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The new themes that Elfman wrote will _not_ be part of the equation. The film is out in 6 or 7 weeks, meaning that the sound mix will be happening very very soon. The studio is happy with a good portion of what Young did…. they just wanted more material reprised from the first two pictures because they don’t feel it’s enough like those scores.
The adapted Elfman material is being recorded tomorrow (3/13) and is scheduled for one day.
This is a guess, but I’m guessing the final “score” will be made up of Young’s new music, tomorrow’s sessions, and then sections tracked in from 1 and 2 that they didn’t want to take the time to rerecord.
I’m a little sad about how this is going down, honestly. I mean, my preference would have been to have Elfman do the whole picture of course, and while I’m not a fan of Chris Young, really, I don’t like it when film scores are goat-f***ed together like this at the last minute. I don’t think anyone wins in those situations, and the music clearly suffers.
Yeah, that’s completely wrong. Elfman and Burton didn’t meet until Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. As you know, any bloake can sniff around on IMDB and see that Burton made a couple TV projects before Pee Wee that were scored by David Newman and Michael Covertino (together).
Either he got his facts mixed up or decided to invent something. In either case, he didn’t do any research at all, clearly. It’s not like I had much of an opinion of Jeff Rona to damage to begin with, but oh well.
Elfman _did_ write new themes for SPIDER-MAN 3… at Sony’s request. He did so to maintain his relationship with the studio, and did not know (nor really care) if the material would be used.
The ultimate decision was Raimi’s, he chose to go with Young’s themes. It makes sense that he would, seeing that he could have more contact (and therefore input) with Young.
There was never an Elfman “walk out” on SM3, since he was never really on it in the first place.
Well, a situation like this is sort of like a musical Wortschatz test… people hear what they want to hear. I’m sure there will be a lot of people proclaiming what amazing music this is, regardless of how good it actually might be.
You can also download a QT of the same material in 480 HD here…
http://flash.sonypictures.com/video/movies/spiderman3/Spiderman3_480p_4000kbps.mov
As for the new Young material that plays over the third sequence… well, I think it pretty much sucks! I hope my feelings here are the result of the music getting a bad temp mix… we’ll have to see.
It’s interesting that the first two scenes contain Elfman music that Raimi rejected from the second movie.
Elfman has a great relationship with Sony, and he did indeed write new themes for the movie dealing only with Sony directly — not Raimi. He did this not knowing – or really caring -whether his material was to actually be used in the final score. Raimi decided in favor of Young’s themes.
Right now they’re mid-way through recording the music. They’ve kept the main Spider-Man theme and the Green Goblin theme, but everything else is Young’s. Most of the score reportedly doesn’t sound like Elfman, but the studio likes it and all is going well.
Elfman is busy recording THE KINGDOM for a few days this week (with more sessions to come later) and has said that he’s happy not to be involved with that “insane asylum.”
I would guess that the “fate” theme probably is the responsibility theme since there wasn’t really anything in part 2 that would fit that description.
Funny that Elfman writing new themes is apparently not happening, but I’m glad Elfman is staying clear of it. Be the music good or bad, Young should be held accountable.
It can really happen at any time. They can do it a month before or they can do it five months before.
As far as I know, there are no plans to release this, but I hope that changes!
The piece is about 8.5 minutes long and contains several little “movements” which are all quite charming.
The opening/conclusion is a bit reminiscent of Aaron Copeland’s classic “hoe-down” music, and uses a theme that’s a bit similar to the “In The Mud” cue from Charlotte’s Web. The following sections really evoke an old school Hollywood musical feel. There’s a big showy Hollywood fanfare, and my favorite bit: an epic flute theme which first appears half way through and gets a wonderful heroic treatment.
All in all, I’m not sure how this would get released unless it shows up on a compilation of some sort. Of course, my hope is that Elfman writes 4 or 5 more of these and that the success of ‘Serenada Schizophrana’ encourages one of the labels to put up the cash to record them all and do a proper release.
