Christopher Lennertz: Composer, Bear Fighter and Filmmaker Extraordinaire

November 14, 2024

Soundtracks, Scores and More Staff

From his grandfather’s love of Mancini, Chris knew all about the famous composer and the breadth of his work. In the scoring session, teenage Chris watched the 68-year-old Henry Mancini receive creative feedback about one scene’s classical orchestral score. The master composer let go of what he’d originally devised, and after ten minutes at the piano, Mancini came back with a jazz composition to suit the scene.  Chris felt the adrenalized rush of this kind of real-time musical storytelling and also appreciated the versatility of multiple genres. After witnessing this scoring session, Chris changed his major to composing the next day.

 

BY JASON LAZARCHECK

 

Christopher Lennertz is one of Hollywood’s most prolific and versatile composers, with composing credits ranging from Alvin and the Chipmunks and Supernatural to Sausage Party and The Boys.

Over the years, Chris has scored hits across many mediums and genres, including video games, broadcast procedurals, children’s movies, R-rated theatrical comedies, and acclaimed streaming dramas.

His talent and versatility are undeniable, but Chris is quick to link his success to the many collaborators he’s worked with. He’s worked with his idols, from Elmer Bernstein, Michael Kamen, and Alan Menken to Money Mark from Beastie Boys and Guns N’ Roses. Chris has worked with close friends, like creator-showrunners, Eric Kripke and Zack Estrin, and music supervisor Alex Patsavas. Chris has brought in and befriended world-class collaborators such as Bruno Mars’s co-writer, Phil Lawrence, and Chris has also been a mentor to many musicians along the way.

Most of the people you would ask would be like, “Oh, he’s one of those weird composers who’s not an introvert.” I kind of hate sitting by myself in a studio. That’s why I collaborate. I always try to find cool musicians to collaborate with on every score, mostly because I don’t like sitting by myself, in all honesty. I like being in the studio with people who you can bounce ideas off of and singers and musicians who can give you something that you don’t have. Or even filmmakers like that. So I love that part of the process, and it very much feels like a little bit of a jolt in a good way.

While many composers are introverted, Chris is a people person. He thrives as an extrovert. His list of collaborators is as extensive and diverse as his filmography and the eclectic musical taste he’s cultivated since he was a kid. As a result, very few composers can claim to be as truly eclectic as Christopher Lennertz. 

“I like conducting. I love standing. I’m not at all the best conductor, but I would always conduct my own stuff because I just like to be able to look at the orchestra and have them play back. And that’s what I liked about being on stage… I just love doing that.”

Very few composers can claim to be survivors of bear attacks, as well. More on that later. Suffice it to say, Chris is a people person, not a bear person.

Lately, Lennertz has been busy working on a new movie and continuing his work on the 4th season of Amazon’s hit series The Boys. He also scored its spinoff, Gen V. 

It’s just the bloodiest thing. The new movie is called Back in Action, which is Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz, coming out of retirement. That’s a Netflix [ movie ].

The spy-comedy from Chris’s frequent collaborator Seth Gordon is due out in November 2024. Recently, Chris has also worked on a new musical, the new Fraggle Rock show, and a Sausage Party series. As eclectic as ever.

Chris’s taste has always been that way. He was born in Boston and grew up in a working-class college town in Pennsylvania. As a small child, he listened to folk, show tunes, doo-wop, and rock, going back to his earliest memories of music.

I very distinctly remember my parents had an old, old record player. And my dad was one-hundred-percent leftover hippie/folk music fan who also loved show tunes and doo-wop. So I remember a lot of Peter, Paul, and Mary albums, and it’s right next to Oklahoma and Evita, and then The Supremes and Motown, and all kinds of stuff like that. So there’s a lot of Beach Boys, that kind of stuff on my dad’s side. One hundred percent. My mom was Beatles, Beatles, Beatles, Beatles. She was the one—there are pictures of her at the concert—just with tears streaming down her face, screaming. So she was a Beatle maniac, absolutely, which I am as well, and so is my dad. I love the Beatles. So I kind of had those things, running, and I just remember sitting in the den with the old, old record player.

In addition to loving his parents’ favorite artists, Chris’s musical heritage goes back another generation.

“I was Conrad Birdie in Bye Bye Birdie. But I was in a band every Saturday and Sunday. That’s all I did. I was in somebody’s garage eating cold pizza and playing covers.”

My grandfather on my mom’s side was a singer before World War Two and actually was in Boston, made two records, and was kind of in the Sinatra/Tony Bennett crooner world. Yeah. So he was a huge big band fan. And I love big band.

Recently, Chris has had opportunities to make his grandfather proud and do more big-band jazz, including a one-act stage show based on Captain America called Chris Rogers: The Musical, which ran for a limited time in Disney California Adventure. The show featured the song by Alan Menken and David Zippel from the 2011 Captain America movie, Save The City by Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman from Hawkeye, and five new original songs with music by Christopher Lennertz and lyrics by Lennertz, Jordan Peterson, and Alex Karukas. Chris also served as arranger and conductor.

I like conducting. I love standing. I’m not at all the best conductor, but I would always conduct my own stuff because I just like to be able to look at the orchestra and have them play back. And that’s what I liked about being on stage… I just love doing that. And that’s probably what first led me to music because [ my grandfather and I ] would go to see small shows in Boston and he would sing sometimes. By that time he was just doing it for fun and had a business. But we would go, and so my first instrument was trumpet when I was nine. And I think it was because I just heard that was the top note and people would just wail and they’d do like a big big-band ending. And I was like, “Ooh, that’s really fun.” And it was!

So young Chris did about four years of trumpet and played in the school orchestra and the band. Then, at 12 years old, he hit puberty, and the trumpet was just not that cool at the time. His real epiphany came when he first heard Eddie Van Halen.

So I just immediately switched and saved fifty bucks and went and bought a Sears guitar, and that was it. But then I really caught the bug. At that point, I wrote my first song.

It was for a contest in fifth grade. Chris wrote his very first song and ended up winning this elementary school art contest. He continued toying around with songwriting into the next year.

I got my heart broken in sixth grade, and when my first girlfriend broke up with me, I wrote this song, performed it at the talent show, and I’m pretty sure I had the Don Johnson jacket on with the pink socks and the whole thing because it was that era, and I probably had a Flock of Seagulls haircut. And so that was the first time I was on stage doing an original song. And definitely, I was like, “Ooh, this is fun.” All of a sudden people were like, “Oh, that was cool. I want to be friends.”

That’s when Chris first wanted to be in a rock band. In addition to that, he also did musical theater in school.

I was Conrad Birdie in Bye Bye Birdie. But I was in a band every Saturday and Sunday. That’s all I did. I was in somebody’s garage eating cold pizza and playing covers. And then by the time we got later in high school, that’s when I started writing more originals and we would play parties on Saturday night or pool parties on Sunday afternoon. It was the Eighties, so I have a bunch of Ibanez shredder guitars, like Joe Satriani and those guys. And then I definitely had a Strat. I didn’t get my Les Paul until a little bit later.

But Chris did have the long hair back then.

“When you tell your guidance counselor in small-town Pennsylvania that you wanna be a musician, they immediately follow with, “Right, but what do you wanna do for a real job? Like, that’s not really a job.” And that’s what people think.“

I had what I like to call the Robbie Hart mullet. If you remember The Wedding Singer. I had party-in-the-back and business-in-front.

Chris got really into Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. And then he would read articles about them and found out that they love jazz fusion. He remembers reading in one article that Satriani was a huge fan of Al Di Meola, who played with Chick Corea’s Return to Forever.

