Jazz-based Film Scores

Otto Preminger's 1955 film, The Man With the Golden Arm is one of those works that has been at the convergence of my worlds as a Composer and a Visual Designer (worlds colliding!) I had never seen the film until last week though was thoroughly familiar with the opening credit sequence or white lines on black background and the unforgettable crooked arm logo design by Saul Bass. Bass is also known for his design of the shower scene in Psycho which Hitchcock handed completely over to him.
View opening credit sequence.

Elmer Bernstein's music is one of the first jazz-influenced scores and makes sense to the story. Frank Sinatra's drug addicted Frankie Machine, the man with the golden arm, so named for his golden touch as a card dealer for an illegal poker club is back from rehab and has learned to play the drums. He wants to change his life and join a big band.

Elia Kazan's 1951 film Streetcar Named Desire with score by Alex North may be the first score to use jazz. But the Man with the Golden Arm comes up again and again as such an influential film. The confluence of forces of being in the right place at the right time, the perfect graphic design, a big named star and of course the powerful and unforgettable motif in Bernstein's score. Bernstein often called himself Bernstein West to differentiate from the other Bernstein, the New York-based Leonard who also contributed some great film scores including "On The Waterfront" and of course, "West Side Story" based on the play for which he also wrote with Stephen Sondheim.
One of my favorite soundtracks of recent past is Michael Giacchino's for "The Incredibles" with Grammy award-winning big band arrangements by Gordon Goodwin.

More evoking film tension through music

As we started to discuss evoking tension on screen in a previous post on Blood Simple, let's turn to another Coen brothers film which shared some of the same ironic black comedy.

It's a delicate thing to add music to a scene. This is a short clip of the first killing in Fargo. Less is more and the mounting tension is so delicately evoked with high strings/electonic textures. As the situation starts to build low horns/strings creep in. The decision to kill quickly moves to a fast crescendo of drum rolls, screaming brass and cymbal rolls among other things. Also note the stunned silence after the climax.

It's effective and well within the harmonic language of modern film scores. Fargo was made 9 years after the Coen brother's debut with Blood Simple in 1985. Obviously having a string of hits enabled them to have a larger budget and Carter Burwell's orchestral score reflects that. No cheesy synth sounds here. Carter is in the enviable position of being the "go-to" Composer for not only the prolific Coen's but also the gifted (and busy) director Spike Jonze.

Disney starts to transform

Some new changes are starting to appear at Disney now that the Pixar thing has happened. Composer-Songwriter Alan Menken (of Pocahontas, Little Mermaid fame) is signed to a non-exclusive multi-year, multi-picture deal. Perhaps the Pixar process of keeping it all in house is starting to spread in the new Disney. Also major animation directors are starting to return.

I grew up listening to and loving the work of the Sherman brothers with their amazing work in Jungle Book, Winnie the Pooh, the Aristocats, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Mary Poppins, the mega hit "It's a Small World" among many, many others...it's truly amazing how much great work they did.

Interview with Rachel Portman

Studio 360 did a piece on Film Composer Rachel Portman (Cider House Rules, Manchurian Candidate, Chocolat, Emma, Joy Luck Club) this past weekend. She just finished the score for Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist coming soon.

12 Tone Music

Artwork by Doctor S.

While 12 tone music has never really taken off among the listening public, it became the academic approach to composition at the ivory towers. For film music, the 12 tone system can come in quite handy giving one a planned method for achieving a certain amount of dissonance. This is especially useful for tense, horrific, or macabre moments. It also can be used to evoke jazz as David Shire did in his beautiful score to the Joseph Sargent's 1974 "The Taking of Pelham, One, Two, Three," starring Walter Mathau. Take a listen to a moment from the film here.

Nice article in the Boston Globe on the father of 12 tone music, Arnold Schoenberg.
"Schoenberg was 18 years younger than Freud, who put names on recognizable emotional conditions no one had described openly before. What makes Schoenberg's music essential is that he precisely delineated recognizable and sometimes disquieting emotional states that music had not recorded before. Some of his work remains disturbing not because it is incoherent, shrill, and ear-splitting but because it unflinchingly faces difficult truths." - the Boston Globe.

