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John Williams scores to suffer the least editing?


TheUlyssesian

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Every film score in the history of cinema is edited.

 

 

For John Williams, two that come to mind with minimal editing are:

 

JAWS (part of The Pier Incident replaced with wild Shark Theme, Quint Meets His End dropped)

 

STAR WARS (Dianoga cue dropped)

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Yea, right around that time.

 

TESB was heavily modified from composer intention too, but mostly just by dropping music, not a lot of tracking.

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Wow, that's surprising you'd think that.  It's one of the more heavily edited and revised Williams scores there is!

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38 minutes ago, Stefancos said:

TLW must be the first Williams score where the editing, tracking and looping became preposterous though.

 

 

 

And yet the music remained effective in the movie, much more so than later atrocities. 

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When I watched the movie in my late teens I didn't really have any concept of tracking and looping at the time. During The Hunt sequence, I didn't sense anything untoward at all. For all intents and purposes the scene still worked well without the originally intended cue. 

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Spielberg generally has good instincts as a filmmaker, but I dunno what "problem" he thought he needed to fix with all the last minute music editing in that picture.

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I think the majority of us were taken aback by how drastically different of a score it was, as compared to Jurassic Park.

 

I've grown to absolutely LOVE the score since then.

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Yup. I think it was a very disappointing snoozefest when I first heard it. But now I find it absolutely fantastic, and up there with his best action scores.

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3 minutes ago, Jay said:

I think the majority of us were taken aback by how drastically different of a score it was, as compared to Jurassic Park.

 

I've grown to absolutely LOVE the score since then.

 

Yeah. The style and tone of the thing was a major departure from the first film, which I wasn't expecting at all. 

 

After all, there was always a stylistic continuity to Star Wars and Indiana Jones scores. 

 

In hindsight, Williams' change in approach was awesome. 

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I just wish Williams re-wrote new versions of The Hunt and The Trek that integrated the Lost World theme, and we had those recording plus of course the unused originals.... instead of only the originals and tracking in the final film.

 

Was Williams to busy doing Amistad to write revisions for TLW or something?

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1 hour ago, Romão said:

Tintin was pretty much intact, was it not?

 

Yeah, as Jay said, Tintin is downright mutilated in the film. And very evidently so. I could make out that the movie was edited on my first viewing of the film without having heard the album too.

 

Anyone know about Schindler's List? And Harry Potter 1? Both of them sound like could be unedited.

 

 

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Harry Potter 1 has plenty of editing

 

They replaced the intended music for the reveal of Diagon Alley with music tracked in from the entrance to the great hall.  3 Note Loop was completely (or almost completely, I can't recall) removed.   There was some changes to the flying lessons scene.  Etc.

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2 hours ago, TheUlyssesian said:

 

Yeah, as Jay said, Tintin is downright mutilated in the film. And very evidently so. I could make out that the movie was edited on my first viewing of the film without having heard the album too.

 

Anyone know about Schindler's List? And Harry Potter 1? Both of them sound like could be unedited.

 

 

 

I only saw the movie once, surprising given how much I enjoyed it. My bad

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2 hours ago, TheUlyssesian said:

 

Yeah, as Jay said, Tintin is downright mutilated in the film. And very evidently so. I could make out that the movie was edited on my first viewing of the film without having heard the album too.

 

Anyone know about Schindler's List? And Harry Potter 1? Both of them sound like could be unedited.

 

 

The Schindler's List score sounds really good in the film. I can't recall any obvious edits but it's been a while since I've seen the film. If anything, I think the CD release contains more music than in the actual film, not just with concert arrangements but an entire piece for the Jewish Ghetto is left out of the film I believe. But great score presentation overall, iirc.

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OST track 2 "Jewish Town (Krakow Ghetto - Winter '41)" was not "left out of the film"; It's a concert arrangement.

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9 hours ago, KK. said:

Yup. I think it was a very disappointing snoozefest when I first heard it. But now I find it absolutely fantastic, and up there with his best action scores.

 

This.

 

As for the topic at hand...every Williams score I can think of was at least somewhat modified for its film. I guess TOD wasn't hacked up too badly...

