The Return of the Temp Score Extravaganza -- Part 3/4
A stream of "temporary" consciousness on temp track influences
By Luke Goljan
Don Davis' score to both Wachowski Brothers movies contain similar
sounding snippets from other scores. His score to Bound has chase music virtually
identical to that from Basic Instinct
(the same portion, by the way, repeatedly used in movie trailers to
emphasize the film as a serious thriller). Davis' score to The Matrix, strikingly original and
refreshingly different-sounding from the current synth-action sound of
today's action movies, bears some similar sound qualities during chase
sequences with a film it is also accused of ripping off in regards to
plot: Dark City. While it's
fair to assume that Davis may have been working under a temp-track set
down by someone who once again obeyed the
this-movie-had-a-similar-plot-and-therefore-its-music-will-fit-perfectly
rule, its also possible that his Post-Modern approach is shared by
Trevor Jones. Maybe they both really like Stravinsky's "Rite of
Spring," which both films also sound a lot like. Or maybe someone just
noticed that the protagonist was running around in an artificially
created world and men in black were following after him. Either
argument holds water. Neo's waking up in the machine-dmoniated world
also bears an interesting resemblance to Capt. Picard's awakening
inside the Borg ship in First Contact.
The orchestra bursts faster and faster until the choir joins in for the
wide shot. Maybe this was a temp-track, most likely it's a coincidence,
but you have to admit both scenes are quite similar…having the music
sound such is just plain strange.
Let's get one thing clear here: True
Romance is a rip-off of Badlands
from A to Z. Not only is the plot similar, but somewhere along the line
someone decided to have Hans Zimmer rip off the main title music from
it too. This is one of the most blatant copies I have ever heard and I
honestly don't know how they ever expected to pass it off as an homage
since it sounds virtually identical. Honestly, I like True Romance, and I like Badlands, but it's a bit like
trying to admit to liking Orgy's cover of "Blue Monday." As cool as it
is, it was done before and you're really not bringing anything new to
the table.
A Zimmer protégé, Mark Mancina made his mark with the
exciting score to Speed and
discovered himself typecast instantly. Fortunately, he has had a few
chances to showcase his talent in other genres and a fantastic example
is the beautiful score to the Disney lukewarm hit Tarzan. Mancina wasn't actually the
first choice to do the score, it was supposed to be Alan Silvestri. Due
to scheduling conflicts however, Silvestri had to pass on the score and
Mancina found himself faced with writing music around both annoying
Phil Collins pop songs and Silvestri temp-tracks. Thus, every time the
music gets really emotional and crescendoes to showcase a discovery, it
sounds like the Abyss music
that was undoubtably put there by someone who thought they'd be helping
the future composer by using his own work. Mancina tries to cover it
with a shakuhachi flute, but you can still tell. It sure is pretty,
though.
Another fan of the Zimmer style of scoring, Trevor Rabin provided more Abyss rips in his score to the
surprisingly good Deep Blue Sea.
It's not like composers ever rip off any portion of The Abyss other than the "Main
Titles" and "Back on the Air" cues. Always the choral stuff. No
offense, but its always painfully obvious. Deep Blue Sea also finds it's
inspiration for track 3 in the pacing and theme of John Frizzell's Dante's Peak (or is that James
Newton Howard's Dante's Peak,
since he wrote the main theme?). And later crashing action music that
increases in speed and intensity has another Frizzell source: Alien Resurrection, insultingly
enough grabbed from a sequence where the Aliens attack underwater. Whoever
temps this stuff isn't awfully creative in their thinking. Sort of like
the use of music from The X-Files
in the trailer for X-Men or
music from The Thirteenth Floor
under the Thirteen Ghosts
trailer. Why not put Antz in
the Spider Man promo?
