Randall Poster: The Man Hollywood Listens To

Taken from Volume 5 of Common Thread, available for free in our Savile Row and Canal St stores.

Text by Mark Rozzo

Randall Poster was nine years old when he bought his first 45 rpm record. It was “Laughing,” the Guess Who’s 1969 hit. His first album purchase came a couple of years later: Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells a Story. As the 1970s progressed, many of Poster’s musical purchases ended up being cassettes, a medium he grew to love via membership in the Columbia House mail-order music club. When he wasn’t Hoovering music, the young Poster, who grew up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and attended the Horace Mann School, was making the rounds of New York’s cinemas. It was a great era to be a fledgling movie hog: The French Connection, The Godfather, Shampoo. 

As Poster got into his teen years and still deeper into movies, he started hitting the Manhattan art houses—the Thalia, Film Forum, and their ilk.

“I’d go to five movies a weekend,” Poster said when I visited him at his Manhattan office recently. “I didn’t miss any of them.”

More than 40 years on, it’s hard to miss Randall Poster. Having combined his twin boyhood passions for music and movies, he has been a staple of end credits since the 1990s, when he became the music supervisor of choice for a parade of directors, most notably Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, and Martin Scorsese, who have worked with him for decades. In all, he has worked on at least 180 films and television shows, ranging from Skyfall to Queen’s Gambit.

If there was a breakout year for Poster, it was 1998, when he selected the needle drops for two music-centric indie films that turned into bona fide classics: Anderson’s Rushmore and Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine. It’s impossible to think of either one of those era-defining movies and not think about the impact of Poster’s musical selections on each one, from Max Fischer over- committing himself to extracurriculars amid the strains of the Creation’s “Making Time” to the horde of glam girls running in their platforms against Brian Eno’s “Needles in the Camel’s Eye.”

It’s no wonder why directors have come to rely on Poster’s musical acumen. His selections invariably deliver the most pleasurable jolts of pure surprise. Yet they also make total, unimpeachable sense. Pull any one of them from a movie or show he supervised (such as Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire) and it’s like tugging a strand of yarn from a sweater. Everything just unravels.

Poster has swept-back salt-and-pepper hair and a trimmed beard; he favours clear-framed spectacles. He lives with his wife, Lynn Goldner, in Riverdale, not far from his childhood home; they have two daughters. When I met up with him, he was wearing Adidas tennis shoes, a charcoal v-neck with a white shirt (“For some reason I only wear white shirts anymore,” he said), and teal-blue trousers held up by a crocodile belt. He radiates a mixture of sagacity, conspiratorial bonhomie, and restless energy. His roost is a fourth-floor series of garret-like rooms at the top of Manhattan’s venerable National Arts Club, overlooking Gramercy Park. If you go to a window and crane your neck, you can see the townhouse doorstep across the square where Bob Dylan was photographed for the cover of Highway 61 Revisited.

The furnishings are smart and sparse and comfortable, leaning toward midcentury. A vinyl pressing of the 2020 album I’d Rather Lead a Band, by Loudon Wainwright III (accompanied by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks), a Great American Songbook collection that Poster produced, was spinning on a turntable situated on a long, sleek credenza. Wainwright’s honeyed voice filled the space. “He’s just the greatest singer,” Poster said. By e-mail, Wainwright returned the compliment. “Randy is a can-do guy who happens to be a snappy dresser,” he said. “That’s a winning combination.”

Poster shares the National Arts Club space with his boyhood pal Josh Deutsch, a former Elektra A&R guy who runs the music-strategy agency Premier Music Group, which acquired Poster’s longtime operation, Search Party Music, at the end of 2020. 

The two of them went to high school and then to Brown together. “Randy is a consummate cultural curator,” Deutsch has said of his partner and friend.

There was plenty of evidence of it under the high ceilings of Poster’s office. The place was littered with books piled high on side tables and with visual stimuli resting on mantle-pieces and leaning this way and that against the walls. (Poster had been in the space for months but hadn’t gotten around to hanging anything.) There were colorful works by the New Orleans painter Roy Ferdinand, Charles Miller’s paintings of honky tonk heroes such as Freddy Fender, photographs by Andrea Sonnenberg (a self portrait, nude in a kitchen), and a row of hand-fashioned painted busts of NBA legends—Dr. J, Darryl Dawkins, Manute Bol—aligned on the credenza. “It’s kind of compulsive,” Poster said of his collecting habit. “But the frames usually cost more than the art.”

At Brown, Poster took courses pass/fail and made interesting friends. He hung out with John F. Kennedy, Jr., and with two fellow cinephiles, Todd Haynes and Christine Vachon, who eventually became a dynamic director-producer combo. 