Then I started buying fusion albums. And then at the time, there were a lot of shredders on guitar who were super classically influenced. So Yngwie Malmsteen would be like, “Oh, I love Paganini’s violin 24 Caprices” and all this stuff. So I started really getting into more classical as well as more jazz and fusion. So by the time I was a senior in high school, I was now playing Metallica on weekends, but all week long, I was listening to Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, and Herbie Hancock.

From folk, doo-wop, show tunes, rock, fusion, and classical, Chris’s eclectic taste in his youth foreshadowed his composing career, although at the time composing wasn’t on his radar. He just wanted to play guitar and write songs. 

I had all these vast musical influences between my parents and my grandfather, and then I ended up being that kid. I had the huge mullet, and we lived next to New Jersey, and I had big boots with studs on them and was wearing a Metallica T-shirt, but I was also doing jazz hands on stage and arranging stuff for jazz band, and writing like choir fugues to get into college… The Metallica kids were like, “What are you doing listening to that Miles Davis?”

Chris recalls there was a lot of snottiness about his wide-ranging taste from his different groups of music friends. He also encountered resistance when he decided he wanted to pursue music professionally. 

When you tell your guidance counselor in small-town Pennsylvania that you wanna be a musician, they immediately follow with, “Right, but what do you wanna do for a real job? Like, that’s not really a job.” And that’s what people think. 

When Chris attended USC’s Thornton School of Music and studied under working professionals, he was able to see music as a career. He entered the school determined to focus on guitar, but he fell in love with composing. Even at USC, he encountered some of the same “snottiness” when it came to genres.  

Even professors—they called them legit composition professors at USC—they do not like film music because it’s very tonal and it’s sometimes very simple and sometimes very old-fashioned. Or sometimes very pop-influenced, which in an academic world, that’s sort of frowned upon. So even then, at the beginning of college, I was like, “Oh, I thought this is gonna go away,” and it didn’t go away, and I’ve still got like these old guys with PhDs who are like, “Well, you know, Jerry Goldsmith? That’s not real orchestral music. And I’m like, “Why?”

As a kid, Chris grew up a huge fan of movies and the music of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, ET, and Back to the Future. That was his era. So even before he switched his concentration from guitar to composing, Chris was a huge fan of John Williams, Bill Conti, Alan Silvestri, and James Horner.

Still, throughout his freshman year, Chris didn’t see film composing as a career for himself. He was focused on guitar but wasn’t a guitar prodigy like some students in his class and had to practice all day just to keep up.

It really took until sophomore year when I got into a Henry Mancini session, and it was that session where I saw people making a living writing music in many different styles, specifically to tell a story.

From his grandfather’s love of Mancini, Chris knew all about the famous composer and the breadth of his work. In the scoring session, teenage Chris watched the 68-year-old Henry Mancini receive creative feedback about one scene’s classical orchestral score. The master composer let go of what he’d originally devised, and after ten minutes at the piano, Mancini came back with a jazz composition to suit the scene.

“I often hire people who have less experience just because the assuredness is there because that’s a bigger help for me. To know that someone’s going to be like, “I’m gonna figure this out. I’m gonna get it done.”

Chris felt the adrenalized rush of this kind of real-time musical storytelling and also appreciated the versatility of multiple genres. After witnessing this scoring session, Chris changed his major to composing the next day.

This was 1992. Mancini died two years later. The film he was scoring was Hanna-Barbera’s Tom & Jerry. Then, almost 30 years after the session, Chris Lennertz would score the 2021 Tom & Jerry movie, honored to follow in Henry Mancini’s footsteps. 

If you look even briefly at his output and his career, the first thing that comes to your mind is, wait a second, he was doing Lifeforce and sci-fi at the same time as he was doing Pink Panther and jazz, and then he did pop stuff. He was doing record arrangements for Linda Ronstadt and all that kind of stuff… And I was like, “Oh, wait. There’s a world where I don’t have to say goodbye to the stuff that everyone said didn’t fit,” and that I think is what I’ve loved the most.

As a film composer, Chris wouldn’t have to limit himself to one genre or style. He could maintain his internal creative curiosity and passion for all kinds of music. In scoring movies, Chris found a career where he could be as eclectic as his own taste.

Growing up, he recognized the power of music in movies, even if he didn’t know composing would be his career. In terms of movie music, what began it all for young Chris might have been Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

That was the Sherman Brothers, and I think I wore that [ album ] out. It was on the ABC Sunday movie at least a couple times a year. And then the other one was Snoopy Come Home. It was when you first met Woodstock. And it was the first time that Snoopy was ever a musical. It always had Vince Guaraldi before, but this was the first time where there were all these original songs… And it’s this heart-wrenching beautiful musical.

Again, it was the Sherman Brothers. In Snoopy Come Home, another ABC Sunday Night Movie, there are eight original songs, and Chris recalls at least five or six that are so catchy, like all of Richard and Robert Sherman’s songwriting, and he describes one in particular.

It’s when Snoopy found out who his original owner was. And there’s this sad song about if his original owner remembered him… And I very distinctly remember, “Oh, I love how that makes me feel. And I love the fact that I can remember the songs, and it makes me feel.” Even though we didn’t have video at the time, there was no VHS, there was no whatever, but I can go back to that place because I’ve got that thing in my head that I can sing along with.

Chris remembers how, through the music, the visuals all came back into his mind. He didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s what he loves about film music. Whether it’s with vocals or instrumental, whether it’s the Indiana Jones theme or a Snoopy song, Chris loves how anyone can re-listen to the music or simply conjure the sound in one’s mind and the rest of the story comes with it.

“Oh, I’m there. I’m back.” I don’t even need to [re-]watch the movie. I can feel it. Whether it’s Williams or Jerry [Goldsmith] or whoever. It’s like that. It just immediately comes sweeping back.

Once Chris changed his major to composing at USC, he began learning how to write music that did just that. In addition to hard work and musical talent, Chris thinks his extroversion contributed to his success. A little assuredness goes a long way, and Chris could sense it among his peers at USC.

 

 

There were twelve people in my class and I could have told you on the second day of class who was likely gonna make it. Second day.

The select few who went on to have the longest careers were Lennertz, his studio partner Tim Wynn, and Larry O’Keefe, who wrote Legally Blonde: the Musical, the Heathers musical, and Bat Boy. Larry is Chris’s big musical theater alumnus friend, and Chris thinks Larry is amazing. Like Chris, Larry was outgoing, confident, gregarious, and funny, but in a drier “theater” way.

I just knew that’s who people are going to want to work with because it instills confidence, but it’s also going to be a fun process. If you work with Larry for six months on a project, you know you’re gonna laugh, you’re gonna come up with something great, you’re gonna have a good time, and you’re gonna be really proud of it. And I think that’s where that confidence comes from.

Chris admits it’s really hard to cultivate and instill confidence, but he values assuredness, not only within himself but in the people he works with, even in his assistants.

I often hire people who have less experience just because the assuredness is there because that’s a bigger help for me. To know that someone’s going to be like, “I’m gonna figure this out. I’m gonna get it done.”

According to Chris, if you ask Doreen Ringer-Ross, an executive at BMI in artist relations at the time, she would have recognized the same thing in him. Doreen was the first real industry person Lennertz met, and she became his surrogate mom while he was in LA and a dear friend.

Each time Doreen came in and spoke, at the end of class she would write her name and phone number on the board. If a student wanted to talk to her about the business, whether they wanted to join BMI or just get her opinions, she said, “I’m here. This is what I do. I’m artist relations. Come in.”

