This is part of a series. Part 1 can be found here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=107376

Note: This one got absurdly long, so it’s gonna be published in four parts.

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Welcome to the next phase of Media Ventures. There’s a pretty clear delineation between Zimmer’s early works and this phase, not only because he won an Oscar but also because of the emergence of four new trends.

First, with Zimmer straddling the line between the character dramas he was previously known for and the new hyper-edited action world he was suddenly in-demand for, we now enter the stage where both of the following quotes were true (for the most part):
- “Like the old-fashioned guys, I try to write a tune. You can write the most marvelous textures in the world and if you don’t have a tune it won’t go anywhere. I like some [textural scores], but I don’t know how to say what I’m trying to describe without a melody. I need to have at least four good notes I can hang onto.”
- “Very few people have the balls to go and make a decent noise against all those sound effects and cuts. You need to know what to hit and what not to hit because you have a thousand cuts going.”

Second, we now enter the stage where Zimmer’s work starts to sound more “masculine”, somewhat a function of the Media Ventures crew working a lot with Jerry Bruckheimer (possibly the most opinionated producer about music since David O. Selznick) or with filmmakers who asked them to ape that sound - Spielberg wanting Crimson Tide to inform The Peacemaker, for example.

QUESTION: Does anyone know the origin of the term “power anthem” - or at least the origin of how it started being applied to Zimmer?

Third, we now enter the stage where the sound starts to be mass-produced. Per Jay Rifkin, “We finished Lion King and we had five rooms immediately busy working on one project and thought ‘we’re on to something here.’ As post schedules are more and more compressed, you just need to be able to throw a lot of firepower at a project, or else really hurt yourself doing it, having a very small team with just a limited number of workstations. If we find that some division isn’t working out, for whatever reason, we will shut it down. But there doesn’t have to be any artificial limit set on what we can and can’t do, not now.”

The credits start to get hysterically long about halfway through this entry - not just because of additional composers, but also because orchestrator Bruce Fowler brought his wife, his two brothers, and fellow jazz composer/bandleader Ladd McIntosh into the fold. Conrad Pope, in a rare instance when he wasn’t asked about working with John Williams, once said, “When I was working for Hans and Bruce, that was more of a copying job. We’d get the MIDI sketches, and the rule that they set down was ‘copy exactly what you see exactly where you see it’, even though the flutes might be wrong. I tried to look at it acoustically.” It should be noted this is not necessarily a modern thing or even unique to Zimmer; Dimitri Tiomkin often needed a similar army of orchestrators since he wrote everything out pianistically.

Mark Mancina and Nick Glennie-Smith graduate, while the next generation or so starts showing up - John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams obviously, but also Gavin Greenaway, Steve Jablonsky, Geoff Zanelli, Rupert Gregson-Williams, Klaus Badelt, and Marc Streitenfeld.

There’s a notable uptick in the number of works that Hans hands off to others, mostly because he doesn’t have time, which includes all the known “bring in MV to save us” replacement scores from this era. The days of Hans not having availability to do a film and it being given to Howard Shore were over.

And of course there was the whole “Zimmer becoming the Alfred Newman of Dreamworks” event.

Fourth, (and this one has nothing to do with the music) we now enter the stage where Zimmer starts to seem sensitive about how he’s perceived. You see a lot of self-conscious statements about his style being duplicated - “the problem is that the whole sound starts to get identifiable” - as well as some annoyance over his position in the industry - “you don’t give Goldsmith a hard time for using the same orchestra as John Williams”. You can draw interesting parallels between post-Oscar Zimmer and Kevin Durant after his first NBA title with Golden State, two greats wondering why they’re not getting more validation from the public and the media after their first major win.

This spills over to Zimmer becoming pissy about his critics. The whole first page of a lengthy, remarkable 1997 FSM interview gets taken up by him slagging Lukas Kendall for his magazine ripping on The Rock and for Jeff Bond calling Media Ventures a factory. It’s not too hard to trace from this heightened sensitivity to the recent cyberbullying of James Southall.

Also, I learned I’ve been pronouncing a name incorrectly - it’s Man-CHEE-na, not Man-SEE-na.

Also, the ubiquity of Journey to the Line might be Jerry Bruckheimer’s fault - see Part 2d.

Oh, and one correction to the first post in this series…Edmund was right (ugh). Mark Mancina was involved with Days of Thunder - he helped out with the credits song The Last Note of Freedom and possibly some of the score (per the July 1997 FSM issue).