Might Elfman himself be in possession of some of those elements? Afterall, they presumably used them (or at least copies of them) when mixing the Family Dog tracks for MFADT vol 2 10 years back…
Eflman said in an interview years ago that Jerry Goldsmith had been very sweet to him early in his career. I’m not sure if he was referring to something Goldsmith said about him or what, but in any case, there was some affection, at least early on.
As Ryan said, though, Goldsmith could be quite a cranky son of a bitch… In the end, his opinion of Elfman really doesn’t matter much. He _really_ didn’t think too much of Bernard Herrmann (as we know, another of Elfman’s big influences). For that matter, I doubt Herrmann would have thought too much of Elfman either!
The chapters from Goldsmith’s daughter’s book (available on Joel Goldsmith’s site) seem to suggest that Goldsmith saw John Williams as a something of a shill for doing things like conducting the Rose Bowl Parade, etc!
Well, if nothing else, I think that a lot of material from 1 and 2 will either be reused or re-recorded. Raimi seemed to accept nothing else for part 2!
Well, I somewhat see what you’re saying in that CHARLOTTE only has a few big themes that it uses again and again. That, however, is the main thing that I really love about it… I find the two key themes (Charlotte’s and Templeton’s) hypnotic and think this score is a long awaited return to one of the things Elfman is best at: theme and varriation. Through the whole album, he’s weaving them in and out of the movie, and the payoff by the end of the album is extrodinary. I challenge anyone not to be weepy during the first few minutes of Wilbur’s Homecoming – it’s quite original and one of the best examples of extended writing that he’s done.
My issue with BIG FISH is that although there are individual cues that I really like (Underwater / Sandra’s Theme, The Growing Montage, etc,) by and large the score CD just isn’t a satisfying listen to me. Jenny’s theme shows up often through the score, but despite some clever uses of it here and there, the whole thing doesn’t stick together in any cohesive way for me. The “main titles” melody never really did much for me either. I think this may have been corrected by a score release lengthier than 39 minutes, but I guess we have no way of knowing the answer to that.
Getting back to CHARLOTTE, though… while I certainly agree that there are more stand-out cues in BIG FISH, this new one really works as a whole much better for me. I agree with Ryan’s statment that it just gets sweeter every day. The first time through, I thought it was pleaseant but nothing special, but as time went on I found myself really thinking about the themes and loving what Elfman pulled off with this one. I’d easily rank it among the best scores he’s written.
Just for frame of refernce, these are the scores I’d generally put on the top teer of his output (in no particular order):
BATMAN RETURNS
BLACK BEAUTY
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
THE FAMILY MAN
HULK
SPIDER-MAN 2
and now CHARLOTTE’S WEBCHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY and RED DRAGON are up there for me too.
All true, but I know Dan Goldwasser (who took the picture) and he said that the piece Elfman was conducting was a wild track that was never intended to be used in the picture.
I think the cue Danny conducted was just for fun… I don’t think they used the recording in the final picture. If you look closely, he doesn’t even have a baton!
It was in the proper ratio when I saw it! Sorry that you got a bum projection of the picture.
I thought it looked and sounded great. The audio got a pretty serious remix from what I remember and the score was nice and loud.
I’ve seen DEEP SEA 3D twice. It uses the themes from Serenada, but really rethinks the music: Everything thing is reorchestrated and completely reconceptualized. There are many new motifs and textures in there too which are unique to DEEP SEA. It should not be mistaken for a hack cut-n-paste job: It certainly isn’t that.
Elfman wrote about 25 mintues for DEEP SEA and Debra Lurie was responsible for about 10 additional minutes of adaptations (the more literal quotes from Serenada as well as some additional music). Her contributions blend seemlessly with what Elfman did himself, and I dare anyone to spot which cues are hers.
Lurie actually has done similar work recently on CHARLOTTE’S WEB.
