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At 51 minutes into this interview:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p060lw2j
Rachel Portman discusses having written and recorded an entire score for The Manchurian Candidate that was thrown out. Luckily she got the chance to re-score it herself (and there was a soundtrack issued), but with the handful of "rejected" score albums we've seen released over the years, I'd love to hear her first attempt, which she describes as "Hitchcockian".
We hear all the time about composers re-writing segments of a score, and sometimes when an expanded soundtrack comes out, we get some alternate cues. But how often does an entire score get recorded, thrown out, and replaced by the same composer? (I mean, probably a lot, but maybe we don't always hear about it).
The soundtrack album for the movie doesn't have a lot of Portman's music, I don't think. As I recall, it shares space with some pop songs. She says her final score was huge, so surely there's an excuse to do an expanded release anyway. But I think it would be pretty great if someone (La La Land, Varese, Quartet, Intrada, whoever) were able to put out a collection featuring both scores.
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Interesting! Thanks for bring that up; sounds like a score worth hearing. Adding to my Rejected Film Scores list (I still update it even though the site is currently down).
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I'm listening to the interview. She actually did two scores as well for "Beloved":
"I originally wrote a whole score and we recorded it, with one theme, and there was just like two or four bars of what became the main theme of one little piece of music that we recorded, and the director said: Rachel, we need to rescore this film; we need to, it needs more music; it needs another theme."
I'm still half way into the interview.
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She actually did two scores as well for "Beloved":
"I originally wrote a whole score and we recorded it, with one theme, and there was just like two or four bars of what became the main theme of one little piece of music that we recorded, and the director said: Rachel, we need to rescore this film; we need to, it needs more music; it needs another theme."
I'd love to hear the alternate cues from that, too!
Beloved is a beautiful and haunting score.
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Digging this up again.
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When will we have an expanded release of Amram's score?
When will you start a new thread and keep this one on topic?
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We are discussing the Machurian candidate.
See the thread title. New threads are free.
Also, is the remake as awful as it seemed in the trailer?
It's not bad, but it's not good either.
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The remake is a piece of crap. There is no other way to look at it, I'm afraid. I'm surprised a composer would label a score as Hitchockian, since Mr. Hitchcock didn't write music. I'm sure what she meant was Herrmannesque.
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There's a promo that has more of Portman's music, I believe. I've seen it at Amoeba a few times, but I wasn't a big fan of the film so I never picked it up.
There's one on eBay right now, and it says it has 18 tracks, while the Varese release only has 7 tracks of her score.
As dismissive as I am of what ended up in the final film, I'm intrigued by this.
Thanks for the head's up about the promo. The search for the unheard and discarded score continues....
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"The remake is a piece of crap. There is no other way to look at it, I'm afraid."
I'm with Bruce on this one. I'd call this movie "misbegotten," because the filmmakers started off on the wrong foot with their whole central concept and from then on they were doomed. One reason for the power of the Condon/Frankenheimer original was that it tapped into the zeitgeist of its time, the cold war, when this country was scared to death of Soviet Communists. At the time of the remake, the country was scared to death of foreign terrorists. But what did they choose for their enemy menace in the remake? Big business. As I said, doomed from the git-go.
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