The 1977 Line

One film score changed everything.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is how music does that. I'm Dale McGowan. I
love science fiction, always have. Speculative science fiction is my favorite,
the kind that changes one big thing about the world
and lets the implications play out against the rest. Fantasy
is different, that usually changes almost everything, So problems are

(00:21):
too easy to solve with a wand or a magic
spell or the convenient revelation with no setup whatsoever. That
water kills the bad guy? What done, balie Maalie. I'd
rather see a recognizable world in which you know one
person is unstuck in time, or the moon is about
to crash into us, or some people can enter the

(00:42):
dreams of others. And because music is a big part
of world building in film, creating a canvas for a
cohesive story to play out on. I've always been fascinated
by sci fi film scores. That was The Abyss from

(01:17):
nineteen eighty nine. See how immersive it is. Especially appropriate
for The Abyss, which is about an alien intelligence under
the ocean. Really good film, by the way, early James Cameron,
and a really good score. But I could have randomly
chosen almost any sci fi film in recent decades to
illustrate that immersive quality of science fiction scores. That's a

(02:02):
rival in twenty sixteen Johann jo Hansen composer and Interstellar
twenty fourteen Hans Zimmer. If you keep moving backwards in time,
very science fiction, the idea this giant orchestral canvas remains
the norm. There's Passengers from twenty sixteen Thomas Newman, Star Wars,

(02:31):
The Force Awakens twenty fifteen, John Williams, Gravity twenty thirteen,
Inception twenty ten. That was Hans Zimmer matrix in nineteen

(03:01):
ninety nine. Even when it's quiet, the science fiction canvas

(03:21):
is usually immense. You can hear how huge the silence is.
See if you get the idea here, that's aliens plural

(03:52):
James Horner. He's creating that space three different ways. The
first is ranged the distance between those low and high strings,
and then there's reverb or echo, and finally there's the
smallness of the trumpet figure, which even echoes itself. So

(04:17):
that puts us back in nineteen eighty six year I
graduated from college. But if you push a little further
back when I was just getting into science fiction, sci
fi had a really different sound. That's the original Planet

(04:38):
of the Apes nineteen sixty eight. It's a whole different world.
What we called a beat boop score at UCLA cramped
anxious dissonant, right, usually electronic, but not always Again, I
could have randomly chosen almost any science fiction score from

(04:58):
that era to illustrate that quality. You go further back
to the fifties when my parents were teenagers, and it's
cramped anxious dissonant with a freaky theremon on top. The
theoremon was the voice of sci fi in the nineteen fifties,

(05:21):
this electronic instrument that film critic Harold Schoenberg once described
as a cello lost in dense fog, crying because it
does not know how to get home. Now, this is
the height of Cold War paranoia during this time, and
a lot of sci fi created allegories out of that anxiety,

(05:43):
like invasion of the body Snatchers. So when did it change?
When did sci fi scoring go from beepoop to the
big canvas Planet of the Apes? Was neen sixty eight,
Let's nudge the time machine to nineteen seventy one. Okay,

(06:19):
that's THCHX eleven thirty eight. George Lucas's first major film
still very beatboop. Here's Andromeda Strain another amazing movie, also
nineteen seventy one, and forward a little more to nineteen

(06:48):
seventy six. It's Logan's Run maybe the ultimate beat boop. Okay,

(07:09):
Let's roll forward one more year nineteen seventy seven, Star
Wars right, Big Canvas. Okay, maybe that was a fluke.

(07:48):
Let's go forward two years nineteen seventy nine. The film
is Alien singular, the first in the franchise, seven years
before the one we just heard. The composer this time
is Jerry Goldsmith, same guy who did the very very
beep boop Planet of the Apes in nineteen sixty eight.
Here's Alien and here's Planet of the Apes again, both

(08:47):
super creepy and anxious, both starting out in space. But
listen to how the canvas has grown for Alien now.
Later the same year, same guy, Jerry Goldsmith Star Trek

(09:08):
the motion picture very star Wars. He right. Then there's
Back to the Future in nineteen eighty five, which was
insanely only the second time the great Al Silvestry had
written for orchestra. Great side story here. While they're filming

(09:31):
Back to the Future and Silvestri was working on the score,
he visited the director on the set Robert Semechis, who
was filming the school dance scene. If you remember that
the realization was closing in on Zamechis that the story
he was telling could feel really small. A teenage boy
lives in a small town, and then he travels in
a time machine to the nineteen fifties when his parents

(09:53):
were in high school. He accidentally interferes in their lives
in a way that threatens to erase his existence, and
then he fixes things and returns to the eighties by
the skin of his teeth. It's a great story, but
it really could be fairly small. Zemechis did not want that,
and he knew the music was a big part of
creating the size of the canvas. It could easily have

(10:16):
been an electronics score, and ten years earlier it certainly
would have. But we are past the nineteen seventy seven
line now, so there was another option. As Silvestry tells it,
he's visiting the set, Zamechis looks up kind of ashen,
and he walks over to Silvestri and says it has
to be big. Al he spreads his arms really wide,

(10:38):
really big. So Sylvestry writes it big and then he
goes out and hires a ninety eight piece orchestra, the
largest in the history of universal pictures to that point,
big canvas about thirty five to forty is typical for
a film score studio orchestra, and according to film composer

(10:58):
Lore who knows, he did it without permission, and when
the studio heads saw the expenditure for recording sessions, they
blew their stacks, as studio heads do in all the stories,
but Zamchis defended the decision. And then a few days
after the initial scoring sessions, Zamechas is filming the clock
tower scene and the actors are just they're not bringing it.

