Action Scores in the '90s

by DOUG ADAMS

"Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties." -Susan Sontag

"Moderation is a fatal thing... Nothing succeeds like excess." -Oscar Wilde

Success has its repercussions. During and prior to the early 1970s action films were considered to be as fecund a creative ground as any other for filmmakers.¹ The stigma of the silly, juvenile action film did not exist. Sure, action films were often dumb, but this was not equated with them as a genre. Dramas were often dumb too. If anything, it was the subgenres of action films—the monster movie and the disaster film, for example—that were looked down upon by some. In 1975, Jaws taught Hollywood that action films could make more money than they ever thought possible. By the advent of Star Wars, producers had thoroughly whetted their appetites for yet unseen profits, and it fell to the action film to appease that hunger. At this point, these films began to be conceived of as corporate products rather than artistic ventures.

But, we know all of this. We've been told time and time again how Jaws and Star Wars changed the face of movie going, but so what? Things always change. Action films would be different today than in the '70s even if Jaws and Star Wars hadn't come along. What really matters is that these were the two films which changed everything. These were two very well made movies. The characters rang true, the stories held together, the production values excelled, etc. It just so happened that each told its story on a larger level than audiences were accustomed to. In Hollywood's eyes, this spectacle quality was what put them over the top. Producers figured that if X number of explosions and stunts worked for Jaws, then X² number of stunts should pull in even more money. And, of course, they were right. As films have adopted bigger-is-better attitudes, ticket sales have soared. Whereas Jaws' huge dollar draw was once seen as impossible, we now have a new all-time money-earning champ every few years or so. Quality, however (and as a direct result), has taken a turn for the worse. Today, high-quality action films are the exception. Body counts and carnage have replaced dramatic cohesion as the soul of these movies. Characters are purposely sketchy caricatures, lest they distract us from the special effects or slow the breakneck pacing. Action films have become exercises in sensory experiences, not storytelling. After all, the filmmakers have to work hard to keep their films packed with more special effects, CGI monsters, and car chases than their predecessors. Who can waste time on storytelling? Good storytelling almost never earns as much money as good explosions. It's just smart business. Financial advisors are probably thrilled, but much of the audience laments the bygone era.

Certainly, bad films cannot be accused of generating bad film music. There have been all sorts of precedents set for lousy films harboring outstanding scores. However, I would argue that action scores have devalued along with action films—maybe not because of the ineptitude of the films, but because of the shift in aesthetics. Again, these films want to make money (many need to in order to justify their ever-expanding budgets) and "bigger-is-better" applies to all aspects of the film. Every scene needs to exhilarate to survive. The filmmakers have been mainlining us adrenaline for so long that they can now only provoke a response by upping the dosage. Therefore, in their eyes, film music needs to be gigantic sweeps of immediately digestible non-substance. It cannot challenge—to add to a scene would be to distract—so it must be redundant, but redundant to the nth degree. (Notice how the phrase "redundant to the nth degree" is itself redundant.) It should not only tell us exactly how the scene wants us to feel, but it must make us feel it more than we ever have before. Under these demands it's amazing that film music can survive, much less thrive.

Yet, though it may be surviving, is action scoring really at the highest level it can be today? Yes, composers have a hard time now, but they always have had obstacles to overcome, and by all signs they always will. It is up to composers to do the best they can with whatever they've got and, in general, it just doesn't seem that they're doing that today. Undoubtedly it's difficult to pour one's efforts into a fundamentally flawed picture, but music is the one element that can shape the way the film plays. It ranks, I believe, above even acting in this regard. I thought Nicholas Cage gave a nice performance in The Rock this summer, but it certainly didn't influence the rest of the film. Music can raise the level of an inferior picture a few notches. It obviously can't save any film, but it can alter the audiences' perception of a film as a whole and as individual scenes by shaping them, coloring them, and lending them some complexity.² This is where action film scoring is lacking today. It is all too content to stoop to the gut-level aspirations of most action movies. Don't believe me? Let's examine some of the films from the past few months to see what was and what might have been.

Preamble: Before we continue I should clarify a few points. First, although this article may not seem to overtly take into account the directors', producers', etc. demands on the composer, they are inherent in all comments. It may seem as if I'm laying the entire blame on the composers, but I'm not. Since the scoring process has often rotted so far down the chain of command, I will resist continually noting that composers are often asked for banal music. All critiques are aimed at the scoring process as a whole—from directors' requests to composers' executions. Second, none of these critiques are aimed at composers nor others as human beings, only as professionals. Third, all opinions expressed herein are mine and mine alone. I do not intend to offend anyone with this piece, though, inevitably, that will be the result. This article will examine what I, personally, feel to be the receding quality of today's action scores and in doing so, I am apt to step on some toes. I really don't expect anyone to fully agree with everything I write—even I probably won't within a few months—but I do hope that it will stimulate some thought. I would really love to see the number of people who listen or compose on auto-pilot reduce. Nevertheless...