So I called her, and she said, “Come on in.” And I drove in like a week later and sat on her couch, and she just kind of chuckled. “I knew that you were the one that was gonna call.” And I was like, “Really?” I’m like, “Who else?” And she’s like, “Nobody else. I knew you were the only one who was gonna call me.” And I was the only one who called.

Five years later, Chris and Doreen would go to Sundance together with BMI. This was before social media and before Sundance really blew up, but Chris the Extrovert would always be there, even when he didn’t have a movie there, and Doreen would say the same thing.

So I just started going down this list and cold-calling all these companies and saying, “You don’t need to pay me. Do you want an intern? And I can give you about twenty hours a week in between school.” And so the one I ended up on, which was the greatest one, was Roger Corman’s company called Concorde.

“I knew you’d be the one who’d show up and go skiing with all these editors and directors and stuff.” Because I was the extrovert.

Before Chris graduated from USC, in his senior year, his teacher was Elmer Bernstein, the legendary composer of over 200 films from The Magnificent Seven and To Kill a Mockingbird to Ghostbusters and Three Amigos! Bernstein possessed the versatility to score comedies and dramas, like Lennertz would go on to do.

Elmer was spotting The Age of Innocence with Scorsese the year we studied with him. And so he would bring in the cut and go over the spotting notes with us before he even wrote it, and then we got to hear what he wrote. And it was really fascinating. “I see. I see where that came from.”

A master composer collaborated with a master director to make creative improvements to the score and enhance the story, and Chris was able to observe the whole process. Upon graduating, he took the lessons he learned from Elmer with him as Chris pursued composing himself. Chris also has a Dalmatian named Elmer Bernstein.

By the time Chris graduated, he had scored almost 40 student films during his undergraduate years at USC.

Chris’s first job right out of college was assisting Basil Poledouris, the composer of The Blue Lagoon, Conan the Barbarian, RoboCop, and The Hunt for the Red October. Chris started out just doing grunt work and carrying boxes for Basil.

But he was lovely, and I eventually learned how to use all the electronics because of his [projects]. And I really watched him work with directors on big movies and got a lot of that from it. But he was just a great human… Basil was like a second dad. 

Chris worked for Basil Poledouris for four years. During that time, Lennertz composed his first feature film, Midnight Tease, a low-budget movie about killer strippers. This opportunity didn’t come through Poledouris. It came through Roger Corman.

When Chris was in college, he didn’t know anybody in Hollywood and wanted to expand his network. So he went to the video store, and he made a list of all the names of the companies that made movies that weren’t big ones because he knew he wasn’t going to get a job at Fox and Disney as a 20-year-old who didn’t know anybody. 

So I just started going down this list and cold-calling all these companies and saying, “You don’t need to pay me. Do you want an intern? And I can give you about twenty hours a week in between school.” And so the one I ended up on, which was the greatest one, was Roger Corman’s company called Concorde.

Roger Corman was the king of B-movies, and Concorde was his second company. Chris worked there his entire senior year for 20 hours a week for free, as promised, filing cue sheets, emptying trash, and getting coffee for Concorde’s head of music, Paul Di Franco.

Paul really liked Chris, and he eventually listened to some of Chris’s music, but Chris didn’t push it too much too soon.

At one point, Paul turned around, and we had these DATs, the digital audio tapes, and he set three of these things down, and he said, “Can you call these five numbers of music editors? Here’s three horror scores. We have this really, really low-budget movie about strippers who kill each other and we can’t afford a composer… See if any of these guys are available.”

Paul needed one of the five editors to cut one of the three existing scores the company already owned to score this super low-budget movie from a first-time director. And all Paul had was five hundred dollars for the music editor to cut the whole movie.

Chris distinctly remembers a moment that lasted three or four seconds…

“…Should I?” And then I just turn around, and I’m like, “What if I did it for five hundred dollars? And I wrote you a new score?”

Many people would experience that moment, that pause, and not act on it and not speak up, but Chris summoned the courage. Even in his early 20s, Chris possessed the confidence and assuredness to take a shot. He had dozens of short films under his belt at that point, and the worst Paul could say to him was no.

And he thought for a second. He’s like, “Let me call the director, and if he wants to meet with you, you gotta meet him the next day or two. And if he says yes, then you can do it.” And so I had coffee with this guy, Scott Levy, and ended up doing this movie called Midnight Tease with nobody in it. And so I did it all on synths, I think there might be one live instrument. I probably spent the whole five hundred dollars and didn’t make anything. But that was the first movie I did for Corman, and I ended up doing five more for that director, and then thirteen more movies over the next three years for them.

Lennertz did this low-budget work for a couple thousand dollars a movie at most, but the films included a remake of Piranha and a remake of Humanoids from The Deep. Those were originally scored by Pino Donaggio and James Horner, respectively. Like low-budget movies were for so many composers Chris admired, these ones that Chris scored at the start of his career in the late 90s were great practice runs.

I’m sure if I listen to those scores now I would wanna stab myself with an ice pick, but I was getting lots of practice. And so meanwhile, I was working during the day and working for Basil and then [Michael] Kamen, but I was doing these and making mistakes, learning a lot, actually spending a lot of the money that they would give me on musicians, and creating. So within five years, I had a pretty decent demo of low-budget stuff.

This all started because Chris was prepared to seize the moment and didn’t hesitate to ask. Despite his extroverted nature and self-assuredness, Chris also experienced self-doubt. There was impostor syndrome and plenty he still needed to learn.

The confidence sometimes came out, like, “Oh, of course, I know how to do that.” And then I didn’t, and I knew I didn’t, but I was like, “I’m not gonna let anyone know, but I’m gonna figure it out real fast.” And then now I think, as you get further along… Even Hans [Zimmer] does this now, where he’s like, “I don’t know how to do that. But I’m gonna figure it out.” And it’s much more honest. “No, I don’t. I’m not great at everything, but I’ll either figure it out, or I’m going to hire the most amazing such-and-such player [or] artist to bring what I don’t know how to do to this score.”

Chris feels that self-belief is a prerequisite. Even if he doesn’t know exactly what to do, he knows he’s going to figure it out.

“While I was still doing Piranha and slasher movies and stuff like that, that’s when I got to the call to work for Michael [Kamen]. And that was my first orchestration job. 101 Dalmatians was the first time I had a real union job on a movie. And that was through Michael, thank goodness.”

In addition to the invaluable practice and collection of composing credits, Chris the Extrovert also gained another friend from working at Concorde. While he was interning, Paul Di Franco brought on an assistant named Alexandra Patsavas.

She’s now a ginormous music supervisor, who I work with all the time, and we became dear friends. She was at BMI just doing assistant work too, I think, and that was her first thing, was working at Corman.

Alexandra Patsavas is a powerful force as a music supervisor, from The OC and Mad Men to Bridgerton and CODA, and Chris would become really good friends with her. Even at the low-budget company, Concordre, Alex was always trying to do something unique, whether it was a different style of music or getting that one song they really couldn’t afford. Alex moved on to another company, and Chris did a low-budget movie for her. That score had a Latin solo vocalist, and that was the score that ended up in the temp for Chris’s first network show at Warner Brothers. And it was all because of that connection with Alex.

She started Chop Shop [Music Supervision] and started having all the success with all the different shows, which always feel like they had their own style. And I keep saying confidence, but it’s that assuredness that you don’t have to just bend to every trend. The one thing that I always thought about when Alex’s career boomed at the beginning is that she would often blow up unsigned bands or bands that at the time were barely KCRW bands. They were on the edge and she would blow them up on a big show like The OC.

