FILM SCORE FRIDAY 4/4/03

Mychael Danna has been let go as the composer of Ang Lee's upcoming film of THE HULK, before the scoring sessions had taken place. His replacement is rumored to be one of two A-list composers: either the composer who for years was erroneously rumored to rely on ghostwriters, or the composer who not only uses other composers to help with his scores but openly credits them on his movies and soundtracks.

On April 22nd, Pleximusic will release Mark Oliver Everett's score to the all-star drama LEVITY, and Universal will release Terence Blanchard's score to the Al Pacino vehicle PEOPLE I KNOW. One week later, Thrive will release Christophe Beck's score to the caper thriller CONFIDENCE.

This fall, the label plans to release some never before released Canadian scores from the 70s and 80s, including Lewis Furey's score to the 1980 film FANTASTICA, starring Thunderball's Claudine Auger.

Dreamcatcher - James Newton Howard - Varese Sarabande
Fear No Evil - Frank LaLoggia - Percepto
The Guys - Mychael Danna - Sony Classical

Dysfunktional Family - Andrew Gross
The Good Thief - Elliot Goldenthal - Song & Score CD on Island (import)
Levity - Mark Oliver Everett - Score CD due Apr. 22 from Pleximusic
A Man Apart - Anne Dudley
Phone Booth - Harry Gregson-Williams - Score CD on Superb
The Son - no score, just superlative filmmaking
Stevie - Dirk Powell
What a Girl Wants - Rupert Gregson-Williams - Song CD on Atlantic

April 8
Ghosts of the Abyss - Joel McNeely - Hollywood
The Wild Thornberrys Movie - Drew Neumann, Randy Kerber - Silverline
April 15
Identity - Alan Silvestri - Varese Sarabande
April 22
Levity - Mark Oliver Everett - Pleximusic
People I Know - Terence Blanchard - Universal
Varese Sarabande 25th Anniversary Collection - Varese Sarabande
April 29
Confidence - Christophe Beck - Thrive
May 13
Something Wild - Aaron Copland - Varese Sarabande
Date Unknown
Amerika - Basil Poledouris - Prometheus
The Big Sky - Dimitri Tiomkin - Screen Archives/BYU
Captain From Castile - Alfred Newman - Screen Archives
The Dreamer of Oz - Lee Holdridge - Percepto
From Beyond - Richard Band - La-La Land
Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Denny Zeitlin - Perseverance
Mighty Joe Young, etc. - Roy Webb, et al - Monstrous Movie Music
Monte Walsh/The Crossfire Trail - Eric Colvin - La-La Land
Roughing It - Bruce Broughton - Intrada Special Collection
A Summer Place - Max Steiner - Screen Archives/BYU
This Island Earth, etc. - Herman Stein, et al - Monstrous Movie Music

April 4 - Elmer Bernstein born (1922)
April 4 - Miklos Rozsa wins his third and final Oscar for Ben-Hur score (1960)
April 5 - Robert B. & Richard M. Sherman win Oscar for Mary Poppins score (1965)
April 6 - Andre Previn born (1929)
April 6 - Dimitri Tiomkin wins Oscar for Old Man and the Sea score (1959)
April 7 - Burt Bacharach wins song and score Oscars for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1970)
April 8 - Maurice Jarre wins first Oscar for Lawrence of Arabia score (1963)
April 8 - Nino Rota and Carmine Coppola win score Oscar for Godfather Part II; Jerry Goldsmith loses for the seventh time (for Chinatown), reportedly wonders why he bothers to show up (1975)
April 9 - Miklos Rozsa begins recording score to The Seventh Sin (1957)
April 9 - Henry Mancini wins song and score Oscars for Breakfast at Tiffany's (1962)
April 9 - Elmer Bernstein begins recording score to The Gypsy Moths (1969)
April 9 - Giorgio Moroder wins Oscar for Midnight Express score (1979)
April 9 - Bill Conti wins Oscar for The Right Stuff score; Michel Legrand wins for Yentl song score (1984)
April 10 - Claude Bolling born (1930)
April 10 - Shirley Walker born (1945)
April 10 - John Barry wins his first two Oscars for the score and song Born Free (1967)
April 10 - Elmer Bernstein wins his only Oscar for, of all things, Thoroughly Modern Millie; Alfred Newman wins his final Oscar for Camelot music adaptation (1968)
April 10 - Michel Legrand wins first Oscar for Summer of '42 score; John Williams wins first Oscar for Fiddler on the Roof music adaptation; Isaac Hays wins only Oscar for song "Theme From Shaft" (1972)
April 10 - Nino Rota died (1979)