Action films, by their nature, tell stories. Action in film involves some sort of constant motion via set pieces or chases or the likes. These elements are best suited to carry a plot because they are basically about extroverted occurrences—big things happening. I can't imagine an action film that is essentially a character study or a mood piece because action does not lend itself to such intimate studies. The best action films have well-developed characters in them, but this is so that the story has a direct bearing on someone we grow to care about. There may be some action films that place the subtext of the picture above the story in importance—the loss of humanity in the future society of THX-1138, perhaps—but the success of this technique is dependent upon a functional storyline establishing a higher relevance. By the same token, I can't think of any action scores which don't intend to contribute to the story in some way. Even the action elements in Jerry Goldsmith's great score to Alien (often characterized as a psychological action film³), which mainly reinforce the fear and claustrophobia, follow and enhance the story of the film. Any good story has high points and low points. This is a simple rule of drama. Internal change is a simple rule of how to keep anything interesting, really. Even something like minimalist music has a rate of change, albeit an extremely slow one. But, this is intended to heighten our awareness of the minute changes which do happen at a more standard rate. Nevertheless, I think one of the main problems action film scores face today is that they aim to affect the audience within the boundaries of each scene, but seldom within the framework of the entire story. This is in direct compliance with the corporate demands detailed above, but that can't really mask the fact that it ends up hurting the films because it destroys internal change. Every cue hovers around one level of effectiveness—usually as emotional as is possible or as kinetic as is possible—but the sum is far less than the total of its parts. These scores seek to add to the "roller coaster ride" side of action movies, but they do nothing for the story.

Notice how John Williams's Superman, the high end of our spectrum, tells its story in long-form. The beginning portion of the score has its outer space-expansive fanfares and otherworldly electronics. This section reaches its height at the destruction of Krypton and Superbaby's flight to Earth. Clark Kent's rural childhood is scored with simpler harmonies for the down-home American feel until Clark finds/creates his Fortress of Solitude and the music opens up again. Enter Superman and Metropolis. The music becomes a bit larger for the rescues and acts of derring-do. The love theme develops from fragments. The villains earn a comic march. Eventually, we come down to the final rocket chase and time-reversal scenes and the music sweeps and jostles like nowhere before. Sure, there were some heart-pumping action cues before, but here they're expanded on and extended so we know that we've arrived at the climax of the film. There's a logical progression to every element of the Superman score. If the film had hit the same climactic crescendos for the scene where the Krypton villains are imprisoned, for the destruction of the planet, for the journey to Earth, for Pa Kent's death, for the Fortress of Solitude, for the helicopter rescue, for the love/flight scene, and so on, how impressive would the finale have been? Our ears would have gotten so tired of the surplus music that they would have simply separated it from the film. Thankfully, we'll always have Superman the way it is, but not every film is so lucky.

Summer action films began this year with Twister, director Jan DeBont's homage to inclement weather and stock characters. Scoring chores went to Mark Mancina, who, to his credit, managed to not totally reprise his work on Speed. The score was peppered with a couple of well-written Copland-as-Americana cues, but in a film about tornadoes you've got to have some ominous music. This is where the trouble began. In spite of being through-composed (i.e. not much motivic material is developed), we get a lot of mostly interchangeable cues. My memory renders it a mash of slippery, chromatic choral cues and chase music from the "big drums and minor chords" school of thought. Now, Twister's score was not dealing with some intangible subtext, it was meant to enhance the film's storytelling. This means that it had to have some sort of linear cohesion to it. One cue is not film music, just as one movement is not a symphony.⁴ The film score, too, is a large-form work, because it occurs and develops over the frame of the film. Twenty-five excellent cues do not make an excellent score. They must have an internal consistency and an overall shape. Twister had a lot of spooky music and a lot of running-and-driving fast music, but any cue could have been picked up and dropped anywhere else in the film without changing anything but the timing. This is another result of filmmakers' demand that each scene be trailer-worthy on its own. We end up with exactly what they give us—a string of similarly effective scenes which do not gel into one flow. Even if the film is made up of structurally identical storm scenes, couldn't each one be scored differently? This would have even lent the film a linear story arc it didn't provide itself with. Not every storm has to be ominous. Make one of them more light-hearted—perhaps an airy cue suggesting the exhilaration these storm chasers felt when in their element, but without distracting from the obvious (and therefore not superfluously reinforced) danger. Make the scary cues different—why not one entirely choral and one entirely orchestral readings of similar material? Listen to the different ways John Williams scored all the "shark attacks the boat" scenes in Jaws. Some are thrilling high-seas adventure, some are deadly serious, and some are threateningly imperative. The shark theme is almost always the same double-bass motif, but it is worked into each cue differently so the familiarity does not beget tiresome repetition. Perhaps even one of the Twister storms (maybe the one right before the F5?) could have been left unscored, remembering that the audience has to listen to the entire film in two hours and not in the weeks that it's composed in.

