Has anyone mentioned JADE by James Horner? Didn't he have a horrible experience on that one, where he didn't get on with William Friedkin and turned in a score that must rank amongst his worst, most least inspired efforts ever?
I remember reading somewhere that when Mark McKenzie watched Warlock II: The Armageddon he though the film was too nasty and did not wanted to score it, but as he was under contract he went ahead and delivered a very good score, with a beautiful love theme.
Has anyone mentioned JADE by James Horner? Didn't he have a horrible experience on that one, where he didn't get on with William Friedkin and turned in a score that must rank amongst his worst, most least inspired efforts ever?
I am quite sure this score is Horner's #1 among teenagers in Sweeden.
God, I caught most of HANOVER STREET on a local station with my senior caregiving client yesterday, and I can't imagine what went through John Barry's mind being face with that. All I can say is he sure didn't rise to the challenge, as it was an even more lugubrious effort than usual from Barry. Even the cues for the action scenes (such as they were) were totally ineffective at getting any energy going.
WWII, B-25s, Harrison Ford, Christopher Plummer, John Barry. And I HATED that movie!
I have often said that I think I'm the only viewer who enjoyed that movie ... though I do acknowledge that its last boys- own act lets it down ... and John Barry's scoring for those scenes is less than his usual standard. The main thread of the film is excellent, it's well played and Barry's recreation of a 1940s' score is simply superb. That Barry was unable to conduct the score may have led to some scenes being not quite on the mark but my DVD rip of the music ... with extensive dialogue ... makes for a great listen, separate from the CD release.
I like to learn more about those stories, how problem-solving occurred in writing the music. That's really fascinating to me.
Ditto. When I finally get around to nabbing Intrada's Chinatown, I'm devouring those liner notes.
And to Paul, thanks for your input. It's not that I don't believe you, but I'd also like to read sources on those accounts. (Good gravy, this is sounding dangerously close to the film score version of tabloids!)
This has been a fascinating thread, but it fails to address an issue that has been staring me in the face ever since I saw the heading: namely, the plight of film composers behind the Iron Curtain. My master’s degree was on the de-Stalinization of post-war Polish culture, so this is a topic that I’m quite familiar with.
There were vast numbers of Polish citizens who worked in the visual, performance and literary arts after WW2, whose political views were profoundly at odds with the prevailing ideology imposed by Soviet lackeys. The totalitarian dictatorship of the Polish Communist Party brooked no dissent, least of all from creative artists with questionable allegiances.
The film industry was a particularly nevralgic component of the communist propaganda machine in the Soviet bloc following the Second World War. After three years of muted state-control over cinema and the other arts, the post-war Polish Minister of Culture imposed Zdanovian Socialist Realism, in line with other Eastern European countries. This became a powerful weapon in ensuring political and social control and was instrumental in the building of a monolithic, totalitarian regime. Of all the arts, cinema played the most vital role in the indoctrination of Polish society; its agitational and educational role was fully exploited in a slew of agitprop movies, documentaries and newsreels. Replete with the most egregious pro-Soviet anti-west propaganda, these visual artifacts all had musical scores, always orchestral and often with wall-to-wall music.
While conducting background research for my thesis, I was able to speak to Andrzej Markowski, a film composer whose resume includes Andrzej Wajda’s debut film, A Generation (1954), a particularly nasty piece of communist propaganda. Like the majority of Polish film industry employees, Markowski was a pragmatist. His philosophical outlook matched that of other ethically-challenged Polish film composers: keeping body and soul together with a regular pay cheque trumped the moral imperative. The basic needs of the family precluded the possibility of committing professional hara-kiri by refusing to accept scoring assignments. In short, being faithful to one’s political convictions was fine when it didn’t imperil the lives of one’s nearest and dearest. Markowski pointed out that those who did rebel against the system, invariably failed to find work and ended up like the avant-garde artist and pedagogue Wladyslaw Strzeminski, who died of starvation.
I also spoke to Wojciech Kilar about scoring films which he ideologically hated. Kilar is a good case in point here because his personal views could not be more diametrically opposed to Marxist Leninist thought – demonstrated by his espousal, after democratization, of the extreme right-wing party that now rules Poland. The composer was often called on to create music for films that falsified the post-war history of Poland and paid obsequious homage to the communist authorities – something Kilar despised. He admitted to a considerable amount of soul-searching but ultimately was contractually obliged to score whatever film came his way - and did so to enable him to devote more time to the composition of what he saw as more important classical pieces..
Jurassic T. Park’s comments about “finding the parts that are meaningful to you and throwing yourself into them” is almost a perfect paraphrase of Kilar’s approach to these films. He told me that he ignored the hideous politics and tried to find something personally significant in the film that he could latch onto that helped propel the narrative forward. Usually, it was enough to satisfy the producer. Interestingly, Kilar’s earlier films are often extremely sparsely scored, especially the politically problematic ones. According to the composer, he would convince the director/producer that his film didn’t require much music and was able to get away with ten-fifteen minutes of scoring. With full financial remuneration, needless to say.
This has been a fascinating thread, but it fails to address an issue that has been staring me in the face ever since I saw the heading: namely, the plight of film composers behind the Iron Curtain. My master’s degree was on the de-Stalinization of post-war Polish culture, so this is a topic that I’m quite familiar with.