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In TOD they messed up the ending of The Child Returns, and there's plenty of Inserts throughout (not sure if that qualifies against the OPs criteria or not), like that weird Trek to Pankot Palace one we don't have the sheet music for.  And of course the entirety of the ceremony music is completely hacked up as compared to the sheets and album track (which matches one of the sheets)

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2 hours ago, Jay said:

In TOD they messed up the ending of The Child Returns, and there's plenty of Inserts throughout (not sure if that qualifies against the OPs criteria or not), like that weird Trek to Pankot Palace one we don't have the sheet music for.  And of course the entirety of the ceremony music is completely hacked up as compared to the sheets and album track (which matches one of the sheets)

 

All true, but a couple of microedits for timing's sake and the hacking up of what amounts to a source cue is still pretty minor compared to some of the competition, I think.

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14 hours ago, Jay said:

Was Williams to busy doing Amistad to write revisions for TLW or something?

 

I can't find the recording dates for The Lost World anywhere but Spielberg was shooting Amistad as early as March 1997. If you believe internet rumours, Spielberg was mostly hands off with Lost World's post after finishing the first cut, handing supervision duties to David Koepp ala George Lucas supervising Jurassic Park while Spielberg shot Schindler's List.

 

Given the likely proximity of the sessions to Amistad's shoot (combined with Spielberg's lack of interest), I can envisage a few scenarios:

1) Spielberg felt the score was fine, flew off to shoot Amistad, then saw a cut with the score and decided the film was too dark; he instructed the crew to track the main theme where possible, as it was too late for Williams to re-write and assemble an orchestra

2) Spielberg felt the score was too dissonant in places but was too focused on Amistad to bother asking for time-consuming rewrites, nonchalantly deciding he would track the main theme (easier for everyone involved)

3) Spielberg was unhappy all along and asked Williams to re-write several cues, but he couldn't due to conflicts with Seven Years In Tibet

 

I'm guessing it was probably a combination of factors from all three hypotheses.

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On 01/19/2016 at 6:16 PM, Stefancos said:

TLW must be the first Williams score where the editing, tracking and looping became preposterous though.

 

 

 

TPM for me.

 

23 hours ago, Quintus said:

 

And yet the music remained effective in the movie, much more so than later atrocities. 

 

It was much more effective than on TPM, that's for sure.

 

 

23 hours ago, Quintus said:

I bought the CD prior too, it was the peak of my JW fandom. I was really disappointed by the soundtrack album back then! 

 

23 hours ago, Jay said:

I think the majority of us were taken aback by how drastically different of a score it was, as compared to Jurassic Park.

 

I've grown to absolutely LOVE the score since then.

 

I loved it on first listen. One of my favorite Williams scores from the last 20 years.

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It's one of my favorite Williams scores from the last 20 years too!  I hope Universal gives it the 20th Anniversary treatment in 2017 like they did for JP in 2013, but I'm not holding my breath.

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On 19/1/2016 at 6:13 PM, Jay said:

 

STAR WARS (Dianoga cue dropped)

 

Not only the Dianoga (and the first minute of the Trash Compactor cue), but all the music for scenes on Tatooine that were shot as pick-ups is edited (as the music was done before shooting them): R2's capture by Jawas, tracked music over Sandcrawler shot, Luke's Landspeeder/Tusken Raiders is heavily edited...

 

In Empire there were some horrible (and surprising) tracking decissions, that were thankfully corrected for the SE: tracked statements of the Imperial March opening, Boba Fett's departure is cut short and out of sync...

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1 hour ago, oierem said:

In Empire there were some horrible (and surprising) tracking decissions, that were thankfully corrected for the SE: tracked statements of the Imperial March opening, Boba Fett's departure is cut short and out of sync...

I just noticed the Imperial March tracking for the first time recently in the theatrical cut. Not sure why they did that. I guess that's one of the few SE changes I agree with.

 

Still, nothing can make up for the horrendous music editing during the climax of the ESB SE where they added (unnecessarily) Darth Vader's shuttle landing on his Star Destroyer which completely ruined the pacing and the Rescue From Cloud City/Hyperspace cue.

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11 minutes ago, DominicCobb said:

 the climax of the ESB SE where they added (unnecessarily) Darth Vader's shuttle landing on his Star Destroyer which completely ruined the pacing and the Rescue From Cloud City/Hyperspace cue.

 

What makes it even worse is that it's so obvious that they just used some unused footage from ROTJ there.

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It may have been mentioned already but Saving Private Ryan is pretty much edit free and bar one short cue which may have been tracked its all on the album 

Miracle!

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