Elfman originally recorded in March, but it was always planned to come back in the fall and do some pick-up sessions. Lurie adapted some of the cues that no longer matched the edit of the final film.Anyway, back to DEEP SEA… several IMAX scores have been released on CD, so I don’t see why this one wouldn’t be. Elfman CDs typically sell well, so there’s certainly a buck to be made. There may have been some issue about not wanting the release of DEEP SEA to clash with the release of Serenada, so it could still be a ways off, but I suspect it will come out sooner or later (that is, assuming the movie stays in circulation!)
Well in FORBIDDEN ZONE, the “zone” is located in the Sixth Dimension. I’m guessing it’s more or less a direct sequel to that movie, rather than a riff on FIFTH ELEMENT
Well in FORBIDDEN ZONE, the “zone” is located in the Sixth Dimension. I’m guessing it’s more or less a direct sequel to that movie, rather than a riff on FIFTH ELEMENT
Well, in the case of A CIVIL ACTION, the film was pretty dramatically reediting at the 11th hour and Danny had to go back and rescore a bunch of stuff. A lot of the album consists of cues recorded for the first cut of the picture that didn’t really fit the new version of the movie. Much of what he did is in there, and only a little of it got drops (notably the main title cue).
Another on the list of “sorta rejected” scores, however, is ANYWHERE BUT HERE. Danny only wrote a short score for the movie, but even so several cues were dropped in favor of pop songs. I read an interview with him sometime after where he said that he really wanted to take his name off the picture, but his agent convinced him not to.
Wow, I heard that ROBINSONS was due to score later this month! I guess there’s some major reworking going on now that Lassiter is on board, which can only be good for the movie (and the score).
I posted this in another thread, but I think it speaks to some of the concerns here:
Date: February 26, 2006 05:34PMI think there WILL be a Serenada release eventually, but who knows when. By the way, I’ve heard both Serenada and the music in the movie, and trust me when I say that both are outstanding. Initially, I didn’t care much about the music for the picture, but my mind was changed pretty damn fast on that one.
There’s an article on soundtrack.net that describes this all way better, but they recorded the whole thing in Decemeber and then tracked it into parts of the movie. Elfman THEN wrote about 25 minutes of totally new music using the Serenada themes, but completely rethinking the orchestration and everything. Parts of the score go from movement one right into movement four and then back… it’s all really fresh and really good! The new music was recorded in January and conducted by Pete Anthony. It certainly does not feel like it was just tacked in there.
In ways, more dynamic and chilling than Serenda itself! Debra Lurie wrote about 10 minutes in addition to that, but most of what she did are adaptations of sections from Serenada. There is one section involving turtles that she scored with kinda a 50s doowop thing… it sounds nothing like the rest of the score, but really works in context!
Anyway, this is all a long way of saying that the score in the picture is really good, and I hope that the album (should there be one!) includes the six movments plus at least some of the Deep Sea cues, if not all of them (everything together totals around 75 minutes).
I think there WILL be a Serenada release eventually, but who knows when. By the way, I’ve heard both Serenada and the music in the movie, and trust me when I say that both are outstanding. Initially, I didn’t care much about the music for the picture, but my mind was changed pretty damn fast on that one.
There’s an article on soundtrack.net that describes this all way better, but they recorded the whole thing in Decemeber and then tracked it into parts of the movie. Elfman THEN wrote about 25 minutes of totally new music using the Serenada themes, but completely rethinking the orchestration and everything. Parts of the score go from movement one right into movement four and then back… and it’s all really good! In ways, more dynamic and chilling than Serenda itself! Debra Lurie wrote about 10 minutes in addition to that, but most of what she did are adaptations of sections from Serenada. There is one section involving turtles that she scored with kinda a 50s doowop thing… it sounds nothing like the rest of the score, but really works in context!
Anyway, this is all a long way of saying that the score in the picture is really good, and I hope that the album (should there be one!) includes the six movments plus at least some of the Deep Sea cues, if not all of them (everything together totals around 75 minutes).