He points to the time Alex used the Imogen Heap song, “Hide and Seek.” At the time, the song was not huge, and Heap was not a big star, but on The OC, it was iconic.

It was huge… As big of a swing as you could take and that I think is something that I remember from even when Alex was an assistant, she would always be suggesting, “Oh, I know you’ve never heard of this, but trust me.”

Patsavas is a true tastemaker for broad audiences. Chris admires her confidence, passion, and versatility, and those are the same qualities that contributed to his own success in the next chapter of his film career.

While I was still doing Piranha and slasher movies and stuff like that, that’s when I got to the call to work for Michael [Kamen]. And that was my first orchestration job. 101 Dalmatians was the first time I had a real union job on a movie. And that was through Michael, thank goodness.

Michael Kamen was the iconic composer of Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and Band of Brothers, and he was another extrovert. While Basil Poledouris was more introverted and not as much of a showman, Michael Kamen’s extroverted confidence reminded Chris of Henry Mancini. 

He did the strings for The Wall, and he’s at Royal Albert Hall, conducting for Aerosmith and Clapton. And I saw just the way he sort of ran the show, and the way he also honestly addressed the notes and concerns from the producers and director too. It was like, “We’re on a team and we’re telling a story, but I’m gonna come up with the answer that you need… I’m gonna be somebody’s solution in this little world of music, that that they don’t really understand, that I understand.” And that was the great thing about working for somebody like Michael Kamen. Before there was Hans there was Kamen. He was the showman before Hans became Hans. And he was the one with the hair, and he was just bigger than life.

Chris relished watching Kamen work with big personalities like Joel Silver and conduct orchestras with bravado. Eventually, Lennertz would bring his own showmanship and collaborative spirit to big box-office movies like his mentor, and Lennertz’s custom studio in Palos Verdes, which resembles a chapel, is actually a replica of Michael’s place, which Michael had bought from Dave Stewart from the Eurhythmics.

“So I was doing Supernatural, and then I was doing video games which I love like Gun and Medal of Honor, but very, very serious war [genre] and lots of violence and demons and all this stuff. And so then they’re like, ‘Hey, can you write something really sweet for kids?'”

Before Lennertz had his own big box-office movies, however, his first hit would be on the small screen. While Chris was working for Poledouris and Kamen and scoring low-budget movies, his friends from USC, with whom he did all those short films, were writing spec scripts and working as development assistants. 

Thankfully one of those people was Eric Kripke. And I did seven or so shorts—three or four big shorts and a couple of small things—for him in college… Less than ten years later, he’s got the show called Supernatural.

In college, Chris was a year older than Eric, and the boys connected right away at a fraternity that Chris describes as “kind of Revenge of the Nerds-y,” where everyone wasn’t a business major and weren’t all blond and from Orange County.

We had a really diverse group of guys, most of whom wouldn’t have joined the other houses. And we were all just cinema majors, music majors, and we couldn’t find a home, but we’re stuck in downtown Los Angeles and didn’t have any social life.

The frat had a lot of people not from LA, and they just wanted something fun to do on weekends. In Chris’s second year, they were looking for new members, and all of a sudden this kid comes up from Ohio, Eric Kripke, and he’s a film major. Chris and Eric immediately hit it off.

We were on the front porch of this fraternity house at USC, and you’re supposed to talk to all these people… We just talked just the two of us for like an hour and a half. I didn’t meet anybody else. And we were just talking about, like, “Oh, and you remember that part at the end of E.T. when the French horns came in!” And he’s like, “Oh yeah, and then you know in Jaws when you don’t see the shark and you think…” And, you know, it was like that.

The boys bonded over how they loved the same kind of movies, the same kind of directors, and the same kind of music. They just had the same tastes. Then every time Eric made a short, he called Chris and they had a lot of fun doing it. As undergrads, Lennertz and Kripke developed a shorthand that continues to allow them to have fun every single time they work together.

So when Kripke created Supernatural for WB, naturally he called Lennertz, and that series ran for 15 seasons. Later, when Kripke created Revolution for NBC, Lennertz would score that show too, and the two former frat boys are currently collaborating on Amazon’s The Boys and Gen V. 

As Chris’s TV career intensified with Supernatural, he was also scoring major video games. Lennertz composed hits such as James Bond 007: From Russia with Love, Gun, several Medal of Honor titles including European Assault and Warfighter, Mass Effect 2 and 3, and The Sims 4.

So I was doing Supernatural, and then I was doing video games which I love like Gun and Medal of Honor, but very, very serious war [genre] and lots of violence and demons and all this stuff. And so then they’re like, “Hey, can you write something really sweet for kids?” Now I’m like, “Great. I get to go play in the Alan Silvestri sandbox. Awesome!” And so that I actually love the newness and the freshness of it. I think it allows me to come to every project with a little bit of that butterfly feeling. “I get to finally do this kind of thing now.”

This new kind of thing was 2007’s Alvin and the Chipmunks, and Alvin brought in over $360 million in box office revenue. It was Chris’s biggest movie to date by far, but afterward, he had to work hard to avoid being pigeonholed, or in this case, chipmunk-holed.

There was five years after Alvin that literally every call was “OK, this one’s talking squirrels. And then, when this one’s done we’ll do Cats and Dogs Two, and then Marmaduke,” and that was when I was like, “Literally, I will do anything anybody wants that doesn’t have a talking animal in it for a dollar. I don’t care… I will demo for it.” And I demoed for Horrible Bosses, and I’m like, “Please, let me get this adult movie.” And then all of a sudden, after that, all I got was movies filled with F-bombs, and it was that and Identity Thief, which was also great. And then I’m like, “OK, now I wanna do animation or sci-fi,” you know?

“I think I can bring something to a show like The Boys, that maybe even came from a dramatic need of a scene from Horrible Bosses. Or even Sausage Party, or something like that. And I’m not gonna do it the same way… I think that’s hopefully something that allows, first of all, newer sounds and different sounds, but allows me to not be bored.”

Chris had to compose his way out. He took the initiative and bet on himself to demo for the 2011 R-rated comedy, starring Jason Bateman and Jason Sudeikis. Horrible Bosses enabled Lennertz to do a string of popular live-action theatrical comedies from Think Like a Man, Identity Thief, and Ride Along to Pitch Perfect 3 and Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.

Post-Alvin, Chris has also scored more dramatic films like Adam and Thanks for Sharing, as well as a number of drama series. In addition to his continued work on Supernatural, which ran 15 seasons from 2005-2020, Chris scored NBC’s Revolution, ABC/Marvel’s Agent Carter, Lost in Space on Netflix, and then Amazon’s The Boys. 

The blessing and the curse of this business is that people will automatically get to know you through the biggest successes you have, and then that’s where they wanna be able to put you. And in one sense, wouldn’t it be great to be Tom Newman in the 90s? And everyone’s like, “I need that guy. I don’t care how much he costs. Because that’s the guy I need.” And, I don’t know, I bet if you asked Tom Newman about five or six years after American Beauty, he’d be like, “Man, if I have to write another one of those things with marimba and piano, I’m probably gonna want to jump off a cliff,” you know? And so, as somebody who’s super ADD and eclectic with their music loves, the most painful part for me is getting pigeonholed and then having that be the illness… But for somebody who always gets bored with doing anything for too long, that’s my favorite part of my career. As long as people allow me the space that I will be able to do something other than what I just did last time.

