Matt

I don't know any details, but I thought this might be...

I believe he designed the score as a close knit fabric to the film, as most good scores should be!, only to have it used like a carpet.

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Originally posted by scoreguy16:
This is kinda off the topic but why do a lot of his scores have a track called Weepy Donuts???

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They don't... the only one that employs that track title is Good Will Hunting.

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Originally posted by Jeron:

They don't... the only one that employs that track title is Good Will Hunting.

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Originally posted by scoreguy16:
This is kinda off the topic but why do a lot of his scores have a track called Weepy Donuts???

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Self-indulgence, perhaps??

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Originally posted by TimT:
Well don't forget The Family Man, and To Die For....

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Well I don't know about To Die For... but there were no track titles for The Family Man promo that was sent out. Ryan Keaveney (Cinemusic/Elfmaniac) put together that tracklisting from tracks from other Elfman CDs as an "inside joke" to Elfman fans.

Regardless, Clayton's question is still some what moot. If "To Die For" is the only other Elfman disc with a "Weepy Donuts" track title, that's still only one other disc. Hardly "a lot of his scores" as Clay put it.

Jeron

That is very fascinating, I (of course) had no knowledge to all of the trouble Batman Returns had behind the scenes.
Was that Batman Returns article you read in a Cinefantastique magazine?

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Originally Posted by Some Guy with a website called Filmtracks.com, which coincidentally contains a review of the CD

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Originally posted by scoreguy16:
Jeron, sorry to break this to you but there were in fact track listings to The Family Man promo. And one of them was Weepy Donuts. Track 16 to be exact...

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Clayon, you obviously didn't read what I said.

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Ryan Keaveney (Cinemusic/Elfmaniac) put together that tracklisting from tracks from other Elfman CDs as an "inside joke" to Elfman fans.

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I consider Ryan Keaveney a friend and I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about. I own the actual academy disc - there was no track listing included. Get your facts straight, Clay.

Cheers,
Jeron

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Originally posted by scoreguy16:
Jeron, don't ever call me Clay again.

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Woah, woah, calm down little doagie. It's a pony ride, not a horse race.

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Originally posted by scoreguy16:
And I do have my facts straight.

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That's not evident, dude. Sorry.

Jeron

SFT

- - - - - -
SOUND EFFECTS SUCK
After Batman, Danny Elfman did a number of action films (Darkman, Dick Tracy,
Nightbreed), but it wasn't a dislike of the genre which forced him to call it quits after Batman Returns in 1992. "Personally I love doing those big action films. I had a great time writing the score to Darkman. It
was a big, old-fashioned melodrama, and I love big, old melodramatic scores." Instead, it was the interminable sound effects of the genre that turned him off. "It was during the screening of Batman Returns that I decided I want to write music that will do what it was meant to do for a film; I don't
want to write music that will compete with an opera of sound effects. Contemporary dubs to my ears are getting busier and more shrill every year. The dubbers actually think they're doing a great job for the music if a crescendo or horn blast
occasionally pops through the wall of sound."
The situation on Batman Returns was his worst ever. Elfman wrote his music with dynamics in mind, only to find that
everything was flattened out by the dubbing mixer. The film was so poorly dubbed that Elfman believes his music actually hurt the picture; had he known how the sound effects would have been used, he would have
simplified his writing. "In the end result, I believe that if 25% of the score and 25% of the sound effects had been dropped, the entire soundtrack would have been infinitely more effective than the busy mess it became." Many composers will argue that a good relationship with a director will help get their score across in the final mix, but
unfortunately most directors "don't have good ears, even the brilliant ones. With Tim Burton, I had my best and worst dubs back to back. I've never had a better dub than on Edward Scissorhands, and I've never had a worse dub than on Batman Returns. No director does this consciously, they just
lack the audio skills to deal with such a complex science."

As an example of good dubbing, as practiced in the past, Elfman mentions Lawrence of Arabia, where the first several minutes of a huge battle scene are played solely with sound effects, and at a specific cut, the music takes over completely. "The music raises the emotional level enormously,
and you're not aware that all the sound effects have stopped, your brain thinks they're continuing. That to me is perfect dubbing." Another example EIfman gives, enthusiasm bubbling, is Hitchcock's sparse use of sound effects. "Hitchcock was wonderful at giving a heightened reality to
a scene by being very selective with the sound. We would rarely hear sound effects for action that we did not specifically see, and he would let the music fill in all the holes in our imaginations. It let us imagine these things are there all the time, but we're not hearing everything all the time, and you don't think anything is wrong."

Today, however, "sound people tend to look at each individual moment. They look at five seconds, and if something's missing for a fraction of a second, there tends to be a panic. They don't look at the context over the entire soundtrack and the entire film. Hitchcock's films, if dubbed today might
become a whole different animal as the soundtrack would get filled from top to bottom, leaving no room to breathe, and certainly no room for Bernard Herrmann's marvelous scores. There is a point at which all of this starts to wear down on the audience's ears." EIfman compares the experience of dubbing a film to mixing an album - in each case, you tend to scrutinize it moment to moment, looking at every single instant, and if there are major flaws your ear tends to grow accustomed to them just by the repetition. Even if it's wrong, it will start sounding right. However, a major
difference is that when you mix an album, you can "A-B" it with another recording just by popping in a different CD and re-aligning your ears. "You might pop in another album for comparison and realize, 'Oh my god, there's no bass!' But it's only by listening to something else that you realize that
you almost completely lost your bass, because your ears will compensate for it and make you think you've been hearing it all this time. That's a luxury we have when we're mixing, you can pop in something else at any time and re-adjust your ears to see if you've slipped, but you can't do that on
the dubbing stage of a film. You can't just turn on another film and go, 'Beep beep, A-B, whoa! Why does that other movie sound twice as good as ours? Maybe we're doing something wrong here.'"

Elfman isn't critical of any particular sound designer, as much as the entire freight-train dubbing mentality. "They're simply doing their jobs, which is to provide every possible sound. It's the mixer's job to select sounds and ask, 'Do we need to hear everything that you see and don't see all the time?' What contemporary dubbing is doing is taking all our imagination away from us."

Nevertheless, film remains a medium obsessed with creating an audio-visual "virtual reality," a type of sensory overload, to the expense of the story and characters, even though those are what people are going to see. "An audience very seldom realizes when they're hearing a terrible score, any more than they realize when they're watching terrible editing. If they could magically see a scene edited much better, they would notice the difference, and likewise, if they could suddenly, magically see the same scene with a very effective score, they would find themselves unconsciously more involved."