Music To Gag On

By: Randall D. Larson
Date: Thursday, March 09, 2006

GAG is a new independent thriller about a pair of professional thieves who break into a house and discover a man held captive in a hidden room, beaten beyond recognition. In trying to help, the thieves become trapped by a torturous serial killer. Set entirely within the confines of the house, the film is the directorial debut of Scott McKinley, a former marketing rep for Troma. The film, completed in 2005, is awaiting a distribution deal, although the soundtrack album is being released this month by Perseverance Records.

"We have already seen a surprising amount of interest in the project... we're not sure how word leaked out but horror fans know their genre and apparently we are on to something. We have had some studio people buzzing around and have had requests for screeners from a number of different sources... while we are flattered, the film is only close to completion. When ready, we will invite anyone/everyone who thinks they can handle the material", said McKinlay.

The musical score is by Dennis Dreith, a long-time musician and composer who started out ghostwriting episodes of Hanna Barbera TV cartoons. Dreith's musical score is a multi-layered, electronic-based score that mirrors the film's descent into the darkest sides of depravity. Dreith used elements of classical avant-garde music to emphasize the disturbing psychologies of its characters.

"Dennis has been a dream," said McKinlay. "I've worked with a lot of people on the film, and mostly everybody I worked with on this film has been real cooperative and real enthusiastic. Admittedly, we've worked with film students and editors and people who are new to the biz, but to have a veteran like Dennis who's been around the block a few times, so he not only served the purpose of doing a great job with the music, but he was a bit of sage for everybody on this thing. I even used him as my secret weapon when I couldn't get people's attention in meetings. I'd say, 'I'm almost to the point of... don't make me tell Dennis!' He has a sort of fraternal kind of figure, and he was really instrumental, no pun intended, in the whole project."

In an interview I had with Dennis Dreith last month, GAG's composer describes his film music background and what led him into the clutches of GAG.

The Film Music of Dennis Dreith

Q: What's your background in music and how did you first get involved with film scoring?

Dennis Dreith: I started off doing a lot of things in the record business. But I was always fascinated with films. Before I was actually a musician I have recollections of going to movies and listening to the scores, and being very impressed and enamored of people who actually did that kind of music. So that was always in the back of my mind. Then I did a lot of arranging in the record business all kinds of string and horn arrangements and when I finally decided to not go on the road any longer, I had a friend who worked a Hanna Barbera, and they were short handed and needed somebody to do a lot of ghostwriting. I spent about four years ghostwriting all kinds of shows.

Q: That must have been a great grounding school for learning how to do this.

Dennis Dreith: It was. When people ask me where I studied film composing, I say I was a ghost writer at Hanna Barbera for four years! And then I transitioned from there to some movies of the week and some live action stuff.

Q: What was the mandate on the Hanna Barbera shows concerning the music? What were there looking for in scores?

Dennis Dreith: It really needed to be as active as possible. They wanted it to be an odd kind of hybrid, to have a flavor of the old Warner Bros cartoons but to be more contemporary. I had to have a foot in each door there. They wanted almost a Carl Stalling kind of frenetic riff-based things, but they also wanted to utilize a lot of contemporary techniques.

Q: You've been an orchestrator on a number of notable film scores. How did you find those experiences, and how did they prepare you for composing film scores yourself?

Dennis Dreith: In terms of orchestrating for people, that was an outgrowth, clearly, of all the work I'd done as an arranger in the record business. I studied orchestration with a guy named Dr. Albert Harris. There were a bunch of us who studied orchestration with him, almost everybody who became an orchestrator who's my age was a student of Al Harris'. On one hand, I think it was an actual progression to go from orchestrator to composer, although these days a lot of the composers have never worked as an orchestrator, or don't do their own orchestrations. When I worked at Hanna Barbera, and when I did all the movies of the week, you had to be your composer, orchestrator, and conductor, in those days, there just wasn't the money in the budget for other than that, so to be a skilled orchestrator was a prerequisite. I think that was true of a whole generation of film composers, even though they don't do a lot of their orchestration in later years, people like Jerry Goldsmith, he was an excellent orchestrator, and surely John Williams, although he doesn't do the orchestrations now, but John clearly was an excellent orchestrator himself. I think that was just part of the lexicon of being a good composer in those days, also being a good orchestrator.

Q: Do you continue to orchestrate your own work now or do you use other orchestrators?

Dennis Dreith: Mostly I still do a lot of my own orchestrations, depending on what the budget is. The picture I just completed, GAG, as primarily an electronic score, so that was orchestrated into, we used a lot of orchestral elements in terms of samples, but that was orchestrated into the computer itself.

