The Film Score Thread

Michael Giacchino, Randy Newman, David Newman and Trevor Rabin discuss the history and future of film music. Click on link for 45 minute video.

http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2012/04/26/26206/airtalk-event-the-history-and-future-of-hollywood-

.

Probably my favourite track from the score.

On a Piccioni binge.











Oh, I know that guy, he's a nihilist.

Karl Hungus.

I want that silver clock!

ROCKY porn!

Pure Mancini magic.

Fantastic. I love early 70's stuff.

Some Jerry Fielding.

Uploaded two scores; THE EIGER SANCTION and DRESSED TO KILL. For the Faggot in all of us.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

Whoa. I did a photo shoot recently and made a very similar shot like that but with a wrench instead of a razor. I never even saw DRESSED TO KILL. I'm kind of amused finding this screencap.

I'm less wild about DRESSED TO KILL than I am about, say, BLOW OUT. But I've only seen it once. It's got a terrific first act, though.

DRESSED TO KILL's first act is as fine as anything De Palma has made. That museum sequence is just spectacular.

In thread over the FSM board titled "Your controversial film score opinions", I found a great post. Surprisingly, I agree without almost every word of it.

"Miklos Rozsa couldn't get a scoring job today, even for 'artistic' independent films. Herrmann, though, would be busier than he was in the last decade of his career.

Randy Newman gets a lot of credit for his bombastic, routine scores because of his brilliant seventies pop songwriting.

Say what you will about Jerry Goldsmith's late-career scores (I don't care for many of them), they show he was an artist who never stopped growing throughout his career. Despite talk of 'modern' sounds, today's composers find their sound and stick to it, depending on repeat business for the same thing over and over instead of challenging directors who want something new and possibly 'difficult.' Whether it was to keep getting work or because that's just the way he was built, Goldsmith didn't sit still for long.

In scores like MUNICH, MINORITY REPORT and MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, John Williams shows more creativity and imaginative use in instrumentation and concept than anything the Zimmer disciples have used in the same time period.

Zimmer has still got it, and has never lost it. Even when I don't like his scores, which is often, I appreciate that he uses his position to try new things as composer. His producing or supervizing is like Spielberg in the 80's, helping others produce pap. But he's great.

If I made up a playlist of John Ottman and Michael Giacchino scores, and removed the main and end titles and hit 'random,' I couldn't tell you who wrote which tracks.

Still, Giacchino's end title music for CLOVERFIELD is the best music for a horror movie since ALIEN 3. And Ottman should have won an award for the choral piece he wrote for VALKYRIE.

James Horner has an uncanny ability to create a sense of awe through music. The first half of AVATAR is one of the finest science fiction scores ever written. But I usually bail long before "War" even comes on, it's so labored.

Very few great movies have scores using choir.

Kitaro deserved more Hollywood work after HEAVEN AND EARTH.

After years of hunting down and buying expensive Giallo scores, I've come to the conclusion that most people who raved about them to me were just trying to be cool, and did so figuring no one would ever actually get to hear the stuff they were raving about. But I'm still open to more Italian scores. Just no more for boring movies about knives going into beautiful women.

After listening to his scores and much deliberation, I've decided my first instincts were correct, and Gustavo Santaolalla's consequtive Oscar wins are a pathetic joke.

The charges of repeating himself and 'borrowing' from others will always hound Horner because they're absolutely true. He steals, and he repeats himself too often. After the mid-80's there is a noticeable falling-off in quality. It's like he thought, "Why am I killing myself to make deadlines when I can just recycle? Who's gonna notice?" People try to stop talking about that only because they're sick of having to defend against the charges, not because they're not valid.

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION (dir. Schepisi) shows that Goldsmith should have written scores for Woody Allen movies. It would have helped both him and Allen.

STAR TREK 5 is the only ST movie score that sounds like it's the score to a movie version of the old TV show.

I always shut off the SUPERMAN CDs after the Fortress of Solitude music.

Trevor Jones repeated himself too much, but he should work more. He's another one who can rise to the challenge when the movie inspires him.

I'd pay for a 2-CD set of the scores to SILENT RUNNING and ZARDOZ, even though they're both lousy movies. Yes, they are.

The Remote Control crowd didn't destroy film music. But the popularity of their style is a musical dead end.

ALIENS is mostly filler.

So is ATTACK OF THE CLONES.

Score for score, Franz Waxman was the best of the Golden Age composers.

John Williams and Steven Spielberg should have used their break on THE COLOR PURPLE to start seeing other people.