Evoking Tension in Film

This is one of those emotions that is almost singlehandedly carried by the music in a film. Try watching any tense moment on film with the sound turned off and it's completely lost. I tried to watch the beginning of Monsters, Inc. with my 3 year old son recently. I had forgotten how scary the opening moments were - and my son has never seen anything scarier than Dora the Explorer or Maisy or Miffy. (Noggin is big in our house.) And as my son started to slink down into the couch, I reached for the volume to erase the scariness.

John Williams' 2 note motif for the shark in Jaws still brings back terror to many. Flicking through the channels the other night, I stumbled on a film noir moment and the soundtrack was just chilling.

The Coen brothers' first film Blood Simple, scored by Carter Burwell, is one of my personal favorites. In re-watching it this week, I noticed how cheesy the synth sounds used were. Most of the first scenes of tension used these synth patches which have been relegated to the discount bins now. The main theme of the film really holds up well with it's minimalist piano and moodiness. Then again, they made the entire film for $1.5 million with funds invested mostly from small business people and nobodies far, far away from Hollywood.

I also noticed how some of the main tense moments utilized diagetic music (see my previous post on Diagetic vs Non-Diagetic) as the score and it worked quite well.
Take a look at this short clip. In this final moment of the film (don't look if you haven't seen the film, you'll know too much)
Frances McDormand's character is being hunted and is desperately trying to save herself. The music in the moments before this seem to be coming from her Portugese neighbor's window echoing through the courtyard. The diagetic music then rushes up to the forefront building on the final moments. (M. Emmet Walsh is fabulous btw. Remember him in Blade Runner?)

Blood Simple won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1985 Sundance Film Festival

The Beautiful Country

This is a beautiful, yet heartwrenching story. Norwegian Director Hans Petter Moland has shined the light on some pretty horrific things that happen everyday to illegal immigrants. The story follows a half-Caucasian/half-Vietnamese young man from his home to his search for his real mother and then his father in the USA. The score by Zbigniew Preisner (Three Colors Red, and all of those great Polish films) is haunting and delicate. The early scenes in Vietnam felt a little trying too hard to capture Vietnamese exoticism, but as soon as we move in to the modern film harmonic language, Preisner's score is very effective.

Nick Nolte's performance is just spot on perfect.

What made it even more hard to watch was the fact that we used to live in Hong Kong and have seen the camps set up for the Vietnamese. Set in the most beautiful green hills in a remote area, the walls were 20 feet high blocking any view of anything except for the sky. My wife went to the camps to run some HIV workshops and the people were just so appreciative to have anyone from the outside actually thinking about their well-being. Some of those kids then took part in the summer school program (Summerbridge Hong Kong) she directed.

The magic of film has made us all feel the pain and suffering in a way like no other.

----
I went to Vietnam in 1993 to headline a concert on China Beach at an international surf competition. We stayed a night in Ho Chi Minh City and played an impromptu gig at a club/restaurant where we were eating dinner. There was a wedding going on and the bride and groom and all their guests gave us a standing ovation. Flying in, we saw hundreds of "crater lakes" which covered the country. We played a gig at the Da Nang city hall with amps that looked like were from pre-war Soviets. I lost my electronic tuner that night. There were hordes of very enthusiastic young Vietnamese men hanging around us everywhere. One night at a club where we were honored guests watching some great music, I expressed my admiration for the Vietnamese instrument called the dan bau. It's a single string wooden instrument that sits on a table and the tension of the string is changed with a flexible plastic or wooden "bow". The player, usually women, can express so much by also using harmonics created by touching the side of the hand to the string. The band we saw were fully amplified and the player, a man, was doing Jimi Hendrix plays the dan bau. Awesome! The next night, standing on the beach playing our concert, a man came up to us and said he had heard I was interested in the dan bau and had driven 40 miles with his. I bought it and have since not been able to get it to sound anything close to what I heard that night.
We drove motorcycle across the rice paddies on the mud walls that line them. Stopped and had a slow drip coffee and baguette - best in Asia. And those beautiful school uniforms, flowing white as the girls rode home for lunch on their bicycles...Vietnam was/is so magical. It truly is a beautiful country.

Junebug - silence as score

I saw the lovely movie Junebug (director Phil Morrison) last night. Wonderful film with great acting, direction, editing, writing. The music credit reads "original music by Yo La Tengo", the indie group. And there was a song of theirs in the opening credits and at the end credits and then maybe 2 other music cues, which actually sounded like something out of a stock library. And then...silence.

