Want to see a movie without any wallop? Just turn off the film’s score.
Turn off the screeching strings in “Psycho.” Shut out the orchestral triumph in “Star Wars.” Skip the bittersweet piano from “Love Story”. Miss the majestic theme of “Born Free”.
Most people – including many executives in the film business – don’t give movie scores much thought. Yet a good score can make an average film nearly great, and a bad score can make a polished work seem inept.
Under slightly new rules for the 68th Academy Awards, 10 film scores have been nominated for Oscars. The scores, judged by the composers’ peers as 1995’s best, are distinctly different, united only by a common accomplishment. All of the scores have translated plot, character and setting into a new language - music.
Good scores, like nice wallpaper, not only cover the cracks, but make the room look beautiful. At the same time, too much music can yield too many distractions – movies can drown in a sea of violins, oboes and flutes.
“All of us have the inclination to want to stand out – to want to be special,” said composer Thomas Newman, whose “Unstrung Heroes” score was nominated in the newly named original music or comedy score category. “But if you call too much attention to yourself, it’s not special.”
“When you’re selling an emotion, you have to push all the buttons an audience is expecting to have pushed,” said James Horner, nominated for “Apollo 13” and “Braveheart” in the newly-named original dramatic score category. “But it all has to be very gentle.”
Almost every movie’s story line suggests appropriate music – that’s why the Oscar-nominated “Pocahontas” score (by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz) has recurrent themes plucked from Native-American melodies. Sometimes, though, the most obvious music is the least workable.
The plot of “Unstrung Heroes” follows an eccentric Jewish family. Newman started his research listening to klezmer, clarinet-heavy Jewish folk music, looking for hints of where the score might go. It didn’t go anywhere.
“It just seemed pandering – it seemed to parody the movie,” Newman said.
Newman then looked at the film’s title, and started playing on the word ‘unstrung’. He toyed with zithers, mandolins and banjos – all of them detuned, or unstrung.
“The instruments gave me some clues,” Newman said. “The characters were so neurotic, it was like strings snapping.”
For “Braveheart,” Mel Gibson’s epic set in 13th-century Scotland, Horner first listened to Middle Age music, plainsong and the chants of Benedictine monks. It was interesting, evocative – and, in a movie setting, totally unbearable.
“Mel wanted to take a lot of chances, but he left me to do it. It was my conservatism that kept the score from being too different, too unapproachable,” Horner said.
The composer built the score around primitive instruments such as small Irish bagpipes and medieval flutes, using less of the familiar tones of a 20th-century orchestra. Horner had to carefully manage the film’s explicit violence: Too serious a score would be overkill, and anything too light would make the bloodshed laughable.
“How do you score a disembowelment? That’s very tricky,” Horner said. “I told Mel, ‘Let’s score it like a lullaby.’ By using a boys’ choir and softening it acoustically, it makes the scene more dreamlike – it softens the whole thing.”
For “Apollo 13,” the plot suggested standard Hollywood action movie music. Horner and director Ron Howard went in a different direction.
“I wanted to get at the idealism of all these young men,” Horner said. “I just didn’t want it to be a traditional movie score.” The movie’s score is dominated by a hymn sung by children; it is loudest when the astronauts step onto the deck of the aircraft carrier.
“The hymn is like Shaker music – an early American harmony that you might hear in a small turn-of-the-century church,” Horner said.
Compared to “Braveheart” and “Apollo 13,” not a lot happens in “Sense and Sensibility”. Director Ang Lee’s movie version of Jane Austen’s 19th-century romance is about feelings, not actions – when emotions change, they do so subtly.
“Ang was very keen to have a gentle feel – he wanted a very intimate score, one that reflected the suppressed emotions of that society,” said Patrick Doyle, the nominated composer of the “Sense and Sensibility” score. That intimacy carries into the movie’s incidental music – several piano pieces in the film were composed by Doyle, too.
Attentive listeners will notice definite but minor shifts in the film’s score as the story unfolds. The music surrounding the character of Marianne Dashwood (played by Kate Winslet) is at first innocent, young. When she nearly dies from a fever, the music changes.
“There’s a maturity and an emotional catharsis,” Doyle said. “The music becomes a little more grown-up.”
The “Toy Story” score is hardly grown-up. That made for a good fit for Randy Newman, a composer with a child’s fascination for whimsy.
Newman (cousin of Thomas) is probably best known for “I Love L.A.” and “Short People,” but he has scored many films, including “The Natural”, “Avalon”, “Maverick”, and “The Paper”.
Where composers often have only eight weeks (and sometimes just a month) to write a movie score, Newman started working on director John Lasseter’s “Toy Story” more than a year before the film was released. Some of the movie’s songs, including the Oscar-nominated “You’ve Got a Friend,” had to be written early so animators could match the action to the music.
Newman’s underlying “Toy Story” theme is a New Orleans, lounge lizard jazz, filled with bass and piano. Newman says the score was influenced by Carl Stalling, who scored the Looney Tunes cartoons, and by the film’s madcap story of Buzz Lightyear and Woody.
“When you get animated characters engaged in antic behavior, you have to catch it,” Newman said. The movie’s relentlessly upbeat plot also gave the sometimes cynical composer an opportunity to write “happy” songs.
“It makes you write songs you would never write,” he said. “Like ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me.’ I would never write the song. You don’t have a friend in me.”
Elliot Goldenthal, who scored “Interview with the Vampire” and “Batman Forever” but is not nominated this year, says movie composing is satisfying in part because your work reaches a large audience.
“For one of my (symphonic) concerts, maybe 1,700 people will show up,” Goldenthal said. “But ‘Batman Forever’ will be seen by 1 billion.”