Q: You are credited with "additional music" for HOWARD THE DUCK (1987) and THE SHADOW (1994). Can you explain what music this was and what the film's needs were for music when you became involved?

Dennis Dreith: Those offers were a specialty. THE SHADOW was interesting because that was a Jerry Goldsmith score. My first call on that film came in because there were going to be some arrangements of Cole Porter songs in the film, but the studio couldn't actually get the sync license worked out for the songs they intended to use. I was already hired to orchestrate a couple of songs, so I was asked instead to write a couple of songs in that style kind of like writing period music, which I had done quite a bit at Universal. It was the same thing back in the early days when I first got hired on HOWARD THE DUCK. There were a lot of composers they used on that picture at different times they were throwing scores out all over the place, it was quite a mess! But around that time I started doing a lot of specialty things, and so what I did for THE SHADOW I also did for a couple of pictures at Universal, one was MOBSTERS. I did all the period music.

Q: What were your musical experiences on THE PURPLE PEOPLE EATER?

Dennis Dreith: That was fun. That was for a writer/producer named Linda Shayne, she's a b-movie actress and kind of a queen of the horror flick (HUMANOIDS OF THE DEEP, THE LOST EMPIRE). She's a very talented woman. PURPLE PEOPLE EATER was really a children's show based on that song, with a lot of '50s music. The creature, Purple, came from another planet but most of the sounds he made were out of a saxophone. So music was an important part of that movie. We used a lot of '50s rock and roll elements, and it was a lot of fun. Working for Linda was just a hoot. She's got a great sense of humor and was just lots and lots of fun. I had a great time working with her.

Q: You composed music for the 1989 Dolph Lundgren film THE PUNISHER, which was recently released on CD by Perseverance Records. What kind of musical opportunities and/or challenges did a muscular action film like this pose for you?

Dennis Dreith: This was an interesting project. Once again, I guess what makes any of these things interesting are the kind of people that you work with. The director, Mark Goldblatt, who's also very well known as an editor, probably does more high

profile action picture movies than any other editor (HUMANOIDS OF THE DEEP, TERMINATOR, RAMBO 2, COMMANDO, TERMINATOR 2, TRUE LIES, PARL HARBOR, XxX) and has a great sense of music, he wanted something different. So the idea of THE PUNISHER was that it was a comic book character, a tragic-heroic character, so we wanted something that had elements of something John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith would do, only instead of writing it in a straight action-adventure, we turned it on its ear a little bit because the character has had a tortured life and has a certain degree of insanity. It was more like a John Williams meets Charles Ives kind of thing. In that score you'll hear things like heroic elements of music but it was very polytonal, with the brasses playing in a different key than the strings, those kind of things, and yet if you took each section by itself, it would be very tonal, heroic music

Q: This seemed to be a fairly larger film than some of the others you had done, and certainly was in the vogue of the action films of the late 80s. What did the score do for you as far as getting you some additional assignments along that line?

Dennis Dreith: It didn't do any of the things that any of us thought it was do. The studio, which was New World Pictures, went bankrupt right as the picture was being released, so the idea that film was supposed to propel Mark Goldblatt from an editor to a role as a director, it was supposed to be a major role for Dolph Lundgren, it would be a really good stepping stone for me into a lot of other action things as a result the picture kind of languished and didn't do any of that. I don't think any of us had much of a payoff. Ironically, the picture's had more notice, now because the CD was just released. So, in a way it's kind of interesting. A lot of the benefit I've received came after THE PUNISHER was finished and I went back to orchestrating for a lot of people. Mark went back to editing, and we both went back to our work-a-day world.

Q: I wonder if the new version of the film got people back to see the old one again.

Dennis Dreith: Absolutely. I would say if it hadn't been for the remake, and there's been a lot of Internet debate about which picture people liked more, I don't think we would have had the CD. I just recently returned from the Sundance Film Festival, and especially in the areas of Troma Dance and Slam Dance I met a lot of people who were actually familiar with my name and who had seen the '89 PUNISHER or who actually had the soundtrack album. I was quite surprised. Clearly it was the other movie that sparked a whole new interest in our version.

Q: At the time, what were the musical needs of a straight-ahead action film like THE PUNISHER? What kind of musical voice did you feel you could contribute to this film?

