Lush, romantic film scores played an indispensable role during Hollywood's golden age. Like many directors, German and East European composers fled European turmoil and ended up in Los Angeles during the 1920s and '30s. Among the earliest of these, Austrian-born film-music godfather Max Steiner composed 300 scores over his 40-year career with RKO and Warner Bros., crafting musical themes that inventively elaborated character traits in Casablanca, Gone With the Wind and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. While Steiner produced opulent orchestral soundtracks with factory-like efficiency, Miklós Rózsa never completely hid his Hungarian roots, continuing to compose non-film music alongside scores for big-budget historical dramas like Ben-Hur and El Cid. (Erich Wolfgang Korngold would also eventually be celebrated for both his film and non-film compositions.) Nuanced reflections of love and terror were a specialty of German-born Franz Waxman, lauded for his eerie music for Hitchcock's Rebecca and his sonic depiction of Norma Desmond's dementia in Sunset Boulevard.