But THE LOST WORLD is a better score than JURASSIC PARK, while MINORITY REPORT is better than A.I.

And WAR OF THE WORLDS is a better score than SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. And way better than HOOK.

(And HOOK the movie is creepy. In a bad way.)

For all the good scores, half the time they worked together, Spielberg brought out the worst in Williams. After the 70's, when he worked for directors who weren't so sentimental, Williams was at his best.

Electric guitars are bad news in scores. Of course there are exceptions, but not really. (Shore's CRASH and...uh...)

There are a lot of little Zimmers, but no little Horners.

Call me a Goldsmith fanatic, but I've always thought THE WIND AND THE LION was a much, much better score than LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.

Elliot Goldenthal should write more scores for action movies. And, of course, horror movies.

One quality Hollywood and younger score fans seem to fear in music is strangeness. I don't mean 'weird sounds,' but approaches to score that make one feel uncomfortable--odd ensembles, going without synths, unusual music that isn't like what people hear on the radio. The folks who don't like to get out of their comfort zone artistically don't know shit about art.

I haven't heard a new Danny Elfman score in years. I'd buy THE FAMILY MAN if a legit score CD came out, though. It's better than EDWARD SCISSORHANDS.

Back in the 80's, I thought George Fenton was going to be the next big thing.

The mega-success of movies based on comic books is not a good thing for those who think we've had nothing but comic book-like movies coming out of Hollywood for thirty years. If they're only now discovering that they haven't been making their movies enough like comic books, what are movies going to be like in a decade?

When Mark Isham is good (BLACK DAHLIA, CRASH), he's really good. But too often he's just good enough.

If you hadn't told me Emmerich had changed composers, I wouldn't have noticed.

Science fiction fans are the least adventurous, most conservative of moviegoers, especially where the music is concerned. They only like stuff they liked when they were little kids.

And folks who like "controversial" movies are just as bad, liking movies that support the positions they're comfortable with, backed with music that you can safely play in Starbucks, never anything challenging. Whatever their flaws, 70's art/'controversy' movies like LAST TANGO IN PARIS, THE CONFORMIST, CRUISING, and THE EXORCIST didn't have nice, normal scores.

Jerry Goldsmith's science fiction scores of the 60's and 70's are more forward-looking and musically fresh than any science fiction scores being written today--and I'm not even talking about the electronics.

But if some label announces their new line of Goldsmith re-releases with the synths removed, half his scores with synths should be given the treatment.

It's a good thing I keep finding 60's and 70's scores of Ennio Morricone's to like, because his stuff from the mid-80's on is unlistenable.

Thomas Newman is the best idea for a Bond composer since John Barry.

A steady diet of nothing but film music isn't very good for you. A steady diet of nothing but film music composed during your teen years and after is very bad for you.

Based on the score to BELOVED, Rachel Portman could become the best writer of horror scores ever, but she won't.

Gil Melle was better than anyone who's currently using synths in their scores.

I've read the sentiment "People around here don't let you criticize Jerry Goldsmith" many times. But I've never seen anyone actually say or even suggest that you can't criticize Jerry Goldsmith.

99% of the music written for horror movies is wretched noise. And I love dark/avant garde/strange music.

John Williams wrote a brilliant score for STAR WARS, and it has set back film music and what film music should do for a movie by decades.

Michael Convertino is a better composer than anyone who has won a Best Score Oscar in the last ten years.

It's a good thing that today's film score fans don't have a lot of impact on who gets hired for what, or things would be even worse than they are.

David Newman's theme for SERENITY should be considered a classic. It is emotional and expressive, and brings out the feeling for the characters, and ignores the spectacle, which doesn't need emphasizing. Most genre scores just hype the visuals, but this almost ignores them.

Carter Burwell's BLAIR WITCH 2: BOOK OF SHADOWS should be just one of many outrageous, experimental horror scores of the past decade, instead of uniquely original in a sea of drones.

The composers who stick very closely to the temp track are getting by, but they're dooming themselves. I could name a few who had potential some years back and who now get few big assignments. The ones who seem to make it are the ones who can thread the needle and give the director what he wants while pleasing their own artistic impulses.

John Scott should have a row of Oscars at home, from working for big movies. Anyone who doesn't appreciate his artistry doesn't know one of the best composers alive.

I rarely listen to most of the expanded scores I've clamored for over the years.

Bourne-style drum-and-bass scores are dated before the movie gets to cable.

Of course, saying a score is "dated" usually only means it doesn't sound like it was composed today, as if that is the only criteria for musical quality. (Have you listened to what's composed today?)

