This is part of a series. Part 3a can be found here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108037
The Road to El Dorado, aka Elton John’s The Road to El Dorado (2000) - **½
Zimmer & Powell; songs by Elton John & Tim Rice;
songs produced or arranged by HZ, JP, Gavin Greenaway, Danny Jacob & Patrick Leonard;
technical music advisors Klaus Badelt, Justin Burnett, James McKee Smith & Geoff Zanelli;
guitars by Heitor Pereria; conducted by GG & Ruper Gregson-Williams;
thank you’s to Ryeland Allison & Jay Rifkin
That’s not a joke in the title for what is my eighteenth discovery of this effort. That’s really what the album was called (the album on Spotify today even has a picture of Elton John on it instead of the original shot of the film’s characters). It should’ve been called Elton John’s Lightning Doesn’t Strike Twice.
The film, an adventure comedy about conquistadors in South America, would seem at face value to be a reunion of two collaborators from 1994’s The Lion King, but that’s not strictly true. Elton’s method was to create songs on concept and then hand them off to the composing team, basically being detached from that point unless new songs or promotional appearances were required. Mark Mancina arranged most of the songs for the earlier film and didn’t even meet Elton until that movie’s premiere. John wrote a pleasant enough concept album here - but it’s one which has such limited alignment with the story and the region that even the film’s music supervisor Marylata Jacob would concede “it was a real challenge to make it work within the body of the world of El Dorado', though she would commend how Zimmer and team modified the songs to fit the film. There are hilarious behind-the-scenes videos of the film’s stars Kenneth Branagh and Kevin Cline getting frustrated over how many takes they had to do for the sole song they sang, an experience Katzenberg would somewhat jokingly describe as “one of the more humiliating moments in their respective careers.”
Kevin Kline: ”Hans is great. He’s very encouraging and funny - and a real taskmaster.”
Hans in the booth: “SING until you hear the tape STOP”
Kline: ”We did it again and again until they twiddled their little dials so we were in tune.”
Kenneth Branagh, clearly lying: ”It was a hoot.'
I know I saw this film in theaters when it came out but outside of showing up a few minutes late I remember nothing from that experience. The film would bomb critically and commercially, though it didn’t seem fatal to the career of the director Bibo Bergeron who would help helm the studio’s bizarre Shark Tale a few years later. Production was not smooth on this one according to Powell. “Normally, in an animated film, it's all worked out so much that they're really not going to change the edit around. El Dorado was an example where the edit was changing pretty much up to the last minute.” Not helping matters: Zimmer’s original off-the-beaten-path approach to the score. “I wanted to write music for three violins and a guitar, but everyone wanted big orchestral music. John warned me that my music wouldn’t work and in a way he was right. It doesn’t evoke the grandness that the images suggest.”
There’s even less score on this album than there was on the prior year’s Tarzan album. The two tracks credited to Zimmer, Cheldorado and The Brig, have a low key playful charm, even if they largely play like a South American twist on the composer’s comedy scores from this decade. The suite of Powell material zigs and zags towards something much closer to his later boisterous animation scores - high-pitched female choir over bouncing contemporary rhythms, rousing horns, hyperactive guitars, silly pseudo-source music, jazz - to the point that you can’t help but wonder if it was a partial replacement version of Zimmer’s original take.
The score’s all over the place but unobjectionable, yet even with those marginally positive impressions the album’s pairing of it with the studio versions of John’s songs (not the arrangements heard in the film) only serves to make the whole thing feel even more bizarre and mismatched than it perhaps was in the movie. Spotify jumped to Rocket Man right afterwards, which was 10,000% better than all that came before it and didn’t help my impressions of the film’s songs one bit.
Interesting but probably just pure coincidence: like in Disney’s Tarzan the prior year, most of the songs aren’t even sung by the characters.
Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) - ***
Zimmer; “Band” composed of KB, NGS, JR, Michael Brook, Dave Gamson,
Lisa Gerrard, Oliver Leiber, Heitor Pereira, Martin Tillman & Mel Wesson;
choir orchestrated by Bruce Fowler; choir arranged & conducted by Gavin Greenaway;
music editors Marc Streitenfeld & Zigmund Gron; Jim Dooley and others as Zimmer’s assistant
Recalling that earlier quote from John Powell - “You want to pay us money, we can sound like Hans Zimmer, Jerry Goldsmith or Lalo Schifrin” - it’s clear this team got paid, but no one paid them to sound like Lalo.
