Of the recent posters I've completed I've done a few pulp classic, comic book, and novel stuff, so that's what the theme of these first few is:

THE GREEN HORNET - John Ottman or John Debney
DR. STRANGE - Christopher Young
GREEN LANTERN - Richard Gibbs and Bear McCreary
CAPTAIN AMERICA - Alan Silvestri or Brian Tyler
FAHRENHEIT 451 - John Williams
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1984) - Elliot Goldenthal
I AM LEGEND - Marco Beltrami
KILLING PABLO - Harry Gregson-Williams
THE DARK TOWER SERIES - Alan Silvestri or Basil Poledouris

ummmmmmm ...

Philipp

np: "ben hur" (carl davis)

As for me, they simply don't make the films I wish they'd make. My desires for the cinema aren't commercial enough. For instance, I would love to see a new widescreen travelogue film along the lines of 50s Cinerama films like Search for Paradise or South Seas Adventure. But with all the CGI, spaceships, and explosions out there who gets thrilled by a real sunset or shots of travel landmarks?

I'd love to see a solid Olympics documentary along the lines of Olympia and Tokyo Olympiad. The Bud Greenspan films are ok, but nothing special and broadcast news simply cannot do justice to the Olympics.

I'd love to see a few Hemingway stories done right on film but once again I don't see anyone in a hurry to make Hemingway and especially to make him without messing around with him.

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
I'd love to see a few Hemingway stories done right on film but once again I don't see anyone in a hurry to make Hemingway and especially to make him without messing around with him.

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Ohh, I would kill somebody to see a good adaptaion of a Hemingway story.

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Originally posted by Widescreen:
If we're playing the fantasy choice game, the Green Lantern films would be scored by Harry-Gregson Williams. Play the last half of "El gato" from The Rundown and check out the famous panel of all the Green Lantern Corp floating mid-space with their rings glowing and reciting the oath. I get chills from the thought...

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I don't know if you've ever seen Alex Ross' painting of this iconic GL Corps. scene, Widescreen, but I remember flipping through his book of DC art while listening to Beltrami's I, Robot score and as soon as I hit the Green Lantern section and saw his rendition of it (I kid you not) the end of track 15 ("Round Up") - where the choir swells to an amazing finale - made me gasp. The image and the music worked so well together. So, in light of recent memory, swap Marco Beltrami with Richard Gibbs and Bear McCreary for my dream Green Lantern score. I've got some more to toss around, as well:

THE DEADLY KISS (it's actually a Raymond Chandler Philip Marlowe story I'm conjurring up) - John Debney
JOHN CARTER OF MARS (A PRINCESS OF MARS) - John Debney or Brian Tyler
METAL GEAR SOLID - Harry Gregson-Williams (who else?)
THE INVISIBLE MAN - Angelo Badalamenti
LORD OF THE FLIES - John Murphy
IRON MAN - Steve Jablonsky
BLACK PANTHER (the Marvel comics hero) - Hans Zimmer (come on, the guy does some amazing African-influenced stuff)

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Originally posted by nuts_score:
JOHN CARTER OF MARS (A PRINCESS OF MARS) - John Debney or Brian Tyler

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They did a TV version of The Old Man and The Sea and added a love story. Even when they did it in 1958 without a love story it all takes place in a studio tank.

They did a mini-series of The Sun Also Rises and added all sorts of scenes and characters not in the book. There was a recent TV version of another Hemingway short story that I didn't even watch because the short story was really short and had no dialogue and so I figured the TV version was just going to be made up from scratch.

The 1932 version of A Farewell to Arms is an ok film in places but it has nothing to do with Hemingway. The 1957 version has its own digressions.

The Macomber Affair is ruined by having it conform to the production code. The 1957 version of The Sun Also Rises has a great score and cast but is still held back by the code.

I like The Snows of Kilimanjaro as a film but it isn't Hemingway either (in fact Hemingway dubbed it The Snows of Zanuck).

Probably the closest Hollywood has come to doing Hemingway right is For Whom The Bell Tolls but Hemingway had problems with it even though he was friends with both of its stars. Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man isn't too bad either probably because it had A.E. Hotchner working on it. Hotchner wrote a TV version of FWTBT that Frankenheimer directed in 58 or 59 that I would die to see. Hotchner was also going to script a version of Across the River and Into the Trees that was set to star Gary Cooper but Cooper died of cancer and the film was never made.

There are a couple of versions of Hills Like White Elephants including one with James Woods and Melanie Griffith and a student version you can acquire on-line, but they don't seem to work either.

The part of Huston's The Killers that is Hemingway is pretty faithful. The rest makes an interesting film but none of it is Hemingway.