Sometimes we hear a score and think it's a new, exciting voice, but it turns out it's just the first in a long line of sound-alikes by a new composer. I could name names, but you know who I'm talking about.

I'd love to see a big sci-fi spectacle scored with an unusual ensemble of one flute and one cello, or something equally audacious. Would make the action scenes very interesting.

Losing Basil Poledouris, Michael Kamen, Shirley Walker and Joel Goldsmith when they all had the potential to deliver many classic scores if they were in the right places at the right times....sucks.

Christopher Young is going to be the next Howard Shore.

Saying you don't like the LOTR scores isn't all that controversial. Pointing out that they actually are great because they're NOT like John Williams scores, but more like the scores Williams was trying to emulate, might be.

I don't think I'm alone in being a little sad that Jerry didn't write one last, undeniably classic massive epic score on the level of ST:TMP, ALIEN or THE WIND AND THE LION that went on to win the Oscar and give him the TITANIC-level popularity he seemed to want.

Action movies and their scores suck because they are about James Bondian superheroes and not gritty, painful violence that actually hurts and costs. They're playtime, not interesting stories about characters touching on real humanity in somewhat believable situations but, as William Goldman put it, gods involved in mayhem, and the music reflects that.

The works of some Golden Age composers haven't aged well. Think about the ones you have in your collection and haven't listened to in ages--that's probably who I mean.

Sometimes an ambient score isn't new, modern, cutting-edge, or something us old farts have to wake up to, but is actually just an excuse for artistic timidity the young folks are too unsophisticated to notice.

I'm all for complete score albums, but most contemporary movies have too much music.

If I were magically put in charge of Hollywood, I'd outlaw the use of music in movies for one year.

Some people who are labelled old fogeys are people who remember what quality is, and aren't afraid to say they can't hear it in today's music. Some are just old fogeys who wish things were like they used to be, not because things were better, but because the old fogeys were young back then.

The best film composers were American, or came here to do their best work.

The score to PROMETHEUS isn't going to be better than the score to ALIEN, but it might be better than the score to ALIENS."

http://www.filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?threadID=72415&forumID=1&archive=0&pageID=43&r=786#bottom

Indeed, Poledouris is sorely missed.

to hell with it.



was using this whilst writing earlier. Sort of punches along conjuring images of the confusion and mayhem of the battle scene.

"Roberrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt!"

Still...I mingled with John Barry, Remembering Chet again, Coney Island...God knows what I was writing.

Sharky wrote:

In thread over the FSM board titled "Your controversial film score opinions", I found a great post. Surprisingly, I agree without almost every word of it.

"Miklos Rozsa couldn't get a scoring job today, even for 'artistic' independent films. Herrmann, though, would be busier than he was in the last decade of his career.

Randy Newman gets a lot of credit for his bombastic, routine scores because of his brilliant seventies pop songwriting.

Say what you will about Jerry Goldsmith's late-career scores (I don't care for many of them), they show he was an artist who never stopped growing throughout his career. Despite talk of 'modern' sounds, today's composers find their sound and stick to it, depending on repeat business for the same thing over and over instead of challenging directors who want something new and possibly 'difficult.' Whether it was to keep getting work or because that's just the way he was built, Goldsmith didn't sit still for long.

In scores like MUNICH, MINORITY REPORT and MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, John Williams shows more creativity and imaginative use in instrumentation and concept than anything the Zimmer disciples have used in the same time period.

Zimmer has still got it, and has never lost it. Even when I don't like his scores, which is often, I appreciate that he uses his position to try new things as composer. His producing or supervizing is like Spielberg in the 80's, helping others produce pap. But he's great.

If I made up a playlist of John Ottman and Michael Giacchino scores, and removed the main and end titles and hit 'random,' I couldn't tell you who wrote which tracks.

Still, Giacchino's end title music for CLOVERFIELD is the best music for a horror movie since ALIEN 3. And Ottman should have won an award for the choral piece he wrote for VALKYRIE.

James Horner has an uncanny ability to create a sense of awe through music. The first half of AVATAR is one of the finest science fiction scores ever written. But I usually bail long before "War" even comes on, it's so labored.

Very few great movies have scores using choir.

Kitaro deserved more Hollywood work after HEAVEN AND EARTH.

After years of hunting down and buying expensive Giallo scores, I've come to the conclusion that most people who raved about them to me were just trying to be cool, and did so figuring no one would ever actually get to hear the stuff they were raving about. But I'm still open to more Italian scores. Just no more for boring movies about knives going into beautiful women.

