I WILL say I think it's a bit of a waste of time, unless there's a lot of unrecorded stuff from 2 & 3 we really need to hear. (Could be, could be.)

I was told that a great deal of DIE HARD 2 was ghostwritten, partly because of scheduling and partly because Kamen hated director Renny Harlin. Notice that huge batch of orchestrators, including the recently popular Don Davis. Don Davis is supposed to have ghosted much of DIE HARD 2, and some of that even appears on the Varese album (don't know for sure which cues, but some of it is supposed to be more or less rewritten cues from Davis' BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.)

I also understand that Kamen basically wrote TWO different scores for DIE HARD 3 -- the one we hear in the movie, and the one we hear on the CD.

A boot of the Kamen tracks from the original "Lethal Weapon" album is floating around. It also has his score for "Mona Lisa" on it, which is very good.

H Rocco, you can pretty much forget about the Fox album. When they lost their deal at Arista, the label went into limbo, and most of those albums went south.

I heard there were some additional problems with the release regarding the re-use fees, as both "Die Hard" and "Predator" were recorded in Los Angeles.

Thanks,
Shaun

Bought the original lp the day I saw the flic on Hollywood blvd. Of course most of those intense modernisms were missing.

Page Cook dissed the score in FilmS In Review for its architectonic dissonance and mechanistic inhumanity leaving necessary traits of compassion and ordering principles behind in favor of a world-view of obligationless cutthroat irresponsibility. I took it as a massive emotional juggernaut perfectly suited to Riggs' nihilism not to mention Richard Donner's turbo-driven overhaul of the genre. Clapton and Sanborn's contribution added a lot of heart. Extremely influential score with its titanium-coated blitzkrieg of activity.

[This message has been edited by mlw (edited 15 February 2000).]

Thanks! Good to know I'm having an effect, preferably a positive one.

NP: The Ninth Gate (still... ; Kilar)

However, after one day of recording PREDATOR in Budapest, the performance was considered so bad that the production pulled out and moved everything back to Los Angeles. Hence, Intrada could no longer afford the fees involved.

A similar thing happened on TOTAL RECALL: Goldsmith conducted a few sessions with the Graunke Symphony in Munich (with which he'd worked before) and decided that the Graunke just wasn't picking it up. He was able to demand the National Symphony in London, and that's what we wound up with.