I’m sure at least one participant on this forum will say I skipped over too much of Trevor Rabin’s output.

Anyway…off we go!


Speed (1994) - ***
Mancina; orchestrations by Bruce Fowler, his wife Yvonne Suzette Moriarty, Ladd McIntosh, and Don Harper;
add’l music by John Van Tongeren; paycheck for doing nothing to Curt Sobel

One of the earliest cases of someone reaching out to Zimmer based on an earlier score and him telling them that actually so-and-so wrote most of that so they should use him.

MM: “20th Century Fox did not want me to do the movie at all - ‘you’re a nobody’ - and Jan said ‘don’t speak to anybody, just do it’. I wrote the elevator music; Fox hated it, Jan liked it a lot. [Fox] wanted Michael Kamen - and was I think in fact doing it - and the director said ‘Absolutely not, I want Mark.’”

I haven’t listened to this in at least a decade. I thought I was gonna drop this from its prior rating - and the early chunk of dull atmospheric music supported that hypothesis. But the main theme is terrific, and you get plenty of simplistic-yet-highly-effective action tracks.

MM: “I love orchestra but sometimes I get very bored with it.”

Given that I could actually discern brass and woodwind lines, it wasn’t as cheap-sounding as I remembered (at least not in full; maybe let’s not speak of something like Fight On Train). However, this starts a trend where Zimmer & associates are given large orchestras (93-piece, in this case) that they really don’t need.

MM: “It was a small picture. Sandra Bullock was completely unknown. I had no idea of the impact that movie would have.”

I missed out on the LLL expansion; this is based on the chronological order of the original album which seems to omit any material that John Van Tongeren is credited on. “What happened was there were six or seven Dennis Hopper scenes where he was on the phone. I wrote a big seven minute piece, then John [arranged] to each of the scenes. I’ve done that before and not gotten any credit and it’s a lot of work.”


Drop Zone (1994) - ***
Zimmer; add’l music by Nick Glennie-Smith & John Van Tongeren; 'Hyphopera' by Ryeland Allison

The last of Zimmer’s collaborations with John Badham, who would be sentenced to movie director jail after the next year’s Incognito. Zimmer recorded an extensive sample library prior to this score - and almost the whole thing is derived from that.

HZ: “Drop Zone was written just for fun. I was being reckless--nothing to prove, nothing to lose. I remember playing [Badham and his spouse] Too Many Notes (Not Enough Rests) and I saw that he was just about to say something about a change when his wife said, ‘That’s brilliant!’ - and that was the end of that discussion.”

Frank Lehman, a music theory professor at Tufts, stated much later that “the composer’s predilection for digital augmentation can yield a distinctly overproduced sound, where every detail is manipulated somehow and the individuality of component parts is sacrificed for a holistic impression of busy loudness.” He was talking more about the Remote Control era, but I think the statement applies here as well. When the music is vibing in a “rock cool” way, it’s harmless fun, but when it’s trying to imitate a very busy orchestra it can sound noisy and even obnoxious - especially in moments of dissonance. And good luck remembering any of the themes - this sucker is more about tone and style.

HZ: “We lost the discs. It’s a score that doesn’t existing other than as a recording, because it was never written out in any way.”

Still, all the guitar stuff (the last team-up for a while with Climax Blues Band guitarist Pete Haycock) is super cool; fans of Days of Thunder will probably enjoy this. And a moment of epic tragedy adds a female vocal that’s the halfway point between Pacific Heights and Point of No Return - brief, but great.

NGS: “Yeah, the cues used to go on forever in those days.”

Marc Streitenfeld appears as Zimmer’s assistant.


Rhythm of the Pride Lands: Music Inspired by The Lion King (1995) - **˝
Zimmer, Rifkin, Mancina, Lebo M. & others; guitar on ‘He Lives in You’ by Trevor Rabin

There were a lot of competing imperatives here - Jay Rifkin and Lebo M. wanted to make more music, Disney Records wanted to get into the adult music scene, The Lion King was a license to print money, the Oscars were coming up. So it’s a minor miracle that this album, mostly an “inspired by” collection with some reworkings of prior themes/songs and one unused piece, isn’t a colossal misfire.

MM: ”I wrote ‘He Lives in You’ when I was producing The Lion King songs, but Elton had the gig already, so I kept the song in my back pocket. I’ve never actually even met Elton John.”

