The final one-sheet poster for TROY.
© Warner Bros.
Trojan Horse
By: Randall D. LarsonDate: Thursday, July 08, 2004
The prevalence of rejected film scores has become so commonplace these days, as studios continually strive to meet the lowest common denominator of audience taste, that it's no longer a surprise when even the top composers in Hollywood find their music tossed out in favor of something else.
Jerry Goldsmith, residing for decades at the top of Hollywood's A-list, recently had his score for TIMELINE rejected by director Richard Donner after it had been recorded (Varese Sarabande has promised to issue it on CD). Goldsmith was also the victim of one of the most infamous score rejections in recent history his wondrous, fantasy-filled score for LEGEND was extricated from the film by director Ridley Scott after studio brass felt the film needed something more commercial (it was replaced with an effective but hardly comparable score by the electronic band Tangerine Dream; audiences in Japan, however, saw the film with the Goldsmith score and the DVD version provides options to watch the film with either score). There are several other notable score losses than have become landmarks of bizarre studio or director decisions over the years. Alex North composed a magnificent score for Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY only to have it tossed in favor of excerpts of classical music (Varese later issued the rejected score on CD conducted by North's one-time student, Jerry Goldsmith); Lalo Schifrin recorded portions of his gripping, haunting music for THE EXORCIST until he was let go by director William Friedkin, who decided to make up his own score using record album excerpts. Last year, Mychael Danna every bit as thoughtful and introspective a composer as Yared found his score to Ang Lee's HULK tossed aside after much time invested in the project.
Other composers have suffered the indignity and the now-accepted business practice of having their work discarded. The reasons for all of this are manifold, sometimes simply due to a misunderstanding between what the director or producer wanted in a musical score and the original composer's unavailability to rescore it due to other commitments. Or it may be that the director simply wasn't happy with the direction taken and decided to try someone different.
Other times a score's loss if due to more commercial reasons; certainly it was in the case of LEGEND. But the most glaring recent example of score entossment, and the subject of severe controversy, is that of TROY.
The Fall of TROY
Originally, director Wolfgang Peterson hired Gabriel Yared (CITY OF ANGELS, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, COLD MOUNTAIN) to [IMG5R]score the film. Yared worked on the project for a year, producing his finest score to date, an intricate and organic composition every bit as large on scope and concept and power as the film's visual and set design. In the end, Peterson threw out the score and hired James Horner, who composed a completely new score in a fraction of the time Yared had.
A simple case of a rejected score? In this case, Yared took the unique step of posting a personal statement about the score, along with excepts of its music, on his web site at www.gabrielyared.com (the musical extracts have since been removed at the "request" of the producers, who own the rights).
The April/May issue of Film Score Monthly (www.filmscoremonthly.com) reports on this TROY score debacle in an excellent and thorough interview with Yared about his TROY score, by editor Jeff Bond. Yared speaks candidly about the rejection and upon what his intentions and approach had been toward scoring TROY.
What is especially disturbing about the score's rejection is that it was reportedly excised from the film in response to Achilles (Brad Pitt) sprints across the battlefield in TROY. © Warner Bros.
"The idea that many months' work can be replaced in a couple of weeks simply by paying enough money or hiring somebody with a big team is really offensive to anyone who feels they are creative music or any kind of art," Yared told FSM.
What's clear through this and other examples is that filmmaking is a business a huge, Big Business and that the artistic intentions or integrity of a filmmaker will almost always become subservient to the more commercial-minded business notions of a studio (with a few notable exceptions; the tale behind Terry Gilliam's' masterpiece, BRAZIL, is legendary in this sense, and is fully told on the Criterion DVD release of that film). While money reins supreme in the Hollywood music factory, the fact that the whim of one small audience is enough to completely alter a film's artistic integrity (and that of its director) remains baffling. Evidently, no one stood up for what was hitherto accepted as an entirely satisfactory and appropriate film score Peterson himself worked closely with Yared for months, evaluating and commenting on what he was preparing until the very last minute when he decided to pull the score out. Yared wasn't even notified personally he had to receive word through his agent to learn of his score's demise.
One of the comments of that focus group The final one-sheet poster for TROY. © Warner Bros.
