Peter Jackson: "James Newton Howard and I had creative differences over the score and I did not want to argue with a human. I have always admired the work of HAL 9000 and look forward to working with it."

HAL 9000 has 7 hours to generate 2 hours of music before the premiere.

-----------------

If they want really generic scores that are void of any individuality or personal touches, they should just have computers generate them and be done with it.

While we're at it, do you like Goldsmith??

If the majority of the people on this board were not so desperately trying to fit in with the crowd, maybe you wouldn't suck so much life out of this hobby with your idiocy. Scorro = "hey look at me everybody, i think just like you do!! please like me"

I'm not much of a Zimmer fan by the way...I'm just a non-fan of moronic posts. unfortunately filmscore monthly boards aren't much better...the search continues

This Uri, whoever he was, wasn't here long enough to know you. He didn't like the FSM board either. I don't know what he's looking for but he should start his own board to find it.

Anyway, Media Ventures (aka Remote Control) has the perfect solution for giving the suits what they want from film scores, library cues already made, a generic pre-fab sound where you know what you're getting when you visit their showroom.

And it really is like a brand. If I want a certain look for my house, I can go to Ethan Allen or Laura Ashley. A certain look for my self, I can buy Ralph Lauren or Bill Blass. And if I want a certain sound for my films, I can go to Remote Control. Except that those other designers represent a kind of image or style and Media Ventures seems to represent a lack of style.

Ultimately, I think this is what the studios want. They want to make a love story or a monster movie and go to the supermarket and pick out the love cues and the monster cues and plug them in at the last moment. And they want a sound devoid of any personal touches or anything that would call attention to itself as music, a kind of invisible sound.

But they'd also like to win Oscars for Best Original Score too. That means hiring a person and an orchestra and having an original score for each film. They just want everyone to produce the same style of music and be the same smiling easy to manipulate personality, the Pod Composer.

And I don't think this is new to Hollywood. The approach has always been towards invisibility, towards Background Music as opposed to Foreground Music. But the style is being pursued in a relentless way now so that the Golden Age composers who were looked on in their time as hacks without personality come off as highly individual compared with what we hear today.

It's like the line from STAR WARS: "All vestiges of the old order have been swept away." What was OK last year is not OK this year. The film composer already had to make compromises to work in movies, but the Pod Composer has to make a million more compromises than ever before. Or he has to be naturally mediocre and superficial, a service robot with a smiley face ready and excited to give you whatever it is you want, satisfaction guaranteed.

Look at all the rejected scores we've had over the last 20 years. Hell, over the last two years. It suggests that producers either don't know what they're looking for or that they do know and it's plainly insulting to people of talent.

Whatever the current nature of Media, it seems the public wants or the producers believe in this "sonic, invisible, music-like sonority that accompanies movies". Whatever that is, it isn't quite music, and it's probably difficult for a composer to create because they're likely to sit down and, well, create music which isn't what they are being hired to do.

Some guys get it. Media Ventures with their blend of bombast, atmosphere, and feminine soloists. Horner with one crescendo after another.

And some guys don't. Yared trying for complex themes and harmonies on TROY. Shore for giving Jackson the retro Steiner sound he wanted for KONG. Elfman trying to keep his own personality on-board SPIDERMAN 3.

And next year we'll see who gets the jobs and the money and who gets looked over for being hired.

All of this is just the wrong trend for a great artistic medium. I'm not saying anything you haven't heard me say before a million times. And I know that every year some composers still produce great scores. But I'm thinking of the big picture and overall trends and what the future will be like based on the present and I just wish the people paying for the music and dictating what they want were more willing to trust that the old-fashioned way still works best for films and that individual composers should be left alone to create and be respected for sounding like themselves and no one else.

I think much of the problem here is the filmmakers themselves. They don't know how to communicate with composers, they don't know what they want from the score for their films.

When I was at film school, I kept running into people tracking inappropriate music into their films. When I asked why they would be using something that doesn't really fit there, the response was "because I like that song." That certainly accounts for such bizarre anomalies as Ladyhawke, which I know has a lot of fans but I found embarrassingly wrong for that movie.

I think part of the problem here is that understanding how music works with a scene, while a large part of the education of film composers these days, is not a priority for filmmaking courses. As a result, filmmakers of today are more comfortable with a completely generic sound than they are with a score with its own identity, and that leads to the prevalence of composers such as James Horner and Media Ventures or Remote Control or whatever they're calling themselves today.

This is especially obvious when composers whose personal sound is very distinct are hired to score a film and then their scores are then rejected. If you hired, say, John Barry or Elmer Bernstein to score your film, you have a general - although not too specific - idea as to what you will get. Rejecting a score by one of them only demonstrates that filmmakers not really knowing what they want out of their score.

The idea of replacing the score to save a movie that's in trouble (which may very well be the case on Kong) is basically a very desperate, last-minute move that rarely works. Don't get me wrong, it is possible that James Newton Howard will pull a modern classic out for this one, but Chinatown situations are few and far between.

uri, It was a joke, a form of exagerated parody. Try to develop a sense of humor and not take yourself so seriously. And work on that overwrought lack of manners. Yes, I do like Goldsmith very much!

and uri, go f__k yourself

It's very hard to add much of any worth when you agree with what people have said.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Mark Olivarez:
I have a bad feeling this could turn out to be a "by the numbers" replacement score which means JNH will be forced to copy a temp track and not come up with anything unique and fresh. I hope I'm wrong.

