Fourth of July News Extravaganza

Welcome to any readers who might have linked in from Harry's www.aint-it-cool-news.com today! Here is a roundup of what's going on in the film music world, including some new and late breaking developments.

Scoring Assignments

Michael Kamen (Robin Hood, Die Hard) scores The Avengers, starring Uma Thurman. Danny Elfman is inked for four films: Flubber, Superman (d. Tim Burton, the Jon Peters production), Good Will Hunting (d. Gus Van Sant, who did To Die For), and Revenant (d. Richard Elfman, Danny's brother, a vampire film). Carter Burwell (Fargo, Conspiracy Theory) scores Jackal, starring Bruce Willis. James Horner, if he ever finishes Titanic (which will have Enya-like vocals by the voice of Norway, Sissel), will score Zorro and Mighty Joe Young. Mark Snow is naturally scoring the X- Files movie, Blackwood.

See "Upcoming Movies 6/97" for the last complete list of composers and their upcoming films.

Score Updates

I was privileged to stop by a Starship Troopers recording session, music by Basil Poledouris. The film is due in November and the score kicks. I can't give out any details about the film save those which people have seen in trailers: it's unlike anything you've seen, a war movie with thousands of giant CGI bugs shredding people apart. Verhoeven's stamp is all over it and in a way it's the final chapter of his Robocop/Total Recall, non-Eszterhaus sci-fi tryptich.

There were basically three elements of the score going down: 1) Super muscular, fairly tonal Basil music along the lines of his brassy action music for Robocop, Quigley: Down Under, Conan and the like. 2) Large-scale, purposefully generic "join the army" type music for Verhoeven's film-within-a-film advertisements and newscasts. 3) Aggressive, unrelenting "bug" music which is in many ways Basil's take on Stravinsky—a genre new for him. This stuff is awesome and I was bouncing off the walls when it was being recorded. Although I broken this score into three parts, it really is of-a-piece and is the next step in the composer's growth, as well as a revistation of the adventure genre he does so well. He has had several months to write, and will be writing more of the score until the final orchestra sessions in August—a very unusual, extended post-production schedule nowadays. The film is out this November.

Sheryl Crow is more than likely doing the title song for the next Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies. David Arnold (Independence Day) has begun recording his music for the picture, which reportedly makes much more use of the James Bond theme—and in more of a traditional orchestral setting than GoldenEye. No one seems to know when Arnold's album of James Bond cover songs will be out.

Jerry Goldsmith's score for L.A. Confidential is like a cross between Chinatown, Leonard Bernstein's On the Waterfront, and the suspense, electronic-drum parts of Basic Instinct. Unfortunately, there are only two score cuts on the album, from Restless—the rest is jazz standards—and one of those is Goldsmith's newly composed "TV theme" for a fake '50s cop show seen within the film (like 40 seconds long). The film has been getting a lot of good buzz.

Goldsmith has also recorded his score for Air Force One, on which he hastily replaced Randy Newman, whose very score was apparently too busy for the filmmakers. Goldsmith has written a patriotic main title very much like Star Trek: First Contact (Newman's main title was more of a foreboding, ominous thing) and has written the bulk of cues in the movie that use this warmer, broader feeling. Joel McNeely, handing "additional music" on the project due to time constraints, has taken around 20 minutes of the machine gun action cues. (Joel Goldsmith, who did additional music in First Contact, is busy on other projects.)

Upcoming Albums

The answer is unfortunately no: there will not be a separate Danny Elfman score album to Men in Black at this time. Yes, I know the movie is huge. There are two cuts on the Will Smith album. There will be, however, a score-only Alan Silvestri CD to Contact on Warner Bros. shortly after the film's release. People have noted that there is a very Forrest Gump-type theme heard in the HBO Making of Contact special, and asked if that's the score—yep.

Pendulum Records' reissue of Cocoon (James Horner) will be out in late July. In August they will issue the first CD ever of Laurence Rosenthal's great score to Clash of the Titans (1981), with 10 extra minutes of music.

Laserlight, a division of Delta Music, has issued seven soundtrack albums at budget prices: Bleeding Hearts (Stanley Clarke, jazz score), Butterfly (Morricone, Pia Zadora film), Cherry, Harry & Raquel (William Loose, Russ Meyer film), Fake Out (Arthur B. Rubenstein, Pia Zadora film), Gaby, A True Story (Maurice Jarre), Hundra (Morricone), and Vixen (William Loose, Russ Meyer film). They do not have any immediate plans for any further soundtrack releases.

