No Foolin'!

by Lukas Kendall

Happy April Fools. A word of warning: today on rec.music.movies and all over the Internet you will find April Fools jokes of every possible nature. This is concentrated in soundtrack-dom with announcements of unreleased and long-desired scores suddenly be offered on CD. These are all jokes. Do not believe them! It only takes one person to fib about something, and someone from Bolivia is sending me e-mail for six weeks, going, "It is true Commando soon on CD?!? Where purchase can I?!?" (This is a hypothetical example. Commando is NOT coming out on CD.)

Consequently there will be no jokes in our column today. Except about the English capabilities of Bolivians, evidently.

Hey, do you want to know why people don't hire composers to do something cool or different, or give talented new composers (or talented but older and overlooked composers) a break? I have recently and informally been asked my opinion a couple of times from people who actually work on movies. Why? Because I'm Lukas. I will not name names or provide any details, but I will pontificate enough to get across my vast importance.

I think all of us as film music fans have some favorite composers who don't get the work they should. But having been asked my opinion on who I would recommend, I found myself recently mentioning the same old names--the safe choices. Me!

Why did I do this? Because:

1) There was no point in recommending someone who they would never seriously consider. I mean, I'd love to hear Hoyt Curtin come out of retirement and do something, but there's not even any point in suggesting it.

2) I do not want to be held responsible for someone having a bad experience. It's this simple. It takes a leap of faith to say, hey, who you really need is this 25-year-old friend of mine who has only done student films. Or, who you really need is this guy who used to do a lot of TV.

What if someone actually followed my advice and it didn't work out? I may really believe the people I am recommending are good, but I have no way of controlling the outcome. (If it was up to me, by the way, all action films today would be scored by Gerald Fried.) Someone has asked my opinion, and if I give a opinion that results in misfortune, I will never be asked again.

This I am sure is why the same ten people always score the same types of movies. It's simply easier to say, get Alan Silvestri or James Newton Howard (nothing against Alan or James, they're cool). If I was an agent, every filmmaker or studio music person is a paying customer I cannot afford to lose. I could not afford to recommend anyone for a job who did not have a justifiable profile for getting it, or was coming off of a hit film. In other words, although I may have the influence to get so-and-so on a project, I could not risk doing so unless so-and-so just scored something like The Usual Suspects or Scream.

Part of the reason it's so hard to pitch new talent is probably because the movies and scores they work on are so terrible. This is not to slag on Marco Beltrami, but anyone who scored Scream would have a great shot at getting more work: agents, producers, music execs and everybody down the line could defend their choice by saying, but he did Scream! Whereas if you just scored Wishmaster (I can't even remember who did) you could be the second coming of Mozart and nobody would care. Also, so many films are so generic, that they demand generic scores. You could be Mozart and write the "correct" score for Wishmaster but receive no attention, because the "correct" score for Wishmaster probably sucks.

Elmer Bernstein gave the keynote address at last Saturday's SCL film music conference (full report in an upcoming FSM) and related how he got his first movie in 1950: some executive had heard a radio score of his, and made an "executive decision" to hire him. This man did not hire Elmer for a horror score because he had just done another horror score, or anything of the sort: he believed in him as a composer and made the choice to use him. Elmer said that such things never happen today, and trashed the mentality of sending out demo tapes because said tapes do not adequately convey what an individual composer does or is all about.

Obviously today the train has flown off the rails and the film industry is a web of fear and foolishness. (Wow, cool sentence.) It would be great if we at FSM could somehow offer an audit to the industry people who every day wonder which composer to hire. But, nobody would listen to us, and we'd probably have to tell them only what they want to hear. Elmer did raise a good (if contradictory) point: how does one evaluate a composer if not by a tape? Maybe it's as simple as having composers provide tapes not of film scores but of work that they would actually write independent of picture. (Too bad not many people still do this.)

Ah, what to do. If you are a composer, you must seriously do one of two things: 1) Be someone's apprentice. 2) Score a surprise hit and good low-budget movie for your buddies like The Usual Suspects. (You don't have to edit it too, as John Ottman did.)

Time to make new friends, composers! And also don't forget these key things: 1) write good music. 2) don't smell bad. I'll bet more composers have lost work due to the latter than the former.

Finally, a note to everyone out there in Red Sox nation on this blessed Opening Day. This is the year! Woooo! Join me and Andy Dursin in laughing at the sound of these names from the past (New Englanders will understand): Danny Heep, Dave Stapleton, Eddie Romero. Mere mention of "Now pinch hitting, Eddie Romero" is enough to send me and Andy into fits of hilarity.

Send your bewildered comments: MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com

P.S. "Joe Hesketh"