A lot of action films fall prey to the affliction of sameness. In James Horner's Jumanji, the opening scene where the two boys bury the game was given the same level of dramatic impact as when the house split in two, or when the lion appeared, or when Robin Williams entered. John Debney's Cutthroat Island seems to level out at the same ear-splitting volume throughout the entire film. None of these scores observe an overall dramatic arc. Every chase scene is creating and releasing unrelated bits of tension. Every love scene is building to the same gushing climax. There are no moments of reflection, introspection, or melancholy. There exists a theory known as the rule of the Golden Section. Roughly paraphrased, this theory states that just under two-thirds (0.618034... and so on)⁵ of the way through anything there is some significant occurrence. The idea is that those things which humans naturally find appealing or stereotypically beautiful are most likely to adhere to these guidelines. Much of nature adheres to this rule. Many flowers have their largest leaves about two-thirds of the way up their total height. Multiply a human's height by .618 and you'll often find the waist. The eyes are approximately two-thirds of the way up the human face, the heart two-thirds of the way up the torso. Human-made art often follows these rules as well. Debussy was a strong believer in the Golden Section and structured his works accordingly. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring has some elements of the GS in its construction. Alien's climatic cat-and-mouse chase begins at roughly around this ratio, as does Star Wars' trench battle. Of course, many, many quality natural and human-made works of art don't follow this theory, but it can at least be seen as the antithesis to the 1990s thrill-a-minute action music in that it is constantly keeping one eye on the overall arc of the finished product.⁶ How many action film cues are written to be digested in the course of an entire film and how many are written with hopes of inclusion on the year-end "Best of 199X" CD? Even a film like Waterworld comes close to Golden Section dimensions (well, kind of close) with the final Smokers battle/rescue coming around the Section. Why, then, is all of the action scored as dramatically identical trouble-victory, trouble-victory, trouble-victory scenarios? They're not stepping stones to a significant occurrence, they're action music vignettes. However, each individual action scene has an internal consistency that comes close to GS proportions. Could James Newton Howard have stepped far enough back to see the full picture?

Look at Lalo Schifrin's Bullitt (1968), a crime film with some strong leanings toward action. Some may consider the small amount of music in the film a score in miniature. As always, I consider the entire film to be scored; it's just that some cues consist entirely of silence. Viewed this way we can see the great shape Schifrin drew. He only used audible music occasionally because he didn't want us to be affected on a moment-to-moment basis, but rather by the entire film—macro structure versus micro structure. Maybe it's not a brilliant film or score, but it's a great example of how music can be effective without the orchestra blathering away in every scene. Herrmann used silence brilliantly in North by Northwest for the crop-duster sequence. John Williams also used great silent cues in Return of the Jedi (the speeder bike chase) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (the bar fight). Again, these scenes placed elsewhere in the film could very well have sustained music. Mr. Williams, however, was more concerned that he leave room to express himself when it was truly relevant.

And establishing relevance seems to be another unmet challenge of today's action scores. Randy Edelman's Dragonheart was a sweeping, swashbuckling epic, but everything swept, swashed, and buckled with the same kind of overwrought earnestness. Within the first ten minutes of the film there is a truly momentous occasion: the dragon gives the young king half of his heart so that he can survive his wounds. This creates a current which runs under the entire film and, ultimately, dictates its conclusion. Why then are the preceding scenes of the young king-to-be and Dennis Quaid sparring, the arrival of the then-present king, and the peasant battle scored with the same pomp and circumstance? Sure, each cue is composed differently (sword match: cheerful winds, arrival: murky drones, battle: thudding action music, heart: chorale style strings), but they are all dealt the same hand-wringing... uh, super-sincerity. It seems a bizarre criticism, but don't sell so strongly those plot elements which are ornamental. Leave them alone, don't make them work so voraciously. The heart scene was probably scored well, but our ears were so accustomed to a large orchestral backdrop that it couldn't have mattered less. We just eventually tune it out; we may hear it, but we're no longer listening.

Team Zimmer's The Rock fell victim to this even harder. The Rock was like a 1980s action score on steroids. Everything was The Big Moment. Watch the scene directly preceding the attack on Alcatraz where Sean Connery is reunited with his daughter. The attack on Alcatraz is the crux of the movie, right? This is where the main plot really settles in and begins to churn away. Then why are our ears bombarded by histrionical trumpet strains during the reunion scene? This scene is not important to the real plot. It's not even a sub-plot. It exists to A) put something in between the macho car chase and the macho attack on the island and B) have a goal and therefore an excuse for the car chase. Now this could have been a minor quibble, but every scene in The Rock is scored this way. It reminds me a bit of the Gill-Man motif from Creature from the Black Lagoon. Overall, Black Lagoon has a fine score, but at times it leans on its crutch a little too hard. The creature motif seems to pop up in fortissimo, flutter-tongued trumpet almost every time we see the creature for the first two-thirds of the film. Not only does this become aurally repetitive, but it tries to fill the same narrative purpose over and over—shock, fear, panic. Maybe in 1954 the sight of the cutting-edge rubber costume was enough to warrant this response several times, I'm not sure. As it plays today, however, it feels like insistent urging to be scared. In the story, this really doesn't tell us anything because there's no ranking of importance, even in terms of fear. Shouldn't it be more frightening to see the Gill-Man attacking the heroine than to see the distant reflection of his face? There are some variations on this motif, of course, as well as some very nice cues where it's somewhat interwoven in the orchestration, but this one color just shows up too much. It stops telling us anything. The Rock's score affected every scene this way. There was so much music—and such slushy, overly emotional music—that it eventually canceled itself out. Which scenes are really important to the plot? It should be obvious, but the music keeps telling us that everything is absolutely crucial. It's an unintentional, all-encompassing red herring of a score. The Ritalin-deprived direction and photography alone should have dictated less score throughout. The film was already visually screaming at us; the music was almost redundant as a rule. (At least in a rock video, where techniques used in The Rock originated, the "movie" is only three minutes long, and the music is a self-contained song to which the narrative, if any, is subservient.) Everything ends up coming across as an unfocused swirl of images and sounds, where all we can do is sit back and marvel at what a lovely shade of blue it all is.