The story is of a Chicago art dealer (played by Embeth Davidtz) who goes to a little town to sign an outsider artist and meets her new in-laws. There are these great shots of the neighborhood in a semi-rural location somewhere outside Chicago. And they are shown in complete silence. There are several sequences using this silent "score" to convey the emptiness in the neighborhood, the house of where her husband grew up and the community.

In many indie films, I usually feel like the dramatic action could have used some underscoring. Or worse, the song choices used instead of an original score take too much attention away from the story.

Here, the silence was so loud. Stunning and effective. Sort of like a John Cage score...Silence by Yo La Tengo.

Paperwork, Contracts, Licenses

To make sure you have the right to put music in your film whether you hire a Composer or license a work from a Publisher and record label, you need to have the right paperwork.

We talked about the 2 basics before: A Synchronization License (sometimes called a Sync License) and a Master Use License. The sync license, from the publisher, allows you to put it to your picture and the master use is from the record label or whomever owns the "master recordings."

Here's a good place to look at sample contracts.

Process, Process, Process

Any creative endeavour is affected by the process. Change the process and you change the results.

When painter Jackson Pollock started to use a dripped paint technique he stole from some Mexican artists, his results were far different than anything seen before - freed from the confines of the borders of a canvas and capturing the energies of free jazz, the Heisenberg principles of physics and the post-war boom of the 50's.

When a young NYU film student started applying editing room thinking to the recording studio - the modern day version of "post-production" rap was born with classics from Run DMC, LL Cool J and The Beastie Boys still selling today.

When the young American revolutionaries stood up to the British redcoats by figthing from the brush and not standing in clear formation (with the color red and a white cross on their chests!) the small ragtag army of General Washington defeated the mighty British Empire.

Change the process and you change the results.

I'm always interested in process of creation. For it's in the process that you can see the genius and perhaps borrow a little.

Last Sunday's NY Times (Business section) had a great article about Pixar's process.

"The problem with the Hollywood model is that it's generally the day you wrap production that you realize you've finally figured out how to work together," Mr. Nelson said. "We've made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We're trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It's no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it's a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people."

The article goes on to say how all Pixar employees are expected to take 4 hours of classes every week at "Pixar University." How cool is that?!

In my time as a VP, Creative Director at a major advertising agency, I pushed for this kind of bonding, unity and creative fueling for my team. Unfortunately, we didn't have the clear-eyed vision of leaders like Steve Jobs and John Lasseter.
...And...their stock price shows it.

Sell plush toys to pay for your production costs

In Friday Jan 27th's Wall Street Journal there's a cover story (upper left lead article) about how television shows for tots rely on merchandising to pay for their production costs. With that age group, advertising is ineffective, so sell plush toys, backpacks etc. Get ready for this. Dora the Explorer sold over US $1.4 billion in merchandising last year!

This actually occurs on the music side of filmmaking where sister record companies to the distributor insist on pushing their latest act by placing a song in the soundtrack. This movie extra, the soundtrack album usually has very little to do with the film except in earning extra merchandising dollars. But why stop there? Why not special limited edition iPods that are engraved with the signature of the lead actor in your film? And why not load that iPod up with special edition music cues from the film along with commentary from the composer? If you can get name talent, you may be able to sell their likenesses before you even start shooting thereby paying for the shoot. You may notice I'm being a little bit cheeky here. But not really that much.

My time in advertising/marketing has twisted my brain to see "brand extensions" everywhere. Is that like hair extensions?

Big Idea - crew your film with student filmmakers

I've been working on this wonderful little movie about a sweet little lady named Betty Gunness who goes to church everyday, bakes everyone apple pies, looks after shut-ins and...well there's a darker side - but you need to see the film to see what happens.

Filmmaker Eric Maconaghie Rogers has got a big idea in how to crew his films. Students. He happens to teach film at a very cool sounding progressive trade school.

Here's an article

Entrances and Exits for music in film

I'm currently re-spotting a film I'm working on as the edit has changed the film significantly. This got me thinking of best points for starting and stopping music in the film. (See my previous post on what a spotting session is).

Entrances
1) change in emotion or dialog
2) change in camera emphasis or camera moves
3) new actions - character leaves/enters
4) response or reaction by a character
5) Edit points - this may not always work - but definitely useful for cartoony or hard starts

Exits
Pretty much same as above or just dissipating into the ether as it becomes no longer necessary to be there.
It can also be effective to trail off to provide a silent buffer for another entrance coming up.