Islands in the Stream is another film that reproduces a section of Hemingway and then goes on to create its own stuff in the later sections. I like it as a film very much but it isn't 100% faithful to Hemingway. That might actually be a good thing since there are weak sections in this unfinished postumous novel, but nevertheless...

To Have and Have Not is a masterpiece, one of the greatest movies Hollywood ever issued. Hemingway and Hawks got together for a few weeks to talk about some ideas and I'm sure Hemingway created the character of Eddy the Rummy because he's not in the original book but later turns up in Islands in the Stream. From there William Faulkner and Jules Furthman created the rest. So, it has a little Hemingway in it but it isn't the book and it's ultimately more Hawks than it is anyone.

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Lou Goldberg wrote:
But with all the CGI, spaceships, and explosions out there who gets thrilled by a real sunset or shots of travel landmarks?

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I don't think this is an entirely unthinkable idea now, as it seems not terribly far removed from March of the Penguins. Though I don't understand why that film made it so big and Winged Migration never caught on.

I can't mention many of the films I'd like to see made because I haven't given up on the notion that I might one day make them myself. Of course, like Lou, most of my ideas are not commerical enough to be greenlit in Hollywood as it currently exists, so it's likely that I wouldn't be able to afford a Hollywood-sized score.

That being said, I'd love to see Michael Nyman score a soccer film, as he's a big fan of the sport and I think his upbeat music would go really well with the game. It need not be great film; I just think the subject matter would inspire something really great from him. Actually, I would have loved it if he scored Bend it Like Beckham, after hearing how adroitly he tied his style to Indian music on his recent album, "Sangam".

Nyman is also scoring the film version of H.G. Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes that I've been constructing in my head for the past couple years.

I have some other ideas for a post-apocalyptic film (grasping for a more Bergman-esque version of Le Dernier combat, I suppose) that I would like to be scored by either Giya Kancheli or Eleni Karaindrou. Actually, my first two choices were Virgil Thomson and Georges Delerue, but they're not around anymore. If I get to make it, I fear Kancheli will be out of the picture by then as well.

That's actually a common problem for me. I've had this teen-drama-introspective-existential-reincarnation film rattling around in my head (and in various stages of scripting) since I was 17 (five years ago) and I always wanted Jerry Goldsmith to score it. If he kicked the bucket, I always imagined it would then fall to Elmer Bernstein. So last year was pretty horrific. The job has now fallen to Bruce Broughton. If he falls out of the running, Christopher Young is next in line.

And I'd like to see Richard Band score any dramatic film. Like the sort of job that only Thomas Newman gets hired for now. Just give him a decently sized orchestra and some space to fill and I'm sure everyone who made fun of Laserblast not long ago would be stricken speechless (just as they would be if some record label decided to release his score to Ghostwarrior).

One that almost happened is Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which was to be scored by Alberto Iglesias. That would have been a really tremendous piece of work. On the DVD of Lost in La Mancha (the documentary about the film's failed production) there's a deleted scene of an early meeting Gilliam had with Iglesias, who plays him the two themes he has written on the piano. It's gorgeous stuff. I hope Gilliam gives Iglesias another call if he ever gets the project going again.

Kirk
NP - The Magnificent Ambersons (one of the best scores ever)

Unlike you Kirk, I don't really have films in my head I'd like to make myself. But my feeling was that given the film music I like and given who would be out there to work with on films made ten years from now, if I were to ever make a film, I'd wind up re-recording a Golden or Silver Age composer and tracking in the music rather than having something original written for a film of mine.

So, if I wanted to "work" with Goldsmith and have his music in my film, I simply would. And it would be a tremendous score too since it would be culled from the best he ever did.

Hollywood would object since it would be "too old-fashioned" but so would any film I make be old-fashioned. My guess is that it might be a revelation (Tarantino gets away with it).

We had a lot of pop stuff before STAR WARS had this very full-out orchestral score. The Gerhardt LPs from the 70s really surprised people about film music and I think if people actually heard Tiomkin or Herrmann in modern films they might be pleased rather than turned off. And even if they weren't, screw 'em. If I'm making the films, I'm making 'em my way and it's in the contract that you pay for them but don't dare touch 'em (unless you want to be dead).

WATCHMEN - Alexandre Desplat (also, whenever I look back at some of "Watchmen" I also like to listen to select tracks from Beltrami's Hellboy, but I'd be very interested in what kind of an intricate score Desplat could weave for such an intricate tale)
SPLINTER CELL - John Powell
THE CALL OF CTHULHU - James Newton Howard or Pino Donnagio

NP> JNH's Signs (***/****)