From an INVISIBLE JUKEBOX with Jim Jarmusch in the November 2009 issue of The Wire:
Alan Licht: “Dennis Hopper’s film Easy Rider was the first narrative feature film that used pre-existing songs on the soundtrack. You’ve done that a lot, and professed a dislike for standard film music?”
Jim Jarmusch: “Well it’s such a formula – I get so bored, it’s like they have five scores, they may as well just pass them around and reuse them, I can’t tell the difference, really, it’s all the same. With the world of music so varied, it’s just mind-boggling that they use the same formulaic thing. There are people doing some interesting things, like T-Bone Burnett, he tries to bring something in here. I’m glad his hand is in film scoring, somewhere, somehow, but… I don’t know. I just love music so much it’s dismaying to me to see it reduced to wallpaper.”
While it is entertaining (& I am sure hugely frustrating for the composer) to read of directors rejecting scores because they have fallen in love with the temp score, I also suspect Mr Jarmusch is being slightly disingenuous/fascetious by his statements, although I know what he means… But I’m also intrigued if Easy Rider actually was the first soundtrack to use pre-existing music as score – anyone know any different? I don’t think they mean source music, after all people have been using music from radios etc for a very long time to reinforce the acoustic world onscreen. But a score using pre-existing music as score? It seems so common now, it would be great if it was such a great indie film as Easy Rider that started it all…..
Easy Rider is dated as being made in 1969. So if you think of it, Kubrick’s famous film 2001:A Space Odyssey was made in 1968, a year before, and features numerous pre-existing pieces of classical music! In fact, Kubrick ended up repalcing a lot of Alex North’s origial score with bits of the temp music (of which North only found out upon release of the film…ouch)From this film onwards, Kubrick started using pre-existing to a much larger extent.
So I don’t know if preexisting music was used even before this (I would almost think so) but it definitely was done before Easyrider.
Interesting subject…
I watched Birth of a Nation (1915) when I was doing film studies at Uni and I’m pretty sure that used pre-existing classical pieces re-recorded by an orchestra.
There was a great programme on BBC radio a few months ago called ‘Tarantino’s Jukebox’ where he talked about how he would decide on some of the music during the writing phase as it helped him write and pace scenes
At the risk of sounding like a disillusioned old fart (which is somewhat accurate), I basically agree with Jarmusch about most film scores. Second-hand Strauss and Debussy begets second-hand Zimmer and Goldsmith. It’s not much better than the top 40 in terms of variety.
I’ll get my coat.
heh heh I don’t necessarily disagree…. in the end its a conservative approach due to the huge financial risk… but creatively its also interesting: is an important part of becoming a professional film composer about being able to emulate the “successful” film scores of the past? So it ‘sounds like” what they expect a film score to sound like?
“Zimmer and Goldsmith”
Right, but wether music composed for films is good or not depends on the culture and the period of time. The russian great composers were often working in films (Prokofiev – Eisenstein ; Khatchatourian – Tarkovski, Shostakovitch …), whereas at the same moment in the western world, film music was considered by “serious” musicians as a cheaper exercice. (imagine Schönberg writing for a Humphrey Bogart movie …hehe, maybe we could try to match them now ?)
Btw, i think Stravinsky’s (again a russian) Rite of Spring was composed before Disney’s fantasia (which dates from the 40′s).
true – I think Jim Jarmusch is referring to current Hollywood film making