FILM SCORE FRIDAY 10/3/03

Composer Michael Kamen has announced publicly for the first time that he is suffering from multiple sclerosis. Diagnosed six years ago, he was recently presented with the Dorothy Corwin Spirit of Life Award by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

In announcing his condition, Kamen remarked "There is really no pain. There is some discomfort and my walking isn't as good as it used to be, but I'm still able to conduct; I'm still able to get onstage and offstage; I'm still playing the keyboard and playing the oboe and singing. I'm writing music, and that hasn't slowed down." Among the composer's many current projects are stage musical versions of two films he scored, Don Juan DeMarco and Mr. Holland's Opus, and he also scored the upcoming Meg Ryan vehicle Against the Ropes.

On November 4th they will release Christopher Young's score to RUNAWAY JURY, a John Grisham adaptation directed by Gary Fleder (Kiss the Girls) and featuring an unusually impressive cast -- John Cusack and Rachel Weisz as jurors in a trial against a gun manufacturer, Dustin Hoffman as the prosecutor, and Gene Hackman as the ruthless jury specialist using blackmail and bribes to throw the trial.

November 11th sees the release of five new CDs, highlighted by Jerry Goldsmith's eighth feature score for director Joe Dante (not counting Dante's Twilight Zone: The Movie segment and his episode of Amazing Stories), LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION, a mixture of live action and animation which stars Brendan Fraser, Jenna Elfman, Steve Martin, and all the classic Looney Tunes characters.

Another fantasy comedy, ELF, was scored by John Debney and stars Will Ferrell as a man raised from infancy by Santa's elves who tries to adjust to life outside the North Pole. In a completely different vein, SYLVIA, scored by Gabriel Yared, is a biopic of the poet Sylvia Plath, with Gwyneth Paltrow as Plath, Daniel Craig as her husband, poet Ted Hughes, and Paltrow's real-life mom Blythe Danner as Plath's mother.

The final two CD releases for the week are both of scores for television, a medium that is too little represented in the soundtrack world. ALIAS features Michael Giacchino's music for the popular series which stars Jennifer Garner as a spy; previously, Giacchino was best known for his music to the Medal of Honor computer games. TAKEN is Laura Karpmann's score for the Emmy winning Spielberg-produced miniseries about alien abductions, and is the first Karpmann score to receive a commercial CD release (a few of her earlier TV scores were released as composer promos).

Finally, on November 18th, the label will release John Ottman's score to GOTHIKA, the latest film from Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis' horror production company Dark Castle, which also brought us House on Haunted Hill, Thirteen Ghosts and Ghost Ship. This supernatural mystery stars Oscar-winner Halle Berry as a therapist at a mental institution who finds herself on the wrong side of the bars after an encounter with a ghostly apparition and her husband's murder. The film co-stars Robert Downey Jr. and Penelope Cruz, and is the first American film directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, whose eclectic resume includes directing La Haine and Crimson Rivers and playing the love interest in Amelie.

A variety of other upcoming soundtracks have been announced recently: next Tuesday, Hip-O will release the soundtrack to INTOLERABLE CRUELTY, featuring songs plus seven cues by Carter Burwell. On October 14th, Lakeshore will follow up their UNDERWORLD song album with a disc of Paul Haslinger's score. On October 21, Hip-O will release the RADIO soundtrack, with songs and 26 minutes of James Horner's score. The same day, Warner Bros. will release the soundtrack to MYSTIC RIVER; no word yet on how much if any of Clint Eastwood's score will be featured.

Decca will release THE CAT IN THE HAT on November 11th, featuring David Newman's score and two Marc Shaiman/Scott Wittman songs, and on November 25th Elektra will release Hans Zimmer's score for the epic adventure THE LAST SAMURAI. Sony Classical has announced score CDs for BIG FISH (Danny Elfman), THE MISSING (James Horner) and PETER PAN (James Newton Howard), but no release dates are available yet. No word on soundtracks yet for two other Horner projects, Beyond Borders and House of Sand and Fog, but I would assume they are inevitable.

