Enter music for a film, Part II: We are the music makers
In doing the research for a recent post about movie soundtracks with an alt/indie/modern rock bent, I found a number of other directions I could take the discussion. Here’s one of them: a discussion of artists who started out at some point making alternative music, then eventually left it behind to focus solely on scores and songs for filmed output. (This is separate from artists who dabble in screen work in addition to their “day job.” I’ll address those musicians in the next post in this series-to-be.) My research didn’t turn up too many names along these lines, but what names I did turn up are pretty darn big. For an idea of who we’re dealing with here, let me give you a sample from outside the lines of indie rock:
Trevor Rabin
No, neither Rabin nor his buddies from latter incarnations of Yes are anywhere near the alt-rock universe, but his roster of film scores have names and budgets as big as the arenas he used to play and as such can’t be ignored. If you’ve watched a movie in the last 15 years with Will Smith (Enemy of the State), Bruce Willis (Armageddon), Samuel L. Jackson (Snakes on a Plane), or Nicolas Cage (Con Air) on the marquee, chances are Rabin did the music for it.
See where I’m headed here? Good, now let’s look at four who score big for modern rock:
Danny Elfman
Once destined to blaze a trail to obscurity with his springy New Wave band Oingo Boingo, Elfman had them sing the theme to a silly sci-fi movie he was trying to score — Weird Science — and all of a sudden the dude’s just money. Pee-Wee Herman comes calling about a Big Adventure; Tim Burton, Sam Raimi, and Barry Sonnenfeld won’t leave him alone; he gets all Oscar on us circa Good Will Hunting; the Simpsons and the Desperate Housewives reside in his ‘hood. Elfman is the 800-pound gorilla of alternative rockers who left the stage for the Very Large Orchestra-Capable Studio.
Mark Mothersbaugh
What Elfman handles in quality Mothersbaugh makes up for in, uh, quantity. At least he didn’t stop being bravely immature after his days in Devo. More TV and film soundtracks than Elfman doesn’t necessarily make him better, but Mothersbaugh has his share of prime cuts. On TV he made the theme for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse as well as incidentals for the underrated sci-fi series Sliders, MTV’s Liquid Television and HBO’s Big Love; his most notable small-screen music involves the theme and scores for Nickelodeon’s classic cartoon Rugrats. In film, his biggest winners include most of Wes Anderson’s movies (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), Lords of Dogtown, Happy Gilmore, Bottle Rocket, and 200 Cigarettes.
Clint Mansell
What’s a boy to do after he leaves behind one of Britain’s most confrontational industrial crossover bands, Pop Will Eat Itself? Wait for the call from his budding-filmmaker friend, that’s what. In this case, his friend was Darren Aronofsky, and Mansell would end up writing music for two of the more brain-melting films of modern times, π and Requiem for a Dream. Other more conventional films would come along — Murder by Numbers with Sandra Bullock, Man on Fire with Denzel Washington, the ensemble drama Smokin’ Aces, Aronofsky’s The Fountain — but Mansell’s earliest work remains his most notable.
Graeme Revell
Yet another refugee from an industrial band, this New Zealander used parts of the SPK tune “In Flagrante Delicto” to launch his soundtrack career with 1989’s psychological thriller Dead Calm, an Australian film which in turn launched the career of Nicole Kidman. While Revell has since had to weather his share of soundtrack work for a host of iffy remakes (The Fog, Walking Tall, Assault on Precinct 13), adaptations (Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Aeon Flux, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), and sequels (for the likes of Child’s Play, Psycho, and Miss Congeniality), Dead Calm would foreshadow a movie-music career more often than not based in the dark, the weird, and the sad. These highlights include futuristic films like Until the End of the World, Strange Days, and both of Vin Diesel’s Riddick movies; comic-book flicks including The Crow, Spawn, Tank Girl and Sin City; Quentin Tarantino projects From Dusk Till Dawn and Grindhouse; and acclaimed docudramas like Blow and The Insider.