Danny Elfman's scarily prolific score-writing career
Danny Elfman is the composer who brought us some of the most famous music in movie and TV history.
Despite all his successes, Elfman lives in fear, and he works hard to keep it that way, reports CBS News' Jamie Wax.
"These impossible things keeps me excited," Elfman said. "It's scary but exciting."
These days, the "scary stuff" is reimagining the music he composed for the films of his close friend and collaborator Tim Burton, to be performed for a live audience.
"There's 85 musicians and 45 singers that have to learn this all from scratch," he said.
Elfman is one of the most prolific composers in Hollywood. In fact, there's a good chance you've been amused, moved or thrilled by one of his scores.
"Half our job is actually writing music, and half is being something between a magician and a fortune teller and a psychiatrist," he said.
Elfman first gained notoriety as the front man for the 1980's Ska band Oingo Boingo.
Then he got a phone call from a young director named Tim Burton. He asked Elfman to score his 1985 feature debut, the quirky, dark comedy "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure."
Elfman said he doesn't know what Tim Burton saw in him back then.
"He's never explained it to me. He was just going on impulse," he said.
The two have collaborated, almost exclusively, on 15 films over 30 years, including "Beetlejuice," "Batman," "Nightmare Before Christmas" and "Edward Scissorhands."
But there's one Elfman composition that everybody knows: "The Simpsons."
"Those three syllables kept my family in health insurance for a quarter century," he said.
Elfman created the Simpsons theme song in a matter of hours and voiced its only lyric.
"I wrote it in my head in the car on the way home from meeting Matt Groening and I said 'No one will really hear this anyhow - it's just a goof,'" he said.
That goof has opened more than 500 Simpson's episodes.
Nevertheless, Elfman said he always has something to prove.
"It's a constant challenge, and a constant intimidation and a constant comparing myself with the greats who proceeded me," he said. "I couldn't get tired of that."