Chris still composes music for animated films but with fewer talking animals. Sausage Party is talking about animal products and not for kids. The 2016 Seth Rogan animated comedy is R-rated. And Tom & Jerry don’t talk. True to the classic cartoons, in the 2021 movie that Chris scored, the eponymous animated animals are silent.

As a composer, Lennertz not only maintains his versatility by scoring such wide-ranging movies, but he also relishes it.

I love the fact that it goes from Supernatural to Alvin. I love the fact that I went from that to that. And then the Bosses, and then Think Like a Man. So I do love that thing. But there’s also the flip side of that. There is a trajectory of stylistic continuity, probably, that allows Horner to go from Aliens to Rocketeer to Legends of the Fall to Avatar, where at the same time, no one’s gonna be like, “Hey, you know who we should get for that new Star Wars thing? Let’s get that Think Like a Man guy.” I mean, that’s not gonna happen, you know?

While Chris doesn’t have one signature sound, his versatility allows him to work on all the various kinds of movies he’s appreciated as a lifelong fan of screen stories. He clearly has an encyclopedic knowledge of films and film composers and a genuine love of Hollywood lore. That’s in addition to his deep knowledge of many musical genres.

The result is Chris Lennertz has a huge sandbox in which he can play and create. He’s proven himself as adept at scoring adorable animated movies as ultra-violent dramas. No one else can say they’ve done The Smurfs and The Boys. 

Even though I used turntables and a Wurlitzer in [prior movies], well, that’s not the language of The Boys. But now if I use distorted bass and a 70’s drum kit and a bunch of broken amplifiers, but I kind of do the same tonality, it works, and now it’s different than anyone who hadn’t done The Smurfs might have done.

Lennertz’s versatility is truly admirable, and he himself sees that quality in the composers he admires the most.

“The people I work with are the ones who have to have that leap of faith, and they know that I can do anything, hopefully. And Seth Gordon’s new movie is a monster action movie, and thank goodness, I’m thrilled. But it’s not because he’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve done all these action movies with you before.’ We did Horrible Bosses. But he’s like, ‘No. I know that you can tell a story with me, and that’s the thing that gives you the trust.'”

It’s not an accident that they actually do that. Even though people might not think they do. But if you really look at John Williams’s entire—I mean, we know what he’s what he’s known for—but like Stanley & Iris. Go listen to it. It’ll blow your fucking mind. And it’s so small. It’s flute and piano, and it’s amazing. And then you go to Alan Silvestri, and you’re like, “Oh, Back to the Future.” But then you’re like, “Wait, but also Father of the Bride. And then Soap Dish.” Soap Dish is ridiculous, and it’s all tangos… The amount of color and the amount of brushes on the palate is so big that it does allow you to then combine… That’s the amazing thing about somebody like John Williams, who even though eighty-ninety percent of his work is very orchestral, it still only takes about seven or eight seconds to listen to something and be like, “That one’s Jurassic Park. That one’s Rosewood. That one’s Superman. And that’s the ultimate—to be able to, no matter what, to always have, “Oh, I can tell which score that’s from.” And I think that’s the real fun part, to develop a sound.

So it’s those kinds of versatile composers, like Henry Mancini before them, that Chris still looks up. And in terms of current-day composers with big wide sandboxes, Lennertz points to Theodore Shapiro and Chris Beck and would lump himself in with composers like them.

I think I can bring something to a show like The Boys, that maybe even came from a dramatic need of a scene from Horrible Bosses. Or even Sausage Party, or something like that. And I’m not gonna do it the same way… I think that’s hopefully something that allows, first of all, newer sounds and different sounds, but allows me to not be bored.

At the same time, Lennertz admits it’s a different experience for him compared to composers who have a signature sound. He’s quite busy and doesn’t need to be busier, but his reps don’t necessarily get as many incoming calls as other types of composers.

I don’t have a lot of people that I don’t know calling Richard [Kraft] and Laura [Engel] and being like, “I want your guy.” Doesn’t happen. And I think part of that’s because, absolutely, there are people who are like, “I need Nick Britell because I want what he does.” Or “I need Tom Newman, because, you know.” And “I need Danny Elfman,” because we know what that sound is, or [Alexandre] Desplat.

Compared to them, Lennertz thinks a composer like himself, who is very varied in his style, gets a lot of his work through his relationships rather than the producer saying, “We need to get the guy who does that.”

Of course, the grass is always greener, and Chris has had conversations with other composers who crave a change.

I’ve had the conversation with Menken, where he’s like, “Oh, man, I’d love to do something that’s not a kids’ movie.” Or I haven’t had this conversation with Tom Newman, but I’m sure there’s a point where, “Man, I’d love to do an urban action thing,” but nobody’s going to [call him]. For the very same reason that they’re not gonna call me to do Tom Newman, they’re not gonna call Tom Newman to do Ride Along, whether he wants to do it or not… But as an ADD person, I’d rather have it my way, I think.

Chris’s relationships with filmmakers and his extroverted nature are big reasons why he’s been able to hop from genre to genre. It has to do with people and trust—filmmakers and showrunners whose relationships with Chris go back as far as his undergrad years at USC and the trust he built with them there in the trenches.

The only reason that I got hired for The Boys is not because anyone could look back on Agent Carter and think that that period spy piece makes sense for that. The only reason I got it is because Eric Kripke trusts me.

Chris loves collaborating with his friend Eric on The Boys and Gen V. The Boys is especially fun because the show was such a big swing that not everyone expected it to be well-received or acclaimed. Now that it’s a hit, there’s that much more trust from Amazon to let Eric, Chris, and the whole creative team do their best work.

Similarly, Chris worked with another USC classmate, Zack Estrin, on the 2018 Lost in Space series. Chris has collaborated many times with director Tim Story, starting with the movies Think Like a Man and Ride Along. 

 

Chris has also collaborated in different movie genres with director Seth Gordon. Their relationship began with comedy on Horrible Bosses, and most recently Gordon brought Lennertz on to Back in Action, a bigger action movie.

The people I work with are the ones who have to have that leap of faith, and they know that I can do anything, hopefully. And Seth Gordon’s new movie is a monster action movie, and thank goodness, I’m thrilled. But it’s not because he’s like, “Oh, I’ve done all these action movies with you before.” We did Horrible Bosses. But he’s like, “No. I know that you can tell a story with me, and that’s the thing that gives you the trust.”

Regardless of Chris’s collaborator and the specific sound they’re striving for, the impetus for Chris always comes from the characters and what it feels like for them to be in the story. Then Chris makes it a creative conversation with the filmmaker or showrunner.

It really came from Eric because Eric and I had decades of socializing around entertainment and art that was not even ours, where I could still learn. So we would go to a concert, and I would see how we would react to it, and we’d have a party, and I’d see what music he would put on. And I wasn’t taking notes or anything. But it’s all learning. “Oh, what kind of movies does someone go to? What kind of concerts does someone go to? What kind of books do they read? What does their playlist look like?

At the time with Eric, this would have been a mix tape, but regardless, finding common ground helped fuel the creative process. Chris took a similar approach when he landed Horrible Bosses, but unlike working with Eric Kripke, Chris didn’t have decades of socializing with Seth Gordon. Chris worked with him as an editor on another movie but this was the first time Chris worked with Seth as a director. 

The first thing I said was, “What albums, soundtracks, radio… What would these characters be listening to in their head or on their cars’ radios while they were doing what they’re doing in this movie?” That was the first thing I asked. And he’s like, “Oh, you know, Beastie Boys, Beck, The Black Keys, maybe Run DMC for the super dorky characters. And then for Aniston’s character, she’d probably be listening to Goldfinger or Shirley Bassey. And so that was eye-opening for me. So then I took it one step further, and I said, “All right. I’m gonna put this all in a blender and try to figure out how this can be our sound for our score.” And then I went one step further.