I would loved to have seen The Rock scored like a more sparse version of Planet of the Apes, where Jerry Goldsmith wasn't so much trying to say something about this film or trying to sell it to us. He was creating a soundscape for it to occur in. I wish there was a less new-agey way to describe it. He wasn't just putting a shine on the completed film. The music functions below the surface of the story, strengthening the fabric through which the story was woven by dealing more in depth with the film—the barren landscapes, the unfamiliar social order. Now I don't know how in depth one could have gone with The Rock, but look at The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which is in a similar bad guy/good guy genre. David Shire never really has to say anything about the film's ingredients either. He doesn't try to remind us that the terrorists are nasty and that the transit cops are clever. In fact, it could be argued that most of Pelham's music goes to the attitude of the setting: New York in the '70s. The Rock really could have benefited from a more oblique approach, and a lot less music.

Alan Silvestri's Judge Dredd was a reasonably well done Neo-Romantic style score, but there was simply too much music in the wrong places. The story was so juvenile and muddled that the music really would have served it better if it had only been used in the most necessary places. The entire Sylvester Stallone and the photocopier guy go to the desert plot, for instance, was mostly a time-killer and excuse for a set change and special effects. I know that it supposedly set up the theme of retribution, but wasn't Dredd's fall from power supposed to do that? Were the filmmakers being gluttonous or didn't they trust their audiences? It would have been very interesting to see Silvestri use a sparse and modernistic style of scoring throughout this entire section in contrast to the hustle and bustle of the pumped-up city music. Something in the style of his Predator would have been better. The desert plot just wasn't important enough to warrant the same magnitude of scoring as the city plot.

Last year's Batman Forever has a great example of an incidental scene being overscored. At the end of the film we've just watched Tommy Lee Jones fall to his death, we've just seen Batman rescue his psychiatrist and Robin, we've just seen Jim Carrey's inexplicably simian forehead. Elliot Goldenthal's music cascades down the chasm for Tommy, Robin, and Nicole. It explodes over Carrey's distorted vision of Batman. Now all is well. The Riddler will be placed into an insane asylum. The asylum establishing shot comes up and... the music swells and churns again. It's like the Dragonheart problem backwards. All the important stuff is done with, but the score keeps on telling us how momentous everything is. After this we still get another crash when Jim Carrey does his spiel, then yet again when Batman and Robin run in front of the bat-signal.

Batman Forever definitely was several notches above either Dragonheart or The Rock in that it was well composed music. Its theatrical flaws mean it wasn't great film music, but it has a musical integrity and a cleverness that I find impossible to deny.⁷ Orchestrations are full-bodied and immensely colorful, thematic connections abound, and Goldenthal's trademark eclecticism never fails to hold together. But, even as good music it wasn't able to function as a great score. It's often just too much for the bombastic picture and its multiple story peaks eventually render each other less effective. Thus, we come to the more conceptual half of this article. Does cleverly composed music always make for better film scores? We've already established that good music doesn't necessarily make good film music, but does it make better film music? Could Batman Forever have been better scored with worse music? Yes, it probably could have; however, in my opinion, if two films are scored equally as well dramatically, and one is brilliantly composed and one is illiterate drivel, the better composed music is the better film music. This may seem obvious, but the peripheral issues can get pretty tricky. Why should better music make for better film music? If two scores work equally well in the context of the film, what gives the better music the edge? And then there's the issue of what "better" means, if anything. "Better" is always subjective, but there usually seems to be a consensus at some level. I couldn't imagine someone arguing that, say, GoldenEye's score is better than The Empire Strikes Back's. Is this the reign of popular opinion or are there certain musical gestures that are inherently more appealing to the human ear? And if it's inherent in our humanity how do we account for non-Western music? Japanese Noh dramas tell stories, but American pop culture doesn't exactly embrace them as naturally appealing. "Good" may be a learned critique, but perhaps there are elements of every culture's music that somehow speak more directly to the human psyche or soul or whatever. Maybe the culture we grow up in teaches us to refine our listening skills as they pertain to our culture's music—from American pop to African master drummers. If we grow up in a culture where a certain music is not present, it's possible that we don't develop an internal assessment structure for evaluating it.