He didn’t work at the college radio station, WBRU, but, having been inspired by that milieu, put together a script with some friends called A Matter of Degrees, which, after years of incubation, came out in 1990. (Goldner was one of the producers.) The film is largely forgotten now, but its soundtrack was notable. Poster had managed to put together a smorgasbord of late ‘80s alternative music—Yo La Tengo, Miracle Legion, Firehose, Alex Chilton. In the process, he had a realization. “What I really wanted to do was to work with great directors,” he said—and work with them specifically as a music supervisor. Which he then did with Larry Clark, on 1995’s Kids; the project fostered a surprise hit in Folk Implosion’s “Natural One” and put Poster on the Hollywood map.

A couple of years later, a mutual friend introduced Poster to Wes Anderson, who had made a splash in 1996 with his scruffy debut, Bottle Rocket.

Poster began working on Anderson’s next film, Rushmore, almost from inception. The result was spectacular. Rushmore had arguably the punchiest found-object soundtrack since Easy Rider. (The film also included original-score elements by Mark Mothersbaugh, late of Devo.) 

“We really front-loaded that movie!” Poster said. “And we’ve been having this musical conversation ever since.”

Their sensibilities melded perfectly, and they’ve worked on ten movies together, including The French Dispatch, with its unusually layered soundtrack consisting of Alexandre Desplat’s score, Poster’s musical selections, and cover versions of old French pop songs sung by Jarvis Cocker, which Poster produced, including the 1965 French hit “Aline,” a tune that he and Anderson had been dying to include in a film for 20 years. (Poster met Cocker when they were both working on Velvet Goldmine.)

“Generally I just make the music a more tangible element in the movie,” Poster said of his approach. “I’m using music to tell a story.” The process can begin early; the songs Poster picks for a typical film are not sprinkled in at the last minute. “I started working on The Royal Tenenbaums when it was three sentences,” he said of Anderson’s 2001 film. Music supervision means gathering up all the potential songs, assessing them, and making decisions about which ones would be the most compelling and work best in context. It usually means a lot of time sifting through albums and mp3s, but it can occasionally mean putting shoe leather on the pavement. Poster likes to seek out experts and superfans in areas of music that he knows little about. “I’m always looking for the best people,” he said.

In the case of the music for Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, Poster traveled to India to discuss using music from the legendary director Satyajit Ray’s films with the Satyajit Ray Foundation, the kind of intoxicating pilgrimage he wouldn’t mind having more of. “Nothing else has been quite like that!” he said. Being a music supervisor often means being forced to become, on deadline, an authority—on Indian film scores or, say, music from the 1920s, as Poster had to do for Boardwalk Empire. 

“That’s really what keeps it interesting for me,” he said.

What of his filing system for keeping track of so many songs from so many eras across so many genres? “It’s a bit of a mess,” Poster admitted to the radio interviewer Terry Gross; you get the impression that his music library is mostly stored in his head and that he works via a combination of deep analysis and lightning-fast instinct. Not to mention a lot of listening. 

At one point during our visit, his friend Lee Foster, the managing partner of New York’s Electric Lady Studios, dropped by. They briefly discussed a potential art trade: an outsider-ish piece by the late songwriter Daniel Johnston (whose estate Foster represents) for one of Poster’s pieces. The friendly negotiation remained unsettled as Poster proceeded to cue up music on his laptop for us to check out. At these moments, he goes into deep-listening mode.

His guests are obliged to follow suit and they are rewarded for their attentiveness. Poster played the Mountain Goats’ “No Children” (with its cheery chorus of “I hope you die”) and the boogie-woogie pianist Katie Webster’s soulful rendition of “Never Let Me Go,” a 1954 hit for the R&B balladeer Johnny Ace. We sat in reverential silence, wondering what Poster’s bionic ears might be picking up.

Poster’s work on Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon gave Poster the opportunity to feature early 20th Century banjo and roots music. There’s always toggling between a handful of films, television series, and albums. A whopper of a project is For the Birds: The Birdsong Anthology, a multi-disc music and spoken-word anthology, around the theme of birds, which won a Grammy Award  in 2024 for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition. It involves the Audubon Society and totals more than 200 songs and poems by a variety of lauded artists, including Nick Cave, Beck, Karen O, Mark Ronson and Karen Elson.

“He always has plenty of ideas and brings great enthusiasm to every project,” Wainwright told me. Poster could barely contain his excitement about the bird project—or about birds, a newfound passion. “Whenever I’m working on something,” Poster said, “I keep in mind that some kid might end up being inspired by it someday.”

It was getting late and Poster needed to shove off. The commute home to Riverdale would take a good hour. As we said our goodbyes, Foster said, “The one question I’ve always had for Randall is, ‘How do you find the time for all of this?’” Poster laughed. “I just work all the time,” he said, making it sound like the greatest form of play there is.