Chris decided he was going to make the score for Horrible Bosses sound like a record and try to put together a band full of the actual people from the groups and artists he and Seth were talking about.

So I’m like, “How do I get to Money Mark from Beastie Boys? And so we had breakfast. And I’m like, “How do I get you to play all the keyboards on this score?” And I found the drummer who played on Beck’s Odelay, Victor [Indrizzo]. And I’m like, “How do I get you to play drums on the score?” And Chris Chaney from Jane’s Addiction and [Mike] McCready from Pearl Jam. And I found all these people, and we ended up doing the score with the actual people from the bands that he was saying they would hear in their head.

And ever since then, whether Lennertz is with a new director or even now on Seth’s new movie, the first thing he does is say, “Send me your playlist. I know you have a playlist when you shoot. Send it to me.” Because that’s what he’s going to do.

I’m going to listen to that playlist over and over and over again. Because when you were shooting, you were hearing that and you were playing it for [the actors], and so that’s what’s going on in your characters’ heads and you’re feeling in your head. I need to incorporate that into what I’m doing.

Chris is interested in what the director is listening to and what the characters would be listening to. If it’s an antagonistic character in Horrible Bosses, and he’s an asshole, what would he do if he got out of the shower and wanted to go ruin somebody’s life? What music would he crank? Because that’s what Chris wants. That’s where he wants the inspiration for his composing to come from, and he’ll do that.

And then when we’re not working on a movie, that’s the other thing I try to do with directors and producers is let’s go see shows together. What does Tim Story want to go see at the Hollywood Bowl next summer when we’re not working on a movie? Because the next time we work on a movie, I get that. That’s part of his taste. 

For Lennertz, it’s an effort to get into the musical taste of the storyteller he’s working for and the characters in the story. What would they skip over? What would they listen to? What would they turn up? What would they turn down? And Lennertz finds the fastest way to communicate, especially with a writer or director he doesn’t know well, is for them to send him a huge folder of MP3s.

And I always say, “Don’t send me the temp for your movie.” Sure, if there’s something in the temp, but I don’t necessarily want to hear a seven-year-old score. I wanna hear what would your characters listen to in their real life if your movie was real. What would Jason Bateman, when he got in the car as his character, what would he immediately go to on his playlist?

That’s what Chris wants because it will influence what the score truly wants to be. Also, when it comes to instrumentation, he’ll often ask collaborators not to just send him examples of what they think is the right sound. Rather, if they find a record that is unrelated but there’s one instrument that they like and sounds cool, then Chris can utilize it.

“And the first thing I need to do is swallow my ego and realize that I can’t play guitar like that, and I can’t play drums like that, and I can’t play whatever. And so go get the people who can and put that together.”

For Baywatch, Seth sent me a bunch of Run The Jewels and some A$AP Rocky. And there are parts of the score that feel maybe like it’s got some influence of that, but it’s specifically the one synth pulse-y thing that Run The Jewels does that made it in, but it’s combined with a bunch of other stuff that’s not that at all. So it doesn’t really sound like a Run The Jewels track. It just sounds like there’s that one element.

Lennertz, with his encyclopedic knowledge of film composing, compares this moment of finding one instrument or element on Baywatch to the process on Dr. No. At some point, producer Albert Broccoli decided that composer Monty Norman’s stuff for Dr. No wasn’t going to work.

The story goes that [Broccoli] had this one record that was not a big hit by The John Barry Seven, and he’s like, “That guitar. That guitar is it. Let’s go get that guy and bring that.” And then it turned out to be John Barry bringing Vic Flick to put that guitar in the right place. Even though it wasn’t necessarily a song from that album, that was the right tone. It was just that single instrument. 

So Lennertz always tries to mine elements like this and draw inspiration from directors and producers. It might be two or three instruments. A specific player. A tempo. A beat. A lot of times it’s a groove, especially with contemporary music. And Lennertz tries to find his sound from there.

As fun as it is to play around with music this way, it’s all in service of the story. By ascribing it to the characters, Chris takes the onus off the director. They’re collaborating about what the character needs in the story, as opposed to what the director thinks they want. 

Then when Lennertz assembles his own team for the given project, like he did for Horrible Bosses, he’s basically becoming a super-producer, which is a wholly different skill set than traditional scoring. But Lennertz is one of those weird composers who’s not an introvert. So he can take those inspirational playlists and say to himself, “Of course, I know how to do that. Or I’m going to figure it out.”

The first time, I’m sure my thinking was I’m not sure I can make it sound as much like the Beastie Boys, so I gotta get the actual guy. But then, it didn’t take more than three months until I was like, “This is the most fun I’ve ever had recording something.”

For Horrible Bosses, Lennertz had the ambition and self-assuredness to reach out to Money Mark and take a shot. The worst the Beastie Boy could say to him was no. Then, once the supergroup set to work, as ambitious as it was, ultimately Lennertz delivered at the highest production value to make something that’s on par with Beck and Beastie Boys.

And Chris’s self-belief flipped from “I’m not sure I can do that. I’m not sure I can make it sound like that. And I’m not a specialist at that. I’m a little insecure about it.”

To me, it’s the Quincy Jones thing. From the beginning of Quincy Jones’s career, and I think to a certain extent Hans [Zimmer], Quincy Jones is not Miles Davis. He is not that. He is not that kind of player. He is a producer and a chart writer with amazing taste and really great instincts and enthusiasm. Motivational skills. And he could harness all this stuff. But Quincy didn’t try to play that guitar solo on Beat It. He’s like, “I’m gonna get Van Halen to play it. When I need a bass player, I’m gonna get Verdine White to come play that bass, because that’s not what I do.”

That’s what Lennertz figured out on Horrible Bosses. Instead of trying to fake the Beastie Boys or fake Pearl Jam, he tried to do it as authentically as possible.

And the first thing I need to do is swallow my ego and realize that I can’t play guitar like that, and I can’t play drums like that, and I can’t play whatever. And so go get the people who can and put that together. And then I realized that was the great thing about Bosses. Oh my god, this feels like what it used to feel like when I was sitting in somebody’s garage in Pennsylvania and playing a song for the first time and recording it on a 4-track. It felt fun, like that again.

Film and TV composing is a high-pressure job. There are incredible demands on composers. It’s fast-paced. So Chris does whatever he can to make the process more fun for himself, and that includes working with his heroes.

I love the Beastie Boys. And to be like, “Oh my God, wait, what you want is that organ line,” and because now I got this guy sitting next to me who actually played that organ line, and he brought all his shit in the back of his pickup truck, and he’s like, “Oh, that’s the keyboard we did for that song,” that—it’s that adrenaline rush. “Holy shit, we got the real thing.” 

Horrible Bosses was over ten years ago, and now Lennertz does that on almost every score, whenever he can. Even if it’s just a single instrumentalist or an arranger or with songs. For example, on UglyDolls, the 2019 kids’ animated movie, Lennertz wanted one specific song to feel like a Bruno Mars song.

So we ended up going and getting Phil Lawrence, who co-wrote Uptown Funk, to produce the song, because if there’s anybody who knows how to make it like Bruno Mars…

In doing so, Chris continues to learn and expand his versatility, as well as his list of collaborators and friends. Even now, he’ll still call Phil “because he’s the guy.” That’s how Chris does it, and it’s one of the main things he’s loved about his career.