This is possibly the initial incarnation of two types of Zimmer scores. First, there’s the “jam band” format where he would get a bunch of artists in a room together and test out ideas. You can see this in An Everlasting Piece, Black Hawk Down, Matchstick Men, and, heck, all the way to The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Second, there’s the “suites for everyone” approach where he would write a bunch of demo ideas but instead of then writing the score himself or with one other collaborator (as seen with NGS on Cool Runnings and Gavin Greenaway on The Peacemaker, among others) he would hand the ideas off to a large team - if nothing else proving the scalability of the MV apprenticeship model.
Hans claimed he thought it “might be interesting for a huge summer blockbuster not to have a large orchestra blaring away, but to have a small ten-man ensemble of cello and guitars plus percussion playing gritty, grumpy stuff that was not so polished. But there comes the crunch point when you wonder if you are ruining a $100 million movie.”
Anything involving Heitor Pereira’s guitar is a strong point; the original series scores (and those from other TV genre staples of that era like I Spy and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) existed both on the strengths of their great themes as well as their regional flavor, so whether as an intentional throwback or just because it sounded cool Zimmer and team managed to create at least one thing that fits with the brand’s style. Bare Island is so over-the-top you can’t help but laugh, yet it’s still fun in a guilty pleasure kind of way. The back half of Mission: Accomplished has a breezy likeability that could’ve come from Zimmer’s early days of character-based comedy/drama.
Intriguingly, Injection seems to originate the “chugging guitar momentum” style that would show up in Black Hawk Down as well as much later works like Inception and Rush. And The Heist seems more like it belongs in Forces of Nature, which makes sense when you consider songwriter, guitarist, producer, and former Ta Mara and the Seen member Oliver Lieber worked on both scores.
KB: ”Prince of Egypt I was merely orchestrating. On Thin Red Line he gave me, say, the piano track, and I would synth-orchestrate it. Starting with Mission: Impossible he’s given me complete scenes to compose.”
Zimmer and team didn’t ruin the movie - but it’s an underachieving work that is fairly transparent about how much of a rush job it was. Ambrose has progressions and male choir that suggest a lot of prior works. Another recurring idea is clearly ripped from Broken Arrow. Gerrard’s presence mainly reinforces how much better Gladiator is. It probably didn’t help matters that Zimmer stepped away mid-project to help on Dreamworks’ misbegotten IRA wig comedy An Everlasting Piece - but then how was he supposed to say no to director Barry Levinson, the man who gave him his big break in Hollywood?
JR: “This movie happened very quickly. Hans had some basic theme sketch[es]. [We] had a couple of guitar players in one room, a couple of musicians in another room and me in my room. And we passed hard drives around. We would each do something to flesh out these sketches and turn them into full ideas. Martin Tillman [and I] did a couple of cues on our own. [We needed to] create a theme for the virus. We worked for two or three weeks, twenty-four hours a day. It was hard to have fun. I did enjoy talking to Tom Cruise about Stanley Kubrick at 3 a.m. in the kitchen. But that doesn’t sustain you after ten days of sleep deprivation.”
An expanded score was officially released - but only on LP, which I’m sure went over great with this crowd.
This would be the first appearance of guitarist, music producer, and film composer Michael Brook, also known for inventing a guitar that could maintain an unlimited sustain that is unsurprisingly called the Infinite Guitar. “I liked film music on its own, people like Ennio Morricone and Bernard Hermann. Because I’m an instrumentalist and not a singer, it felt like an area where you’re not thought of as second-tier just because you don’t sing. If you’re in pop or rock music, you are. On [the 1986 kidnapping film] Captive, I was a co-producer and did a little bit of composing, but it was mostly [U2 Guitarist] The Edge. After that, I did an IMAX film called Fires of Kuwait, which was a documentary and the first project I scored on my own. On MI2, I really enjoyed the kind of community of musicians assembled by Hans.”
Gone in 60 Seconds (2000) - **½
Trevor Rabin; produced by TR & Paul Linford; orchestrated by TR & Gordon Goodwin
No, not the music for the astonishingly successful B-movie film from the 1970s. This, my nineteenth discovery of this effort, is the score for the fairly successful (if critically reviled) remake that continued Bruckheimer’s collaborations with Disney and was made for something like 600 times the original’s budget.
Rabin’s score is a work that seems content to maintain a consistent level of modern electronic cool not too far removed from some of what Brian Tyler would write for the later Fast & Furious sequels. The occasional use of solo vocals is a nice touch, as they lend a kind of floating, pop-ish sensibility to the easygoing chord shifts. It’s not a very thematic work, and even in its moments of coolness it struggles to maintain a consistent mood, but except for one stretch that features drill sounds it’s rarely obnoxious.
Not helping matters - a been-there-done-that feeling to the proceedings. It’s not apeing earlier guilty pleasure MV works like Speed or Bad Boys, but it’s also not quite as attractive or memorable as those works, nor was it doing anything particularly distinctive within what was by this point a familiar template for action movie scoring. The film had a ton of song placements, so Rabin may very well have been tasked with what John Powell did for Forces of Nature the prior year - write something that fits with the aesthetic but doesn’t stand out too much on its own.
