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Hey, all. I just got around to seeing “A Civil Action” after owning the soundtrack for a few years, and I noticed several tracks from the CD missing from the movie, most noticeably the main titles. Now, I know Elfman got shafted on “Anywhere But Here” and has expressed that disappointment in interviews. Was there any similar discord in “A Civil Action” or was it just the victim of the standard amount of extra music that never got used?
I remember reading an interview where Elfman talked about how A CIVIL ACTION was seriously re-edited at the last minute, and he had to go back and redo a number of cues. He said it happened while he was in the middle of INSTINCT, and that in all his years of scoring pictures, one movie landing right on top of another had never happened to him before.
I suspect that many of the cues on the CD are the ones that Elfman wrote the first time around, but I base that only on the fact that portions of them don’t appear in the film at all. In the reedit, maybe Steven Zallian (the director), just decided that parts of the film, like the credit sequence, worked better with songs or silence rather than the score. In any case, I think the film is a bit of a mess and the fact that you don’t hear the “all” the music as written certainly doesn’t help the proceedings be anymore cohesive.
Elfman has had cues omitted before (numerous cues from the first MEN IN BLACK, and a good portion of what he did for ANYWHERE BUT HERE), but this is the only case I can think of where the score shows serious evidence of having been screwed with.
Ennio Morricone was originally slated to score “A Civil Action.” I believe this information was reported by filmscoremonthly.com in one of their Film Score Friday columns in 1998.
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