It basically succeeds at what it’s trying to be - a competent extension of the Circle of Life style into African contemporary pop - but it’s still bizarre and occasionally obnoxious, and I have to imagine score fans at the time were annoyed that they were getting this instead of, like, more music from the actual film. It’s Time has supporting choir parts that suggest Feeling Hot Hot Hot. The rejected Warthog Rhapsody is a nice curiosity, but that’s now on the Legacy release. Those responsible for the Hakuna Matata redo should be tried at The Hague.

One By One gets pretty close to the communal joy of The Power of One. He Lives In You is nice. Layla is lovely. Busa is campy fun. They almost salvage things - but score fans weren’t the intended market for this anyway.

Seemingly the first appearance of Yes guitarist Trevor Rabin, though he claims he did some playing on Days of Thunder. Interesting fact: his white South African family fought against apartheid, an intriguing coincidence given Zimmer’s first solo film was A World Apart.

The rating seems harsh - but I’m much more likely to return to Speed or the next score than I am to this.


Bad Boys (1995) - ***
Mancina; orchestrations by B Fowler/Moriarty; add’l music & conducting by Nick Glennie-Smith

My fifth discovery of this rundown - and the first not by Zimmer. More importantly, it’s the first appearance of (to quote Harry Gregson-Williams) “the most odious director alive”.

MM: “[Michael and Jerry] really liked Speed, and they had put my music from it all over. I kept saying, ‘I can’t give you the same thing.’ They said, ‘No, I don’t want the same thing, but I want it to hit me the same way.’ I felt that I was in a rubber room for four months.”

On the whole this is harmless popified fun. You get some of the same pluses and minuses from Speed, like a large orchestra that sounds more synthetic than it should - but gosh, that reggae-influenced idea (more a recurring rhythm than a true “theme”) is dang catchy, and those guitars are very satisfying when Mancina lets them rip.

MM: “What was fun for me, it took place in Miami, I wanted to give it a bit of a Jamaican background - and have a groove to it that the cops could be cruising around to.”

A true surprise - hearing a blink-and-you-miss-it resurrection of the gospel vocals from Point of No Return and Drop Zone.

MM, in 1998: “I've heard Bad Boys in so many movies - with slight changes.”

We start to get into areas of questionable attribution - Christopher Ward is credited with additional music in the film but not on the album - though this is nothing compared to the absurdity of trying to reconcile “who wrote what” for Bad Boys 2.


Crimson Tide (1995) - ****˝
Zimmer; orchestrations by B Fowler/Moriarty/McIntosh; orchestrations & add’l music by NGS; choir conducted by Harry Gregson-Williams

One of the few works from the 80s and 90s that the self-critical Zimmer says he’s proud of. It represents a (sorry) sea change; it’s a work so transcendently successful that it dethroned Black Rain from its temp track perch.

HZ: “Crimson Tide is a hard job because you can’t make anyone the villain. It’s not really an action movie, it’s two people shouting at each other. There was a tendency to glorify the army, and I didn’t want to do that.”

I had this score at **** prior to starting this rundown, largely because of how synthetic it was - and while that’s still true, there’s a difference between synthetic and being grating or cheap-sounding - never mind that all of this was exceedingly appropriate for the film. I also think Zimmer got much better at writing this type of stuff compared to what we hear in Drop Zone - there’s a clarity to the composition that (for the most part) doesn’t get buried in a mess of activity.

And, sheesh, my wife was even bouncing around to the end credits. So…yeah, that rating was too low.

I finally got around to the original album program, which wasn’t immensely worse than the boot I’ve had since high school which seems to largely rearrange some but not all of it in film order. Still, I cannot (sorry) fathom why anyone thought it was a good idea to have a 20+ minute second track. The full score certainly overextends itself - but it’s still a better listening experience.

Harry Gregson-Williams is credited for the first time - as a choir conductor!

HGW: “I thought I was going to be a bloody opera singer. There’s a lot of choral music on my scores, but I don’t do the singing anymore. Perhaps the gift I was given as a child didn’t translate as a vocalist later on. But everything that went with it was indisputably helpful. We weren’t trained to be slightly good; we were trained to be absolutely really good.