Chicken Run (2000) - ****½
HGW & Powell; orchestrated by B Fowler/Moriarty/McIntosh, Liz Finch & Harry Kim;
“music assistance” by Steve Jablonsky, James McKee Smith & Geoff Zanelli;
score readers RGW & Alastair King; original album compiled by Gavin Greenaway;
thank you to Hans Zimmer
JP: “The irony is that I left England because I couldn’t get into film, and I never thought I’d get to work on a Nick Park Aardman project.”
It’s the film score that dares to ask the question “but what if Antz was a love letter to Ron Goodwin?” It also fixes one of the points I raised about Antz: having themes that are unforgettable earworms. The other point about the MIDI feel to some of the action still stands, though that feeling is less frequent throughout this work.
It’s a great, great, great score - 5 stars with a handful of 4 star moments (a good portion of the middle plays as above-average kiddie comedy material, which only really sticks out because the highlights are so good). I’d spend more time writing why, but if this is what’s introducing you to Chicken Run, you’re playing the film music game incorrectly! Worship at the altar of Building The Crate.
JP: “They temped it with The Great Escape . I knew the score very well. Harry never heard it before. The directors actually tried to buy the original and we were worried because they probably didn’t think we could do it. It took months and months to get that opening right.”
Plenty of future Powell mannerisms are all over this work - never mind the way credits seem to be laid out on H-Z dot com - but even though Powell is on record as loving the film music that inspired this score the end result was still based on significant collaboration. HGW: “The opening titles of Chicken Run, which I thought were brilliantly done - not my cue. My theme, but John wrestled with that cue for months. And it happens the other way around as well.”
This would be the first appearance of Alastair King who has since been a frequent orchestrator for the Gregson-Williams brothers.
That “thank you” in the album is perhaps more than just a token mention, and Zimmer couldn’t resist joking about it in an interview done the following year. “I wrote the trailer music, and John and Harry got paid for it - and they never ever shared the money with me! No, that's just what it is - collaboration. They didn't have time, so I helped.”
Flanders Film Festival in Ghent, aka The Wings of a Film: The Music of Hans Zimmer (Oct. 2000) - ****
Performed by Zimmer, Lisa Gerrard, Lebo M., Keswa, Pete Haycock, Heitor Pereira, Gavin Greenaway,
Rupert Gregson-Williams, Luís Jardim, Ralph Salmins, Andy Pask, Bruce Fowler,
John Powell (as Third Percussion from the Left), Tamara Teirbrood & Eddy Vanoosthuyse;
Dirk Brossé conducting the Flemish Radio Orchestra (VRO);
arrangements by Bruce Fowler, Steve Jablonsky, James Levine, Henning Lohner & Geoff Zanell;
orchestrations by B & W Fowler/Moriarty/McIntosh & Liz Finch
concert co-produced by Henning Lohner
Jim Dooley and Lorne Balfe as assistants (among others)
thank you’s to Klaus Badelt, Patrick Cassidy, HGW, Jay Rikfin & Jeff Rona
My twentieth discovery of this effort.
HZ, before the concert: “Lisa, Pete, me - none of us read music. Hopefully we’ll all start at the same point and end at the same point.”
Released on CD in 2001, this covers Zimmer’s first attempt at a film score concert - a victory lap for the successes he and his team produced over the last dozen years. Filmtracks called it “a sort of Media Ventures collaborative spectacle”. Hans later recollected, “I have a really good memory, but I cannot remember saying 'yes' to this concert idea. I must have been drunk! Ultimately it was great fun, I just wasn't sure if we could get a record out of it. And I did relax and learn not to be terrified - so I would do it again. So I figured I'd get all the people I'd worked with before - like Lisa and Lebo M., Heitor. It was really about picking pieces that were written for these particular people. The worst player is myself. At one point or another I was amazed - I COULD actually play this.”
Participants had since told amusing stories about arranging the material, some of which had to be done from scratch given many original recordings were partially or entirely electronic. SJ: “The first thing Hans asked me to do was a suite from Driving Miss Daisy so [they] could play it live. People need to realize how much of an intense situation this was; it’s HIS MUSIC, and I’m listening to the track, trying to get all the notes.” JP: ”We always knew it was going to be an experiment. Judging by audience response it worked well enough. We use a lot of brass, way more than you’d have in a regular orchestra. Eight horns, five or six trombones, two tubas. Hans doesn’t use trumpets very often. I’ve been helping him to get excited about trumpets for the last few years.”
