Burt Bacharach & Hal David: The Movie Flop That Ended a Decade of Hits

In 1973, Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote the score for a big-budget musical remake of "Lost Horizon." It was supposed to be an event. It was, instead, a disaster, not one song from it became a hit, and several were outright mocked in reviews. Demoralized, the two men simply stopped working together. Dionne Warwick, who'd built her career on their songs and hadn't been part of the decision, felt abandoned enough to sue them both. Then David sued Bacharach. Then Bacharach countersued David. The cases didn't settle until 1979, six years later.

It's a strange way for one of pop music's most successful writing partnerships to end, not over a fight about a hit song, but over a flop nobody involved could get past. Worth knowing going in: this is a story about two men who built something close to a perfect division of labor, composer and lyricist, and still couldn't survive one bad project intact.

A classical composer who liked things you could whistle

Bacharach, born in 1928, trained seriously as a composer, studying under Darius Milhaud, Bohuslav Martinů, and Henry Cowell at the Mannes School of Music and elsewhere. Milhaud, whose own music leaned on polyrhythm and asymmetrical phrasing, reportedly told the young Bacharach never to be ashamed of writing something melodic enough to whistle. Bacharach took the advice literally for the rest of his career, smuggling genuinely unusual harmony, key changes, and shifting time signatures into songs built to sound effortless on pop radio. Asked once why a particular song moved from 4/4 to 5/4 to 7/8 within a single phrase, he simply said, "That's just the way I felt it."

David, seven years older, came from a more plainspoken tradition, Brooklyn-raised, the younger brother of lyricist Mack David, with an ear for conversational, unadorned phrasing rather than clever wordplay. The two met and started writing together at the Brill Building in the late 1950s, and their first hit as a team, "The Story of My Life," recorded by Marty Robbins, reached number one on the country chart in 1957. A year later, "Magic Moments," recorded by Perry Como, gave them back-to-back UK number ones, reportedly the first time any songwriting duo had managed that.

Music built to be hard to write words for, and a lyricist who kept up anyway

What made the partnership work wasn't that David's lyrics were simple. It's that they had to sound simple while sitting on top of some of the least conventional pop melodies of the era. Fitting a plainspoken, singable lyric onto a bar that unexpectedly drops a beat, or a melody that leaps somewhere a listener doesn't expect, is a genuinely harder assignment than writing words to a steady four-four groove. Their process varied: for stretches they worked in the same room for hours at a time, and at other points, particularly once Bacharach was living on the West Coast, they worked apart and traded ideas long distance. Either way, the partnership after 1963, when the two reunited following a few years of working with other people, produced one hit after another built on exactly that tension between complicated music and uncomplicated words.

If you write music that's harder to sing than it sounds, David's catalogue with Bacharach is worth studying. The trick isn't dumbing the lyric down to match a strange melody. It's finding words plain enough that the listener never notices how strange the melody actually was.

Finding the voice the songs needed

In 1961, Bacharach and David brought in a young backing vocalist named Dionne Warwick to sing demos, and she quickly became the definitive interpreter of their material rather than just a demo singer passing songs along to bigger names. Over the following decade she and the duo produced dozens of chart singles together, among them "Walk On By," "Don't Make Me Over," "I Say a Little Prayer," and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose." It's one of the clearest examples in pop songwriting of a writing team finding one voice that could carry their most demanding material and then building a decade of work specifically around it.

The peak: an Oscar, a Broadway hit, and then the fall

By the late 1960s the partnership was at its commercial height. "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," written for "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and recorded by B.J. Thomas, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1970. Their Broadway musical "Promises, Promises," which opened in 1968, won a Grammy and ran for well over a thousand performances. Both men were already Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees by 1972. There was, on paper, nowhere further up to go.

"Lost Horizon" arrived a year later and undid a good part of it. The lawsuits that followed didn't just end the professional partnership, they cost both men their working relationship with Warwick for years, and neither Bacharach nor David wrote another song together for two decades.

What's worth taking from their partnership

Bacharach and David never fully rebuilt the writing team that made "Walk On By" and "I Say a Little Prayer," though they did reconvene briefly in the 1990s alongside Warwick, a partial thaw rather than a second act. Some of Bacharach's biggest later hits, including "That's What Friends Are For," were written with a different lyricist, Carole Bayer Sager, not David, which is worth knowing since the two songs get lumped together in memory more often than the credits actually support.

What their story leaves behind is a case study in how much of a songwriting partnership's output depends on a working method that's actually working, and how fragile that can be once real money, one bad project, and someone else's career get tangled up in it. If you've got music that needs a lyricist who can make the difficult sound effortless, or words that need a composer willing to bend the rules to serve them, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Songwriters Hall of Fame: Burt Bacharach, Songwriters Hall of Fame: Hal David, American Songwriter: Behind the Grammy-Winning Songwriting Duo of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Songfacts: Film Flop Splits Songwriting Duo, Wikipedia: Darius Milhaud