---

Nah. They hire William Ross for that.

This too isn't new. Jean Renoir looked at Zettl's (still very great) book SIGHT, SOUND, MOTION, a key media textbook from the 70s and said in his autobiography that filmmaking isn't about knowing where to put things on the y-axis (Zettl looks scientifically at the film frame as an x-axis and y-axis and talks about the effects of placing things within the frame on viewer perception) but having some experience of life.

Hemingway echoes this when he says if a writer can't write but has a real story to tell is better than the other way around, being able to write but having nothing of interest to talk about.

A number of critics have said that film people are people who know about life from watching movies and so they know a lot about movies but not much about life. But it turns out that they don't know much about movies either unless they were made in the last 20 years.

I have my own film student horror stories ("Who's Francois Truffaut?" "Oh, I just want to do it for the fame.").

It all depends. I looked at the Making of featurettes on the CHARLIE'S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE DVD (Yes, I'll watch anything I guess). And here's McG (Since when are film directors naming themselves like Rappers) directing like he needs to be put on Ritalin (McG: "That was great! That was great! Give me a hug."/Drew: McG's energy is so enormous, he makes it so much fun to be on set."). I'm watching McG cream over all these neat sports cars he got from companies to put into the movie and I'm thinking I wouldn't want him to direct traffic let alone a movie I'm going to watch.

A similar Making of featurette on the recent Jackie Chan AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS showed a young chubby director with a goatie and black T-Shirt all excitement and energy on his set too.

This is the new director: Mr. Happy Set. The prefect guy to hire a Remote Control score. I'll bet it was management's decision to hire Trevor Jones on that one.

Compare that to images of Hawks or Hitchcock on their sets, well-dressed and more-or-less serious, as if what they were doing held some gravity.

Look at directors like Scorsese. I don't even always like Scorsese films but he knows his film history. He knows his movies. He knows to hire Bernard Herrmann the first chance he has a budget to. He knows to use Elmer Bernstein even if it ends in the GANGS OF NEW YORK debacle.

Elmer still had good things to say about Scorsese afterwards to. Herrmann had fall outs with both Hitchcock and Truffaut and yet he spoke of them with respect in later years. Elmer didn't know what working with Todd Haynes was going to be like but Haynes knew his movies, he knew Sirk and he viewed Sirk through the lens of Fassbinder, and he respected Elmer and Elmer in turn liked his FAR FROM HEAVEN score and really campaigned for the Oscar which he didn't get.

If I went up to McG and said Bernard Herrmann I'd expect him to go "Who?" as if he were Julia Roberts at the Oscars. Oh, and hey Julia, they're called Conductors not Stickmen. God help us. Culture is doomed.

But I'd like to place Peter Jackson in the Scorsese/Haynes catagory. I would think he would know something about films, film music, and getting what he wants. Though I could be wrong.

My guess is the suits imposed the scoring change on KONG and it isn't a question of Jackson's inability to communicate what he wants.

Though, in this case, the real answers could be anything.

I agree with you Swash that a director's inability to know what film music is, how it works, and how to get what they want can be a serious factor in the mix. One shouldn't just automatically blame the bureaucrats and the bottom line. The director can be at fault too. And one shouldn't immediately absolve the composers either--they can screw up too.

"I think of film music in terms of a second dialogue, a way of speaking to the spectator's subconscious, of bringing buried, hidden feelings up to the surface."
By Michael Legrand.

For example, Terry Gilliam first hired Goran Bregovic to score The Brothers Grimm with his trademark gypsy music. Gilliam had been listening to it on the set constantly while making the film, and he was sure that this was absolutely the sort of energy he wanted the film to have. But once they actually got into scoring, he discovered that the music wasn't quite working the way he wanted it to, that it was really calling for a more traditional score. So he parted ways with Bregovic, brought in Dario Marianelli (who did some brilliant work, I think) and liked the result much better.

So you see, a director might not know exactly how music should work with a film until he actually hears it working. It is not always a sign of the director's lack of vision or mediocre talents anymore than the same director improvising material on the set would be. It is simply a different way of working, and I think it's a little unfair to judge a director harshly for dumping a score if it is truly not working the way they want it to work.

What makes me suspect King Kong was a studio decision more than anything else is that I would expect Jackson and Shore to be pretty much on the same wavelength at this point. It is entirely possible that Shore's music simply wasn't working the way Jackson originally thought it would, but they seem to have such a close working relationship that I have a hard time believing they wouldn't have worked this out much sooner, either by altering Shore's approach or, if that wasn't working either, taking him off the film much earlier.

quote:

---

Lou Goldberg wrote:
I have my own film student horror stories ("Who's Francois Truffaut?" "Oh, I just want to do it for the fame.").

---

Kirk

I really didn't expect it to sound EXACTLY like I predicted! Oh well. I missed the boys choir. Those little details are important I guess.