The new song compilation CD BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: RADIO SUNNYDALE also features one score cue, "The Final Fight," by Rob Duncan.

A piece of "film music" familiar to many soundtrack collectors which has actually never been featured in a film before will be heard in the new film WONDERLAND, a docudrama about porn star John Holmes' involvement in a brutal murder in the early 80s. Along with the inevitable songs and the Cliff Martinez score, one scene is scored with "I Work the Whole City," one of Dave Blume's jazz-pop reworkings of Bernard Herrmann's original music from the old Taxi Driver soundtrack. The Sony CD of Wonderland does not include this cue, nor does it feature any of Martinez' score.

This week's issue of the L.A. Weekly features a profile of Martinez, in which he expresses his appreciation of Herrmann ("He's one of the pioneers of minimalism in film. He had an amazing ability to take a simple three-note motif and spin off endless variations that not only held your interest, but created great emotion as well") and Elmer Bernstein, as well as more recent composers such as Carter Burwell, Harry Gregson-Williams, Thomas Newman and Hans Zimmer.

He also tells an anecdote which explains why his usual collaborator, director Steven Soderbergh, tends to prefer discreet, minimalist film music: "One time me and Steven went to see The Rocketeer, which had this bombastic orchestral score. And I was groovin' on it, and Steven elbows me and goes, 'Don't you hate that shit?'"

The soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL VOL. 1, released last week in stores, features Herrmann's theme to Twisted Nerve as promised, as well as Charles Bernstein's White Lightning and Quincy Jones' Ironside. And a bunch of songs, natch.

The new Criterion Collection DVD of THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER (aka All That Money Can Buy), for which Herrmann won the Oscar, features a great deal of supplemental material about the composer and his music.

The brand new, 2-disc DVD release of the classic THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD features an isolated track of the classic, Oscar-winning Erich Wolfgang Korngold score in mono, as well as 17 minutes of Korngold playing on his home piano and the contents of a 30-minute 78 RPM release with Rathbone narrating the film's story over a recording of Korngold conducting his score.

Two films with unreleased early 70s Jerry Goldsmith scores have just been released on DVD. THE HOMECOMING: A CHRISTMAS STORY was the TV movie that became the long-running series The Waltons, and though Goldsmith scored the movie it did not include the main title theme he later wrote for the series, one of his finest and most popular works for television. Also available is THE DON IS DEAD, a 1973 gangster film featuring the kind of offbeat orchestrations that made the composer's work from that era especially delightful.

The thriller SCENES OF THE CRIME, starring Jeff Bridges and scored by Christopher Young, has skipped a theatrical release and is now available on DVD.

Oscar- and Tony-winning director Elia Kazan died September 21 at his home in Manhattan. Born Elia Kazanjoglous in Constantinople (now Istanbul), he moved to the U.S. at the age of four, growing up in New York. After attending the Yale Drama School, he joined the famous Group Theater as an actor and went on to play small roles in a few films, including City for Conquest. He began directing for the Group and his first big success was the Broadway production of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. He directed such other shows as the musical One Touch of Venus, Tea and Sympathy and the groundbreaking A Streetcar Named Desire, and won Tonys for directing All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and J.B.

His first feature as a director was the Oscar winner A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, following it up with Best Picture and Best Director winner Gentleman's Agreement, whose depiction of pervasive anti-Semitism in the U.S. is still impressive today. These were followed by the documentary-style true crime drama Boomerang! (seeing it today can only remind one how much "documentary-style" has changed in 55 years) and the terrific thriller Panic in the Streets. During this period, he, Lee Strasberg, and other Group Theater alumni founded the Actors Studio, which helped determine the style of screen and stage acting for the next half-century.

The fifties were the prime period of Kazan's screen career, with classics like A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata! (Kazan is probably the only great director to have made two films with exclamation points in their titles) and Best Picture and Best Director winner On the Waterfront. However, during the same period, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee about his past involvement in the Communist Party and named eleven others, an act which allowed him to continue working but for which he was criticized to the end of his life.

