Although much of the music we hear in movies these days seems to be hit songs chosen to sell a soundtrack album, the four nominees for this year’s Best Original Score Oscar are living proof that composing for movies is still a thriving art.
The composers, like their scores, vary widely in their influences and approaches. But they all share an irrepressible enthusiasm for the endless creative possibilities of matching music with moving pictures.
“I check to see if I still want to do this every day, if I’m bored yet,” revealed Hans Zimmer, who’s in his second Oscar competition for “The Lion King” (He was previously nominated for “Rain Man”). “I’m not. This is the greatest fun you can have, you get to do everything you want. And sometimes you get paid for it!”
Self-taught Zimmer (“Two weeks of piano lessons. I’m afraid that’s it.”) is competing against three men with very different musical backgrounds.
Thomas Newman, who’s up for both “Little Women” and “The Shawshank Redemption” this year, is a member of Hollywood’s first musical family. His father Alfred was 20th Century Fox’s musical director for more than three decades and won nine Academy awards, the most by an individual. Alfred’s brother, Lionel, was also a prolific composer and arranger, as is Thomas’s brother, David. When he isn’t writing songs and recording records, the younger Newman’s cousin, Randy, scores films, too.
Elliot Goldenthal is nominated for the “Interview with the Vampire” score he composed in a quick three weeks, after the film’s original score was discarded at the last minute. Classically trained, Goldenthal studied informally with Aaron Copland and John Corigliano, and moves freely between composing for film, symphony, opera and other live stage work.
“Forrest Gump’s” Alan Silvestri trained as a jazz guitarist. He has scored 40 films since his first movie job, “The Daring Dobermans,” including the music biz-based “The Bodyguard” and the current spaghetti western spoof ‘‘The Quick and the Dead.”
They all had to apply their varied experience and training to vastly different requirements.
“Since it’s primarily a prison movie, ‘Shawshank’ is fairly static in a lot of ways,” explained Newman, who works out of the same Pacific Palisades studio where his father composed scores for “All About Eve”, “How the West Was Won”, and hundreds more. “That physical stasis had to be counterbalanced by more emotional and psychological music. That was a huge challenge, in terms of how to make that contrast more noticeable.
“In the case of ‘Little Women,’ it was a very ensconced period piece,” continued Newman, whose other scores include “Fried Green Tomatoes”, “The Player”, and the upcoming “How to Make an American Quilt”. “That helped me decide what direction to take the music in – those choices are always made by the nature of the material – which was more outwardly melodic and folk- inspired.”
“It was an unconscious writing experience for me,” New York-based Goldenthal said of his 11th-hour “Vampire” sprint. “There was no time to be nervous. Basically, it was drinking coffee all day, drinking beer all night, and getting it done. Actually, I’d much rather be in a situation like this, with three weeks to compose 80 minutes of music, than in a five-week situation where they’re changing the film constantly, which is what I went through on ‘Alien 3’. Having a locked film and being left alone, that’s almost heaven.”
Zimmer, on the other hand, had nearly four years to noodle around with musical ideas while “The Lion King” was being animated. But he, too, had to bring it all together quickly – “I had far more time than Elliot. I had 3-1/2 weeks.” – once a rough cut of the feature was finally assembled.
Of course, Zimmer was also able to work off Elton John’s demos of the songs he was writing for the film – three of which are nominated in the academy’s separate, original song category.
“These songs weren’t plastered-on hits from the ’60s,” Zimmer said. ‘‘So I got to integrate them into the score and they never stood separately. At the same time, I was able to write a score that stands on its own two feet.”
So, said Silvestri, did he, even though “Forrest Gump’s” soundtrack is loaded with pop hits from the ’60s and ’70s.
“We had concerns in the conceptual stages of the film about how the songs were going to work, but it didn’t turn out to be as big of an issue as we thought it could have been,” said Silvestri, whose previous work with ‘‘Gump” director Robert Zemeckis includes “Romancing the Stone”, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”, and the three “Back to the Future” films. “That source music was really used as sonic sound bites, like showing a calendar on a wall in a shot.
“Those songs remind you of where you were during the time when these things happened and these songs appeared in the world. The score is supposed to remind you of Forrest, what’s happening as you track through his life. The mission of the score is to hold all of the emotional beats together as this boy becomes a man, finds love, loses his mother or his best friend.”
Though he put some of his most painstaking work into the fragile “Gump” score, Silvestri accepts the fact that most people are only going to remember the pop hits collection on the best-selling soundtrack album.
“They did release a score soundtrack that, believe it or not, has actually sold a few copies,” Silvestri noted from his Northern California studio. “But you’ve got to deal with the realities of all this. No one can spend the money needed to produce a film like ‘Forrest Gump’ and not be expected to promote it to the extent that it can possibly be done. Someone doesn’t promote the pop album over the score because they’re mad at me. If they don’t stay in business, I don’t get to write music for films.”
Others are less accepting of musicalizing movies with classic or current pop hits. “The idea of the soundtrack album with hundreds of rehashed songs from the ’50s and ’60s is lamentable,” Goldenthal said. “As much as I love the music – I’m the biggest fan in the world of Sam Cooke and the Beatles – the mercantilism is a little scary.”
The other composers, however, feel it’s less a matter of right or wrong than it is of appropriate choices. “I have to always remind myself that, as important as music is to me, it slips several notches down the food chain in terms of its importance to any moviegoing audience,” said Newman, who worked around a collection of vintage radio songs on “Corrina, Corrina” last year. ‘‘I could always say, ‘Wouldn’t it have been better if that scene had been scored,’ but chances are that doesn’t make that big a difference.
“Which isn’t to say that, when a song is put into a scene only because they can then put it on the album and the album will sell, one doesn’t resent that choice,” Newman added. “But then, sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. You can always smell it – can’t you? – when somebody says, ‘Let’s just shove this song in so we can put it on the album,’ or ‘This song exists for a clear dramatic reason.’”
Since song-dependent soundtracks came into vogue – the 1977 “Saturday Night Fever” and 1983 “Big Chill” are usually considered the main culprits – there have been many abuses at the expense of traditional, originally composed scores. But Silvestri sees a positive leveling out.
“Hollywood is learning what songs do well in a film and what score does well,” he said. “A lot of different experiments have been run over the years. Shoehorning songs into a movie has been tried and it failed.”
All the nominated writers agree that, whatever personal creative potential film composing offers them, they have to avoid shoehorning as well.
“I’m not comparing myself in terms of talent, but I always thought it was healthy that guys like Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Leonard Bernstein, Copland and Corigliano always encouraged their students to work in film,” said Goldenthal, who’s currently composing the “Batman Forever” score. “It’s a great opportunity to learn about yourself and let your technique expand.
“But it’s really the content of the film that determines what kind of musical signature you should give it,” he cautioned. “It’s got to be organic. I can’t try to impose my aesthetic on something where an aesthetic already exists.”
Thus, Goldenthal tried to add a sense of seductiveness to the attractive/repulsive antics of “Interview’s” vampires. And German-born Zimmer reworked his very European musical ideas for “Lion King” after hearing them interpreted by African artists, resulting in an aural sense of place to go along with the film’s ear-catching tunefulness.
“The whole thing you try to do, always, is let the music speak for itself,” Zimmer concluded. “That’s the job: Tell the parts of the story that can’t be told in pictures or words. What all of these scores have in common is that they made the movie better by adding something that couldn’t have been added through dialogue or visuals.”