After listening to his scores and much deliberation, I've decided my first instincts were correct, and Gustavo Santaolalla's consequtive Oscar wins are a pathetic joke.

The charges of repeating himself and 'borrowing' from others will always hound Horner because they're absolutely true. He steals, and he repeats himself too often. After the mid-80's there is a noticeable falling-off in quality. It's like he thought, "Why am I killing myself to make deadlines when I can just recycle? Who's gonna notice?" People try to stop talking about that only because they're sick of having to defend against the charges, not because they're not valid.

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION (dir. Schepisi) shows that Goldsmith should have written scores for Woody Allen movies. It would have helped both him and Allen.

STAR TREK 5 is the only ST movie score that sounds like it's the score to a movie version of the old TV show.

I always shut off the SUPERMAN CDs after the Fortress of Solitude music.

Trevor Jones repeated himself too much, but he should work more. He's another one who can rise to the challenge when the movie inspires him.

I'd pay for a 2-CD set of the scores to SILENT RUNNING and ZARDOZ, even though they're both lousy movies. Yes, they are.

The Remote Control crowd didn't destroy film music. But the popularity of their style is a musical dead end.

ALIENS is mostly filler.

So is ATTACK OF THE CLONES.

Score for score, Franz Waxman was the best of the Golden Age composers.

John Williams and Steven Spielberg should have used their break on THE COLOR PURPLE to start seeing other people.

But THE LOST WORLD is a better score than JURASSIC PARK, while MINORITY REPORT is better than A.I.

And WAR OF THE WORLDS is a better score than SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. And way better than HOOK.

(And HOOK the movie is creepy. In a bad way.)

For all the good scores, half the time they worked together, Spielberg brought out the worst in Williams. After the 70's, when he worked for directors who weren't so sentimental, Williams was at his best.

Electric guitars are bad news in scores. Of course there are exceptions, but not really. (Shore's CRASH and...uh...)

There are a lot of little Zimmers, but no little Horners.

Call me a Goldsmith fanatic, but I've always thought THE WIND AND THE LION was a much, much better score than LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.

Elliot Goldenthal should write more scores for action movies. And, of course, horror movies.

One quality Hollywood and younger score fans seem to fear in music is strangeness. I don't mean 'weird sounds,' but approaches to score that make one feel uncomfortable--odd ensembles, going without synths, unusual music that isn't like what people hear on the radio. The folks who don't like to get out of their comfort zone artistically don't know shit about art.

I haven't heard a new Danny Elfman score in years. I'd buy THE FAMILY MAN if a legit score CD came out, though. It's better than EDWARD SCISSORHANDS.

Back in the 80's, I thought George Fenton was going to be the next big thing.

The mega-success of movies based on comic books is not a good thing for those who think we've had nothing but comic book-like movies coming out of Hollywood for thirty years. If they're only now discovering that they haven't been making their movies enough like comic books, what are movies going to be like in a decade?

When Mark Isham is good (BLACK DAHLIA, CRASH), he's really good. But too often he's just good enough.

If you hadn't told me Emmerich had changed composers, I wouldn't have noticed.

Science fiction fans are the least adventurous, most conservative of moviegoers, especially where the music is concerned. They only like stuff they liked when they were little kids.

And folks who like "controversial" movies are just as bad, liking movies that support the positions they're comfortable with, backed with music that you can safely play in Starbucks, never anything challenging. Whatever their flaws, 70's art/'controversy' movies like LAST TANGO IN PARIS, THE CONFORMIST, CRUISING, and THE EXORCIST didn't have nice, normal scores.

Jerry Goldsmith's science fiction scores of the 60's and 70's are more forward-looking and musically fresh than any science fiction scores being written today--and I'm not even talking about the electronics.

But if some label announces their new line of Goldsmith re-releases with the synths removed, half his scores with synths should be given the treatment.

It's a good thing I keep finding 60's and 70's scores of Ennio Morricone's to like, because his stuff from the mid-80's on is unlistenable.

Thomas Newman is the best idea for a Bond composer since John Barry.

A steady diet of nothing but film music isn't very good for you. A steady diet of nothing but film music composed during your teen years and after is very bad for you.

Based on the score to BELOVED, Rachel Portman could become the best writer of horror scores ever, but she won't.

Gil Melle was better than anyone who's currently using synths in their scores.

I've read the sentiment "People around here don't let you criticize Jerry Goldsmith" many times. But I've never seen anyone actually say or even suggest that you can't criticize Jerry Goldsmith.