Ultimately, the issue of good music in film comes down to the fact that film music, a subordinate art form or not, cannot deny its heritage. Why does brilliant counterpoint in film music work better than mediocre counterpoint (assuming they both support the story equally as well)?⁸ Because film music is still music. I think, perhaps, film-music criticism mainly differs from concert-music criticism in the macro structure level. Concert pieces have proscribed forms and film scores must, to a degree, follow the film. This is why a lot of good film music doesn't work in the concert hall. On the detail-level, interesting composition is always judged the same. Film music has a few more gauges than concert—you can't bury the dialogue, you must avoid sound effects, you must find or create some relevance with the scene—but as far as musical attributes go, clever is clever. I've seen many state that film and concert music are entirely different beasts, but I think that it may be more accurate to dub film music a subspecies of sorts, obviously different, but still connected somehow. Taste, too, may factor into aesthetic judgments. For example, I can't deny that Steve Reich's "Come Out"⁹ is a well-crafted piece, but it gives me a headache every time I hear it. I respect it, but I don't like it. There's so little that separates passable music from great music and yet, it's such a large artistic jump. I'm tempted to say that perhaps the fine points of music should be taught to us at a young age so that more people can tell the difference. But would I just be trying to convert others and tip the scales towards my own aesthetic choices? Ultimately, these are all futile pursuits and unanswerable questions, only because—what can one base any answer on? But I can't just sweep the issues under the rug if I wish to discuss the next point. I don't believe that today's action scores are, musically, at the same level as they once were.

I did my civic duty this summer and saw Independence Day. Let's start here on a positive note. I thought David Arnold did some nice things. I liked the piccolo/field-drum setting of the theme which hinted at 4th of July folklore without saying anything directly about the film. I liked the way Arnold dealt with the mystique of American patriotism when he's actually from the country that lost the war that started on July 4th. I thought it was interesting that the main theme didn't really reveal itself until the (I think) July 4th logo came up on the screen. This showed that Arnold did actually have one eye on the overall story. The problem I had with the score is that it just wasn't well enough composed as music. I thought that the action music was specifically lacking in this respect. Almost every moment of action music had something of some musical interest happening, but it was just a string of mainly unrelated ideas. Themes and motifs may pop up from time to time, but everything else felt like it was filler, just taking up space to avoid silence. Arnold thinks in very musical ways, and there was always a kernel of interest in each bar, but look at this sentence: Relinquish, epitome, recalcitrant, delectable, effervescently. If I stack five impressive-sounding words right next to each other, they are rendered useless unless they have some sort of bearing on one another. Read them with a Shakespearean dialect. Now they sound pretty too, but they still have no meaning—no coherence. My awkward point being, this is how Independence Day's score sounded to me. Musical ideas cannot sound like stream of consciousness outbursts. Why does this matter? Is this just a concert music criticism applied to film music? No, I don't think it is. It's been said that the reason music is in a drama at all is that it shapes the proceedings somehow. It should seem obvious that in order for music to lend a story some shape, the music itself must have some discernible shape to begin with. If a cue just sounds like an unrelated string of undeveloped musical ideas, it can't really say anything significant about anything else. This may go back to composing with longer forms in mind. Composing in short, detached musical ideas only shapes films into choppy little story blocks.

Back in the 14- and 1500s, Monteverdi wrote madrigals which were composed without any one main theme.¹⁰ But, even within each phrase small motives are developed so that, while the music is constantly changing and following a predicated course, it maintains its own internal consistency. Monteverdi would often take just three or four notes and pass them around the voices, or set them in counterpoint to each other, or extend or truncate them, or set them against different harmonies, etc., etc. In my opinion, this self-consistency is one quality of good music. You find it from Monteverdi to John Cage and everywhere in between and beyond. You find it in fine film music as well. Listen to Goldsmith's Capricorn One. Goldsmith takes his one angular theme and spins variations off of it throughout the score. Rhythms are altered, orchestrations change, and the mood switches from mildly threatening to immediately dangerous, so the music is always affecting the story differently. Rather than giving everything its own theme, Goldsmith takes this one bit of material and makes it work so that we feel like each cue is another chapter of the same story. He also does this in The Blue Max. Listen to the way the octatonic (based on an eight-note scale) theme from the retreat music is developed all throughout the cue. It's like a scroll unfurling, constantly showing us something new about itself as different lines are laid against the repeating melody. So, instead a stream of fancy, unrelated words we get a quality sentence. And instead of several showy sentences we get intelligent, well-rounded paragraphs. James Horner's Star Trek II is also quite adept at shuffling its motifs around to gain a continuity.

