A friend once told me that film was the pinnacle of art because it could combine the best of all other media: visual art, textual art, and musical art. But film scoring and composing is one of the least appreciated aspects of the medium. Despite the wealth of wonderful music created over the decades, only a handful of songs have penetrated beyond the confines of film circles into the cultural zeitgeist. Most of these examples are by the legendary John Williams with his well-known themes from Star Wars, Raiders of the Last Ark, Superman, Jaws, Harry Potter, ET and many others.
However, other music-makers like Philip Glass, Danny Elfman and the vast majority of composers are lucky if a single cue of their's registers with the audience. Even then, if it does strike a chord of memory with the viewers, they can't place it. Identification eludes them as does praise and reward for the composers. The hows and whys of this phenomenon are many, but what are the implications? Can great music be labeled as such if it is not remembered? Is memory a sign of validation or inconsequential?
Another composer often slighted for accolades is Clint Eastwood. Like John Carpenter, Eastwood in recent years has chosen to score most of his own films to minimize costs and maximize the aesthetic consistency. Much of Eastwood's music including that for Gran Torino, Unforgiven, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby is sparse. Echoing his visual style, Eastwood creates an aural palette that is both contemplative in mood and minimalist in dynamic. There are no sweeping melodies or whirlwind crescendos to test the audience's resolve for majesty.
Therefore, it was a bit jarring to hear the background music for the trailer to Clint Eastwood's latest film, J. Edgar. Visually, the film certainly looks like an Eastwood picture. All of the footage in the preview is washed out to avoid even a shade of bright colors as previously seen in his twin Iwo Jima films, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, and even more starkly in The Changeling and Hereafter. Yet, the music overwhelms.
The pounding base dominates to give the trailer a seedy feeling of forced importance. If the music sounds familiar, it should.
While not identical in entirety, the blaring base notes are common to both. However, Eastwood did not direct or score Inception – that was Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer respectively. The plot thickens when another teaser is added for Immortals.
Neither Eastwood nor Nolan or Zimmer had a hand in the making of Immortals. This raises an obvious question: Why is Zimmer's music in the trailers for J. Edgar and Immortals?
Studios, producers, editors and directors have been borrowing, reusing, and recycling music from other films since the advent of sound with The Jazz Singer. If one link in the final cut chain is dissatisfied, scores are abandoned and replaced by late additions. While the most famous studio excisions are footage related as with RKO burning Orton Welles's final reel of The Magnificent Ambersons or Tony Kaye dressing like Jesus Christ to object to the editing of American History X, the same pitfalls have happened with music. One of the more notorious falling outs was over Jerry Goldsmith's score for Ridley Scott's Legend being bumped for a synth, electronic rendition by Tangerine Dream. A similar complication arose over the composing of Scott's Blade Runner as well.
My first exposure to this trend was watching Halloween: 20 Years Later as a teenager. While not well-versed in the minutia of filmmaking or criticism, I was diligent and obsessive enough about the films that I enjoyed to know their inner workings. Over the course of 1996 and 1997, I had many nights of repeated viewing pleasure of Scream. The meta-, reflexive dialogue and self-conscious heroines was a much needed shot of adrenaline to a dormant genre, but I also enjoyed Marco Beltrami's score. It nicely complimented the on-screen thrills with effective, if formulaic tension in the strings and percussion. When the news trickled out that Kevin Williamson, writer of Scream, was working on a sequel/reboot of the Halloween franchise, I was ecstatic. Fast-forward to the release and I was happy with the picture, but I couldn't shake the nagging sensation that I had heard all of this before. Like the people struck by selections from Glass's “Pruit Igoe” or Clint Mansell's “Lux Aterna,” I knew I had heard the music previously but it took a while for the realization to sink in. As pointed out at Filmtracks: Modern Soundtrack Reviews, H20's original composer John Ottman, most well known for his scoring and editing of The Usual Suspects, had his score replaced in post-production by Miramax (http://www.filmtracks.com/titles/portrait_terror.html).
Another recent example of this trend was in the heralded documentary/docudrama, Man on Wire. MOW is a rendering of Philippe Petit's successful, high wire act between the both towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. As noted by film critic Godfrey Cheshire, director James Marsh's choice for the score is mostly reused sections from Michael Nyman's scores of Peter Greenaway's films and a few from Jane Campion's The Piano (http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2008/07/man-on-borrowed-piano-wire/). Though the criticism was later retracted after additional information from the director in a follow up post (http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2008/08/man-on-borrowed-piano-wire-follow-up/), I am particularly interested in Cheshire's questioning of the intellectual honesty of recycling film scores:
“Unquestionably, purloining one's score from other, more artistically serious movies is taking the easy (and sleazy) way out. Most filmmakers use pre-existing music during the editing process, then set about the task of having a composer fit the film's themes and images with their own score... And contempt for the audience's intelligence is implicit in the assumption that viewers either have no memory of past cinematic achievements or don't care when they are traduced.”
There is a degree of shamelessness to the repatriation of music and themes for other films. It smacks of a disconcerting carelessness on the film's part and an expectation of audience ignorance to such aspects. Won't many home viewers regard the use of Zimmer's Inception theme in J. Edgar along with the appearance of DiCaprio in both as an implicit sign of correlation? If they did, who could blame them? Or are these examples somehow unrelated because they are regarding music in film rather than music in film trailers?
Deception in advertising, even film advertising is old hat as well, but generally it is visual editing that carries the tinge of dishonesty. One need look no further than Moneyball to see how the film marketing shifted from week to week depending on box office receipts. Initially, it was marketed as an Apatow comedy mixed with screwball sports film like Major League only to be repackaged as a heartfelt, true story, feel good sports movie of the year akin to Remember The Titans (http://www.awfulannouncing.com/2011-articles/october/moneyball-the-feel-good-movie-of-the-year-the-oddities-of-movie-marketing.html). Who is to blame for the advertising schizophrenia? Directors? Producers? Editors? Studios? It seems the usual critical punching bags are off the hook for trailer integrity.
Most film trailers are utterly disconnected from the filmmaking process. Instead, they are assembled by independent companies and freelancers like Mark Woollen and his company, Mark Woollen and Associates. His latest notable successes for trailers include Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, The Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, and David Fincher's The Social Network (http://blogs.indiewire.com/mattdentler/archives/mark_woollen_qa/) . However, much like the trailer for J. Edgar, the initial teaser for The Social Network contains “non-diegetic” music. While the online community was abuzz at the brilliance of the Radiohead “Creep” cover by Scala and Kolacny Brothers, the film's later audience did not have the pleasure of hearing the music or even experiencing the narrative of the film's trailer. In a way, it was almost disappointing that the trailer was so layered and complexly dovetailed with “Creep” while the film itself had no such apparent connection. Can a great trailer with a fantastic mixture of interpretative yet inconclusive cuts and a wonderfully symbolic score somehow unfairly prejudice an audience's expectations for a film? Can a trailer overshadow a film when the music and stories of each don't match?
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