BigMacGyver

Happy Birthday, John Williams! Just played temple of doom to celebrate.

Hm, this is really difficult. As far as their effectiveness in the film is concerned i would prefer the first score while the second one, for me, is a far more satisfying listening experience on CD. Especially the collectors edition of the first score drags heavily while the second one floats with more ideas that are typical for William's post star wars/close encounters efforts. There are some nice seafaring moments in both scores but in 2 they seem to be way more fleshed out.

Thats the typical newbie-mistake: Every good film music with a memorable theme comes from John Williams. 8O But here are some that easily reach the same level of impact like a great williams score: Alan Silvestri - Judge Dredd Why? Easily his best work for a sci-fi/action film to date. Alan Silvestri - Siegfried & Roy I call this one the Alan Silvestri concert. It definitely has some williams influences in terms of orchestration but is overall pure silvestri magic all the way through the 50 minutes of running time. David Arnold - Independence Day I can only agree here. A thrill ride! Star Trek - The Motion Picture Jerry's best without comparison.

I am sorry but that is not correct. The new deal with the musicians union applies only to scores recorded after august 2005. Everything that came before does not benefit from lower fees if the CD is limited to 14,999 copies.

That's another universal owned title which sadly means: no way.

As a kid, i found the dark passages of E.T. highly disturbing and horrifying, especially when this dark "thing" moves right to elliot for the first time making these strange chewing noise and the music becomes really scary. It scared the shit out of me that i did not even dare to watch. I also watched Close Encounters when i was younger and there is some very disturbing material as well.

You are refering to titles owned by studios like Paramount that are simply not negotiating about anything. If you want to express your frustation towards anyone then to their music executives. Sadly, there is no way to do that (what a coincidence) and the labels seem to get all the rant from fans... for releasing the great music that they can get their hands on.

It must be a score which does not suffer from a difficult licencing situation which pretty much cancels out 1941 since the OST is still in print on varese and otherwise the rights would belong to Universal which makes it pretty much impossible for FSM to release it. Midway is another universal title and therefore hard to do for them. Force 10 from Navarone might be possible but Lukas kendall stated one year ago that we should "better not hold our breath for this one". That situation could have changed by now. He also stated recently that they are going to release a title that they have been working on for the past 7 years. Personally i would love to see force 10 released because i liked the score very much when i watched the film. Another possibility is Elmer Bernstein's Canon for Cordoba (1970).

The problem is that it is not up to varese to release it. Someone will have to buy the rights of the music from MCA who issued the original soundtrack release. It is very unlikely that they will give away the rights for one of the best selling soundtracks. The re-use fees of this recording are horrendous due to the large orchestra that was used (at the time the largest ensemble ever used for a universal pictures score). There was a petition for a BTTF score release some time ago but it simply went away and i remember that only a little less than 300 people signed. Sadly, no good signs for a score release. The delorean bootleg that is described on soundtrack.net is actually very poor. The cues are not in the correct film order and there is a terrible noise distortion whenever the brass reaches higher volume which is especially terrible on the skateboard chase cue.

Rumour has it that the next batch of Varese CD's is not going to come out before may. I know that's hardly a guarantee but varese seems to have other priorities right now with their busy release schedule for spring.

These are the clues for the next batch of FSM releases: "Coming Next Month: For scheduling reasons, two Silver Age titles: two swinging sixties LPs on one CD and a WWII favorite from the 1970’s." One of the LP reissues could very well be the long rumoured release of William's jazzy score for the 60's TV series Checkmate.

Well, assuming that I will never suffer from any financial problems that might force me into selling my collection, I will probably give them to my children, assuming that i will have any in the future. But as soon as i would find out that even my own breed is only interested in the ebay profit of these things i would rather give it to an institution which is specialised in preserving film music. As long as the collection remains intact for future generations to enjoy all these goodies. No one would benefit from cremated CDs, especially not myself since i will be pretty dead by that time anyways so i would rather want to leave it behind, knowing that it is in good hands for future generations.

As it seems, Michael Giacchino's score for the series is just about to be released on Varese Sarabande. Check their news section for a very odd teaser.

Here is what someone posted at the FSM board about that: Seems like he is baking his own breads now. Maybe the rumours about the indy re-recordings were not refering to silva but tadlow? That would explain why silva never made a statement about that.

They could have said a little more precisely that they are refering to sheets of the score instead of original scores. That can cause a lot of confusion. Then the situation might be even worse with the original masters probably being lost forever. That makes me wonder what else we might not know about paramounts score archive... if such an archive exists anymore.

It seems like paramount is too lazy or financially inflexible to handle any licencing issues that may be involved with a release of the original sessions. But it is good news that they finally seem to care about preservation of their goodies. God knows what may already be lost from their vault so maybe they are slowly waking up.