The use of music in a scene serves to highlight an emotion onscreen - often inside a character's head - or can also connect scenes or give foreshadowing of what's to come. By the same token, the use of silence right after music serves to highlight the new silent texture and whatever dialog is being said. Interesting to note that some highly climactic moments work best with no music at all. For example, the murder scene in American Beauty (score by Thomas Newman) is completely silent.

The Age-ability of Film and Film Music

I recently saw a bit of the 1992 Rob Reiner film "A Few Good Men" the other night on cable. While the writing still seemed to hold and the acting was believable, especially Jack Nicholson, the music score by Marc Shaiman was very dated. What must have sounded very hip and current at the time, now sounds "so yesterday."

What makes this score sound out-of-date? Choices. Mainly choices in instrumentation but also harmony, melody, texture. The "latest" synth sounds and electronic drum machines may make you seems so current when you release it, it's also what's going to relegate you to the 99 cents bin at the video store within a few years.

So how does one walk this fine line? Just being conscious is a huge part of it. Musician/composers Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays spend a lot of time thinking about this for their Pat Metheny Group releases. Whilst using the latest synths and sampling technologies, their music retains a kind of "timelessness." Listening to symphonic orchestral pieces from over a hundred years ago by Sibelius, Beethoven, Dvorak, Rimsky-Korsakov, one is astounded by how current they still seem. Perhaps this is due to the cultural common vocabulary of the symphony orchestra. It's been part of western culture for hundreds of years and is now a standard "vocabulary."

Have a quick listen:
Marc Shaiman's 1992 Code Red/Semper Fidelis
and
here's Jean Sibelius in the summer of 1899 with "Finlandia" .
Is it just me or do I detect a strong inspirational force for Howard Shore's "Lord of the Rings," parts of it at least.

All this talk of aging well got me thinking about wines. We opened a bottle of a 1992 Pauillac recently and it was just like...eh! Something happened to the bottle - it wasn't exactly bad but not great. But that's the story for another blog.

If you were around in the 1970's did you remember Orson Welles reduced to selling Gallo wine? Poor Orson - what a fantastic director...

Looking Good, Sounding Good

There's a lot of talk about split second decisions nowadays. Malcolm Gladwell (who wrote the thoroughly engaging "Tipping Point" has another bestseller with Blink. This article from Nature talks about the 50 millisecond gut decision that web users make when viewing a site.

It's the same in filmmaking. Obviously, the quality of your "look" speaks loudly. It's what researchers call "cognitive bias." People like to be right - so if their first impression is good, they want to continue in the process. One of the fastest ways to take advantage of this cognitive bias is to improve your audio.

The area where most filmmakers suffer is in audio - dialog, sound effects and music. Yes you can mix your audio directly in FinalCutPro these days and even manipulate it well in SoundtrackPro. But if this is an area you have no interest/expertise or time to put your attention to, I highly recommend outsourcing it to a mixdown engineer. As a Composer, it's amazing to me how sound design artists can spend just as much time as I do working out themes and motives. A great Sound Designer often recreates all environmental sounds in a shot. From the crunch of the gravel underfoot to the "just right" car door slam to the wind blowing in the background. These little details add so much realism to any work and therefore believability, investment in the storyline and genuine caring and interest in what comes next.

On a recent animated short(Award-winning "Coqui" by Nelson Diaz), I asked my mix engineer David Huston to fix up a botched final mix as the original done by a to be unnamed post-production facility. What I expected to be a 2 hour fix turned into a 3 day reworking of sound design, dialog and a final master mix. The results? Fabulous.

What looks good actually sounds good first.

All Your Promos... We Have Monetized...

For a long, long time, trailers and music videos were considered a promotional device - an add on - not the real content. In fact, MTV Networks was created when Bob Pittman realized that he could take all this "free" content and put all in one place, thereby attracting lots of eyeballs and then advertising - lots of advertising dollars.

The recording artists were the ones who paid for it all, including the stretch limos and shrimp cocktails for the A&R Reps and the coke in the back room.

