These ought to be the best of times in the world of film music. Paychecks are getting bigger, sound systems are getting better, and film soundtracks are dominating the sales charts more than ever before. Almost everyone involved is sharing in the bounty: record companies selling soundtrack albums in unprecedented numbers, film studios who’ve found music to be a potent marketing tool, and pop musicians who use soundtracks to increase and maintain visibility.
But for one group, the soundtrack boom has been a mixed blessing. Film composers who write the instrumental scores that are often the music most crucial to a movie aren’t really sharing in the good times. A few recent case studies:
• The week that the U2 song ‘Hold Men, Thrill Me, Kiss Me’ was released to radio stations, the composer Elliot Goldenthal was still writing the score for “Batman Forever”. “U2 had a year,” he says with a shrug. “I had less than a month.” Mr. Goldenthal, on a similar schedule when he wrote for “Interview with the Vampire” last year, worked around the clock to write the hour and 55 minutes of music used in the film. Then Atlantic Records, which was heavily promoting an hourlong soundtrack album of songs featuring U2, Seal, and others, told him that he could put no more than 45 minutes of his music on an album devoted to his score.
• Asked to write the music for “Die Hard With a Vengeance” in less than three weeks, the composer Michael Kamen battled with the film’s producer, who tried to save money by finding a nonunion orchestra. “The movie cost $100 million, and it was going to make considerably more than that,” says Mr. Kamen. “I didn’t see why money had to be saved by breaking a union.”
• The summer’s most expensive movie, “Waterworld”, commissioned a score from Mark Isham (“A River Runs Through It”). Late in post-production, Mr. Isham’s score was rejected and James Newton Howard was brought in to write two hours of music in about six weeks. “I like to pace myself at about two minutes of music a day, which is uncomfortable and slightly terrifying. But it’s also getting more common.”
Nearly every notable compose now has stories of impossible deadlines, music drowned out by deafening sound effects, scores rejected for capricious reasons, or pop songs substituted for score. At a recent panel discussion that followed a screening of the documentary “The Hollywood Soundtrack Story”, the veteran composer Elmer Bernstein surveyed the lot of film composers and concluded, “You find yourself longing for the old studio system.”
Thomas Newman’s father and uncle, the composers Lionel and Alfred Newman, were part of the studio system, running the 20th Century Fox music department. “It’s not that composers get less respect than we used to,” says Mr. Newman, who received Oscar nominations this year for both “Little Woman” and “The Shawshank Redemption”. “It’s just that there’s no interest in what we do. Post-production is a psychologically desperate time, and that’s when the composer comes in. There’s only a small amount of time for you to prove that you have good ideas.”
Some of the pressures on today’s composers are the result of the accelerated pace of post-production and the changes in films that are often made until the very last minute. But others can be traced directly to the boom in soundtrack sales.“If they tell you, ‘We need to put a song here because such-and-such a record company has advanced us so many hundred thousand dollars,’ there’s nothing you can do about it,” says Mr. Newman. “In those cases it doesn’t matter if it’s not a good idea; it’s a marketing tool and an opportunity to jump on a bandwagon.”
Mr. Kamen has had more control in his movies: “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”, the 1993 “Three Musketeers” and “Don Juan DeMarco” all contained No. 1 hits, and Mr. Kamen was a co-writer of all three. “Because I’ve been successful, I have the leverage I need,” he says. “On ‘Don Juan DeMarco’, some genius at the record company decided to go after the Johnny Depp audience by approaching all these alternative-rock bands to do a song. And fortunately, I was able to say, ‘I’ve done two songs and they’ve both been No. 1 hits, so let me do this one too.” (His song ‘Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman’ was performed in “Don Juan DeMarco” by the mainstream rocker Bryan Adams.)
Still, Mr. Kamen is the rare composer whose music can be used to help sell a movie. Gary LeMel, president of the music department at Warner Brothers, admits that it’s rare for a score to have the kind of promotional impact a hit song can. “Every once in a while a score album will jump through,” he says, mentioning “Chariots of Fire”, “Dances with Wolves”, and “Out of Africa”. "Usually, that happens when there’s a beautiful melody at an emotional moment in the film.”
When the music doesn’t fit that narrow bill, composers need to fight to land a spot on soundtrack albums. “If it’s a song-driven movie and the company hopes to have a hit soundtrack album, we try to get the composer’s work included on the album,” says Mike Horner, a partner in Film Music Associates, an agency that represents more than two dozen film composers in Los Angeles. “Our success depends on how much of the album is presold, on whether there’s a record company that wants to put on their own artists. We usually ask for three tracks on the album, and we get one.”
Mr. Isham recalls being shut out entirely. “The common practice on bigger pictures seems to be that the record label will pay the entire music budget, and in exchange they get to put whatever they want on the album,” says Mr. Isham. “It means they get this huge promotional push for as many artists as they can get on the soundtrack. And 9 times out of 10, that completely leaves the film composer out of the loop. I’ve actually had cases where the company releasing the soundtrack has contractually suppressed any score being released.”
Still, the market for score albums is a healthy one, even if they don’t approach the sales figure of song-oriented albums. (The albums of songs from “Forrest Gump” has sold more than six million copies worldwide; Alan Silvestri’s score album, a strong seller for the genre, has sold about 100,000.) The past year has seen dozens of classic but long-unavailable scores re-released, including Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock music, John Williams’s “Reivers”, Vangelis’s “Blade Runner”, and Alex North’s never-used “2001: A Space Odyssey”. In addition to specialized labels like Milan and Varese Sarabande, mainstream labels like Sony, Rhino, and Warner are getting into the business.
And while film composers face new pressures and can’t always share in the lucrative end of the soundtrack market, most of them still like the job. Mr. Goldenthal, who spends most of his time writing modern concert music, compares Hollywood to the well-meaning if musically ignorant royalty who used to support classical composers. “Every time I write a score,” he says, “I call it another orchestration lesson paid for by the brothers Warner.”
Then there are the material rewards. “A few years ago, I was on a panel with Alan Silvestri and Danny Elfman,” Mr. Kamen recalls. “Danny had just gone through the ‘Batman’ experience, where they brought on Prince to do some songs, and he was furious. He was going on and on, badmouthing everybody, and at one point he said, ‘They don’t pay me enough money to put up with this.’ And Alan and I just looked at him and said, ‘Yes, they do.’”