BASIC - Klaus Badelt

"James Vanderbilt's script is mostly flashbacks and scenes of people sitting around talking, but director John McTiernan takes that script and muscles it up, with camera movement, atmospheric sets and a pounding score."

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

THE CORE - Christopher Young

"Score by Christopher Young is far more supple and less bombastic than those normally plastered over films like this."

Todd McCarthy, Variety

"The sci-fi action film "The Core," begins with a portentous overture over the Paramount mountain range and then the camera plunges into inner Earth and slams into the movie's title logo."

Elvis Mitchell, New York Times

FROM: "Josh Zach" <Weejitz@aol.com>

SUBJECT:  HELP
 
I am vigorously looking for a piece of music. I know of only two places it has been used. During Warner Brothers 75 Anniversary, the company released a theatrical montage which ran before their films started. The piece of music I'm looking for accompanied that montage. The other place I've heard the tune in the past was during an Oscars ceremony. I believe it was used during the 'In Memoriam' segment. I don't know what ceremony it was used in, but I do know it was within the past six years.

I would be willing to bet that the music was originally used as part of a score to an earlier Warner picture. I say that because Warner would have the copyright on the music to use it in their theatrical montage.

If you, or someone, could help me identify this piece of music, I would be very grateful. I have been curious about the source of this music for quite some time. I'm sorry I cannot be more descriptive, but I'm 85% sure that the piece was used during the 'In Memoriam' segment sometime within the last six years.

Whatever you can dig up is immensely appreciated.

FROM: "Robyn Arlidge" <rmarlidge@optusnet.com.au>

Re: this year's Oscars' "In Memoriam" music

The theme in question is the music that accompanies the final scene and end credits of 'Dangerous Beauty', composed by George Fenton. The same theme was used for the 'In Memoriam' segment a couple of years ago.

FROM: "Preston Jones" <pjones@fulpat.com>

Hi, Scott. Can't resist piggy-backing on your column today.
 
First, one quick opinion: Eminem's win over "I Move On" will go down in Oscar history as their worst pandering-to-pop-radio choice of Best Song ever since they passed over the Gershwins' "They Can't Take That Away From Me" in favor of "Sweet Leilani" in 1938. (At least, the fact that the Academy apparently chose not to have somebody other than Eminem recite the number indicates that they realized it's more about the performance and persona than about the "song-writing," and gives rise to the hope that Eminem's ouevre will die with him after his earthly demise. Not that I mean that mean-spirited remark literally, but I do believe that a "song" is music plus words, not just words; and I believe that honoring such a genuinely mean-spirited artist as Eminem does no honor to the Academy.)
 
About CHICAGO and the Academy audience applauding the Credit crawl asserting that the stars did their own singing and dancing. A lot of the CHICAGO publicity emphasized all the sweat and tears of the three stars preparing their numbers. As Leonard Maltin has pointed out on his website, "Movie Crazy," in the Hollywood heyday there was such a thing as professionalism and it was routinely understood that actors worked hard in rehearsals without expecting a medal for it.
 
A few Fridays ago, director Rob Marshall hosted a screening of Vincente Minnelli's THE BAND WAGON as part of the "Cinema's Legacy" series wherein prominent film-makers show movies which influenced them. Many in the audience were interested in the contrast between the fluid editing of BANDWAGON versus the frenetic MTV-editing in CHICAGO. Marshall claimed that he did not use that editing in the TV version of ANNIE, (and, not having seen it, I'll have to take him at his word), but said he chose the faster style for CHICAGO because he felt it would help him keep that constant byplay between reality and fantasy moving forward. However, it's interesting that Marshall also told of attending a focus-group pre-release screening of his CHIACAGO and being horrified to hear a woman in the audience discussion afterward declare, "Well, you can obviously tell that that wasn't Richard Gere doing that tap dance! Look at the way they shot it and edited it" It was then, says Marshall, that he decided to put that credit in the end about the stars strutting their own stuff. Personally, I hope this was a learning experience for the talented Mr. Marshall. If you have to pay today's prices to see a star dancing but you don't know whether or not you've seen him dance until you read it in the end credits, something is wrong.
 
