Cruel world

I am, most of the time, a very stuffy “film music” (not “soundtrack”) type who goes into all sorts of eggheaded intellectual musings about stuff nobody else cares about. Nevertheless, sometimes I find myself bemused at the way that a lot of soundtrack buffs don’t seem to have any grasp of how the movie business actually works, or at least, how they prefer to indulge themselves in fantasies about how composers get jobs on big films.

I’m talking, of course, about John Smith. Or rather, I’m talking about talk about John Smith. You know Smith — he’s a wonderful composer who many of us are fond of, and film music aficionados and soundtrack geeks alike love his music, which is bursting with quality. When his scores are reissed by soundtrack labels, everyone is excited. Heck, they even get excited when he scores a car commercial. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Smith has not scored a significant film in the last 15 years. But this fact doesn’t ever stop some soundtrack fans from wondering — and even getting upset — that Smith has not been considered to suddenly come out of his relative modern obscurity and be asked to score Blockbuster XXX. Indeed, every time a film composing assignment is announced, someone will pipe up, “Gee! I wish they would get John Smith to write the music!”

It seems to me that people are confusing the way that Smith gets attention that he gets from soundtrack labels (and rightful attention it is) with the way that studios and filmmakers pay attention to composers and choose them. Unfortunately, you’re only as good as your last movie, and if you don’t work, people forget you very quickly. Patrick Doyle once recounted the way that Kenneth Branagh comforted him when visiting him in the hospital by telling him: “You’ll never work again, of course. People have such very short memories. I’ll try and prop up your career.” Black humor, but it has a grain of cruel truth in it, and unfortunately that is the way the business really works - for everyone in Hollywood, but for film composers even more so.

Honestly I would like John Smith to get more high-profile work, but unfortunately there are a lot of John Smiths out there who really are waiting by the phone, not getting called, and turning to other projects outside of the world of film, which helps ensure that they will continue not to be called, at least not for Blockbuster XXX. Another thing that seems to kill composers’ careers is when their creative relationships go stale; the top director or producer that they hitched their star to, is no longer turning out the hits, and if a composer hasn’t continually expanded their network of creative contacts, the phone will ring less and less. As Elmer Bernstein told young composers, it’s not about promo CDs, it’s about networking, pure and simple.