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Posted: |
Jul 4, 2015 - 4:05 PM
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By: |
McD
(Member)
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OK, inspired by a few of the recent posts about film music being not what it used to be, I thought I’d throw in my own two cents. No one is going to agree with all of this, I'm sure, but what the hell. I fell out of love with current film music a while ago, but have only just realised it all went sour for me and my favourite composers at near enough the exact same time. There were probably about 18 utterly apocalyptic months for my movie music favourites, and my interest never fully recovered.
For many, 2004 is already enshrined in Film Music infamy due to the death of arguably its most beloved composer Jerry Goldsmith. But for me, this was the year when it all went to shit.
It started to hit the fan slightly earlier, of course. 2001 saw the retirement of John Barry and Maurice Jarre. 2002 and the death of Elmer Bernstein, just two years after an Oscar nomination (and a campaign which saw Elmer still full of beans). In 2003, one of my favourites, Craig Safan, who was finding it increasingly difficult to get any work, composed his last assignment within the industry, and was forced to go off to write circus music (no kidding!) and show tunes. The same year saw the unexpected retirement of Elliot Goldenthal, arguably the biggest talent to emerge in the 90’s (barring three scores for his Mrs, and a snatch of a score for Michael Mann).
Two greats Basil Poledouris and Jerry Goldsmith both also finished their last films in 2003, after sadly becoming terminally ill. Then, six weeks before the beginning of 2004, an ailing Michael Kamen suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack. The stage was well and truly set for the end of film music’s greatest period.
In 2004, another of my favourite composers (and my vote for the most underrated of my lifetime) Michael Convertino, hung up the baton and decided he’d had enough. He’s come back for just one score in 2009 and promptly vanished again.
The biggest name in film composing also had a very bad year, for me at least. As great as the Williams / Spielberg collaboration had been for them both for the first 20 years, the next 20... the exact opposite. Certainly the post ’93 films have been mostly awful, poor scripts, logic thrown out of the window, with scores that rarely matched the heyday of the collaboration. Possibly the worst of those films was Amistad, with Saving Private Ryan not that far behind. But at least in those instances John Williams could take cover behind African rhythms and war noise. But on 2004’s The Terminal, a moronic comedy that wasn’t funny and made no sense whatsoever, Williams had nowhere to hide. It didn’t help that he decided to emphasise the Eastern European nature of the Hanks character making the score sound like Schindler for dummies. JW’s involvement in this project was just so undignified to me it hurt. His talents are allowed to wane, given his age and the ridiculous heights he reached previously – I personally consider 2008’s Adventures of Mutt to be his worst ever cue – but his very involvement in this crud makes me sad. And he didn’t step up to plate and knock it out of the park either. And to date, he’s only done one single film with no Spielberg / Lucas involvement since.
A disastrous year also for another of the biggest scoring legends of the day, Danny Elfman, who scored just Spider-man 3 and complained it was the worst experience of his scoring life. Chunks of his music were replaced by Christopher Young. He would never work with Sam Raimi again, he said, but the kid’s got no backbone and, like with Tim Burton a decade earlier, after a film apart, they kissed and made up.
My favourite composer in 2004 was Gabriel Yared. He’d worked for a whole year on the score to Troy. This is how films should be scored, when they can afford it. It was rejected after some nasty feedback on preview screenings. James Horner may have put the final nail in the coffin himself when shown the film (before Yared was officially sacked). Horner, who wanted the job since day one, would score it in just 9 days, and Yared, justifiably upset, released an open letter and dumped what he had of his unfinished score onto the internet. Whilst Horner almost certainly answered the question ‘Can you do this score in a 9 days?’ with ‘It’ll cost ya’, I don’t think the experience did him any favours. His score was unfavourably compared to Yared’s – not Horner’s fault, but still... Did Yared contact Horner directly? The fact that Horner broke ranks himself with some very harsh words about Yared in public soon afterwards, makes me think he did. His remarks on Yared’s score seem ridiculous in the extreme, and he also attacked him for aping Bach in his Oscar winner The English Patient. Horner said that! I dunno, reading between those lines, I can almost imagine the line Yared may have taken with him.
Either way, it was a bad experience for Horner, snubbed again immediately afterwards by Petersen. And on a film about a nautical disaster!!! The ultimate slap in the face! Like he hadn’t done the business on The Perfect Storm! Or even that film with the iceberg!