And now iTunes has come to monetize the promotional stuff. Music videos, shorts, and perhaps one day...even movie trailers. I think there are lot of people who would collect great old movie trailers the way they do classic posters. For a $1.99 a download, that comes to a lot of money. In fact Apple's iTunes (needs a new name) reached 1 million video downloads in 20 days. And why stop there. I could see putting up classic commercials that are just sitting around. In fact, Universal has a CD called As Seen On Tv: Songs From Commercials. Pretty soon, it will be best commercials on DVD. Advertising geeks and insiders already pay up to $500 for a Superbowl DVD (all the spots shown each year.)

And just as the musicians (and composers) get screwed, the directors of these videos and trailers don't receive anything.
Yeah, I know this blog is supposed to be focused on music to picture issues, but I had to get this out. Our world has turned into intellectual property. Your DNA is even being copywritten (as this lasts longer than patenting - thanks Disney!) as we speak.

Here's a director-centric article at Boards magazine.

Have a nice day - now back to our regular programming.

Ang Lee - Best Director

You already know he won at last night's Golden Globes. From the outside looking in, Ang's process seems quite different than a lot of other working directors. For one thing, he seems to surround himself with entirely new production crews on each film depending on the project. While Hollywood is known for this great model of creating entirely new teams on every film, the reality is that much of the time, the core crews remain the same. Take Spielberg who's collaborated with Composer John Williams for over 30 years now. And Martin Scorsese with his Editor Thelma Schoonmaker (she's introducing a screening of Kundun at the Museum of the Moving Image on Jan 21). The list can go on and on Carter Burwell with The Coen Brothers and Spike Jonze. Actors and Directors often pair up for multiple films with the classic team of Scorsese and DeNiro, Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, and Woody Allen and whomever he has an infatuation with at the moment.

Lee does have a solid partner in writer/producer James Schamus whom he met back in 1985 while still at NYU Film School after he had just won a grant from the Taiwan government to produce Pushing Hands.
"I didn't want to make a flop. Anyway, I took the money and I was looking for a line producer, and through a friend of mine I knew Ted. And then there was Ted and James at the new-found Good Machine. They shared two tables with another company, I think. So I did my pitch. And they did their pitch. They told me that they were the kings of no-budget film-making in New York. James looked like a used-car salesman and a professor. . . And they said, 'Pay attention. We said 'no-budget' not 'low-budget'. Your money, about $400,000. . ." Guardian UK Nov 2000)

Anyway since those days, he's collaborated with a variety of people. From a Composer standpoint, he's used Mychael Danna 3 or 4 times, Patrick Doyle for "Sense and Sensibility", Danny Elfman for "the Hulk", Tan Dun for "Crouching Tiger..." and now Gustavo Santaolalla for "Brokeback Mountain."
I wonder if this introduction came from his DP on this Rodrigo Prieto who also worked with Santaolalla on the fabulous films "Amorres Perros" and "21 Grams" by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu.

The process is use whomever's right for the story you're telling.
And you know what? I haven't even seen it yet. The lines were around the block...

John Williams on his process of film composing

Williams: Melodies or melodic identification are, for me, the hardest things to do, and I spend a lot of time on those melodies that will sound very simple or inevitable when they're heard. In a case like this, it's weeks of tinkering around with various approaches and different ideas and trying to manipulate one or the other to make it feel like it lives or wants to belong in the film in a very natural way. It's not easy for me, and I spend more time doing that than orchestrating or developing or doing contrapuntal workouts of the material -- once I have the material, all those other things are relatively easy. Beyond that, it's always hard to say. If we talk about the genesis of these things, a lot of it has to do with the way you feel and how you respond to the material. - excerpt from Hollywood Reporter, January 10, 2006 interview with Jeff Bond

Apple and Video Content

Well...there was hardly anything mentioned at yesterday's MacWorld keynote that we didn't already know about. So I guess we'll have to look into our crystal ball and see where is Apple leading the way with video on demand.

It is interesting to see how the Pixar shorts are now being sold - something that was never meant to be a money maker. These shorts, from what I understand, are usually test projects to work out new software and new talent and teams. They use to include these for free at the beginning of other Pixar DVDs or as bonuses. Now you can buy them for $1.99.

Anger Management

A great short has come to my attention. It's called Anger Management and was directed by Jane Selle Morgan for Aquafina.com. They produced 10 shorts for 10 New Year's resolutions. Oh...and the music is by yours truly and was licensed through our online royalty free store.