I'm not saying that action scores should only have a handful of musical themes and ideas which are constantly played with. Some scores craft well-rounded cues in which material is developed within each cue alone. Through this, some sort of integrative element or elements will run to tie everything together. Alex North scored the second large battle from Cheyenne Autumn with mainly percussion instruments and unique material, but it's related to the rest of the score by the perfect fourth motif that the French horns introduce in the main titles. Bernard Herrmann also does this wonderfully in Mysterious Island. Almost every creature gets its own signature sound, from the bee's buzzing sonorities to the phorarhacos' orchestrationally upended fugue. So, each battle scene has an integrity on its own. Herrmann also has the all-encompassing island theme which ties the score's various adjuncts to each other.¹¹ Do we find this two-fold unification in many of today's scores?

Besides providing cohesion, musically sound scores can also form thematic (in terms of story) relationships between scenes. John Williams's Star Wars trilogy is packed with musically connected scenes. Ben's theme becomes part of the triumphant march at the end of the first film because his ideals survived even through he didn't. Luke, upon impulsively leaving Yoda and wandering off to his friends' aid, is scored with Yoda's theme like a nagging reminder in the back of his head. Darth Vader's martial theme becomes a tragic elegy on string harmonics when Vader removes his mask and dies. Even Williams's action cues are well developed enough that something like the space battle in Return of the Jedi can make a sly reference to the asteroid battle music from Empire, or the basket music from Raiders can be quoted in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Do you think that Arnold will quote the crop-duster music when they blow up the aliens in the end of Independence Day 2? Would the general audience know it? Williams has stated that he writes his scores assuming that the audience will see the movie only once and not buy a CD. He doesn't mean that he writes down because of this, but that he has to make his gestures make logical sense. How better to do this than to write logical music?

John Debney's Cutthroat Island has so much music in the film that it only serves to reinforce the fact that it's not terribly well composed. Everything is written to be essentially linear and melodic, leaving textures pretty much ignored. Yet, even the melodies aren't particularly outstanding.¹² They usually stay within one general key area for the chase section until they go to the Important Chords (usually all major or all minor chords separated by a minor third, a minor sixth, or a tritone, musicians) whenever the zenith of the action is upon us. Of course, every chase has the same zenith in the same place. How close does that come to Golden Section proportions? Orchestrations are from the tired "brass means toughness, strings and woodwinds mean tenderness, and percussion means savagery" lineage. Everyone contemplating large, wall-to-wall action scores should have to listen to Max Steiner's King Kong. Is it overblown? Yes. Is it raucous? Yes. Is it well composed? Definitely. Steiner works with numerous melodies which are crafted well enough that when he plays with variations we can tell. He also plays with textures in the music, notably the island material. The music is more harmonically modernistic than most of today's action scores. Steiner wasn't afraid of dissonance and used it to its full potential. (Amazing that a 1933 score would have more dissonance than a 1990s score, isn't it? It proves that the producers claiming that people really want good, old-fashioned action scores don't know what the good, old-fashioned action scores were really like.) And this is all besides such intricacies as the imitation of airplane engine sounds in the trombones and the onomatopoeic string writing at the finale. Maybe not all of these ideas work decades later, but it's a lot more thought than goes into most of today's efforts. Some of Kong's music may sound pretty stock by today's standards, but Steiner was one of the first to use these sounds to score action. He added a whole palette of colors to action scores.

Some scores consist of some very effective, musically interesting cues that sound like they're all from different scores. I'm afraid that the smorgasbord score will be seen as one of the most prominent and least effective styles of action scoring from this decade. Waterworld, as of now, is the apex of this style. There are the rugged, orchestral action cues. There are the percussive electronic cues. There are the new-age synth-arpeggios cues. There is some pretty effective writing going on, but it keeps sounding like someone is changing the channel behind the film. It's like watching the movie on an airplane while flipping the radio headset from station to station—perhaps each bit of music will work well with each scene, but when they're all set side-to-side they contradict each other's point of view. We gained a cohesion within each scene, but not among scenes. Alan Silvestri's Eraser followed in these footsteps last summer. It's rock guitar for Arnold Schwarzenegger's entrance, it's orchestral action for the plane sequence, it's "jungle" percussion in the zoo. Fine, interesting, but where's the flow? What does the "jungle" percussion have to do with the rock guitar? The scenes were related. It's the same characters; it's part of the same story. If the music jumps around like that, does it enhance a handful of scenes or does it enhance a film? It would have been more interesting if Silvestri had used some tuned drums or mallet instruments and formed a percussive version on the main theme. Or, he could have developed the zoo material all by itself and brought snippets of the theme in via guitar or orchestra. Having the percussive cue stand apart as a collection of outbursts which are related neither to one another nor to the entire score only serves to give the proceedings that ancillary feel. Even John Williams's Hook had this problem with its one light jazz cue. If he had scored all of the Peter Banning scenes in this way, then switched to orchestral scoring for Never Never Land it would have made better sense. Or, if he had used some connecting thematic material in the jazz cue. Wouldn't it have been interesting for Williams to paraphrase the Peter Pan theme in the jazz to imply that this character was under the surface? Could he have used the theme as a bass line or inverted its first five signature notes so that our ears would have to find it under a couple of layers? This would mirror what the character had to do. As it is, there's just this one jazz track which is a fun piece of music and which works well with the yuppie/baseball scenes, but it's presented as a crooked annex to the real story.

