SHOOT-BACK HERE | E-MAIL THE AUTHOR

KNOWING THE SCORE - January 22, 2003

by
Paul Tonks

soundtrack -- n. / Pron. "sound ( trak"
1. The narrow strip at one side of cinema film carrying the sound recording.
2. The music that accompanies a movie.
3. A commercial recording of such music.
4. A bastardised phrase record labels use to sell you crappy songs that have nothing to do with the movie they're apparently associated with.

What’s wrong with film music today? Why isn’t film music as good as it used to be? Why does so much film music sound the same today?

I’ve heard these questions in various forms for years. I’ve thought hard about them too. In the process of writing a book on the history of the craft (FILM MUSIC, Pocket Essentials), I came to some conclusions along the way. With a few years’ additional perspective, I’d like to pass on some of those conclusions…

TELEVISION
I’ll attempt a vague chronological order with these. Since the earliest experiments occurred in the 1920s, TV comes first. For a few years, audiences were happily concentrating on the advent of cinematic sound. They didn’t want to be faced with the price of a home TV set. In 1939, NBC began broadcasting to a mere 400 homes. Technology moved fast even then, however, and as costs came down, so did cinema attendance figures. By 1953, half of America was sitting glued to the small box. The effect on film was therefore tremendous, with studios looking at elaborate ways of luring people back to theatres. Bigger screens, dazzling colour, epics to fill a weekend. There were knock-on effects to film scoring from that. The impossible task of writing the most amazing thing ever heard. Or at least something amazing enough that audiences went away eager to re-live the music again (see SOUNDTRACK ALBUMS). Composers also found themselves with less time and less money in which to do more.

There has been another, more direct, way TV has affected film music, though. As societal and fashion changes have come about, TV has always been quicker to convey them than film. The immediacy of television lured many composers by its ability to place their name directly into homes. Established composers then had their schedules stretched considerably, meaning many new composers came along to fill the gaps and saturate the market of available talent. All of them were then subject to emulating the changes in fashion and society that debuted on TV in the films that attempted to be as contemporary. Musical styles therefore cross-pollinated between the mediums. Especially with the advent of Rock and Roll! (see SONGS)

STUDIO MUSIC DEPARTMENTS
Back in the Golden Age of cinema, the major studios all took the recording of film music very seriously. After the advent of sound (THE JAZZ SINGER, 1927), it became imperative to acquire the best musicians available and chain them to a contract of exclusivity, where possible. Music Departments came into being within the studio lots and were quickly known as "closed shops." It was a fight for anyone to get in once the ranks were filled with the cream of the crop. 20th Century Fox was headed up by Alfred Newman. RKO by Max Steiner. As Music Directors they were responsible to studio chiefs, carrying a huge amount of responsibility in addition to finding time to write their own scores. The best writers in the business worked with the best players. The best of the new talent got the benefit of both. It was a system that worked.

And then, one by one, the Music Departments closed. By the time Rock ‘n’ Roll was heavily influencing societal trends, the Departments were doomed. The result? Everyone’s freelance. Everything’s subject to individual contract. Everything takes longer to co-ordinate anew.

There’s actually been a recent example of attempting to re-initiate some of this system. In 1996, Hans Zimmer became an Executive at Dreamworks SKG and as Head of Music was responsible for overseeing music on all their output. So far the studio has put out around 60 movies and of those he’s scored: THE PEACEMAKER, THE PRINCE OF EGYPT, GLADIATOR, AN EVERLASTING PIECE, THE ROAD TO EL DORADO, SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON and THE RING. Through his company Media Ventures he’s had direct influence on: ANTZ, CHICKEN RUN, SHREK and THE TIME MACHINE. But to my knowledge he had nothing to do with John Williams getting AMISTAD, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, AI, MINORITY REPORT or CATCH ME IF YOU CAN. That was all down to the established Spielberg relationship. Similarly, Zimmer wasn’t involved in Jerry Goldsmith doing SMALL SOLDIERS, THE HAUNTING or THE LAST CASTLE. The point here is that, try as we might today, the system is just too darn complicated now to ever allow for one person to have influence over as much output as was possible in the Golden Age.