Sadly, it was even worse for Yared. He hasn’t done a bad score since, but neither has a single one had any of that magic dust he was sprinkling with gay abandon on almost everything up to Troy. His next released score, L’Avion would be the last of a great run of almost uninterrupted classics matched by very few composers ever. I’ve started to accept the magic probably isn’t coming back.
And there’s Howard Shore, who would, to my hearing, go the same way as Yared, and at the same time. In my Top Five from The Fly, his appointment on Lord of the Rings was a hugely welcome surprise. And Shore knocked it out of the park, becoming a legend in film music, and gaining a fan base who normally don’t care about these things. But... 2004 saw him thrown back into business as usual. Like Frodo, he was the little guy who could, his mission a complete success. But things when he got back to The Shire were never the same.
I’d say his pre-LOTR days with Cronenberg yielded six five star classic scores out of eight. The five scores post-LOTR? None terrible, but none memorable either, like all of his other assignments these days. Shore might as well have gotten a ticket on that boat with Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood at the end of Return of the King, and gone off Into The West. [For the record, other than a brief blast on Spotify and 30 minutes of the first film, I’m generally unfamiliar with The Hobbit films and scores]
But of course, the year remains best known in film music circles for the loss of Jerry Goldsmith, whose popularity in film music is arguably matched only by John Williams. Personally, I’m amongst a minority who didn’t think much of 21st Century Goldsmith, I have to admit. He could have retired after Malice in 1993 and my Goldsmith listening habits would be little different. But legend he was, and the sense of loss in film music circles was unheard of.
If the death of Goldsmith was the end of a golden era for film composing, there is probably an event which rung in the new, lesser era. ‘Twas a phone call from Christopher Nolan to a composer, telling him he was going to direct a superhero reboot film, and he’d like him to do the music. But there was a catch. He also wanted James Newton Howard involved, so the composer would have to accept he wouldn’t have sole musical vision on the project and he hoped handing over some of the reins wouldn’t be an issue.
Hans Zimmer almost couldn’t say yes for laughing.
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Well it was nearly everything post 1980 for me, but I'm just a sad old git.
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I'm generally dire about the current state of film scoring....but no.
There have been some utterly magnificent scores in the past decade (Howard Shore's Hobbit scores among them). So I can't agree with this. They're endangered, not extinct.
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I stopped reading when I got to the utter guff being spewed about the Spielberg/Williams collaboration, but I probably should have stopped reading when Elmer Bernstein was killed off two years too early.
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Posted: |
Jul 4, 2015 - 6:08 PM
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By: |
Ray Worley
(Member)
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Other than the fact that we lost some great film composers around that time, there's very little I can agree with here. (OK, I can agree that LOTR was a magnificent achievement and a milestone in film scoring and that Yared's TROY was miles better than Horner's). But I can't agree with the basic premise here.
I'm basically a senior now (although I still feel 20) and I've been collecting soundtracks since the late 60s. Sometimes I feel that there aren't as many good scores now , but I think that is just perception and a bit faulty. Every decade has some truly great scores and a tremendous amount of dreck. It's always been that way. As Theodore Sturgeon famously said: "90% of everything is crap".
Maybe the fact that in past decades, most scores were never released as stand-alone listens and now almost everything gets released....including stuff that probably shouldn't...leads to the belief that scores are not as good these days.
The OP seems overly harsh in his criticisms of say, Williams' recent work. I don't agree, but that's his opinion. I think some folks just get stuck in appreciating a rather narrow style from a certain time period and that's all they can relate to. There are just as many folks here who only seem to like stuff from the 80s as there are people who don't like anything written since Miklos Rozsa died. I think they are both missing out.
I love Rozsa and Waxman and the Golden Age, also Goldsmith and Poledouris and the Silver Age, but I value new adventurous-sounding modern scores too, like Zimmer's CHAPPIE or Serra's LUCY.
But what are you gonna do? People like what they like. A rant like that isn't going to change anyone's mind, anymore than my dissent will.
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Hard to disagree with the argument that the winds of change blew very strongly through the film music world from about 2001 through 2004, leaving it basically unrecognizable afterward. That era certainly was the death of most of the stuff a lot of us held dear, but life and the film industry both go on. But yeah, remember what it was like to count the days until a new Goldsmith score came out?
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