The purely orchestral material is nice but rarely sensational. Up to this point, with the exception of maybe Backdraft, Zimmer’s more “traditional” compositions weren’t exactly crowd pleasers - so while the Commodus material and Journey to the Line were arguably essential inclusions if you were trying to cover the man’s career highlights so far, they didn’t blend terribly well with the “getting a band together” feel of the surrounding material - which was honestly more fun anyway. The Thelma and Louise arrangement, probably the most shamelessly entertaining piece on the album, is basically a righteous rock guitar concerto for Pete Haycock - and probably the closest thing in the concert to the feel of Zimmer’s more recent events. The extra oomph in Lea Halalela is a step up from its performance in Rhythm of the Pride Lands. Pereira’s M:I 2 solos are thrilling.
The Rain Man performance is fine enough, but the arrangement often seems more “Far Eastern” than the original recording. Broken Arrow would’ve been a great inclusion to the program, but likely was never considered as Zimmer despised the film. The biggest surprise is that Zimmer’s lovely Nine Months material made the CD, but that shock has more to do with the film’s critical reception and star Hugh Grant’s admitted horror at his own performance than anything about the composition.
Zimmer, ever the self-critical perfectionist, didn’t have the most positive view of the recording. “We recorded music from Backdraft and Crimson Tide and a lot of other bigger pieces - but they just didn't sound that good, so they aren't on the album. After the concert, I went back to the studio to listen to the recording and it sounded awful. Listening to an orchestra played through a PA system is a bad experience! I'll admit, I had the matches out and was ready to burn the tapes! I seriously considered giving the record company enough money just to make it all disappear. Anything good about that CD is because of the musicians and Alan Meyerson.”
JP, possibly hungover after partying until 6am after the concert: “I got to sit in the back and groove with the musicians. Crimson Tide needed a lot of keyboard players, so I had to go out and play. We were doubling french horns, to try to get close to the original sound. And in The Thin Red Line there’s a big bass sound that I had to play. But for the most part I played the percussion. The other percussionists were very kind to me. Obviously I lack a lot of technique. After three days of rehearsals my knuckles were killing me, it’s very painful and I had to tape them. I don’t play an instrument particularly well. My father always used to call me ‘a jack of all trades’. Which means you can do a lot of [things] not very well.”
On the whole, it’s a fun concert - no Joe Hisaishi in Budokan, but still reliably entertaining and rarely dull.
Also, jazz musician and critic Mike Zwerin covered the concert for the International Herald Tribune and produced an all-time snob statement of purpose: “With the possible exception of Miles Davis with ‘Elevator to the Gallows’ (there must be others), film music tends to be derivative and unswinging, and is by nature secondary and ought to stay that way.”
That Powell credit is perhaps some of the earliest public evidence we have of that man’s very cheeky sense of humor.
Concert co-producer Henning Lohner had a comparatively unremarkable tenure at Media Ventures, but as this concert’s co-producer he is responsible for the first credit here for Scotsman Lorne Balfe. “After school I moved to London. I slowly realized that if I wanted to get into film then at that time, I would have to move to LA. I [worked] for Henning. I constantly harassed the [MV] studio manager for an internship. Finally he caved in and I moved over. I then also worked for Rupert. After this, I began writing for Hans.”
The 6th Day (2000) - ***½
Trevor Rabin; also produced by Paul Linford & Steve Kempster;
possible uncredited contributions by Don Harper
This is a film that I vaguely recall being advertised and supposedly signaling the continued decline of Arnold Schwarzenegger projects, though I actually had to look it up to learn what the film was actually about (a cloning conspiracy). David Arnold was supposedly attached at one point to work again with Tomorrow Never Dies director Roger Spottiswoode, but for whatever reason he left the project and Rabin took over. The original planned version of the film, which would have been directed by Joe Dante and starred Kevin Costner (who dropped out), likely would’ve been very different from the one we got instead.
Rabin meshed together an orchestra, electronic textures, weird vocals, and a host of other elements to create an effective “near future” sound that has managed to avoid sounding dated in later years. It’s a layered work, tied together by a terrific, malleable main theme that hits the same kind of sweet spot with its easy harmonic shifts that Rabin’s finale material for the prior year’s Deep Blue Sea did. The action material doesn’t break any new ground, but it delivers a lot of the same fun that mid-90s Mancina action scores did, the brawny brass and guitar wails in The Roof Top and parts of The Rescue providing guilty pleasure highs.
There are a few moments of unison hits and abrasively cheap sounds, but they’re in the minority. This album, my twenty-first discovery of this effort, made for a very pleasant surprise.
Side note: Some brief demented chime sounds in Adam’s Birthday wouldn’t have sounded out of place in Bear McCreary’s music for the 2019 Child’s Play remake.
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Next time: Amazon’s the worst, right?
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