SONGS
In an early column here, I stated frankly how I feel about the use of songs in films and soundtrack albums today. Like everything else on this list, it’s a factor of filmmaking steeped in history. It, at some point, made a relevant sense to certain movies. It quickly switched to being about making or saving money. And now as a result, mistakes are made every day in its application to the process.

If you really want to find a target to blame for getting songs where you’d rather not have them, blame rock ‘n’ roll. Hollywood had been through a couple of phases of Musical successes, but they were of a genre unto themselves. Every so often prior to the mid-50s, a studio would latch onto the success of a popular musical style and ask a composer to crowbar it in. Every so often the idea worked too. To this day, Dimitri Tiomkin’s use of “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling” in HIGH NOON (1952) remains a sweet (if overused) part of the narrative. Then only a couple of years later, “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets in THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE (1955) changed everything. From that point on, the idea of being able to dig further into the disposable income of younger generations of moviegoers was a massive behind-the-scenes mindset. Enter the Sixties…

There are milestones of fashionable change in-between, but the next stage of lucrative opportunity came with the advent of CD (see SOUNDTRACK ALBUMS). With studios developing, buying and merging with record labels the state of play now is whole departments devoted to song deals long before anyone starts thinking about hiring a composer. The two likely results from that are: 1) the composer’s work is downsized and stylistically pre-determined by these songs, and 2) you’re far more likely to be hearing them than the score on the album.

Let me state my opinion again for the record (ho ho): The greater proportion of songs used in films neither benefit the telling of, nor guarantee long-term popularity for a movie.

PRE-DETERMINED RELEASE DATES
The first "Blockbuster" movie is generally deemed to be JAWS (1975). Close on its heels came STAR WARS, SUPERMAN, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, etc. The significance of the "Blockbuster" is in how it came to have studios staying up nights in their laboratory, desperately trying to distil the formula that guaranteed Box Office Gold. In amongst those elements was a sharper focus on release dates. It had long been figured out that movies opening around the holiday seasons would likely attract more customers who were off work for a while. But somewhere into the 80s, there started to be compiled the research to forecast returns from every one of the 52 weeks in a year. Every conceivable release date came to have meaning.

That’s one way in which the industry came to be obsessed with aiming squarely for a desirable day of the year. The other is simple economics. Every day before a movie can make a ticket sale is time spent not gathering interest in the studios’ account.

What has this meant to the film composer? In today’s industry it means a composer has an immovable and tight deadline to work to. Unless of course test screenings determine a move might be prudent… (see below)

MTV
Really, this belongs in with TV, but I have such a beef about this, I wanted to spotlight it separately.

MTV appeared on August 1st, 1981. The first video broadcast? “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles. The irony? (Apart from Hans Zimmer being a member of the band.) To my mind, it’s been the case that Video Killed the Movie Music Star. Let me explain…

MTV came about just as soon as the technology supported the idea. Its inspiration was the enormous success in the 70s of disco (SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER), and rock (GREASE). The station encouraged anything that was musically and visually creative, especially since the video format allowed for dazzling new editing techniques. Just like the seeming takeover of cinema by TV in the 50s, this, too, needed competition on the big screen. Commercials and pop video directors were therefore lured to movie projects and straight away audiences were lapping up feature length pop videos like FLASHDANCE and FOOTLOOSE. Anyone remember a note of the original music from those? This chain of events then links directly into the video rental/sale market explosion, the advent of CD albums and a long line of movies conceived of for their pop video and album sale potential.