Richard Harvey gave me my original start in about 1990. My dad had said ‘you need to meet [him]’. He hired me as a kind of runner-apprentice-tea boy-orchestrator-arranger-cricket enthusiast. It was through working at his studio that I met Hans Zimmer; he was about to do Crimson Tide. Hans was the complete reverse [of Richard]; no manuscript, all computers. And then he buggered off back to LA.”

Speaking of the choir - HZ: “I used choir in exactly the opposite way [from Hunt for Red October]. We never see the Russians, I just wanted it to be in their heads all the time. Jerry and I, and occasionally Tony, spent seven days arguing about the choir, actually just one section of the movie. They got so bad that at one point Jerry’s wife said, ‘Can you guys just calm down, because Jerry’s not getting any sleep.’”


Nine Months (1995) - ***˝
Zimmer; add’l music by NGS; orchestrations by B Fowler/McIntosh

My sixth discovery as part of this rundown - and the first case where I thought “ZIMMER wrote this?” Maybe he was attached because he wrote the logo music for 1492 Pictures (a heraldic fanfare that sounds nothing like this score); this was the first picture to come from Christopher Columbus’ new production company.

Clarinet emphasis, piano solos, an English classical sensibility - if I’d done a blind listen you could’ve fooled me into thinking this was a Patrick Doyle album. There is one hilarious exception - the portentous first half of For Russia letting Crimson Tide mannerisms creep in - and some of the ensemble swells have a unison / sampled feel to them, but otherwise this is a rather charming work that stays in a pretty consistent zone. It’s a tad repetitive, but with only ~30 minutes of score it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

This would be the last film Jay Rifkin would get solo credit for mixing.


Something to Talk About (1995) - ***
Zimmer & Graham Preskett; orchestrated by Bruce Fowler

Hans goes West! My seventh discovery as part of this rundown - and, uh, wow, despite it being another comedy score it is decidedly NOT like Nine Months. Banjos! Guitars! Drum kits! Bongos! It’s basically the intersection of the bluegrass moments from Days of Thunder, Zimmer’s music for Nancy Meyers movies, and some Pacific Heights quirkiness.

Graham Preskett is primarily a violinist and TV music composer - and has shown up in a few subsequent Zimmer scores. If you try searching for an interview with him the top results are all for interviews with current Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott. He has possibly the most hilariously low budget artist website I’ve ever seen.

Lasse Hallström wouldn’t use Zimmer & team in any of his future films. Might be something, might be nothing; he’s not a director with a go-to composer.

This would be the last film Jay Rifkin would get any credit for mixing at all.


Money Train (1995) - ***
Mancina; orchestrations by Bruce Fowler; conducted by Don Harper

Did you like Speed, and want sorta the same thing with the occasional blues / smooth jazz feel (amusingly not too far from the Michael Kamen sound that almost replaced Mancina’s on that earlier work)? Here ya go. Agreeable for the most part, with only the final action track occasionally reeking of fakeness.

MM: “There was a year there that everybody thought, ‘Get the guy that did Speed.’ I got calls all the time, ‘You’re the guy that did Speed, we want this Speed thing.’ I don’t even know what that was, I guess it was percussive. I was just concentrating on adding an energetic, somewhat metallic drive, because that’s one of the reasons they hired me.”

H-Z dot com has an absurd amount of other uncredited orchestrators listed. IDMb cites add’l music by John Van Tongeren & Christopher Ward. Album doesn’t mention either set of folks.


Beyond Rangoon (1995) - ****
Zimmer; orchestrations by Fiachra Trench; orchestrations, add’l music & conducting by NGS; ethnic pipes by Richard Harvey

If you put the Eastern elements and wordless vocals from Pacific Heights, some dramatic and action mannerisms from The Lion King, the puffing suspense from Crimson Tide, some Rambo 2 synth farts, and Zimmer’s love of Morricone in a blender, you’d probably get this. Honestly, parts of this really aren’t too far from Horner’s Apocalypto / Avatar sound.

Said director John Boorman years later, “Hans would always say to me, ‘Just show me what you feel, what you want on that.’ ť And so I would tap it out on the keyboard, and then he’d feed some more instruments and then we’d go with that. It was wonderful.”

I can’t help but wonder if this was in the temp for The Last Samurai - or if Zimmer just defaulted to this mode after admittedly struggling to combine Western themes with Japanese style.

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Next time: a Silver Age composer gets replaced, the Muppets appear, and two action scores provide us with an absurd amount of amazing quotes.