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Posted: |
Oct 13, 2019 - 11:46 AM
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By: |
The Mutant
(Member)
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Here’s some interviews by Jon Burlingame I found online:
Wolfgang Peterson:
"[I thought,] ‘Maybe we’ll get something that’s a little different, more daring.’ Finally, it didn’t really go together. At the end, it comes down to the filmmaker, what kind of taste he has. If I just have the feeling that it doesn’t work for the picture I’ve done, then I have to make a hard decision.
“It has nothing to do with the quality of the music,” Petersen says. “Randy’s one of the greatest in the business, and a hugely talented man. We all know that. But it was not my taste, and finally I had to make that decision.”
Goldsmith:
“I’ve known Randy since he was a kid. I’m very fond of him,” he says. “I don’t know what happened, or what went wrong. But regardless of whether I did it or anybody else did it, obviously they were going to change it. And it’s a wonderful picture. It’s a very emotional film: the president and the threat to his family, the decisions he has to make as a president, a father and a husband--this kind of conflict, which makes it more than just an action picture.”
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Here’s Newman’s take on The Hijacking scene.
I kept as much sound effects and dialogue as possible.
More clips coming.
The Hijacking:
https://vimeo.com/365932818
Thanks for posting but yeah,that doesnt work at all.Especially compared to the kickass music that JG came up with.
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Here’s Newman’s take on The Hijacking scene.
I kept as much sound effects and dialogue as possible.
More clips coming.
The Hijacking:
https://vimeo.com/365932818
It sounds pretty comical, way too upbeat for that action scene.
It could have been great in a 70s version of the film, which Charlton Heston as President.
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Posted: |
Oct 15, 2019 - 7:16 AM
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By: |
dv95327
(Member)
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No, it doesn’t work at all. Exhilarating music on its own for sure, but it has no place to go once it starts because Newman floors the pedal out of the gate. Look at what Goldsmith does. He lets off the pedal, lets it breathe, layers instruments on, takes them off, quiets the orchestra, makes it louder. Adds things on top of rhythms, takes them away. It gives the music a sense of momentum but never makes it feel like it’s too much on the picture. It ebbs and flows with respect to the tension he’s trying to build. It also does a wonderful thing by using these techniques to respect scene changes. Note, for example, when we switch to the hijackers to Rammstein Tower that the drums and the basic rhythm keep going but Goldsmith backs off the volume and changes what’s being played over that rhythm. It acknowledges the scene change without causing the music to lose its forward motion.
Newman, on the other hand, just scored every series of shots as its own scene. The music, as a result, just sounds frenetic, harried, and zany (for lack of a better word). Its, to quote others, like Newman was scoring an over the top comedy. It’s been suggested he thought the movie was asinine and scored it that way. Maybe so. But he doesn’t respect the completeness of the entire scene, which is a major strike when scoring a film. This combined with Newman’s 100 mph approach seems to have blighted his score.
What else does this sound like?
Oh yeah……
Truthfully, I don’t think Newman deserves all the credit for lousing this one up. Given how you can also put Yared’s score to Troy over the movie and it just weighs it down in the same exact way, I suspect Peterson had a very difficult time articulating what he wanted his music to do until panic struck. Once, it happens. Twice, one becomes suspicious.
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Posted: |
Oct 15, 2019 - 10:23 AM
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By: |
John Mullin
(Member)
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I think the Goldsmith score is better for the movie, BUT I really don't think these videos (and much of the commentary here) are being entirely fair to what Newman did.
Truth is, we are NOT listening to the Newman score mixed into a full film soundtrack, where the music would be playing under dialogue and competing with heavy sound effects. Newman likely wrote knowing that there there would be guns firing, feet scuffing, fight noises and the sound of the airplane itself that his music would have to break through if it was to be heard. If you listen to an isolated score - even a very well regarded one - on a DVD, it doesn't always play that well on its own up against the picture.
I think this music might have been perfectly fine if it had made it to the final mix. The main difference, I think, is that Newman was scoring the nightmare quality of the situation whereas Goldsmith was scoring the heroism and, on occasion, the adrenelline.
I don't think that Newman's approach was an invalid one for this movie at all. For all we know, Peterson and Newman might have initially agreed that that was what the music should be.
But as it got closer, clearly the director / producers / studio began to think that crowd-pleasing heroism was the better way to go. And they were probably right about that. I don't think Newman's score would be playing at campaign rallies today or that people would necessarily be clamoring for an expanded release of it!
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Posted: |
Oct 15, 2019 - 11:50 AM
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By: |
Brad Wills
(Member)
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Mutant, I appreciate all the effort you've put into these clips, especially for this particular film. Most of the admiration in this instance is for having the fortitude to spend even more than a single second with this preposterously frenzied, clanging, hysterical, over-the-top, unintentionally funny, disastrously unfocused mess of a score, the single most justified rejection in film history. This is truly some of the worst music I've ever heard in my life. But keep up the good work - even if, in this case, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
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Posted: |
Oct 15, 2019 - 11:57 AM
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By: |
John Mullin
(Member)
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I did watch it all the way through. You did a great job! I'm not trying to bag on what you did at all, but I still don't think this is anything like what the score might have sounded like in an actual film mix.
I work in film and television post production, and I often attend / supervise final mixes. The score would almost never be mixed that loudly up against picture, for one. And although you were able to get a lot of the sound design back in there from your library, there's still an awful lot missing that the score would both have to play under and complete with. Really loud gun shots, engines from aircraft and vehicles, alarms and sirens, body thuds, people running and shuffling, and then people screaming and, of course, the dialogue itself.
I'm making this point because when I've been in a position where I've had to cut proposed score cues into episodes that I'm working on, and then play them for producers, I've seen producers reject music out of hand if it is mixed too loudly. It happens quite often, actually, even if the composer was on the right track. I'm not saying it's right, but it does. If I go back through and lower the score for another pass, suddenly the producers have no problem with it at all. It's a fine line, and that can be the difference between whether or not a score stays or goes from a picture.
Cinema history is full of scores being tossed for similar reasons. Gabriel Yared's TROY was already mentioned in this thread. The other example that comes to mind is Lalo Schifrin's THE EXORCIST. I'm sure I'm mangling this story a bit in the retelling, but I remember reading that at the sessions director William Friedkin complained that the score was "too loud." So Lalo went over to the master fader and turned it down a little. That's kind of a passive aggressive move to be sure - Friendkin clearly thought so since he fired Schifrin and threw out the music shortly thereafter! - but if you listen to the unused score, it seems perfectly fine and that it might have worked well in the movie.
I truly believe that Newman's score falls into the same category, and I stand by my opinion that hearing it as it is presented here doesn't necessarily treat his work fairly. I agree with those who say that it seems a little silly when it's on its own up against picture like this, but it NEVER would have been mixed like that if it had survived into the movie.
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I have to agree with Brad. Excellent work Mutant! But the score is an utter disaster. It's amazing to be able to see it in context.
It feels like a 9-year-old with ADHD who has just eaten an entire box of Junior Mints chattering beside me as I watch. It makes every death and every intense beat feel like it has a BAM! POW! sting, like in the old 60s Batman series. The whole sequence feels like a comedy.
I get what Newman is trying to do, he's trying to be a bit playful, like Kamen's Die Hard score, but that film had a witty, self-deprecating tone that this film just doesn't, AFO is 1000% serious, and needed a serious, intense score.
Goldsmith clearly saw the right way to score the film, and it was decidedly not this. Brilliant work though, again, in making this available for us all, thanks!!!
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