Tadlow is going to release a re-recording of Elmer Bernstein's complete score for True Grit which is considered as one of his best western scores. Now that is a dream come true. Paramount even allowed them to access the master tapes to restore the original recordings for preservation. Really good to know that the original sessions of this classic are in good hands. The release of the re-recording is limited to 3000 copies and will be released in early may.

I would tell him that i completely agree with his comments from the indy dvd music featurette about John Williams trek music from temple of doom being one of the best trek cues in film music history and ask him what he thinks about the lack of a sufficient release. I would then beg him to pull some strings and make a release possible.

Yes and no. Silvestri is actually just my second favourite composer and williams being my favourite. So, how come i would prefer a silvestri sci-fi score over one from williams? Because Silvestri is hardly scoring sci-fi scores which is the reason why they are much more distinctive from each other than anything Williams has put out for the genre in recent years. Listen to Predator, The Abyss and Judge Dredd. Honestly, i can't find much formula there as they are virtually stand alone pieces. Why is that? Because there were several years of comedy scoring between while williams scored so many sci-fi stuff in a very short time period that especially the action passages sound pretty much exchangeable. What i am saying is: Williams had so many sci-fi scores recently which carry his approach that they hardly offer anything new. So, let silvestri score a box office magnet like WWC simply for a change and give williams his well-deserved break from scoring films. I am sure williams will surprise us with freshness after that.

These new releases are certainly well produced and i am sure many people will like them but I am busy with getting scores from FSM's back catalogue before they sell out and these new releases don't excite me that much. Besides, I am still waiting for an extensive FSM release of the tv music from CHiPs.

Yeah, in fact i know that the score serves the purpose very well since i have seen the film and how it works. Especially the intimate stuff is effective. Still, what i heard did not really excite me that much especially during action scenes. Compared to william's other output for sci-fi related films like minority report or even the SW prequels this seems to be pretty much his formula how to approach complex action scenes and, to be honest, i grow sick of that. Sure, the scores are still distinctive but the formula is always the same. That's the problem with William's recent output: it serves the purpose but does not really do more. IMO of course. So, i would suggest to unleash Silvestri on WWC, which is a genre that he hardly gets his hands on, instead of having williams doing another action-heavy sci-fi score by formula.

I never thought that this one could be such a controversial piece. What i find really interesting is that most people only refer to the main theme when there are much more fine moments in this score that actually foreshadow a lot of material from William's later scores of the new millenium. When i listen to AOTC or ROTS it sometimes feels like he returned to The Patriot. On the other hand, i don't know Amistad and what role this score plays in williams development. Is it really that close to the patriot?

The sound quality of the FSM release is pretty poor and some parts of the score suffer from that (especially when the brass kicks in). The main theme is pure williams joy which has a surprisingly positive feel however during the build up there is this short moment of string suspense which is a terrific foreshadowing of the disaster that it about to come. Sadly, the most of the rest is rather moody underscore with some hints of better ideas (like that cue when they turn on the lights of the tower, the simplistic love theme or the explosives cue at the end). But I have a love-hate relationship with most of william's pre-star wars output so you probably don't want to listen to my words on that one PS.: An Architect's Dream is a nice piece.

I doubt that it is better sounding. My encoding is 192 kbps and I used album tracks with an encoding of only 128 (!) kbps. Some moments almost go to the edge of distortion but maybe Tommy and the others are refering to the arrangement rather than the sound quality. The most difficult thing is to even the volume of the tracks without destroying the natural sound of the orchestra. These damn volume jumps can be really annoying and it takes a lot of time to get that right. And then, there is the inclusion of the album tracks which bring an entirely different sound that needs to be adjusted. Of course this is a matter of taste. However, I think most of the sfx like gunshots, screams, swords rattling and all that go way beyond ambience and are completely disturbing the mood that is created by the music. I prefer a well-made edit that skips these things and goes right on with pure music though without breaking up the flow or mood that is created. Music is more about emotional stimulation to me and the least thing i can stand is a violation of that stimulation by people shooting and screaming. Loosing a few moments of music for that should be no problem. But i certainly admire you for the ability to enjoy a score even with such anomalies.

He might very well take a year off now except if this Lincoln biopic will be Spielberg's next. There was talking about When Worlds Collide being a Spielberg project. Stephen Sommers will direct and Spielberg will produce the film. Now if Spielberg insists on having Williams on WWC it might be another possible next score but Sommer's composer of choice is Alan Silvestri. Seriously, i would rather have Alan Silvestri scoring WWC with a choral armageddon instead of another "War Of The Worlds" from Williams. Now, please don't shot me! PS.: i think Spielberg will enjoy his role as a producer on WWC and the opportunity to work with a different composer like he used to do with the Dante movies and Goldsmith. Spielberg, Sommers, Silvestri is a magic triangle if you ask me... it is the tripple-S