99% of the music written for horror movies is wretched noise. And I love dark/avant garde/strange music.

John Williams wrote a brilliant score for STAR WARS, and it has set back film music and what film music should do for a movie by decades.

Michael Convertino is a better composer than anyone who has won a Best Score Oscar in the last ten years.

It's a good thing that today's film score fans don't have a lot of impact on who gets hired for what, or things would be even worse than they are.

David Newman's theme for SERENITY should be considered a classic. It is emotional and expressive, and brings out the feeling for the characters, and ignores the spectacle, which doesn't need emphasizing. Most genre scores just hype the visuals, but this almost ignores them.

Carter Burwell's BLAIR WITCH 2: BOOK OF SHADOWS should be just one of many outrageous, experimental horror scores of the past decade, instead of uniquely original in a sea of drones.

The composers who stick very closely to the temp track are getting by, but they're dooming themselves. I could name a few who had potential some years back and who now get few big assignments. The ones who seem to make it are the ones who can thread the needle and give the director what he wants while pleasing their own artistic impulses.

John Scott should have a row of Oscars at home, from working for big movies. Anyone who doesn't appreciate his artistry doesn't know one of the best composers alive.

I rarely listen to most of the expanded scores I've clamored for over the years.

Bourne-style drum-and-bass scores are dated before the movie gets to cable.

Of course, saying a score is "dated" usually only means it doesn't sound like it was composed today, as if that is the only criteria for musical quality. (Have you listened to what's composed today?)

Sometimes we hear a score and think it's a new, exciting voice, but it turns out it's just the first in a long line of sound-alikes by a new composer. I could name names, but you know who I'm talking about.

I'd love to see a big sci-fi spectacle scored with an unusual ensemble of one flute and one cello, or something equally audacious. Would make the action scenes very interesting.

Losing Basil Poledouris, Michael Kamen, Shirley Walker and Joel Goldsmith when they all had the potential to deliver many classic scores if they were in the right places at the right times....sucks.

Christopher Young is going to be the next Howard Shore.

Saying you don't like the LOTR scores isn't all that controversial. Pointing out that they actually are great because they're NOT like John Williams scores, but more like the scores Williams was trying to emulate, might be.

I don't think I'm alone in being a little sad that Jerry didn't write one last, undeniably classic massive epic score on the level of ST:TMP, ALIEN or THE WIND AND THE LION that went on to win the Oscar and give him the TITANIC-level popularity he seemed to want.

Action movies and their scores suck because they are about James Bondian superheroes and not gritty, painful violence that actually hurts and costs. They're playtime, not interesting stories about characters touching on real humanity in somewhat believable situations but, as William Goldman put it, gods involved in mayhem, and the music reflects that.

The works of some Golden Age composers haven't aged well. Think about the ones you have in your collection and haven't listened to in ages--that's probably who I mean.

Sometimes an ambient score isn't new, modern, cutting-edge, or something us old farts have to wake up to, but is actually just an excuse for artistic timidity the young folks are too unsophisticated to notice.

I'm all for complete score albums, but most contemporary movies have too much music.

If I were magically put in charge of Hollywood, I'd outlaw the use of music in movies for one year.

Some people who are labelled old fogeys are people who remember what quality is, and aren't afraid to say they can't hear it in today's music. Some are just old fogeys who wish things were like they used to be, not because things were better, but because the old fogeys were young back then.

The best film composers were American, or came here to do their best work.

The score to PROMETHEUS isn't going to be better than the score to ALIEN, but it might be better than the score to ALIENS."

http://www.filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?threadID=72415&forumID=1&archive=0&pageID=43&r=786#bottom

Yes many interesting coments and very few I would disagree, I think I read an interview with Zimmer where he bemoaned "where is the next Jerry Goldsmith" suggesting he feels there is too little real imagination fuelling current film scores.

Love this track. Spine chillingly haunting.

That is inspired, summoning so much in so little a time.

Something about the score that reminds me of Moonraker, namely the space music (Flight into Space's reveal of the station).

I know what you mean. The harmonies reminds me of a lot of Corinne Put Down too. The same sense of tragic inevitability, fate, longing for an afterlife etc. So much subtext.

Exactly that, though no less masterful in its way. I will indeed start foraging for the Last Valley score on YouTube. Make a change from my usual listening habits.

My first attempt at editing something. Not really editing, just dropping in different music. I've posted it as a mashup before, but now I've got something more snazzy.

I dig it.