My Big Fat Greek Wedding

By Jeff Bond

From FSM Vol. 7, No. 8

Most Hollywood blockbusters make their $100 million or so in the first couple of weeks of release and then disappear into the abyss, qualifying as monster hits well after everyone in America has lost interest in seeing them. Then there are the increasingly rare "sleepers" -- movies that no one expects to make more than a few million dollars, but which manage to defy the odds and rake in (sometimes increasing) profits week after week. It took My Big Fat Greek Wedding months, not days, to bring its box-office take to $100 million and counting (it will reach $200 million before the year is out), and after eight months in release the film is still going strong.

That situation has a familiar ring to composer Alexander Janko, who had labored in composing and orchestration, working with Alan Silvestri and David Newman and trying to make his mark for a solid decade before finally hitting it big with My Big Fat Greek Wedding -- almost by accident. Janko was actually taking a sabbatical from film scoring after his work with David Newman on Anastasia, when he happened to get to know his neighborsÖthe parents of Rita Wilson. "We happened to buy a house three doors down from Rita Wilson's parents," Janko recalls. "I rebuilt my house, and Rita's father took an interest in my construction work and we struck up a friendship and I became a friend of the family. When they heard I was a composer, Tom and Rita said I should come down to Playtone [the production company of Wilson and her husband Tom Hanks] and meet [producer] Gary Goetzman, because we have this little film called My Big Fat Greek Wedding and it might be an interesting opportunity for you."

Interesting, indeed.

Janko's road to the big time was only on its first leg, however. My Big Fat Greek Wedding, developed from a one-woman stage show put on by the film's star, Nia Vardalos, was in production in 1999 and went through a long process of post-production. "They did a lot of tweaking and fixing and previewing," Janko says. "They realized they had a good movie on their hands but the question was how to release it. The year it was finished was the year of September 11. I think it sat on the shelf almost a year. We scored in January and February of 2001."

Janko worked with Rita Wilson's brother Chris, a guitarist and composer in his own right, to begin laying the groundwork for the score. "Chris is a really wonderful self-taught guitarist with a completely different background than me," Janko says. "He's a very instinctual performer-songwriter, so he has his guitars and he has the Greek vibe because he's Greek himself. He would come and lay down tracks and the process was very seamless."

While an orchestral score might have been out of the question for a film with a budget of only $5 million, new recording arrangements worked out by the Recording Musician's Association helped the production. "We didn't have any money, so I literally recorded it under the low budget agreement with the RMA, so the movie's become sort of the poster child for the RMA," Janko notes. "We did 35 minutes of music in one day in two three-hour sessions, which is the most you can do in one day. There's a balance of Greek source stuff and scoring."

It's All Greek to Me

Ethnic instrumentation was an important part of the score even though Janko planned to steer the work more in the direction of traditional romantic comedy scoring. "We chose to use the Greek bouzouki, so even though I was going to morph into traditional romantic comedy film scoring, if I could keep some of the orchestrational colors of Greek instrumentation, that would keep it in the essence of a sweet little Greek story," Janko points out. "Obviously I had a lot of piano-driven and guitar-driven thematic and melodic stuff, but I continued the bouzouki throughout the whole score and that was glue that would tie it in to the purely Greek source stuff. The dream would be to hire some Greek musicians and really make it seamless, but I didn't have that luxury and I had to marry needle-drop to underscore. We sampled the bouzouki and mandolin and a balalaika, and we created a bunch of tremolo patches and all the Greek essence stuff you hear in the score is not by us, that's programming. It's not the way I prefer to work -- I like to work with live musicians and I enjoy the essence that they bring to the work. When I did Anastasia with Dave, we were multitracking 12 balalaikas, and it was breathtaking. But we didn't have the money on this little film so I had to work around it as much as possible. We worked pretty hard to see that the programming was as transparent as possible."

The traditional Greek instrumentation not only underscored the film's ethnic point of view, it also provided a method of accenting the story's comic aspects without resorting to standard comic mickey-mousing. "I was really relieved because their filmmaking perspective on this was not let's hit all the comedy moments and play up the physical comedy," Janko explains. "In the film itself there's not that much but there are some moments of physical comedy, and the idea was let's use instrumentation to make it funny -- there's a little bit of lyrical clarinet, there's a little bit of the bouzouki doing little patterns, so we were trying to make it farcical and light but not actually hitting stuff, playing through the comedy. My feeling now is we're so inundated now in movie music with hitting of everything, and it was refreshing to play the emotions instead of the action."

Janko's work on the score involved not only a collaboration with Chris Wilson, but in-depth interaction with Playtone's executive staff, especially Rita Wilson. "It's her baby," Janko agrees. "It was Nia's one-woman show and she went to see it. This is Playtone's first project -- it was their first in-house production that was theirs from the get-go. We had creative input from everyone from Tom Hanks on down to the producers and director, and a music supervisor. Tom is a guitarist himself. He cares tremendously about the music. At a given time there would be nine or 10 people on a music meeting."

The Playtone connection resulted in a little bit of movie in-joking. "They did this really interesting thing -- the 'Only in My Dreams' song which was the only 'original' thing written for the movie, was actually written for That Thing You Do, so I think there was a little bit of tongue-in-cheek self-reference there. They hired this Greek wedding band up in Toronto to record a cover of this song, and when you listen to it you can imagine a really bad Greek wedding band performing this." Despite the film's long production history and the fact that it was released more than a year after it was finished, Janko faced the same scheduling pressures he would have had to handle on any movie with a fixed release date. "This is a great irony. We had no money and no time, and I did the job in three weeks, but once it was done it wasn't rushed into the market place."

Merry Christmas, by the way!

MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com