Again, we can look to The Taking of Pelham One Two Three as a film score that takes several different styles and finds a way to connect them. It's got big band jazz and funk and classical and rock and Latin. But, it's all tied by the bass line, or by the tone-row melody, or by the ensemble colors. Danny Elfman's Batman takes the Joker's Tchaikovsky-like waltzes and Batman's Wagner-like marches and makes them sound of-a-piece by coloring them similarly in terms of orchestrations and harmonies. Michael Small's score to The Parallax View takes elements from both contemporary jazz and classical musics and weaves them together in a single chase cue. Or he combines patriotic triadic trumpet and contemporary electronic dissonances in the government-committee scenes. Wouldn't it have been interesting if Silvestri had used all of his Eraser elements together? If there had been cues combining percussion, guitar, and orchestra, then the scenes using only one or the other would have seemed like off-shoots from the bigger picture rather than diversions. But, what does a texture of rock guitars, ethnic drums, and classical orchestra tell the audience? Not a whole lot, which is probably why the producers wouldn't have allowed it and why it would have been so interesting. Enigmatic music can often give a bit of complexity to films because not everything is so cookie-cutter simple. Real people and real situations are complex. Action films have to have some complexity to them because the whole action premise is based on the immediate response of fight or flight. If we don't provide a "why" or a "who," it's just an instinct-level reaction. Music can refine the "why" and "who" and remind us of them when the film isn't directly doing so.

Even the most mindless Steven Seagal movie will provide "what." In fact, most Seagal movies only exist for the "what," which is the car chase, the street fight, the airplane that's low on fuel, whatever is going on. Even though it shouldn't, music often goes towards this "what." Maybe that's the single biggest flaw in today's action film scores. Let's say that a film has a car chase, then a plane sequence. If the music goes strictly towards the car and the plane, or the rate at which they move across the background, or how pretty they look when they blow up, then of course the overall score is going to form little unconnected blobs. The car has nothing to do with the plane. The connecting thread is the characters in the situations, or the larger story of which the car and plane are elements. Look at the truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark, arguably one of the better chases committed to film. Such a well-constructed sequence would be great inspiration to a modern film composer. He or she could write a little theme for the scene and use it to catch every twist and turn of the road. The music could follow Indy under the truck and blast some sort of heroic major chords when he belts the Nazi out of the driver's seat. It could descend in a non-Mickey Mouse way to catch the jeep vaulting off the edge of the cliff. The composer could write an interesting aleatoric texture in the high strings that could represent the randomness and danger of the gunfire. He or she could do everything that makes an interesting and functional piece of film music, but what would you have? A single cue about a truck, about a dirt road, and about guns. This isn't what the story is about. John Williams scores the scene with character themes and motifs. At first, it may seem like the music is telling us about the truck, etc., but it's really telling us how the characters feel about the situation and how this chase is relevant to the quest for the Ark. As well-made as this sequence is, it's basically one long set piece. Williams's scoring makes it fit right into place in the story so it never sticks out uncomfortably. Action films are ostensibly always built around the "what." That's exactly why scores shouldn't be. Not only is scoring the "what" detrimental to flow, continuity, and cohesion, but it's redundant.

So, how do I get out of this piece? Where's the plastic "have a nice day" smiley face that I prop up and tell everyone that it's all alright? I don't know, other than to say there have been good action scores written this decade. Elliot Goldenthal presents incredible examples of disjunct phrases scoring the most frantic action in his well-balanced Alien³ score. Chase-scene scoring often consists of melodies which follow unadorned, direct lines as if the characters have some straightforward mental goals and a superhuman lucidity in the face of danger. This is sometimes fun in a larger-than-life cinematic context. Alien³'s fragmented approach sounds more like pure panic where our thoughts come faster than our bodies can act upon them—scoring for mortals. That helped the film a great deal. John Williams uses four notes in Jurassic Park for the dinosaurs-are-dangerous theme and develops them through the entire score. The score begins and ends with these four notes. The final chase with the raptors is based almost entirely on these pitches, making for wonderful continuity and portraying this scene as the culmination and realization of the dinosaurs' danger. This past summer Danny Elfman scored Mission: Impossible by ignoring the convoluted plot and scoring either the action or the subtext—that this film was based on a (now retro) hip 1960s television series. The music was really the main tie the film had to its TV origins—the flutes, the bongos, and Schifrin's theme. That was part of the drawing power for audiences. It's our most recent example of a composer expanding the canvas of an action film rather than smearing his own colors all over the finished product. And it's complex, interesting music.

