To Rock or Not to Rock

By Jeff Bond

Excerpted from FSM Vol. 7, No. 3, on sale now...

What do you get when you cross Lawrence of Arabia with the World Wrestling Federation? As post-production winds down on The Scorpion King, the ersatz prequel to last year's blockbuster The Mummy Returns, several of the movie's key players are still trying to answer that question -- at least as far as the film's music is concerned. Composer John Debney was assigned to score the film last fall and was originally set to record his score in December before reshoots on the picture forced the work back to March of this year. Debney consequently had a lot of time to think about his interpretation of the score to the film, which takes the Scorpion King character (played by the WWF's Dwayne Johnson, otherwise known as The Rock) from The Mummy Returns and provides him with a Conan the Barbarian-like backstory.

Debney was faced with a few obvious precedents for the score. First of all there were the two previous Mummy franchise scores by Jerry Goldsmith and Alan Silvestri, both of whom had placed a retro, '50s epic sensibility on their work. But while The Mummy and The Mummy Returns were set in a kind of Hollywood-ized, Raiders of the Lost Ark version of the 1930s, The Scorpion King takes place entirely in a distant past without any clear ethnic or cultural roots. Furthermore, the Mummy movies wereÖwell, mummy movies -- both centered on the monstrous, supernatural character of Imhotep. But there are no monsters in The Scorpion King. "It's something I always joke about as being sweaty men and leather," Debney says. "So I think the music has to be a little more human in approach."

Even veering away from the two Mummy movies left plenty of precedent for a modern sword-and-sandal epic, including the early '80s muscle bash Conan the Barbarian and Hans Zimmer's hugely popular world-music approach to Ridley Scott's Gladiator. But none of those approaches took into account one of the major demographics Universal was looking to tap when they chose to build a potential franchise around The Rock: the wrestler's fervent WWF fan base. These teens and twentysomethings were used to seeing Johnson's heavily oiled pecs flex to the music of headbanging heavy metal rock.

The idea of putting rock songs in an action movie is nothing new, and Universal Music had a Scorpion King "soundtrack" put together well before Debney began recording his score. Universal signed metal band Godsmack to head off the album with their Grammy-nominated song "I Stand Alone" and loaded the rest with music from P.O.D., Drowning Pool and System Of A DownÖall artists well-known to FSM readers! Debney's music was nowhere to be found on the soundtrack album -- also not an uncommon situation for a film composer. But having put out a rock soundtrack for the movie, the question remained whether the metal aspect would be confined to the usual end-credits pile-up of songs or would actually find its way into the score somehow. Universal Music very much wanted the Godsmack song in the picture somewhere, and in order to create a sonic environment in which the introduction of it wouldn't come completely out of nowhere, the idea of integrating some rock elements into the score proper reared its head. This wasn't an unheard-of concept (the highest profile recent example was Joel Goldsmith's score for Kull the Conquerer), but integrating rock, world music and the sort of large-scale orchestral elements Debney was still interested in employing became an ongoing challenge.

Debney went to work early on with the concept of building a score around elements of the Godsmack song. "When I first heard the Godsmack song we were all trying to find melodic threads that I could maybe derive from the song," Debney explains. "It's a great song but there weren't a lot of melodic tidbits I could hold on to that would sustain themselves, so I had to write my own themes the old fashioned way -- there's a hero theme, there's a love theme. There are a few instances in the movie, in the first scene particularly where it's a big fight scene and there are rock and roll electric guitars, drums, bass with an orchestra on top. And throughout the score there are highlights like that. I'm actually a rock-and-roll guitar player. A lot of the stuff you'll hear on the score is me playing. Nobody really knows that's my background. I think Silvestri and I are two of the only ones who were guitar players."

After going full steam ahead with the rock-and-orchestra combo concept, other minds got involved, reportedly including producer Stephen Sommers, who favored a more traditional scoring approach as taken in his original Mummy films. "There was kind of a sea change after a couple of screenings, some people involved were sort of taken aback by the rock-and-roll music," Debney recalls. "There's no right or wrong about it, you just go with what they want, and as it turns out it's more of a traditional score with the non-traditional things being some of the performers, woodwind things, solo girl performers like Lizbeth Scott who did work on Gladiator."

While Debney acknowledges the pendulum has swung back more toward the style of the first Mummy features, he points out it hasn't swung all the way. "I would say that the influence of the score is Middle Eastern, but probably less of that than the two previous Mummy movies. The main themes I think hearken back much farther back than the previous two movies to Lawrence of Arabia. My goal was to write something for the lead character that would make him into Lawrence of Arabia, because you have a tough sell right off the bat because you've got The Rock who is hugely popular with masses of people because of the WWF, but as a movie star no one really knows whether he'll be taken seriously. What I tried to do was really go with it and play him up to be this huge assassin who turns into the hero and becomes king by the end. The theme is very much old school. What I was trying to do thematically was a little more overblown, a little more classic film score theme, that's what I was trying to achieve. This one's very romantic. The last cue in the movie, where he's vanquished all the bad guys and he's standing there in front of everyone with the woman, and they all kneel before him, and the music is soaring but thematically it's a little more romantic than the other Mummy movies. The other Mummy movies had to be scary and maybe have a little romance, but this is a much difference movie in which there are really no monsters, just human beings."
 

For the full story, check out FSM Vol.7, No. 3...
 

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