Suffice to say, there’s not much for a composer to contribute to this, which is sad enough in itself. But there’s a far more affecting aspect from MTV linking into the next item on my list…

EDITING
As mentioned above, the editing of videos for MTV was one of the innovations to have wide-reaching influence. But here’s the problem:

You can edit a pop video to a song. You can’t write a score to a movie edited like a pop video.

That’s an over-simplification, but it encompasses the heart of what’s been a problem for composers ever since films started to be edited for the sake of displaying an editorial style, as opposed to editing to tell a story.

For a few years, this impacted the craft of film scoring only inasmuch as the beats and rhythms of an edited movie might fox the musical flow. Editing film to look as flashy as a video was a reasonably taxing and time consuming process. That meant the physical work took longer and there usually wasn’t the time (see PRE-DETERMINED RELEASE DATES) to fiddle with the cut right up to the last minute. A composer therefore knew what they wrote would fit the cut.

Then came digital editing. Throughout the 90s, I’ve spoken to composers who, time and again, have suffered frustration as their music has been cut down, re-ordered and generally toyed with. You want a perfect example of what this means for a score today? Check in the Archives here for just about anything I’ve written on ATTACK OF THE CLONES…

TEMP TRACKS
Every once in a while I talk about “Temp Tracks” with someone and their eyes glaze in confusion (at least I assume it’s confusion!). Literally, that’s Temporary Tracks of Music. In the Editing Room, there’s a process of having a Music Editor put together a score made up of existing music. More often than not, that music will be from other film scores. So that’s some pretty easy Maths to determine one of the principle reasons why a substantial area of film music can and has been accused of sounding alike.

The advances in technology allow for another rough pinpointing of where things got out of hand. Once electronic "mock-ups" of sounds reached the point at which many folks (OK, Producers) could be fooled that what they were hearing was real, then composers really came to be inconvenienced by the Temp Track process. So we’re talking about the mid-90s again, really, when I noticed that composers were furiously busy erasing the Temp score with synth renditions (hastily written to accommodate a filmmaker’s whim). The technology meant they had the opportunity to more quickly imprint their personality on a project, preventing someone from being immovably in love with another piece. But it meant the workload went up. Just as the average worktime was going down…

SOUNDTRACK ALBUMS
The very first record to call itself an “Original Soundtrack” was PINNOCHIO (1940), so they’ve been with us for some while. A decade later, the 33 1/3-rpm format followed closely by the 45-rpm meant a whole new generation of collectors was born (albeit slowly and sporadically). Any generation of collector will agree that the rough point at which things started to get out of hand was the mid-90s. The first CD player debuted in 1980, with Sony and Philips making units commercially available in 1985. Personally it was 1991 when I recognised the imminent demise of the vinyl format, when certain soundtracks were only coming out on CD. Within a few years it was almost entirely the only way of buying film music. On top of that, there was suddenly an awful lot of it. Somewhere in the mid-90s it became shocking to discover that a film score wasn’t being released on CD. Compounding the problem was the studio push for that additional marketing exposure. So no matter how stressed out busy a composer might be to deliver and mix a score in time, it was now commonplace to figure in time for an album mix (and any necessary re-recordings or edits) too.

TEST SCREENINGS
Again, this is an aspect of the industry that’s been around to some extent ever since the first Hollywood Bean Counter got anal about guaranteeing their money back. There are many classic stories of films being re-edited after testing. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942) is a famous instance with Orson Welles locked out of his own Editing Room. I make mention of it for its musical context too however, since Bernard Herrmann found his work cut to ribbons as well. Such tales can be found throughout cinema’s history, but it was some time during the 1990s when things began to go overboard.

There is now an ever-increasing number of reports of “tossed” or replaced scores. Despite the impossibly tight schedule composers are under, studios somehow throw money at replacements to be written in even more impossibly tight schedules. And why? Because sometimes all it takes is a couple of ticks in the wrong box. Progressing from 1on1 feedback to scorecards to focus groups, Test Screening attendees are now given far too much power in deciding a movie’s fate. If one too many makes mention of an only average opinion of a score – out it goes.