That's the good news. However, years before these might be the better works of a single summer instead of standouts from the past five years. I'd love to say that composers and filmmakers should just adhere to one simple rule and it would solve all problems. But nothing is that easy. There are thousands of exceptions to the few points I've made above and not everything applies in all situations. I barely even touched on such issues as the dearth of harmonic languages in today's action films and the clumsy overuse of the standard symphony orchestra. I would love to hear someone try something audacious like Basil Poledouris's use of an extended French horn section in Conan the Barbarian. Whatever happened to the quasi big band-style instrumentation that Jerry Fielding used so often? Not only was the orchestration so interesting in Fielding's work, but he also dared to draw from non-Eurocentric, Romantic musics. Alex North drew brilliantly on modern American rather than 19th century Germanic styles in his scores for Dragonslayer and especially Cheyenne Autumn. The farthest we ever get away from Western Romantic music on a regular basis now is the cloying practice of slapping a shakuhachi solo in someplace. Is there no room for atonal scores, for jazz scores, or for those scores which dare to be unclassifiable?

Actually, the points here would, at best, only produce a functional action film score. There is so much that good composers do that cannot be verbalized. They must come up with quality material before anything else. They must capture the essence of each scene and hit their marks without Mickey Mousing. They must generate some sort of genuine excitement or passion or other intangibles out of pure sound. Great film scoring is so much more than passable film scoring. Has all of that gone by the wayside in favor of immediate marketability and ticket sales? It's difficult to try to convince filmmakers and composers to turn around because film receipts and soundtrack CD sales are higher than ever right now. We can only hope that they can find a way to mix artistic success and commerce. The problem is too many people pay for poor art, thus convincing its purveyors to continue peddling it. I was in the video store the other night and happened to be standing by a group of middle-aged men who looked like they were fresh off the golf course. "What should we get?" one pondered. "How about that," said another as he gestured towards Money Train. "Have you ever heard of it?" None of them had. The men stood for a few instants regarding the front cover art as the cassette sat on the shelf. "Man, that looks great!" And they picked it up and left. Maybe if we, the audience, begin demanding a better product the filmmakers will begin providing it. That's just good business, too. •

1 Fecund means "fruitful."

2 Everyone knows Elmer Bernstein's stories about setting up-tempo music to basically static images. See The Magnificent Seven's opening scenes.

3 This article uses a pretty wide base as to what are considered action films. This is just an attempt to draw from as many varied sources and opinions as is possible. It should also be noted that examples were chosen for the same purpose. I can't mention every excellent film score any more than I can mention every poor one.

4 Yes, some symphonies exist in one movement, but those really just have all the movements (or sections) played attacca—without breaks.

5 Mathematically derived as the ratio of the shorter portion (last third, or b) to the longer portion (a) set equal to the ratio of the longer portion to the entire length, or b/a = a/a+b. We also find Golden Section proportions evident in the Fibonacci sequence (where each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two terms: 0,1,1,2,3, 5,8,13...) where any given term is the nearest whole number to the Golden Section derived from its left and right neighbors.

6 I love Danny Elfman's Pee-Wee's Big Adventure specifically because it purposely demolished all Golden Section/dramatic architectural principles. Every moment is exaggerated and overblown because that's how Pee-Wee reacts to everything.

7 I think it's possible that many people hate Batman Forever because its musical cleverness is more in a contemporary vein than in a Romantic vein. Many people aren't as well versed in 20th century ideas of composition and, of course, this may result in seemingly less approachable music.

8 Provided that brilliant counterpoint doesn't cover dialogue or distract from the scene. Two sides to the coin, you know...

9 "Come Out" is Reich's recording of an arrested individual's statement to the police. Reich recorded the sentence "I let the bruise blood come out and show them," and looped the title words for approximately 10 minutes during which time he overlaps the words, applies them in canon, etc. I love Reich's minimalism ("Music for 18 Musicians," "Music for Pieces of Wood," and "Violin Phase" are great), but "Come Out" is just too painful to listen to. The text eventually becomes unpleasant and I don't particularly like the mono-timbral effect of the piece. I still respect it and think it's a really interesting idea, but it's an unrewarding listen for me.

10 In fact, these madrigals were often somewhat narrative in their text-painting. Text-painting is a procedure whereby the text to the madrigals (madrigals are vocal works) was reflected in the music somehow. If the word "falling" was sung, the music may have a downward contour. If the word "happy" was sung, the music may have its first major chord of the piece.

11 Part of Herrmann's brilliance lies in the fact that he could take something like the pair of cymbal crashes from Mysterious Island or the electronic timbres from The Day the Earth Stood Still and create a unifying device out of pure color. Jerry Fielding also had a talent for this, from his signature fluid trumpet runs in Lawman to his use of various percussive clicks (xylophone, ratchet, and sticks on timpani bowls) in The Outlaw Josey Wales.

12 Anyone who has heard Debney's seaQuest DSV theme knows he can write melodic music that at least makes a lot more sense than anything he wrote for Cutthroat.

Doug Adams previously interviewed Elliot Goldenthal in FSM #61 and Thomas Newman in #65-67. He has penned in-depth score analyses of Bruce Broughton's Young Sherlock Holmes (#57), David Shire's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (#68) and Thomas Newman's The Player (#72). He can be reached at 18624 Marshfield, Homewood IL 60430. He has our gratitude.