That Haunting Song from the “Severance” Finale? It’s an Oscar Winner…From the 1960s.

We’re working on lyrics here, something for a pop song with a stream-of-consciousness approach. These lyrics are going to be sung over a baroque, hypnotic melody. The song is about a wealthy thief with a cool exterior that hides the swirling, dreamlike thoughts he can conceal but not contain.

First ideas?

Maybe something like, “Round – like a circle, like a bubble (pebble)…”?

Hmm. Maybe “like a wheel” would be better? Or like a spiral, dome, tunnel, cycle, windmill or sphere? Or ring, hoop, apple, balloon, moon, pebble (again!), ball or clock?

Get it wrong and this piece, destined for a movie soundtrack, might sink into the category of forgotten flops and tank the flick besides. Get it right and who knows? Might be a classic, an Oscar winner, the kind of thing that could headline a Steve McQueen movie in 1968, be covered more than 300 times and show up again this spring, 57 years later, in the finale of “Severance,” the Apple TV+ hit series.

Songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman famously got it right – the song, “The Windmills of Your Mind,” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song from the McQueen film, “The Thomas Crown Affair.”

Over the rippling orchestration by Michel Legrand, they opened with:

Round … like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel

Like a snowball down a mountain or a carnival balloon

Like a carousel that’s turning, running rings around the moon

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face

And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space

A working lyrics sheet to “Windmill” and other Bergman songs are preserved in the Library’s Music Division, showing the progression of the song from sketch to finished product. It’s a speck in a snowstorm of a staggering career – the husband-and-wife duo were among the most successful lyricists in Hollywood history, winning three Oscars and being nominated another 16 times. (They also won four Emmys, two Grammys, were inducted into Songwriters Hall of Fame, as well as winning just about every other songwriting honor out there.)

They won a second Oscar for “The Way We Were” (along with composer Marvin Hamlisch), the title song for the 1973 Barbra Streisand/Robert Redford romantic drama, and a third for the score of “Yentl,” another Streisand film. They were Oscar finalists for six consecutive years in the late ’60s and early ’70s. In 1982, they had three of the five finalists for best original song but lost out to “Up Where We Belong” from “An Officer and a Gentleman.”

Television? They wrote the theme songs for ‘70s and ’80s staples such as “Maude” with music by Dave Grusin and sung by Donny Hathaway (“That uncompromisin’, enterprisin’, anything but tranquilizin’ Right on Maude!”); the upbeat “Good Times” (“Ain’t we lucky we got ’em?”); plus “Alice” and “In the Heat of the Night.”

The Bergmans, both native New Yorkers, later took leadership positions in the entertainment ndustry. Marilyn served as president of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers for 15 years. In 2002, she was appointed to chair the Library’s inaugural panel of the National Recording Preservation Board. Alan also later served on the Library’s National Film Preservation Board. Marilyn died in 2022; Alan is 99.

Alan performed both of their Oscar winning songs at the Library’s ASCAP Collection Concert in 2010.

For “Windmills,” he told the crowd that “Crown” director Norman Jewison showed them a rough cut of McQueen’s character, a millionaire art thief, piloting a yellow hang glider, coolly aloof, while beset with nerves about an upcoming heist. Write me something for that, he said.

Legrand was staying with them at the time, Bergman said, and played the couple eight possible melodies for the scene; they all picked the same one. That settled, the lyrics tumbled out, a series of images that might flash through your mind while falling into a restless sleep. The cascade of images made it complicated but the rhyming structure was as simple as it gets: AA/BB/CC. They worked in most of their word choices from their list at the top of the lyric sheet and made a lost love affair the central focus:

Keys that jingle in your pocket, words that jangle in your head

Why did summer go so quickly, was it something that you said?

Lovers walk along the shore and leave their footprints in the sand

Is the sound of distant drumming just the fingers of your hand?

When they were finished, they had what would become a modern standard, recorded by hundreds of artists the world over in the coming decades. Still, it was a hard thing to name.

“We didn’t know what to call it,” Bergman told the ASCAP crowd, but there was “one phrase in there that was attractive to us and we decided to call it ‘The Windmills of Your Mind.’ ”

They got that one right, too.

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