This News Friday 8/8/97

If you missed them yesterday, we had some interview sound clips up of John Powell (Face/Off), Lalo Schifrin and director Brett Ratner (Money Talks). Go here for yesterday's column.

Howard Shore Land

I saw Howard Shore briefly on Wednesday, while he was mixing The Game in Burbank. It is one of his more unusual scores, like Crash, in that it was recorded in several pieces—strings one day, piano the next day, and so on, with separate electronic overdubs as well. You can only really "hear" it when it comes together in the mix. According to Howard, he had done several big scores which were mostly orchestral, recorded traditionally (i.e. all at once, with an orchestra). Crash took him back to how he worked earlier in his career, with several different elements coming together in mixing in unique ways. He has continued that on Cop Land and The Game.

The Game is David Fincher's first film since Seven, which Shore also scored; it's about a businessman (Michael Douglas) put through the psychological wringer by some nut, from what I can gather. From what they were working on at the time, it had that typically focused Howard Shore orchestral sound—edgy but smooth and suspenseful. It really is hard to describe because there are sounds and patterns and low-end washes, rather than distinct longform melodies; it's not punchy or "catchy" in the traditional sense. But it is profoundly present and interesting.

I got the Cop Land CD today, which likewise is dense and suspenseful, with interesting (and sparing) uses of bagpipe—I'll have to see the film to find out what that's about. Milan's press material included comments from the composer which for some reason are not included in the booklet:

"The Cop Land score is an experiment in the acoustic/electric form. The orchestra tracks were recorded with The London Philharmonic in Tooting, England at All Saints Church. I chose this church for its acoustics. I had previously recorded Al Pacino's Looking for Richard there. I then manipulated those acoustic tracks with an electronic score that was created in Tuxedo, New York. This electronic score was composed of environmental/industrial sounds. All of these sounds are non-tonal. The composition process included the re-mixing of these music elements into a music concrete/acoustic form.

"Orchestral recording included the use of a large brass section, woodwinds, strings and four percussionists utilizing field drums. The solo bagpipe was recorded in the church and woven throughout the score."

The Cop Land CD will be out, well, soon I guess. (See Milan's site, www.milanrecords.com.) I do understand that the film went through tons and tons of re-editing which required some re-scoring of scenes. I asked if the title was some pun on "Copland"—you know, the composer Aaron, because the film is sort of an "Our Town" setting. He said no, but that while traveling overseas, people were saying to him, "Hey, you're scoring a film about Aaron Copland, interesting," and he's like, "Nope..." Speaking of overseas, Howard will appear at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Scotland, August 20, to talk scene-by-scene about his score to Crash.

Howard did enjoy John Bender's article on Crash from the last issue of FSM, which we ran here on the site (see the article for 16_July). He sent a copy to David Cronenberg who also liked it—I thought that was cool! We've made plans to interview the composer at length about The Game and Cop Land for our September FSM. My thanks to Howard as well as to score wrangler Ryan Shore for their time.

Questions

Yes, there is a John Williams listed as executive producer on Seven Years in Tibet. I asked people involved in the production, they seemed to think that it is a different guy from the composer.

A few people wrote in with praise for the Peter Bernstein score for TNT's The Rough Riders, with a theme by his dad, who goes by the name of Elmer. (The telefilm was directed by Conan auteur John Milius.) A few labels are looking into releasing the score but there are no plans for an album just yet.

Kyle Beatty wrote:

I'd like to read more about that in an article. Or a piece on Goldsmith in the '70s when, I feel, he fully articulated his style.

We'll certainly have more of those articles in the future. The story behind Chinatown is that the first composer on the project was a guy named Philip Lambro who evidently played up the "China" in Chinatown. Goldsmith was hired to do the replacement score and obliged in 10 days-2 weeks. One his side was the fact that it is a fairly monothematic score and there's only around 30 minutes of music. Still, as music, as film scoring, and as film, it's one of Goldsmith's supreme achievements.

Jennifer Markham asked:

"I am a huge fan of Trevor Jones's music and am eagerly awaiting G.I. Jane for no other reason. Jones doesn't seem to work regularly. What is his story? What is the deal with splitting Mohicans with Edelman? Which country does he live in? What is his background? What does he look like? My brother sez that we have never seen a picture of him because he is a little person, appearing in Return of the Jedi as an Ewok. I am pretty sure this is not true."

You are pretty correct—there is a credit for an Ewok to Trevor Jones in Jedi, but it's another guy. The composer Trevor Jones was born in South Africa and moved to London to attend music school; he graduated and did such films as Excalibur and The Dark Crystal. He looks like a middle aged white guy with gray hair, I suppose—we're eventually gonna have photos on this site but don't have the resources just yet. Jones does work quite regularly, but splits his time between big Hollywood projects like Cliffhanger with smaller films like For Rosanna and Brassed Off (he is still based in England).