The quasi-futuristic Schwarzenegger action flick The Sixth Day borrows its track 12
from track 10 of the quasi-futuristic Stallone flick Demolition Man, scored by Elliot
Goldenthal. Rabin adds in his own little flourishes, but it all sounds
akin to slapping on extra pieces to someone else's work (and why the
hell does that film have an Irish-sounding theme anyway?). It seems
Arnold and Sly's friendly rivalry has seeped into even the music
department. As for Rabin's Gone in
60 Seconds music, a friend of mine discovered a song by Michael
Brook called "Ultramarine," that sounds exactly the same as the
floating vocal-melody-over-guitars which appears for the first time in
track 2. Not a score rip-off, but blatant enough that I felt it should
be pointed out.
John Frizzell's work consistently comes very close to copying the
temp-track, but always manages to avoid it. Beavis and Butthead do America
obviously used Edward Scissorhands
to underscore the walk into the sunset, but Frizzell manages to make it
sound different enough, as he does with the Godzilla/King Kong music in
the opening. Dante's Peak has
a bit of action-car-music that could be Speed, but it escapes without
treading too familiar ground. And Teaching Mrs. Tingle, which has been
described as Christopher Young meets Danny Elfman also seemed to have
some influences of Alan Silvestri's Who
Framed Roger Rabbit, with pieces recreating the feel of the
Judge Doom final-villian-rant music.
Still, only on Thirteen Ghosts
does he really copy anything. The action music sounds similar to both Deep Rising and Aliens and when Frizzell finally
just goes all out in track 7, the music copies Horner's underscore to
Bill Paxton's death in Aliens
and the origin is firmly established. Also odd about this score is the
fact that although the main theme sounds nothing like Don Davis' House on Haunted Hill score, the
two movies have virtually identical plots and sweeping main themes that
play out in the same meter. A group of people gather in a brilliantly
designed setpiece of a house and walk around while the music blasts. A
quirky usually-comedic-actor-in-a-dramatic-turn tells them to leave
right away when suddenly the house locks itself up, shutting them
inside to be at the mercy of the ghosts who live in the basement. It
then becomes a chase movie and a race to discover the true intent of
the person who invited them to the house. And these movies were made by
the same company!
The late Brian May also fell victim to the perils of the temp-track at
least once. His opening titles music
to Dr. Giggles copies a theme directly from Darkman, even going so far as to
utilize the same instrumentation. Of course, May's music has been
temped under plenty of films as well. The score to The Road Warrior is frequently used
as a default action music track.
I mentioned before that it's unfair to use the Edward Scissorhands critique on a
score that happens to use a choir section, but Bruce Broughton's Baby's Day Out is a particularly
obvious example. As the police surround the robber's hideout to
retrieve baby Bink, the music rips Scissorhands
off thematically right down to the chord (2:29 into the track, to be
specific). You can find this music as track 17 ("The End of the Story")
on an extraodinarily expensive promo if you want to put up with the
rest of the score, most of which sounds like John Williams lite.
Whoever temp-tracked Mr. Deeds
seemed to have the same idea, since Teddy Castellucci's music ends up
sounding very similar. Amusingly enough, the same track on Baby's Day Out also steals Kahn's
theme from James Horner's Wrath of
Khan!
Broughton has also drawn inspiration from Jerry Goldsmith, as his score
to The Shadow Conspiracy
reveals. Track 1 is very Goldsmith, with a touch of Kamen here and
there, while the main theme in Track 2 sounds a bit like a Goldsmith
theme played along with a John Barry score. Is there any obvious
temp-tracking? Perhaps not, but the music sounds enough like Goldsmith
(and Williams, as is par for the course with Broughton) to get mention
here. The director, George P. Cosmatos, directed Rambo: First Blood Part 2, which
was scored by Goldsmith, so temping it with familiar music would make
sense. Broughton was also called in as Goldsmith's replacement for Lost in Space, indicating that he
is viewed in more than one circle as a suitable replacement.
Young Sherlock Holmes
meandered into legal territory finally this year with a nice two disc
promo. Looking at this lush ILM-coated spectacle, it's surprising to
not hear John Williams under it, but Broughton makes up for that by
sounding similar (his 'creepy' music particularly notable for this).
Besides Williams, Broughton also snags little bits from Herrmann's Psycho for track 7 of CD 1, three
minutes in (it sounds like the aftermath of the murder). One minute
into track 9 he's going after Poltergeist's
storytelling music. And doesn't that chant sound like they're saying
'Bobbit?'