Dennis Dreith: Even though it is an action comic book hero, what we wanted was to create this dichotomy of a heroic character but one with a great deal of tragedy and pathos and all that. So it you look at the actual comic books themselves, those are extremely dark, and yet there's a sense of vigilantism. It's not so dissimilar in a lot of ways from a lot of those renegade, Dirty Harry kind of characters, except this is much more institutionalized, he's a cop who's gone underground, so it had all these kind of musical elements. It also had a number of interesting challenges in that it was very, very cross culture. So what happened was, the Punisher himself is a police officer who had a very, Western heroic music. He's unlike other comic book characters, he doesn't have any super powers, and yet in many ways he's a bigger than life super hero. At the same time he's battling the Yakuza, so we had all kinds of Japanese musical elements, and we have issues with the Mafia and all of those things, so it's also got the contemporary world. We really tried musically to utilize the different cultural influences and keep it, on one hand, contemporary, but sort of timeless with the heroic element also. It was actually a real challenge.

Q: It's almost as if the music was able to speak for the inner turmoil which maybe the film, in its action-oriented visuals, wasn't able to touch on quite as well.

Dennis Dreith: That was true. All those things were important, and music was very, very important. It is very important to Mark Goldblatt, who has a real sense of what music should do and how it should propel something, and what it should do to our emotions, and how it should affect the pace. It's interesting, if you look at a picture that's been cut by Mark, you get almost a sense that every scene has a rhythm to it, it almost demands a certain tempo, and so it was a real collaboration in regards to that. It was one of the more fun experiences, and someone who actually knew how to push and do things you wouldn't normally do.

Q: You also scored episodes of TV's PARTNERS IN CRIME, ONCE A HERO, and THE FLASH. What kind of experiences did you find scoring episodic television and what musical opportunities were there for you? How did these different projects differ from one another, in terms of their musical needs?

Dennis Dreith: I can't even remember PARTNERS IN CRIME, I'm sorry to say. It was a comedy crime drama. ONCE A HERO was fun. The main character was a super hero, so I scored it with straight out of comic book super hero kind of music. It was a small, low-budget show, and every episode had a slightly different element to it. it was a charming show with very sort of whimsical notion that we have that there's a place somewhere else where super heroes live, and when he comes to the real world, the super hero loses all his powers. We used a very small ensemble and the same musicians for almost every episode. It was a string quintet, a French horn, a trumpet, four woodwinds, and I think tube, piano, and percussion, and sometimes we would add a special instrument. One show had a Western theme to it so we added a banjo and harmonica to that group. It was a core group of musicians, a little tiny chamber ensemble. Like I say, that had a much more whimsical element to it but I guess that seems like a common theme running through a lot of my shows I've gotten to work on super hero shows, which was THE FLASH as well. Danny Elfman composed the theme, and Shirley Walker was the primary composer. I started off as one of the orchestrators on the show and did some additional music for Shirley, so each episode that I worked on I have two or three cues in it. It was a fun experience. Working with Shirley is always a delight, she's extremely talented and it's really highly professional on a very high level. Working with her is always a fun thing.

Q: What are your recollections of scoring BLACK JAQ, another action oriented hero film? What was it like working for actor/director Forrest Whitaker on this film?

Dennis Dreith: That was sort of a female James Bond, it was actually a pilot. It was a lot of fun working with Forrest; it was a real good experience. He's a wonderful filmmaker, I did a couple of projects with him, and a fabulous actor. He's the kind of director who gives you a lot of direction and then lets you run with it. He has a great sense of music. That's a totally different image for him, because we think of him as more of an urban, and he plays those kinds of characters, but of you think about it, he plays them with such Shakespearean force, there's a depth of character, and he brings that up as a director. We did a short for Disney a couple of seasons ago based on the John Henry legend, and always a great of deal working for him.

Q: What kind of music did BLACK JAQ require?

Dennis Dreith: It was a female James Bond kind of thing, so we took it to that place. It had much more of a jazz influence, and I worked on it with a partner who I've worked with quite a bit, Joe Romano. Joe plays trumpet, so on that one we used a lot of muted trumpet on and a lot of percussion. It was much more sophisticated, because it had to have a real contemporary take on a James Bond sort of character.

Q: How did you become associated with GAG?

Dennis Dreith: The director of the film, Scott McKinley, who I've known a long time he worked as the marketing executive. I first met Scott at the Cannes film festival, working in the American pavilion, and I appeared on a couple of panels with him. We'd been in touch over the years, and worked together outside of the movies, not just making movies, but been associated with different marketing things, that kind of stuff, so I knew Scott from that. And when he was directing a picture, he sent me a copy of the script and asked me to do the music.

Q: It's been a few years since you composed a full feature score. What other musical activities have you been involved with over the years?

Dennis Dreith: I did a lot of orchestrating. Joe Romano and I worked on some documentaries and did a lot of commercials during that time. So we were busy but not in anything that would draw much attention.

Q: GAG is described as a pretty potent horror thriller, which seems to be a new genre for you.