Though Kazan's films are especially remembered for their great acting, his use of music was also impressive. At least two of his Alfred Newman-composed projects, Gentleman's Agreement and Panic in the Streets, featured unusually sparse scores, virtually no non-source music between the main and end titles (a far cry from the through-composed, Steiner-style scores one associates with the era), while Alex North's jazz-based score for A Streetcar Named Desire was revolutionary -- as Jerry Goldsmith thought upon hearing it, "This changes everything." He also directed the only film scored by Leonard Bernstein, On the Waterfront, and the first film scored by Leonard Rosenman (East of Eden), who at the time was James Dean's piano coach.

In the sixties he made fewer films but began writing novels, directing the movie versions of two of them, America, America (a Best Picture nominee) and The Arrangement, but he made only two films in the 1970s. The Visitors was a low-budget drama written by Kazan's son Chris (another son, Nicholas, wrote Enough, Fallen, and several other screenplays) which featured James Woods in his first major role, and was inspired by the same true story that was the basis for Casualties of War. In the Kazan film, the protagonist has returned to the States after the Vietnam War, and he and his family are terrorized by the soldiers he testified against. His final film was an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon, and featured a remarkable cast, not surprisingly given Kazan's reputation with actors -- Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Jeanne Moreau, Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence, Dana Andrews, John Carradine, Anjelica Huston, and Robert DeNiro in the title role as a Hollywood producer based on Irving Thalberg. Kazan received a controversial Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 1999, and though he was given a standing ovation many attendees, including Ed Harris, chose not to applaud.

The following is a list of Kazan's feature films and their composers:

A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN - Alfred Newman
THE SEA OF GRASS - Herbert Stothart
GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT - Alfred Newman
BOOMERANG! - David Buttolph
PINKY - Alfred Newman
PANIC IN THE STREETS - Alfred Newman
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE - Alex North
VIVA ZAPATA! - Alex North
MAN ON A TIGHTROPE - Franz Waxman
ON THE WATERFRONT - Leonard Bernstein
EAST OF EDEN - Leonard Rosenman
BABY DOLL - Kenyon Hopkins
A FACE IN THE CROWD - Tom Glazer
WILD RIVER - Kenyon Hopkins
SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS - David Amram
AMERICA, AMERICA - Manos Hadjidakis
THE ARRANGEMENT - David Amram
THE VISITORS
THE LAST TYCOON - Maurice Jarre

The Event - Christophe Beck (8 min. of score), various - Varese Sarabande
Matchstick Men - Hans Zimmer - Varese Sarabande
Out of Time - Graeme Revell - Varese Sarabande
The Rundown - Harry Gregson-Williams - Varese Sarabande
Under the Tuscan Sun - Christophe Beck - Hollywood

Bubba Ho-Tep - Brian Tyler
The Event - Christophe Beck - Song CD on Varese with 8 min. of score
Out of Time - Graeme Revell - Score CD on Varese Sarabande
The School of Rock - Craig Wedren - Song CD on Atlantic
The Station Agent - Stephen Trask
Stealing Time - Joey Newman
Wonderland - Cliff Martinez - Song CD on Sony