You can read Randy Edelman's side of the Mohicans story here on this web site (features). The short of it is that Jones was taking so long revising cues for director Mann that a separate composer, Edelman, had to be hired to finish the picture. However, neither composer really talked to the other, and confusion has reigned to this day. We expect to have Jones's comments on the film shortly from one of his representatives—can you say, "Rashomon"?

Next week: we explain what Rashomon is. (Look it up as title in a movie guide, dir. Kurosawa.)

Air Force One Postmortem

This is why Varese Sarabande's soundtrack CD to Air Force One is so short: it costs a lot of money to pay the musician re-use fees, required to release an album of any score recorded in Los Angeles. Unlike some people, I will actually tell you how much: at least $100,000. Most likely it ran up to $125,000. So on a CD like AFO, if you are Varese, you can pay $125,000 for a 30 minute CD (yes, it's actually 35, I don't know how they worked that out—possibly overtime sections of 5 minutes), or $250,000 for a 60 minute CD. (The 15 minute figure comes out of the union rule that only 5 minutes of music can be recorded per hour, and that sessions are "bought" in three-hour blocks.)

Let's say that Varese makes $6 per disc sold (an educated guess). As it stands, they have to sell 20,000 units just to recoup on their re-use payments—not including mechanical licenses, the advance to the studio, production costs, and manufacturing costs.

I have seen the sales reports on score CDs. They aren't very high. Trust me in that a score CD like Air Force One, they'll be happy to sell 20,000 over the first month or two of release, and maybe twice that over the history of the disc. (Con Air, for example, moved around 15,000 discs in its first six weeks of release.) As it stands, it has a chance of recouping. But if they put out an hour-long CD, it would be a bloodbath.

If you were working at a record label, would you really tell your boss, "Yeah, let's blow $125,000 which we will probably never see again, so a handful of soundtrack fans on the Internet can listen to all the cues of terrorists being shot"? Think about that amount of money in your own life—think about it even in small-business terms. That's a college education. You don't just spend it for no reason—or for the sole reason that you want to make some fans happy, most of whom will buy the CD anyway.

I'm not telling anyone to like the fact that the Air Force One CD is only 35 minutes long. (However, I do point out that some of my favorite albums of all time are no longer than a half hour—like Jaws, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Goldfinger, and Bullitt). But listen to me, please: I'm taking the time to explain this, I've put out a soundtrack magazine and a couple of CDs; I obviously must know what I'm talking about to some degree. It is simply not realistic to demand that Varese blows $125,000 merely on your happiness. Because you won't be very happy if they go out of business.

As for why so many albums are more than a half-hour... well, many are recorded in London, where the re- use fee is paid for not by minute but all at once, or recorded in Germany, Utah, Seattle, or other places where there is no fee. And major labels like Warner Bros. and MCA will often eat the extra $125,000 because unlike Varese they can take that risk, in the hopes of having a Jurassic Park, an album that sells upwards of 100,000 units due to the success of the film, reputation of the composer, and nature of the score.

Anyway, none of Joel McNeely's cues were included on the AFO CD because those were recorded at separate sessions, and Varese couldn't afford them. There are currently no plans to release any of his music, or any of Randy Newman's rejected music. Some of McNeely's cues in the film included the scene where the hostage takeover begins and the first men are shot; and the third-act aerial dogfight.

Goldsmith in Concert

A lot of film music fans showed for Jerry Goldsmith's concert in Pasadena, his first in or near his home town of Los Angeles. Most of the attendees were regular Descanso Gardens subscribers who just wanted to sit in the gardens and listen to music (two words: "white flight"). But there was a sizable film music fan contingent, and that was neat. It was my first time seeing Goldsmith in concert, and the program was an assortment of his longer concert suites (TV themes, Sand Pebbles/Poltergeist/Patch of Blue, etc., Patton/MacArthur), new themes (First Knight, Star Trek, Air Force One), and works by other composers (All About Eve, Ben-Hur, Viva Zapata, Spirit of St. Louis). There was surprisingly little audience recognition of the movies or music—it wasn't like one of those pops concerts where they play Rocky and everybody knows what it is—and the sound and performance weren't the best, it's always cool to hear Chinatown conducted by the guy who wrote it.

I saw Goldsmith afterwards at a reception and told him about that Wu-Tang Clan video that uses his Swarm music (see last Friday's column for the story). He said, "You're making me famous, Lukas."

Okay, I gotta go help Jeff Bond move in to his new LA apartment. Together we will form a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude. I can't wait to carry all his boxes of sci-fi models up four flights.

Best,

Lukas K.

Lukas@filmscoremonthly.com