It’s been self-serving because as an extrovert, it gives me reasons to get out of this room and go to another studio with real people who are really interesting and super talented and super good at things that I’m not good at. And then just allow me [to do what I’m good at]. I’m great at drama and I’m great at storytelling, and think I have a taste in a lot of different styles. So to be able to take six or seven people in a room, who are all better at what they do than me, and then still be able to sort of direct that, almost like I direct an orchestra, that to me is what’s made the last ten years of my career so much more interesting and fun than probably the first ten years of my career.

As a metaphor, Lennertz always uses the word “blender.”

I’m gonna take your playlist and I’m gonna take all the things you say and all the things I know about you, and then I’m gonna take all the things that I felt when I first watched this cut, and I’m gonna dump it all on blender and make a big smoothie out of it. And that’s gonna be your score.

Chris is a true collaborator, as well as an extrovert, an encyclopedia, a storyteller, and a survivor of a bear attack. More on that soon. He’s been able to overcome his fear as a composer, which has changed over the years.

The first, easily, ten years, the fear is I’m gonna get fired and I’m never gonna work again. Everyone’s gonna hear that I blew it and I’m never work again. And my first TV show, I actually did get fired four episodes in. And then the next year I got another show… And then you start realizing, first of all, it had nothing to do with the music. And second of all, everything will be fine. And everybody has a really short memory, which is fine.

But now Chris feels more of an internal desire to do a great job, both for the audience, but also for the people he’s working with. He wants to help them realize their vision and make it the way they want it to be.

Before it very much had to do with a scarcity of “Oh my god, I’ll be out. I’m never gonna have a career.” And there’s a really great Zen feeling when you’re at the point, where like, “All right, I can’t get fired. I can get terrible reviews. And it’s not over. It just is what it is, and that’s people’s subjective tastes. But the fear is definitely real. 

“So I go to the front door, and in my right hand, I had my kid on my hip, and I went to go slam on the door. And I looked, and to the left of the door was this window, and I was like, ‘Oh, shit. The screen’s gone.’ And all of a sudden—’ROAR!’ This bear lunges through that window.”

Chris remembers a day that helped him put fear into perspective when he was working for Basil.

I was at his studio in Venice just off Abbott Kinney and I remember it was a seriously crazy day where I was there. Basil was upstairs because his piano was on the third floor of this loft, and the door rang. He’s like, “Oh, can you get the door?” And he didn’t say what it was, and what am I, 22 or 23 years old? I open the door, and it’s Jerry fucking Goldsmith. With the ponytail and the whole thing. And I was like, “You could have told me!” And so I’m like, “Mr. Goldsmith, so wonderful…” And of course I fawned and whatever. And so they were going to have lunch. It was like 11:00 AM, and they went and had a three- or four-hour lunch on Abbott Kinney somewhere, probably Hal’s. And he came back, and I had to ask, “How was lunch? Are you guys friends? How was it?” And he’s like, “Yeah, you know, we’re pretty good acquaintances.” I don’t think they were super close. But he’s, like, “It felt good. Most of the lunch we just talked about how every time we spot a movie, we kind of wanna throw up for the first week.” And I was like, “Oh my god. Me too.” 

Chris still has butterflies about his latest feature, which he just saw. He had a couple of ideas for the theme, but the fear still happens. Everything’s sizzling, but it’s no longer a fear that his career is over. It’s just like, “When’s it gonna come?” And it always does.

Sometimes it takes longer than you want, but it kind of always does. But it is that feeling of “When’s it gonna come? What’s it gonna be?” It’s almost like when you first met somebody, and you’re flirting. It’s that infatuation period. And I kind of feel like there’s a little bit of that. And it is that fear of, “Ooh, is she gonna like me? Is she gonna reject me? Does she wanna dance?” But you gotta try. Because it’s super exciting.

Flirtation and rejection. Just like the feelings that motivated Chris’s very first songwriting in grade school. Then once Chris gets to the point where he knows what the sound or theme is and loves it himself, he’ll play it for the director or producers and when they like it too, that feeling goes away.

And then the rest of the thing is just work. But up until that point, it’s always that feeling of, “Do I love it? Is it ready yet? Is it ready to show yet?” Which is exciting, but yeah it’s definitely that feeling of excitement that you have to be able to live with. And if you’re not able to live with that, can you get to the point where you show it and feel good about it? It’s that. And I think that’s where people who are maybe more introverted have trouble or less confident have trouble, because they kind of back away before they get to that point. And that point is the magic. That point is where it works. And it’s like, “Oh, this is what this job is really about.”

Composers like Chris can learn to live with the fear of writing new music, survive it, and thrive in it. A bear is a different story.

“We made it a point that we were gonna hire diverse artists and people who would understand the story and the concept of what it feels like to be other and what it feels like to be accepted.”

In the late summer of 2020, Chris and his family joined friends in a cabin up in Lake Tahoe for two weeks to “hibernate” for two weeks. They all tested for Covid-19 and went up there. They went tubing. The first clear night, Chris’s then-7-year-old daughter Vesper said they should sleep out on the deck because there were going to be a lot of shooting stars. 

So we brought a mattress out. Slept on the deck. Amazing. It was super peaceful. And so the next day, on Thursday, we did the same thing. We’re out at the lake all day. Went to sleep. We had s’mores and tacos that night, and we put all the stuff back just on the counter. Now there’s our first mistake, in the house. And Vesper and I went to bed outside about eleven, and about an hour, not even an hour later, she was asleep, and all of a sudden I heard a big bang over on the right side of the porch.

The house had a big wrap-around deck, which went past the front door on the side and up to the street. So Chris pulled his phone out and looked and didn’t see anything. Everyone else had gone to sleep. There was a bedroom behind the kitchen with another couple who had a three-year-old. Upstairs were Chris’s friends Julianne and Dave and their two dogs. And Chris’s wife and their other child, 13 at the time, were downstairs.

All of a sudden I hear a bunch of rummaging around in the house on the main floor. And, you know, I’m just listening like, “Oh, Dave must be up.” And then I hear, you know, pitter tic-tic-tic-tic. I’m like, “Oh, the dogs must be down. He’s probably making himself a sandwich.” Five or six minutes go, and it’s really loud. I’m like, “Why is he so loud? Why didn’t he turn the light on?” And so I’m like, “I better go look.”

So Chris goes. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and walked over to the two big glass sliding doors on the deck. He shined the light into the house through the glass doors. He saw both doors of the fridge and the freezer were wide open. There was food everywhere. And still a loud rummaging noise. So Chris was looking.

I don’t see anything. At the time, I think I thought it was a raccoon or something. And then I look over, I pan over, and there’s a big cabinet where all the cookies and shit were in, and there’s just this huge bear ass. He is full head in it, and there’s just cookies and shit flying out behind him. So I put my phone in my pocket, I went over, I scooped my seven-year-old up, and I’m like, “We’re getting out of here. There’s a bear in the house.”

They had about thirty feet to go around the house, and Chris also had to figure out how he was going tell everybody else that there was a bear in the house. His friends were in there, a three-year-old, Chris’s wife, and their other kid, plus two dogs. He needed to alert them and then get to the street. So he goes around to the front of the house in order to slam on the huge wooden door and scream, “Bear, bear, bear, bear” as loud as he can. 

So I go to the front door, and in my right hand, I had my kid on my hip, and I went to go slam on the door. And I looked, and to the left of the door was this window, and I was like, “Oh, shit. The screen’s gone.” And all of a sudden—“ROAR!” This bear lunges through that window. And my kid’s screaming. And I’m like, “Oh shit.” And there was a big full push-broom, like janitor style, a full push-broom for the outside, and I just grabbed it in my left hand, and I just started smashing this bear in the face, like right in its nose as hard as I could.