While Goldsmith temps are fresh in my mind, I should mention Richard
Marvin's score to U-571, the
main theme of which sounds suspiciously similar to Air Force One. Both very patriotic
movies, so the temping would make sense. If you want another Kevin
Bacon-esque degree of connection, the German film Das Boot about men performing
derring-do in a submarine was directed by Wolfgang Peterson, who
directed Air Force One. U-571, being a movie with a
submarine in it, inevitably drew comparisons with Das Boot. Maybe somewhere, some
studio executive made this connection. Or maybe it's a coincidence. Go
ask the editor.
Patrick Doyle's love of classical music always lands him distinguished
period piece scores and dramas. Consequently, his scores usually avoid
sounding like anything that have come before them. This excepts Needful Things, however, which
contains multiple usages of the Vertigo
tragic/love theme. Maybe he and Joel McNeely were hanging out that week.
Mark Snow's music has been lauded critically for helping define the
dark realm of the now defunct X-Files.
Indeed, it's often so dark that, as one friend said "I can't get into
it…every time Mulder goes to say something sweet to Scully, I keep
thinking he's going to slit her throat." That is, of course, the charm
of the show. Or was, at least. Snow made the transition to the big
screen fairly easily, his feature film score making the jump easily
from the TV sound to the 'big movie' sound. It also heralded a
departure from the music concrete soundscape of the show and the
introduction of evident temp-tracks. Most evident of these is the
reworking of the Speed theme
50 seconds into track 3, (and if you don't hear it at first, it's
unmistakable 1:20 in!). Track 17 yields infinite variations on that
strange theme heard in Usual
Suspects, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Alien: Resurrection. In a track not
present on the soundtrack but audible in the film itself, Snow knocks
off Debney's climactic chase music from The Relic as Mulder and Scully rush
to escape the alien compound. Unique to this instance however is that
unlike other temp-tracks, the cues borrowed from share no similiarities
with the scenes they were eventually reworked into.
J. Peter Robinson consistently provides some of the most top-notch
synth work out there. When finally given a chance at "big-time" movies
(and I use this term loosely) he made the transition over to a larger
sound pretty well, but retained some temp-track influences. His score
to Wes Craven's New Nightmare
completely rips off The Omen
(track 16, 1:23 it becomes quite evident) and even the world's most
obvious score: Jaws (track
31, 1:17). Most of the rest of the score splashes excitedly about in
varying synth/orchestra textures, but these two total rip-offs stand
out defiantly. His score to the Howie Long epic, Firestorm, not only sounds a lot
like The Fugitive (for a
scene where the bad guy changes his appearance and escapes from prison
no less…how original), it also sounds a bit like Terminal Velocity, another
unabashedly cheesy action movie. There are also times it sounds similar
to Dante's Peak, which makes
sense since the forest is on fire in this movie too.
Stephen Endelman's score to Jawbreaker
sounds nothing like Heathers,
but describing it makes it easy to see where the concept to Endelman's
catchy score originated. Teens cope with death in a flippant manner
while learning some important lessons about self-esteem and life in
general while pop music melds with a synth-pop beat-driven soundtrack
reminiscent of Danny Elfman in places. Which one was I describing?
George S. Clinton did a great job of capturing the feel of the old spy
movies without actually ripping them off with his Austin Powers scores. Except in one
place, however. As Austin and Felicity emerge from the water in The Spy Who Shagged Me, the music
playing is a retread of You Only
Live Twice. Another instance of temp-tracking with Clinton is
his score to Wild Things,
which contains a 'sad' female solo theme akin to Scream's female solo theme. Both
films contain Neve Campbell, who was a hot marketing commodity at the
time.
David Kitay's Scary Movie
score has intentional similarities (mostly during the first track) with
the music from Scream. It's
not worth going into much, since this was obviously intentional, as it
was in Spy Hard, where Bill
Conti deliberately copies Speed,
True Lies and Home Alone.
To Be Concluded...
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