Wow, that's a totally different perspective I wouldn't even be thinking about, but makes a lot of sense. I would think much of this burden would fall on the filmmakers themselves, but knowing the role that music plays I can see how the score could really skew a film towards either satire/critique or propaganda/nationalistic.
I would guess the most contemporaneous version of this would be Iranian and Chinese cinema, although I think Iranian cinema has a stronger history of anti-propaganda movements. It's interesting too to consider the degrees of propaganda - like 80's action films where the good Americans win are kind of general societal propaganda vs. the harder propaganda of rewriting historical narratives.
You presented this point quite well already so I won't attempt to reword it. The only thing I can add as well is Kilar's comment about soul-searching is a great point of how the world is not so black and white. It is a calculation to determine if doing a little bit of one thing you do not like enables you to be able to do even more of what you do like. That has meaning in a political and humanistic sense as you point out, but is still functionally the same with basic artistic endeavors.
While the stakes for Goldsmith were likely not the same, perhaps he or other composers like him might take on projects that aren't great to maintain loyalty and friendships with filmmakers he respected. As much as Goldsmith was a composer he was also a human being and his relationships with other people I'm sure served a personal non-musical value to him.
According to the composer, he would convince the director/producer that his film didn’t require much music and was able to get away with ten-fifteen minutes of scoring. With full financial remuneration, needless to say.
I missed this part, but that is a really interesting anecdote and quite clever. I don't know if this was the case, but I like the idea that in working on propaganda the propagandist might be beset by propaganda blindness/hubris with which the clever participant (such as the composer) can exploit and hide satire or critique under a cloak of artistic description, such as the "not needing much music" or some other similar artistic qualification that appears to aggrandize the propaganda but in reality undermines it.
Has anyone mentioned JADE by James Horner? Didn't he have a horrible experience on that one, where he didn't get on with William Friedkin and turned in a score that must rank amongst his worst, most least inspired efforts ever?
Wasn't the story that Horner hated this project from the beginning so he asked for an astronomical fee, figuring the studio would never agree to it, only to be surprised that they did?
I like the idea that in working on propaganda the propagandist might be beset by propaganda blindness/hubris with which the clever participant (such as the composer) can exploit and hide satire or critique under a cloak of artistic description, such as the "not needing much music" or some other similar artistic qualification that appears to aggrandize the propaganda but in reality undermines it.
The mechanism described by Jurassic T. Park was in fact a very real instrument of social critique used extensively by non-conformist purveyors of the arts in Poland. Labeled “ketman” by future Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, it functioned effectively as a resistance strategy until the fall of Communism in 1989.
A little background information might help here.
After fleeing Poland for France in 1949, Milosz was heavily criticized by some quarters of the Western literary establishment for his post-war oeuvre which was shown to be characterized by sickeningly oleaginous flattery of Stalin and the Communist regime of Poland. Milosz responded to this vilification by writing The Captive Mind in which he exposed the intellectual machinations of the creative artist in totalitarian Poland.
According to Milosz, far from displaying complete acquiescence to their Communist masters, in reality, many creative artists merely faked submission to political and cultural dictates. On a prima facie level of assessment by the censors and cultural commissars, the effulgent praise of Communism on open display in every cinema, art gallery and book stall represented a totally sincere level of sycophancy. However, the canny recipients of these cultural artifacts were not fooled. By applying appropriate decoding mechanisms, the truth behind these exaggerated endorsements of Marxism-Leninism was revealed in all its anti-establishment glory.
Regarding film and newsreel scores, composers employing “ketman” would write ironic parodic music for scenes of excessive propaganda - mindless bombastic kitsch that would make Max Steiner seem like a model of musical restraint. Markowski’s score to A Generation, a film I mentioned in a previous post, has all the hallmarks of “ketman”.
A scene worth looking at is the death of the Communist working-class hero at the hands of the Nazis. His demise is accompanied by monumental music cue full of pounding timpani and Bruckner strings. Instead of a tragic-heroic conclusion, the musical aggrandizement serves to create an effect of anticlimax – resulting in bathos rather than pathos. Unfortunately, Markowski died before he could confirm my suspicions about his scoring of the scene.
The sequence starts at 3:24
Another prime example of “ketman” is a 1950 newsreel entitled Fighting the Colorado Beetle. It shows the Communist youth of Poland foiling an American attempt to destroy Soviet bloc potato crops by dropping millions of Colorado beetles onto potato plantations from overhead planes. The perfidy of the decadent capitalists from America is powerfully illustrated in this non-too-subtle war movie score. To the seasoned Polish cinema-goer, this newsreel soundtrack was not simply the product of a pragmatist serving up what the producer demanded for his film. The music is so patently over-the-top that the composer’s ironic contempt for this fabricated anti-US propaganda is quite palpable to the properly attuned viewer.
Of course, for the cynically minded, Milosz’s “ketman” could be dismissed as merely post-hoc justification by an opportunist blowing with the ideological wind. And all the rest is just poor artistry.
Yes, YOR remeber seeing Goldsmith saying nasty things about "Outland".
YOR got really sad, since he just LOVES both movie and score...
I really feel for Williams having to watch those movies over and over and over again without music while working on those scores. However much he was paid, it wasn't enough.