Premier Records, distributed by Empire Music in New York, is planning for November a long-awaited CD of The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Composer David Amram is personally producing the album from the original soundtrack recording. This is a beautiful, jazz-tinged score to a classic movie and all you kids should hear it.

On Retrograde, FSM's label, we'll have Deadfall (John Barry, 1968, first CD release) out in late July. This includes the Shirley Bassey title song "My Love Has Two Faces" (plus two never-before-heard alternate versions of same) and Barry's 14-minute "Romance for Guitar and Orchestra."

Due in September from Silva America are two mid-price albums: Crimson Pirate: Swashbucklers of the Silver Screen (including William Alwyn's Crimson Pirate and the insurance company spoof from Monty Python's Meaning of Life), The Mark of Zorro: Swordsmen of the Silver Screen (including Newman's Zorro, eight minutes from Howard Blake's The Duellists, Mario Nascimbene's The Swordsman of Siena). In the U.K. these will be combined into one 2CD set called Swashbucklers. I'm not familiar with most of this music, but I guess the insurance company spoof from Monty Python is something people have wanted.

There's a ton of way-cool stuff happening on Sony Classical. One is a Michael Kamen compilation, newly recorded, which I know nothing about except the title: Michael Kamen's Opus. There's also Seven Years in Tibet by John Williams later this year, with cello performances by Yo Yo Ma, and John Corligliano's first venture into film scoring for more than a decade: The Red Violin. This latter picture is by the makers of 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould and follows a fictitious red violin through the centuries. It stars Samuel L. Jackson. Corligliano is writing a concerto to be played within the film, as well as the score. His only two scores before this are Altered States (1980—Elliot Goldenthal fans will love this, Corligliano was Goldenthal's teacher for many years and they share certain orchestral techniques) and the bomb Revolution (1985). Joshua Bell will record the violin solos.

On the bummer front, Sony's expanded issue of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Jerry Goldsmith) is still postponed due to delays in the approvals process with Paramount. D'oh!

Varese Sarabande will restart the Fox Classic Series with Planet of the Apes and Journey to the Center of the Earth in August. The Apes CD features the complete Jerry Goldsmith score to the original film: 50 minutes, which means around 20 minutes is never before heard—cues like the first part of "The Search," "The Trial," and the whole ending of the movie. The sound quality is phenomenal—it was remixed for album and will blow fans away. The stereo separation and instrumental clarity is better than ever before. The album includes a 16-minute suite from Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971, Goldsmith) as well. There are no plans at present to issue any of the other Apes scores.

The next classic Walt Disney soundtrack restorations will be out in August: Dumbo, The Lady and the Tramp, and a repackaging of the Jungle Book CD issued in 1990, adding two newly discovered unused songs by Terry Tilkyson. Planned for next February are Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.

Miscellaneous

Warner Bros.' new DVD of Mars Attacks! features the complete Danny Elfman score isolated on one of the alternate audio tracks—72 minutes in all, longer than the CD. Let history note this is the first of hopefully many DVDs to be done this way.

Columbia Home Video will reportedly be releasing later this year a box-set laserdisc of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, including a new, expanded CD of the John Williams score produced by Shawn Murphy (as with the recent E.T. CD). This would be a very good thing.

That distinctive bit of percussive music recently used in the Alien: Resurrection theatrical teaser (after the "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star") and television ads for Star Trek: First Contact is not from a film score; it is an original piece by Jeff Fayman and Yoav Goren called "Code Red." Also by Fayman/Goren is a steadily building percussive piece called "Naked Prey," used most visibly for Waterworld, as well as campaigns for Double Team, The Frighteners, The Rock, Deep Rising and more. The music you've heard most recently in the trailer for Face/Off, and TV ads for Face/Off and Speed 2, is an original piece by Fred Rappaport called "P.O.W." All of these were written expressly for movie advertising, produced and coordinated by a music supervisor for trailers, Ruben Nava of Music Junkies.

All of this information and much more will be contained in the next edition of FILM SCORE MONTHLY, due in approximately three weeks. See elsewhere on the site for ordering information. Thanks for visiting, and come back daily for more news, commentary and reviews from around the wild and wacky world of film scoring!

If you have any questions about film music, ask Lukas Kendall at Lukas@filmscoremonthly.com!