THE INTERNET
Hmmm. Could be shooting myself in the foot with this one! The reason it’s included here is its contribution to the technical advances that plague even as they assist at the same time. Since the World Wide Web appeared in 1990, studios have been utilising the Internet for its ability to communicate at speed. Great for staying in touch. Awful for pressurising someone who could do without interruption.

As transfer speeds improved, it also reached a point where composers were required to demo cues of music almost immediately after they were finished, either in rough or recorded form. Of course there’s an argument that this helps the film makers determine if they’re getting what they want. But you ask any composer if they’re really happy with how much of their precious writing time it takes them having to be in constant contact and under constant immediate scrutiny. There was a time when all a director got was a tinkle on the ivories and then the recording session!

If we really got into how much of a composer’s time is wasted by the Internet we ought to acknowledge all the pesky rumour-mongering and album reviews they sometimes have to read and laugh at too. Sorry guys!

CONCLUSION
Someone could write a book including all this stuff. I sorta did, but felt it worthwhile getting into it some more here. My personal belief is that cinema and film music has always been beset with difficulties (like any industry), but that the real decline occurred as of the mid-80s. I don’t wish to be misunderstood in any of this. I’m not saying all film music is worthless today. Far from it. But I’ve been asked those questions at the start of the column enough times to have thought an answer through. As you can see, it’s not an answer you can easily rattle off in a simple e-mail. It’s a wonderfully, infuriatingly, unfairly, magically complicated craft. Hopefully something here has persuaded you of that and helped answer those nagging questions about the state of things today.

Next time: something far more cheery and optimistic!

NEWS NUGGETS:

In my review of THE TWO TOWERS album I said this about “Gollum’s Song”:
“it would seem someone had the vocal style of Björk in mind.”

Now comes this from Björk herself at her Website:
“i was asked to write the song a month before the birth of my daughter, when i turned it down because i was too pregnant they said fair enough and got another writer then approached me again said they had a song and lyric in my style, they understood i didn’t have time to write it but if i could sing it, i thought it was a little naughty but asked them to send me the notes and the lyrics since i was curious what is "my style" then had to tell them it was 3 days until my baby was due and i couldn’t focus on anything else they then said they were going to ask "björk-kinda singers" and told me they got 3 singers, they didn’t tell me the names but say A,B and C.

“then after the birth they said they weren’t happy with the results and asked me please if i could save them, they could put the deadline back to october 30th (my baby was born on the 3rd) i told them my baby was priority and i was told they went back and chose one of the A or B or C . i then later found out it was emiliana."

Told ya so!

And anyone who’s been wondering about the use of Tolkien’s languages in the scores really ought to check out this great site: www.elvish.org.

We celebrate the following Birthdays:

David Arnold (TOMORROW NEVER DIES ANOTHER INDEPENDENCE DAY)
- Born 23 January 1962, Luton, UK.

Steve Bartek (ROMY & MICHELE’S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION / NOVOCAINE)
- Born 30 January 1952, Los Angeles.

Philip Glass (KOYAANISQATSI / CANDYMAN)
- Born 31 January 1937, Baltimore, Maryland.

Don Davis (THE MATRICES / JURASSIC PARK III)
- Born 4 February 1957, Anaheim, California.

We also commiserate the anniversary of the death of:

Lionel Newman (THE ST. VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE / DOCTOR DOLITTLE)
- Born 4 January 1916, New Haven, Connecticut.
- Died 3 February 1986, Los Angeles.

Sadly, I also have to report the passing of another film music legend since the last column:

Ron Goodwin (633 SQUADRON / WHERE EAGLES DARE)
- Born 17 February 1925 Plymouth, Devon, UK.
- Died 8 January 2003 Brimpton Common, Reading, Berkshire, UK.

SHOOT-BACK HERE! | ARCHIVES