Chris got four or five hits in. And then the bear launched its head through the window and grabbed him on his left forearm. He dropped the broom, and he spun around and fortunately, it let go of him. He took off with his daughter, running as fast as he could, and put her down in front of him. Then Chris ran back to the other side of the house to check on the others, and he heard the bear finally crash through the window and out over the side of the deck.

Vesper was apparently looking over my shoulder and said that the bear got stuck because it was big, so I think its ass was too big and got stuck. And so it actually broke the deck, broke through, and then went off into the forest… I don’t remember much else, other than I was sitting there. And then Dave, by that time, all the lights were on, all the people were up, everyone’s coming out, and there was just blood all over the place, spurting. It looked like a crime scene.

Then the rangers came and they tourniqueted Chris’s arm, and he had to go get tetanus shots and stitches. It was nuts. Chris was fueled by adrenaline the whole time of the incident. As soon as he saw the bear, all he thought was, “Get kid. Warn people. Run.” That’s it. “Get kid, warn people, run.” And then he just did it one by one. 

When he talked to the ranger, Chris learned the mistakes he had made, starting with leaving all the food out and the windows open. Bears can smell from miles away. It knew there was food, and because of Covid, the restaurants were all shut down so it was super hungry. And it thought there weren’t a lot of people around because everything was quiet. Chris learned all this the hard way, including a few other bear facts.

Bears always go out the way they came in. So don’t block the exit, which is exactly what I did. I blocked the exit that it went in through, and it wanted to go out. And I interrupted dinner, which is also not a great idea.

Ultimately, Chris was just unlucky. The doctor at the emergency room said he’s been on the north shore of Lake Tahoe for twelve years and he’s never actually seen a bear attack. There was a bear attack on the south side the year before, and the guy died. So actually, Chris was lucky.

He was lucky the bear was on the other side of the window and it could only get its mouth out. A bite is not nearly as bad as a swipe. Bears’ claws are like razors. Like Wolverine. Chris’s arm would have been shredded. Even with the single bite, it barely missed an artery. Chris just got lucky.

What would have been the playlist in his head? Or the bear’s head?

I feel like it should be Sabotage [by Beastie Boys]. Either that or Seek and Destroy, Metallica. 

If surviving the bear attack is something special Chris shares with Vesper, then creating an animated musical short film is something special he shares with his older kid, Tobi.

Several years ago, Tobi, a teenager, came out as trans, and recently Tobi and Chris collaborated to make a short called Pacemaker. It’s the story of a lonely widower who had an interracial marriage and his trans grandson.

When Tobi first came out as gay, Chris’s father-in-law, Tobi’s grandfather, had heart issues, and he was a grumpy older Midwestern guy, especially when he was not feeling well. Then he had pacemakers put in.

And every time he got a pacemaker put in, he would come back from the hospital with all this energy, and all of the snide comments or lack of acceptance kind of went away when he was feeling good. Because he was, all of a sudden, like, “I feel better, so I just want everybody to be happy.”

Chris thought it would make for an interesting story and a good lesson that when people are happy or feel good themselves, they tend to also worry less about what other people are doing and simply want them to feel better too. Then they can see things in their life that make them happy and want that same joy for somebody else.

So when Tobi then came out, I was like, “Oh, wait. I can see how this could be a story of a grandfather who was very much in love with his spouse, but maybe society didn’t love that combination at the time. And then once presented with this more life-threatening situation, he can realize that, “Oh, well, my grandson is actually in the same place.”

In telling the story about how the grandfather fell in love and didn’t listen to society’s judgments about his love and their existence as an interracial couple, by the end of the song, he realizes this is not different from accepting his grandson’s identity and their crush.

That was the idea behind Pacemaker. Chris and Tobi have always watched all of the Disney musicals. Tobi was a huge Tangled fan, in particular. So father and son set out to make a short musical with the same heart as a Disney or Pixar movie.

It’s the movie that they can’t make yet. They just can’t do it. Their boards and advertisers and stock and investors won’t let them. They’re not at the point where they can do that. Can we make that movie?

Chris wrote the short very fast and Tobi consulted. Then they brought in a bunch of amazing producers and an amazing co-director who worked at Blue Sky as an animator, Brian Vincent Rhodes. They decided they would just make it themselves, and Chris and Brian teamed up with a company in London named ARC.

We made it a point that we were gonna hire diverse artists and people who would understand the story and the concept of what it feels like to be other and what it feels like to be accepted. And so our exec producer is trans and fully transitioned, our sound designer, and both of our mixers are gay. We had artists from Ukraine. We had artists from Africa. We had artists from all over Europe and the Far East. And they were all working either in London or remotely with London.

Chris and the Pacemaker team spent a year making the movie. Phil Lawrence, Chris’s friend from UglyDolls, coproduced the songs with him. He did the demo so well, that he became the granddad. Chris felt they couldn’t replace Phil. It had to be him, even though he was a little young. Phil made it work. And then Chris went after Alex Newell, who Chris adored at the time, which was before Shucked the Musical opened.

 

We thought that Alex would get it because Alex is gender fluid. And I knew their voice from Once on This Island, before even Glee, which was their Broadway debut, and I just knew it was an amazing voice. And so we did the sessions before Shucked opened. And then next thing you know, they become the first nonbinary Tony winner of all time.

Chris hopes families see it. He wants to slowly change the hearts and minds of people who just don’t quite understand yet about transgender people.

I think they just need to see the humanity in it. And once they do, they’ll be like, “Oh, OK. I get it. It’s just people trying to be who they really are, just like me.” And once they see that, then hopefully it’ll open them up.

Chris was motivated by his own child. The combination of Tobi coming out as gay and then trans, the Covid pandemic, and the bear attack all fueled Chris’s desire to say, “You know what? Let’s make a movie” and tell a meaningful story.

We have one shot. So the world needs this. And I just felt from the beginning that it was going to be a thing that could allow Tobi and I to work on something related to his transition that would be educational for me and for our family, and also possibly for other people.

And so they decided to do this together and figured it out as they went. Chris thinks it really worked because they had such a diverse team. ND Stevenson, Pacemaker’s executive producer, created Nimona on Netflix, and ND fully transitioned. In addition to collaborating creatively, Chris would call and ask questions about how testosterone works, the feelings, side effects, and what to watch.

Chris recognizes how amazing it was to be able to go through this whole experience and develop real relationships with people he was creating art with whom he could ask for advice as a parent.

Pacemaker premiered at Outfest and then went on to many other film festivals all around the world. It’s now available online.

In addition to his TV and film work, Lennertz has also been working on a stage musical with a director and writer who are in New York. His partner on the lyrics is a magnificent poet from Atlanta named Amena Brown. The four of them are working on a Broadway stage musical. The idea also came out of Covid, based on a couple of true stories Chris found. He wrote a couple of early songs before he got everybody involved.

The story is about gentrification in cities and centered around a woman who lost her dad and moved away.

She wanted to be a big fancy restauranteur but ended up coming back to their town, to his barbecue restaurant. The quick pitch is it’s Waitress meets Kinky Boots with Stacey Abrams… Something like that.

Eclectic as ever. Versatile as anybody. And always bringing people in to collaborate and contribute so the sum is greater than its parts. Whatever genre Chris Lennertz is exploring and blending, he will continue to create great music and tell great stories.

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