(11:20):
It's just flat. They're tired. So Zamechas fires up a
sound system on set with the backing track for that
scene that's just been recorded, and their spirits sword in

(12:11):
the movie was huge. So that's nineteen eighty five. Eighty
nine is the Abyss. Ninety six is Independence Day, ninety
nine is the Matrix Great Score. You hear a little

(12:59):
like tronic sound mixed in with the orchestra, but it's
ninety five percent symphony orchestra. If the Matrix had been
released in nineteen seventy six. It would certainly have been
an electronic score and a very different feeling. The masterpiece
that is, the Matrix soundtrack owes its existence to John Williams. Okay,

(13:20):
so you get the idea. Star Wars was the watershed.
It would have been normal to give it an electronic score,
normal at that point. But George Lucas wouldn't have hired
John Williams if that's what he wanted. Lucas wanted to
lean into the fantasy and mythological themes of the story
more than the science fiction setting, the space traveling robots
and Lightsaber's part in the force. So Lucas created temp

(13:45):
tracks from existing music, very common practice to give Williams
an idea of what he was looking for in a
given scene, and he mostly used big romantic orchestral pieces
from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. John Williams
was class trained, first as a pianist at Juilliard and
then in composition at Eastman. That's why Lucas wanted Williams.

(14:07):
He knew he was feeding those classical temp tracks to
someone who spoke the language, and Williams frankly didn't stray
too far from those temp tracks. Now it's pretty well
known that Williams repurposed some classical music for his scores,
but I don't think most people know how extensive this
borrowing actually is. Lucas gave him Mars from the Planets

(14:31):
for the very first scene, that massive star destroyer passing
overhead right chasing the revel ship toward the planet. Remember,
here's what Mars sounds like, and here's what Williams wrote.

(15:05):
Then later, when C three PO and R two D
two are on Tattooine, the desert planet and they're kind
of wandering around lost, Lucas gave him the opening of
part two of The Right of Spring An Williams wrote this,

(15:55):
And when Lucas said that he wanted the main title
theme to be heraldic with a lot of brass, Williams
gave him this, which sounds an awful lot like the
main title of King's Row from nineteen forty two. This

(16:27):
is a little bit of a theme in John Williams's work.
Here's Jaws, and here's de Vorjak's New World Symphony fourth Movement,

(16:50):
the love theme from Superman and Ricard Strauss's Death and Transfigure.

(17:15):
Now it's fun to point these things out, But I
am not dissing John Williams. If you've never heard my
episode about Stairway to Heaven, you might not know that.
I am entirely supportive of composers who dip into the
finite well of musical materials and draw out something that
resembles something that already exists, even if it's intentional. Williams
used those existing materials to great and noble purpose, and

(17:37):
he's drawing on some of the best stuff ever written.
He was certainly selected by Lucas in part for his
deep knowledge of and access to that classical literature, and
he came through with a score that changed science fiction
film scoring. But here's the thing, not just science fiction
film scores in general had become kind of small in

(17:59):
the sixties and seventies. The forties and fifties had been
the heyday of symphonic scoring, with films like The Ten Commandments, Vertigo,

(18:24):
and North By Northwest. Even as far up as nineteen
sixty two, outside of science fiction, big canvas scoring was common,
like Lawrence of Arabia and How the West Was Won.

(19:04):
But then small scores became the norm even in those genres.
Piano scores, pop song scores, small ensembles, the acoustic guitar
of Cool Hand, Luke and the Sting in nineteen seventy three,

(19:34):
Come On, Old Hustle, Love Story in nineteen seventy five,
Easy Pieces also nineteen seventy I don't even want to
talk about two Mules for Sister Sarah. That's Ennio Morricone

(20:17):
and the French Connection. Hold on a lot of good

(20:39):
stuff there, but that was the small canvas for most
films of that era, and when George Lucas and John
Williams decided to go back to the big canvas in
nineteen seventy seven, they brought the whole industry with them.
Maybe the best illustration of the difference in scoring between
the pre Star Wars small canvas and the symphonic depth
of scores that came after, especially in sci fi, is

(21:03):
the Apples to Apple's comparison of a film and its remake,
and for that we go back to the Planet of
the Apes. Jerry Goldsmith's nineteen sixty eight score was a
masterpiece of anxiety and alienation, but by the time Danny
Elfman was scoring the two thousand and one remake of
Planet of the Apes, there was no question of turning

(21:25):
out a cramped dissonance score like Goldsmith had, it would
not have landed the same. For twenty four years, audiences
had been swimming in the orchestral depths of the Abyss
and three Aliens, four Star wars Is, and seven Star Treks,
the Matrix et Independence Day three, Back to the Futures
and Iron Giant. The Goldsmith approach to science fiction in

(21:48):
sixty eight would not have hit the same Elfman had
to serve the same basic story, had to generate anxiety,
but to do so by meeting audiences where they were
in the middle of a vast orchestra instead of a scattered,
frantic threat environment. He used a symphonic juggernaut to depict

(22:11):
the orderly, terrifying, relentlessness of the Ape Army. The pendulum

(22:51):
will swing again. It always does. But two generations after
the film that brought back the big canvas in a
big way, film scores so far shown no signs of
going back. See you next time for how music does

(24:30):
that