Dennis Dreith: I've done a couple of things, but nothing quite as intense as that. I did a Universal picture a couple of years ago called TRAPPED, which was about a woman locked in a building with a stalker, and it had much of the same types of elements. The GAG score is required to have an extremely dark element, because the picture itself is very, very dark and a fair amount of violence and gore takes place. There's a

lot of atonal, 12-tone musical elements to it. We could have used a lot of synthesizer drones, but we decided it should have somewhat claustrophobic feel to it, so it would close people in. We wanted to use, as much as possible, sound design, so there was a fair amount of sound design in the score as well as working with the sound designer on the picture. We tried to incorporate something into the score so that we really didn't have kind of just the cliché'd synthesizer drone, and what would be normally associated with a low-budget horror film we would create something a little more memorable than that. And also if we could make something creepier, the idea for the music, because it is as much to underscore the actual action on screen was

Q: What elements of the film did you feel needed to be central to the score?

Dennis Dreith: Any time you have a picture like this, part of what's happening is that you're leading up to an act of violence, and you want to bring the audience there so that there's a climax in the score with that act of violence. There are obvious techniques to that, but at the same time sort of the psychological terror is as important as the actual physical manifestation of it. The music was really meant to do those two things.

Q: Is there any kind of thematic structure to this score?

Dennis Dreith: Rather than having a theme for individual characters and how different things affected them and how they reacted to them, we wanted the different characters to be thematically tied together. Often times in other pictures, every character will have a theme that identifies them, but in GAG, the theme became associated more with motivation that drove these characters. The textures are musical lines that pull together and oppose and tie the characters together. In the course of the film it becomes hard to tell who the good guys are. There were musical elements to weave the characters together to bind them, as it were.

Q: How did the fact that the action all takes place in one house affect your scoring technique?

Dennis Dreith: All does all take place in one house, and there are horrific acts of violence. It's not an action picture, per se, so the music is not nearly as frenetic. There's a certain amount of tension and texture that we used, a great deal of textures overlapping, adding textures one layer over another to create this tension. The idea of scoring the picture has that all the way through it.

Q: How much interaction did you have from the film director, Scott McKinlay, on the score? What was his direction regarding the music, and how closely did he involve himself in the musical process?

Dennis Dreith: I think we did enough talking in advance and those discussions dictated certain things, so I think I was left to my own devices a great deal. I don't mean to say that they weren't involved and everything, because there's clearly a lot of involvement, but I think we set up initially on what was our goal and in this case were single minded about what we wanted to do with it. The involvement was much more in the pre-production stage.

Q: How much music did you write altogether?

Dennis Dreith: I believe we have about 57 minutes of underscore. There's quite a bit of music. There's also one 3-minute segment written by a friend of mine, Mitch Margo from the group The Tokens, which is almost like a piece of source music, almost a muzak kind of thing. And then we have the End Title music performed by Brian Stewart of the band Harley Krishna.

Q: Where do you go from here what do you hope this experience will do for you, and what do you have coming up next?

Dennis Dreith: There's a couple of irons in the fire, a couple of filmmakers I've worked with in the past. I just got a call from someone today about another low budget romantic comedy, and I'll meet with him this week. We'll see. I'm actually currently very involved with producing other aspects that aren't film scores. I'm working on a project with Mitch Margo, and co-producing an album of his material. It's very much not like The Tokens, sort of a throw back to musical commentary and so on, the songs have a social and environmental consciousness. I've been working on that which is a radical departure to anything I've done film scoring, but that makes it fun to do.

Q: That's a good thing, especially coming out of something as dark and grisly as parts of GAG.

Dennis Dreith: Yeah! It is sort of like the light at the end of the tunnel!

For more information on GAG, see: www.gagthemovie.com  

For more information on the GAG soundtrack, see: http://www.perseverancerecords.com/  

Former editor/publisher of CinemaScore magazine, Randall Larson was for many years senior editor for Soundtrack Magazine and a film music columnist for Cinefantastique magazine. He is the author of Musique Fantastique: A Survey of Film Music in the Fantastic Cinema (Scarecrow, 1984) and Music from the House of Hammer (Scarecrow, 1995). In addition to Soundtrax and Music News for Cinescape.com, Randall reviews soundtracks Music from the Movies, writes for Film Music Magazine, and in many other fields.

Recommended Soundtrack sources:
www.buysoundtrax.com
www.intrada.com
www.screenarchives.com
www.footlight.com
www.arksquare.com/index_main.html (Japan)
www.intermezzomedia.com/ (Italy)
www.moviegrooves.com
www.moviemusic.com

For questions or comments, contact the author at Soundtrax@cinescape.com