During his Broadway apprenticeship Salinger first came across Johnny Green, his future MGM musical director, when they were recording motion picture overtures in the early days of sound at New York to be shown before the main features began. Salinger first came out to Hollywood in the late 1930s to work for Alfred Newman (e.g. "Born to Dance" and "Gunga Din") and also collaborated with the famed Broadway orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett on the arrangements for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' 1938 dance picture "Carefree".