(Marshall mused that he might include the un-cut master shots of some of the numbers in the CHICAGO DVD.)
 
This isn't an actual review, but in an essay titled, "Why I'm Not Bored," by critic Stanley Kauffmann (collected in ROGER EBERT'S BOOK OF FILM, Norton, 1997), you'll find this: "No one assumes that a literary critic gets bored, yet, having worked in both kinds of criticism, I know that the rewards of poor films are more savorable, more certain, than those of poor novels. The music in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST was like a Puccini sauna."

I wrote to the New York Times taking Mr. Thommasini (sp?) to task for failing to even mention Elmer Bernstein's nominated score for FAR FROM HEAVEN. Had I known what you knew about Kilar and THE PIANIST, I would have scolded him for that, too. To my surprise, the Sunday Arts & Leisure letters section a few weeks later led off with not one but three letters responding to Thomassini's film music piece, including mine. Many of us can remember the day when the Times wouldn't have run an article on film music, much less three letters.

As expected, the FSM CD of Rozsa's PLYMOUTH ADVENTURE is a joy. But why did no one think to include in the liner notes the words to the hymn? FSM will be doing a lot of us a favor if you could at least print this verse on your website.

SUBJECT:  Hours?
 
Could you elaborate on why Philip Glass does not deserve, in your opinion, to win an Oscar for the Hours. One obvious reason was his reuse of themes from "The Thin Blue Line" (track 12 "Escape"). Other than that, Glass deserves at some point to win an Oscar for his film work. James Horner certainly deserved an Oscar but Titanic, which seemed to borrow heavily on the style of Enya, did not really deserve the Oscar nod. I am however pleased that Goldenthal won for Frida and, not to bash John Williams excellent "Catch Me If You Can," am glad that Williams did not win because his score was basically an upbeat variation of his score to JFK. I'm sure you'll give me hell for that comparison.

Though it's no masterpiece, THE CORE is one of the most sheerly enjoyable films I've seen this year. While it was clearly made to cash in on the success of Armageddon, it has the much more innocent feeling of the kind of movie I grew up watching on TV, like When Worlds Collide or Crack in the World. It's helped a lot by a way-overqualified cast (Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, Stanley Tucci, Tchecky Karyo, Alfre Woodard) and especially a surprisingly amusing script. The credited writers are Cooper Layne and John Rogers, and I don't mean to disparage them by wondering if Nicholas Meyer might have had a hand in the script - the best moments are reminiscent of Meyer's Star Trek films, and Meyer did co-write Sommersby for Core director Jon Amiel. (Does anyone have any info on the history of the Core script? I know that it was originally going to be directed by Peter Hyams, but someone probably decided that Hyams' films are dark looking enough without sending him beneath the earth's crust.) Christopher Young's score is lively and entertaining, but I tend to find his big movie scores (like Hard Rain and Entrapment) a little impersonal, and I get the sense he's more inspired by more intimate stories.

I was a little alarmed to read an end-of-the-year movie wrapup in Esquire magazine from one of my favorite critics, Tom Carson, in which he panned Austin Powers in Goldmember. Not because he didn't find it funny (though he didn't) - after all, nothing is more subjective than comedy, and Carson once praised the unwatchable CIA comedy Company Man - but because he seemed to feel the problem with the film was that it didn't have any memorable catchphrases. Has Saturday Night Live degraded the culture so thoroughly that comedy must rely on instantly repeated catchphrases? And who needs catchphrases when you've got lines like "I'm sorry, I don't speak freaky deaky Dutch," "How about nooooo, ya crazy Dutch bastard," and "You know, Goldmember, I don't think that's something one dude should say to another dude. Yeah, a little bit creepy, mmm-hmmm?"

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