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Superman score questions


jerrygollay

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Is that true that the score have been lost and rediscovered just after Varese Sarabande done that terrible re-creation of the score ? Not to blame the orchestrations of Dechter/ Kashka but the performances were just..Poor ! Also is that true M.Matessino discovered some new music intended to be spoted on S2 ( luna fight, Luthor to the fortress ) ?????

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I don't know... but all I know is that Rhino / Warner released the 2-CD set which is the intended score. I urge you to try to pick that set up. You can get it from Amazon (new and used section probably is your best bet there) or from ebay.

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varese re-recording suffer wrong notes else and else (choirs, oh my God !!! ) it suffer to be slow when it should be fast ( trip to earth , growing up, and to the lair )Jonathan's death lost its magic....

No question about "ultimate superman" which has a 50 musicians orchestra ....

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What's wrong with the choirs?

I'm not bothered by the tempi whatsoever. Besides, what's the point of releasing the performance that perfectly mimicks the old one? I would consider such product superfluous. Always thought that RSNO performance is strong.

And as for wrong notes... I'm not a specialist when it comes to Superman score. Anyone?

Karol, who loves both versions.

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The Varese recording is only poor if you expect it to follow the original to the note, and with exactly the same tempos.

IMO it's a valid and very enjoyable interpretation of the score.

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I agree with Rob. I've heard clips from it and John Debney did a pretty good job a re-recording this at least, unlike the re-recording he did for Back To The Future...

A lot of re-recordings though you shouldn't expect it to be like the original.

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It is my understanding that Williams never had a chance to compose anything for Superman II because shooting was halted and Donner put his efforts toward completing the first film.

The music that ended up appearing in the moon sequence for Superman II can be heard in Superman as Jor-El tries Zod, Non and Ursa. Ken Thorne adapted the music for Superman II.

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It is my understanding that Williams never had a chance to compose anything for Superman II because shooting was halted and Donner put his efforts toward completing the first film.  

It is highly unlikely, but not impossible.

Where are veteran Superman specialists when you need them?

Karol

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MySpace Film Music Group: http://groups.myspace.com/filmmusiccentral

Let's be a bit nice on the Varese release ... that was an intensive reconstruction of the score, they had to go through Williams' archives and many cues were different than the actual recording for the film. Also, they had to record in just a matter of days so time was a huge concern, rehearsals were probably very short.

On Superman: The Movie, I do not believe Williams wrote any material for Superman II, including the Lunar scene. If he had, the Salkinds--who needed large amounts of music for their extended tv presentations--would have definitely used it. Also, the film was pretty much fully cut when Williams scored the film, save for special effects.

Also, here's an excerpt of an interview with Mike:

1. In the original interview, you mentioned that there is evidence to suggest that John Williams recorded some alternate pieces which cannot be found. Can you elaborate further? What are the cues? And what is the evidence?

To answer this I have to explain a bit about what happens to these recordings. When all of the takes are put down on multi-track reels, the composer, mixer, and editor (in the case of SUPERMAN, Williams, Eric Tomlinson, and Bob Hathaway) give notes as to what takes they liked and what sections of each are the best. For example, let's say we have a cue number 165. They may record it five times, so on the scoring log it will appear like this: 165-1, 165-2, 165-3, etc.

Hypothetically, let's say the artists like measures 1-16 of take one, measures 17-78 of take four, measures 79-82 of take 2, and then measures 83-110 of take one again. This is indicated on the log and sometimes on the score itself. And then, takes 1, 2, and 4 -- in their entirety -- are spliced out and put on a separate reel. This reel is then mixed down and dubbed, and the music editor then assembles the cue based on the notes. The remnants of the mix-down are sometimes kept and sometimes tossed.

This procedure is followed for every cue, and the final result is called the "goody reel," a bit of parlance that can apply either to the edited takes or to the reel on which the selected raw takes were set aside, depending on what was kept and what was trashed at the end of production. What all this means is that any recorded takes which are not used AT ALL... never make it to the goody reel. This, of course, includes all "alternates." On STAR WARS (A NEW HOPE), we were fortunate that Lucasfilm still had 16-track reels with all the "goody" components missing, and this is how we found the alternate "Binary Sunset."

On SUPERMAN, we didn't even have the goody reels, which means that alternate bits of underscore are gone for ever. What we primarily used was the six track mix-downs used to actually create the final mix of the film. But according the scoring log (usually indicated by the note "revised"), there were alternate versions of music for the following scenes: the opening of the dome on Krypton, the toddler Clark lifting Pa Kent's truck, Clark's trek through the arctic, and the alley mugging scene. We were fortunate that we did find a 2-track reel of "trims and outs" which contained the original prologue & short march and the alternate "Planet Krypton." The alternate "Can You Read My Mind," strangely, was on the six-track final film stems as if they were to be used in the film, which tells me that this was changed at a very late date. I really wish producers would get into the habit of making an x-copy of the complete raw sessions and hold on to them, because you never know when there might be future interest in this stuff.

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I don't know where Neil has been, but since he did all those interviews with Matessino on "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," I just PM'd him to see if he could inquire about this.

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Ever since Neil has stop being a moderator for some real reason which why he hasn't been participating this JWFAN discussion forum. Although on rare occasions he does show himself time to time on this forum. He was such a great moderator for JWFAN.NET ****Brings back memories when Neil was here as a moderator****

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The Varese release does have a few wrong notes - in 2 places I can think of. Some are in the destruction of Krypton. One is in the final conflict sequence.

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It is my understanding that Williams never had a chance to compose anything for Superman II because shooting was halted and Donner put his efforts toward completing the first film.  

Excerpted from an interview with Superman/II/III producer Ilya Salkind from http://www.supermanhomepage.com/movies/mov...terview-salkind:

Salkind recalled that Williams was set to return until an unfortunate happenstance. "John Williams came to London, we paid [for] the trip. He saw the [second] film. I made a mistake. I let him alone with Lester in the screening room and somehow Lester and him did not hit it off at all. At the end of the screening, John said 'Ilya can I speak to you?' He said 'Look I cannot work with this man.' That was it."
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There are those who know more about the making of Superman that will tell you that's total BS. And I'm inclined to believe them.

Besides it proves that Williams never wrote anything for Superman II.

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On SUPERMAN, we didn't even have the goody reels, which means that alternate bits of underscore are gone for ever.

That interview with Mike Matessino is no longer accurate. The original session tapes were rediscovered in 2000 and were used for the 2001 SE DVD.

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Ever since Neil has stop being a moderator for some real reason which why he hasn't been participating this JWFAN discussion forum. Although on rare occasions he does show himself time to time on this forum. He was such a great moderator for JWFAN.NET                ****Brings back memories when Neil was here as a moderator****

I guess he found something called a life. :)

John- who doesn't see how it's possible that Williams wrote anything for Superman II

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Neil's actually been posting quite a bit at Superman Cinema, oddly enough. He did ask Mr. Matessino about it and got a response which he forwarded to me...

"Hi Neil. A new music source for "Superman" was discovered right around the time the Rhino album came out, not by me, but by Warner Bros. when they did an extensive worldwide search for elements as they were gearing up to do the first DVD release of the films. There were a lot of distribution rights and storage-fee issues that were settled at that time, and I suspect that this may have had something to do with why it didn't turn up sooner. The new six-track source was one generation closer to the original than the mixing stems I used for the album, and it did contain at least two alternate cues that we did not have. Since they were doing an "additional music cues" feature on the DVD, I expected that those cues would be there, but they weren't included. They are, however, both used in the Richard Donner Cut of "Superman II," one of them a bit excessively throughout the picture, in my opinion. - Mike."

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