October 7
Intolerable Cruelty - Carter Burwell, various - Hip-O
October 14
Poltergeist II: The Other Side: The Deluxe Edition - Jerry Goldsmith - Varese Sarabande
Underworld - Paul Haslinger - Lakeshore
October 21
Point of Origin - John Ottman - La-La Land
Radio - James Horner - Hip-O
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Steve Jablonsky - LaLa Land
October 28
Shattered Glass - Mychael Danna - Thrive
November 4
The Matrix Revolutions - Don Davis - Maverick
Runaway Jury - Christopher Young - Varese Sarabande
November 11
Alias - Michael Giacchino - Varese Sarabande
The Cat in the Hat - David Newman - Decca
Elf - John Debney - Varese Sarabande
Looney Tunes: Back in Action - Jerry Goldsmith - Varese Sarabande
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World - Christopher Gordon, Iva Davies, Richard Tognetti - Decca
Sylvia - Gabriel Yared - Varese Sarabande
Taken - Laura Karpmann - Varese Sarabande
November 18
Gothika - John Ottman - Varese Sarabande
November 25
The Last Samurai - Hans Zimmer - Elektra
Date Unknown
The Abominable Dr. Phibes - Basil Kirchin - Perseverance
Amerika - Basil Poledouris - Prometheus
Battle Cry - Max Steiner - Screen Archives/BYU
Big Fish - Danny Elfman - Sony Classical
The Black Swan - Alfred Newman - Screen Archives
The Blue Bird - Alfred Newman - Screen Archives
Brannigan - Dominic Frontiere - LaLa Land
The CBS Years vol. 1: The Westerns - Bernard Herrmann - Prometheus
Dirty Harry - Lalo Schifrin - Aleph
The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal - various - La-La Land
The Ghost and Mr. Chicken - Vic Mizzy - Percepto
The Hellstrom Chronicle - Lalo Schifrin - Aleph
The Keys of the Kingdom - Alfred Newman - Screen Archives
Mighty Joe Young, etc. - Roy Webb, et al - Monstrous Movie Music
The Missing - James Horner - Sony Classical
Peter Pan - James Newton Howard - Sony Classical
The Reluctant Astronaut - Vic Mizzy - Percepto
A Summer Place - Max Steiner - Screen Archives/BYU
This Island Earth, etc. - Herman Stein, et al - Monstrous Movie Music

October 3 - Roy Webb born (1888)
October 3 - Arnold Bax died (1953)
October 4 - BT born as Brian Transeau (1970)
October 6 - Stanley Myers born (1933)
October 6 - Giuseppe Becce died (1973)
October 6 - Nelson Riddle died (1985)
October 7 - Gabriel Yared born (1949)
October 8 - Walter Schumann born (1913)
October 8 - Toru Takemitsu born (1930)
October 8 - Frank Skinner died (1968)
October 9 - Camille Saint-Saens born (1835)

DUPLEX - David Newman

"Rather than affecting a steely, understated deadpan, DeVito enacts black comedy through funny camera angles, wild chiaroscuro lighting effects, and thundering music cues, as if he were performing delicate surgery with a mallet instead of a scalpel."

Scott Tobias, The Onion

"David Newman's plucky, string-heavy score adds a lively comic flavor -- a flavor unfortunately missing in the writing."

David Rooney, Variety

LUTHER - Richard Harvey

"Production is wrapped with rich but old-fashioned taste, from overly careful mise-en-scene to well-researched costumes to pseudo-serious religious music."

Robert Koehler, Variety

FROM: "J. Cabo"

I'm looking for the name of the main theme song played in The Four Feathers (1977 version) made for TV. It's a piano song. I've been looking for it for long time but there's no websites or auction sites selling them or giving information about the soundtrack of that version.
 
Thank you very much.

First, from the writer of the "Wasted Opportunities" column:

FROM: "Jesse Hopkins"

SUBJECT: Defending "Wasted Opportunities"
 
I understand the opposing opinions well. In response to the idea that my article was "flaying a straw man," I am not convinced that old fashioned romantic composing, or dramatic composing in that vein is looked upon kindly by the majority of Conservatory staff and attendees. Although Ross Amico sited great strides toward this type of acceptance, and I do know about them, it is simply not yet enough to erase the stigma to a productive level. We could predict that the new acceptance is proof that there will one day be a breakthrough. Compared to the 50's its great news, but the shadow remains, and I'm not satisfied. As for John Adams, he has his own sensibilities that I don't particularly latch to, but one can even see in the titling of his piece "Naive and Sentimental Music" a product of the self consciousness that many serious composers present something that contains elements of beauty.

