haircut was different). And Kelly had black hair, so we put a cap on her. She looks kind of out of place. I mean, she’s wearing a hat in one scene in the whole movie.

You mentioned the song, “Take My Breath Away.” It won an Oscar. Tell us about how they chose that song.

Lebenzon: We went to Oasis after work many nights and auditioned songs with Harold Faltermeyer, the composer, and Giorgio Moroder, who handled the songs. It was his studio, he won the Oscar. After working all day, we’d go. This was new to me. Billy might have done this on Beverly Hills Cop, but we’d go to this place in the Valley and put different songs up with the scenes we had cut. Don [Simpson] and Jerry [Bruckheimer] and Tony and Billy and I, and Harold and Giorgio would sit and listen and pick the songs. Tony didn’t like too many of them. I think he voted against “Take My Breath Away.”

Weber: He may have, I don’t remember exactly. Then the Kenny Loggins ones, “Danger Zone,” and what’s the other one?

Lebenzon: The volleyball scene. “Playing With The Boys.” That scene was scripted as a real game. Remember they kept score and everything, and Tony shot it like a commercial and they were angry.

Weber: The studio was so pissed off. The head of production, Charlie McGuire. He said, “I’m gonna fire him.” Meaning Tony, because he spent a whole day shooting this scene. And then of course it turns out it’s one of the most famous scenes in the movie.

Lebenzon: We didn’t expect it. And it was interesting to edit. I had never done a commercial before, or a music video. And that was Tony’s forte. 

What was the toughest scene for you to unlock?

Weber: There was a scene that the studio was very worried about. That was the first scene I cut on the movie and it’s when Tom and Kelly had dinner at her place. And then afterwards he tells her about his mother and they were really nervous about Kelly in that scene. That was the first thing on the picture I cut was that scene. And then I put music to it, the Otis Redding song, (“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,”) and it all turned out great. It was the studio that was so worried about her.

What was their concern? 

Weber: They were nervous that her character wasn’t working and the relationship wasn’t working, but then we won them over with that scene.

Lebenzon: The flying scenes were always tough. The end battle went through so much. It made no sense. We wrestled it for months and got it right. We think. We hope. (Laughs.) In hindsight, it seemed to be. 

Do you wanna share any thoughts about working with Tony? 

Weber: Sweetest guy that ever lived. He was an incredibly wonderful human being. 

Lebenzon: Yeah. Kind and gentle and smart and funny. 

Weber: Wonderful, wonderful person. I’m not just saying that. I mean, he was really a sweetheart. 

And what about working with Jerry and Don on this one? 

Weber: They were two great, great producers. All they cared about was trying to make the best version of the movie that they had made the deal to make. And they didn’t care how we did it. We just had to make the best version. 

Lebenzon: Their instincts were always right on. I’d come from a couple other movies, but never one where producers were so involved. I mean, they’d come to the cutting room almost every day just to keep tabs on us and the shooting. It’s a classic producer oversight that really was one of the reasons the movie was so successful. … Money was never a problem. At least that I saw, they probably kept people away and always had good instincts.

What has it been like seeing Tom Cruise go on to become such a huge star? 

Weber: Well, it started right after Top Gun. That’s when it happened. 

Lebenzon: He’s great. He deserves it. He works harder than anybody. We did another movie with him, Days of Thunder, which never would’ve been made without his involvement. He was in the cutting room with us a lot on that. He’s that guy that brings everything he can to what he’s doing. 

What is he like to work with in the cutting room? 

Lebenzon: He’s great. He’s a really hard worker and very sweet person. You just know he is there to work. And I mean it in the best sense, he’s a really hard worker.

What do you remember about the premiere?

Lebenzon: The reaction was really big. Billy and I never knew this movie was gonna be anything. In fact, I think when we first talked at your house, you asked me about the script and I didn’t think much of it. And I was honest. (Laughs.) I imagine if I had said, “Oh, it’s great,” that I maybe wouldn’t have been on the movie. You know, these things are like lightning in a bottle. We never thought we were making the movie that it is today and how it would catch on.

Weber: The Navy set up recruiting tables in the lobby of theaters throughout the United States.

At the time, after the film’s initial success, was there talk of doing a sequel? 

Weber: Not then. The studio knew how hard it was to put together and create what we ended up with. I think it was years and years before they ever brought that up. There wasn’t another foot of film [of the flying] that we didn’t use that we could use. Nothing. Matter of fact, we probably used a couple of shots two or three times.

Chris, I know you’re not at liberty to talk about the details of the new movie yet (this interview was recorded in mid-April before the first screenings), but anything you could share about working on Maverick? 

Lebenzon: It was just great to be reunited with a few of the same people that were on the first one and to connect with the talented director, Joe Kosinski. The whole experience kind of brought back 35 years of memories and it was all very emotional.