I stand by my point, Talgorn is the perfect replacement for Williams, after he retires.
This crazy busy, zany score for a kids movie I never heard from oozes skill, and has so so many little stand alone musical ideas… it’s just… crazy.
Reminds me of the busy Temple of Doom writing, mixed with Carl Stalling. Not for the fainthearted, very dense and hectic… but superb imho. Example: around the 15:30 minute mark onwards.
Thanks Thierry, for your well thought out reply, to which I wholeheartedly agree.
Spielberg + Silvestri I’m more than fine with. Alas, with Zimmer… a big no. Please no, otherwise Spielberg would have lost his marbles.
McNeely is very very good! Such a shame that he is not scoring big pictures… a weird world at times. Actually one can expect it, as for example studios are ruining the LOTR and Willow franchises etc, by letting incapable people write and direct. So I’m not surprised them not looking for highly skilled, classically trained (film)composers and instead going for “modern” filmmusic a la Remote Control, without character and class.
I stand by my point, Talgorn is the perfect replacement for Williams, after he retires. Thoughts?
Yes, I understand what you means...he definitely can write great sympnonic tour-de-force works in the John Williams mode...exactly as Joel McNeely, Bruce Broughton and Gordy Haab can do.
However, we have experienced over the years that Hollywood doesn't work like this....and the powers that be will certainly not hire Frederic Talgorn when Williams retires.
Actually, I guess they will just not hire a composer to mimick legendary John Williams classic film score stuff. They will hire a personality, not the best Williams clone, any good he could be, I am pretty sure.
Plus that it's all a matter of connection, relationhsips, networking. Take Steven Spielberg for instance: when John Williams not available, he lately worked with Alan Silvestri (READY PLAYER ONE) and Thomas Newman (BRIDGE OF SPIES)...only already successfull names....and people with whom he had connection with.
And do I have to speak about how Joel McNeely and Bruce Broughton carreers went on the last 25 years? They indeed worked with Spielberg in the 80ies (YOUNG INDIANA JONES CHRONICLES, YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES) but later on SOLDIER, THE AVENGERS, VIRUS, LOST IN SPACE....all bombed at the box-office and I am afraid that they still suffer from these flops.
Although they are both great composers, totally underrated and, worse, totally under-used. In the same time, almost each Zimmer, Gregson-Williams, Mancina or Powell scored movies was a hit.
So ok, maybe Spielberg could remember Frederic Talgorn worked on YOUNG INDIANA JONES CHRONICLES series, but why having not hired him since?
My best wish is that, once Williams retires, Spielberg goes at least with Alan Silvestri as for READY PLAYER ONE, and my worst fear is that he goes with Thomas Newman as for BRIDGE OF SPIES. And don't tell me he goes with Zimmer or I quit!
But I don't see any reasonable chance for Talgorn, McNeely, Broughton or Haab to take over Williams...although I wished it. They are out of the radar....
My best wish is that, once Williams retires, Spielberg goes at least with Alan Silvestri as for READY PLAYER ONE, and my worst fear is that he goes with Thomas Newman as for BRIDGE OF SPIES.
Thierry, you love what you love, and I respect that. For me, Bridge of Spies was a great score, one of my absolute favorites of the last ten years, and Ready Player One's score was the worst sort of overblown and unearned sentimentality (granted, I thought the film was excruciating, too). But according to a very reliable source, one thing they have in common is that John Williams had a hand in the choosing of both Newman and Silvestri (as well as of John Powell for Solo).
It's very easy to go to the old saw "it's all who you know," and of course in any business, personal connections are important. But we should not so cynically dismiss the value of relying on people who have proven their worth to you in a stressful business.
Didn't Talgorn head back home from Hollywood to France in the 90s, when he realised he couldn't/wouldn't deal with the bullshit that went with working for USA studio directors and producers? And that was when his broad symphonic style was in vogue. Why would he attempt it now, when he barely gets work in his native France.
Didn't Talgorn head back home from Hollywood to France in the 90s, when he realised he couldn't/wouldn't deal with the bullshit that went with working for USA studio directors and producers?
I don't know the real story, I don't know if Talgorn ever said this, I am clueless.
But I've never known anybody in any field who either left a company or changed careers or went back to where they came from who didn't make a similar claim. A (distant) relative has "left" (i.e. been fired from) three jobs in the legal field in the last half-dozen years, and every time it was that his bold new ideas scared them. A (terribly unfunny) standup comic I have the misfortune to know came to LA to break into comedy writing and acting, was unsuccessful, and returned to Boston after sending a mass email to everybody he knew explaining that he wouldn't "play the Hollywood game" and producers felt threatened by that. I could go on and on.
As you say, Talgorn's career hasn't exactly been thriving in his native country, either.
It's unfortunate, but sometimes things just don't work out the way you'd hope, even if you've got the goods.
The way I remember being told it Mike, by the 'in-the-know' Goldsmith Society/MFTM gang, was that it was probably a bit of both. Talgorn is said to be quite an abrasive and outspoken character (or certainly was in the 80s/90s...he was very young back then) who wouldn't suffer fools, so that, coupled with the more 'tow the line/brown-nosing' popularity politics of Hollywood was most likely a match made in hell. But yeah, he's struggled for regular work in France too, since then. He's certainly got the goods though.
Longtime (frustrated) Talgorn fan here. Love his work on Asterix, Monty Spinnerratz, Le Petit Prince, and some of his production library music albums. Always hoped for more. Too bad Intrada couldn't ever pull off Angels in the End Zone.
Thanks to this thread, I just realized that Talgorn has recently been uploading symphonic suites from a number of his unreleased scores on Youtube -- for instance, from the 2000 documentary MAYBACH: THE CREATION OF A LIVING LEGEND:
Thanks to this thread, I just realized that Talgorn has recently been uploading symphonic suites from a number of his unreleased scores on Youtube -- for instance, from the 2000 documentary MAYBACH: THE CREATION OF A LIVING LEGEND:
There's much more!
Fantastic, isn’t it? There is still hope for intelligent, well crafted filmmusic.