Timothy Cooke seems much more interested in how a score works within a film than whether it is good music. That is a valid opinion for someone who cares more about film than music, but I don't think one aspect has to be sacrificed for the other. Because Williams' style has grown and also remained consistent to a level, Cooke calls it "rehashing." The consistency in Williams' work only illustrates the conviction he puts behind his ideas as a composer. As for "new ideas," he's no shorter than Elfman, who I applauded in my article for being an example of one of the better composers out there. Williams and Goldsmith only use big themes when it is appropriate. Cooke says, "Surely we've moved beyond those days of heart-on-sleeve effects. In fact, I believe that such composers are out there, but all too often they don't attract the praise they deserve because they haven't come up with the Big Tune." Even Williams and Goldsmith's textural writing is much better than the rest. Even if they never wrote the big tunes, they would have accomplished more than Preisner or Badalementi.

I respect your differing outlooks, and it is all a matter of personal taste. When personal taste is recovering from being institutionalized, as it was for many years in the Conservatories, and still is to an extent that would deter serious performance of much excellent music, then that's when I have a problem. And when students from these schools who are now film composers can't pull off a convincing emotional score, I think that side of the art is still suffering from the opinions of the staff of the schools. Art music is as modern visual art -- less effort spent mastering and presenting styles and techniques of the past, more time spent trying to break new ground in order to be "viable" as a serious artist. The balance is off and the impact is decreasing.

FROM: "Simon St. Laurent

SUBJECT: well said timothy cooke!

Mr. Cooke's letter from Friday, September 26th is an example of a quality all too rare in the Mailbag column. His arguments about film music being written to accompany a motion picture is something that can't be stated enough. Film scores are no lesser if they don't stand alone, away from the visuals. I enjoy listening to scores from time to time (on CD!) but my first love is the art of "film scoring". It is wonderful. And as a "civilian" friend of mine said after I lent him my CD of the "Chinatown" score, "its great stuff, but after a few minutes I just put on the damn movie!". I knew what he meant.

Mr. Cooke's comment about John Williams writing the same form over and over are well taken -- points I have been making for years. I often -- believe it or not -- get the themes to "Superman" and "Star Wars" mixed up when I hear them played. This is not meant to be a malicious comment as much as a personal one -- and very much in keeping with Mr. Cooke's point. So many of those themes are interchangeable. There are some composers out there who actually take some risks. Mr. Williams just does his thing -- and he is very good at it -- but directors usually need more than an immediate and catchy tune.

I hope to read more of Mr. Cooke's very well presented and considered film music comments.

SUBJECT: Wasted breath on "Wasted Opportunities"
 
Re: Timothy Cooke's anti-John Williams "treatise":

Y-a-w-n.

Nothing but the same old "I dislike Williams(or Goldsmith" diatribes backed up with n-o-t-h-i-n-g other than personal opinion spurred by some other fan's statements..

The paragraph adding faint praise for Danny Elfman as someone who gets the job done the way the director wants it fooled no one.

When are these drooling "fanboys" (or, insert something appropriate) going to stop pretending that Jerry and John are feuding, that it's not an "us" vs. "them" universe when it comes to Williams and Goldsmith; that personal attacks on either composer just because someone else has written that they "outshine the rest" does NOT prove/disprove anything.

It's the 21st Century -- our finest -- F-I-N-E-S-T -- film composers are aging and, in one case, rather ill, and none of us who call ourselves film music fans ought to be creating mythical feuds or belittling any of the composers for the sole purpose of elevating our own favorites, as well as our self-inflated egos.

Mr. Cooke, most of us have the same hopes for the future as you do. But most of us also realize that, as of yet, no one has been propelled to the front ranks -- y-e-t -- to fill the impending void. There are many candidates...most of whom haven't progressed beyond hackdom. But there are a few -- YES! A golden few who possess the talent to assume the mantles of Williams-Goldsmith-Bernstein-Rozsa-Waxman-Newman-Steiner-Korngold.

Let's hope they get their moments!

FROM: "Joel Calhoun"

SUBJECT: 24 Score
 
Now that best music composition for a series is added to the number of Emmys already won by 24, how long will it be before someone releases a score album? Considering the fact that they've released everything from DVDs to t-shirts to script reprints, I find it surprising that no score album has been released as of yet.

MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com