"My score was really solidly orchestrally based in a style with very big themes, harmonies, counterpoint," Yared told FSM. "...although my score sounds very classical, it's still using more contemporary rhythms and percussion, with were a fusion of sampled percussion and live instruments. Maybe all that was too ambitious, this idea to bring the feel of real classical music and avoiding the usual film music clichés and endless drones. I felt the scale of the story and the character deserved something really dignifying and classic, which wouldn't date."
Gabriel Yared has always been one of screendom's most One of the thousands ships launched to save the fair face of Helen in TROY. © Warner Bros.
Whether or not Yared's TROY score may be rescued from oblivion and recorded, as Goldsmith's lost TIMELINE is slated to be, remains to be seen but a legion of film music fans and professionals would seem to be eager to have it.
Forbidden Music
That same issue of Film Score Monthly (which you should acquire post haste to get the full story) reminded me about another classic example of a lost film score. Donald John Long takes a close look at the musical development of 1956's FORBIDDEN PLANET, one of the most respected science fiction films of all time. The film's score comprised of the "electronic tonalities" of Luis and Bebe Barron created what was arguably the first all-electronic film score in Hollywood history.
(Technically, it's not really music, if a distinction is to be made. Gil Melle told me years ago that his ANDROMEDA STRAIN [1971] was really the first wholly electronic film score, since he was creating music and musical motifs, whereas FORBIDDEN PLANET actually used electronic sound effects to create sonic atmospheres in the place of music. As memorable as the Barron's sonic atmospheres were, I'm inclined to agree with Melle on a musical basis. He crafted themes and musical motifs and invented electronic instruments specifically to create the film's score. ("The sounds [in FORBIDDEN PLANET] were generated by ordinary test equipment which you would find in any television repair station," Melle said. "They were ordinary test sign-wave generators, which is not electronic music.") All the same, the Barron's electronic sounds for FORBIDDEN PLANET remained groundbreaking, interesting, and uniquely effective in that film.)
What is not often known is that, prior to hiring the Barrons (which came about when MGM producer Dore Schary heard a [IMG6R]performance of the Barrons' avant-garde music in New York), composer David Rose had been hired to score the film. Rose (hitherto noted for his scores for RKO's THE PRINCESS AND THE PIRATE and such MGM mainstream programmers of the '50s as THE CLOWN, CONFIDENTIALLY YOURS, OPERATION PETTICOAT; since then has mainly been associated with what's become known as Easy Listening music; subsequent film scores have included PLEASE DON'T EAT THE DAISIES, HOMBRE, and TV's LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE. In the '50s, Rose was also the Music Director of MGM Records).
As reported by FSM, after Rose was taken off the project, he destroyed all the sheet music of the discarded FORBIDDEN PLANET score except for his Main Title theme, a gorgeous, lyrical composition that he actually recorded and released as a single to tie-in with the film's release. The track, which was later collected on Rose's 1957 LP, Music From Motion Pictures (MGM E3397), had the attribution, "music inspired by the MGM film," included some overdubbed electronic effects that were intended to more clearly coincide with what was heard in the released film. The FSM article notes that the theme is also available on The Very Best of David Rose, a remastered reissue released in 1996 by Polygram as Taragon Records' RARCD-1015 see: www.taragon.com; currently only available on cassette).
Rose's theme is a lovely, languid, and lyrical melody set amid babbling, burbling, and whooshing electronic effects. While this more flowery approach may not have been appropriate to what became the final tone of FORBIDDEN PLANET, Rose's theme is a unique remembrance of a different approach. It would certainly have been quite a different film had Schary not stopped by that Greenwich Village electronic show.
Incidentally, FSM also notes that some of Rose's music was used in the original FORBIDDEN PLANET trailer, although further investigation by B-movie specialist Steve Vertlieb indicates that the trailer actually contained reused elements of Andre Previn's music from BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK. The only extant evidence of Rose's contribution to FORBIDDEN PLANET seem to remain in that single "inspired by" theme he had the foresight to record.
Soundtrack sources:
Soundtrax is our weekly Movie Soundtrack column.
For questions or comments, contact the author at Soundtrax@cinescape.com.
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