This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Mulan, WW84, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=120127
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.
It admittedly feels crass to speak about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic purely from the perspective of
entertainment, given the economic and social upheaval it wrought as well as the immense loss of life across the globe. Still, lockdowns created a paradox: a lot of people were sitting at home with little to do, but early pandemic restrictions prevented production on films, shows, and games. There was a glut of content to support the initial months, which helped Netflix’s Extraction and Tiger King and ESPN’s The Last Dance became hits. But as the pandemic wore on it became clear that this would not be a short-term thing, and studios were either going to have to release their blockbusters on VOD / streaming (like Tenet and Black Widow) or keep delaying their releases until theatrical distribution was a more viable option (like No Time To Die and Top Gun: Maverick).
Eventually work would pick back up and composers got used to writing at home. Steve Mazzaro saw little change since “you’re still in a room writing until it’s done,” while Lorne Balfe joked that “we were living in a dark hell of sorts, so inspiration was coming easily.” Steve Jablonsky said at the beginning “something would stop working [in] every [virtual] meeting.” Ramin Djawadi said it was an asset working with a director he already knew since “she was listening [to my demos] on her headphones and thinking, ‘There’s no low end on this,’ and it’s like, ‘Oh there is, once it’s on the dub stage it’ll be great!’” Henry Jackman called virtual recordings a logistical challenge “but it's amazing how quickly we found a way to adapt.” And COVID Compliance Supervisor credits started appearing in albums.
Artists got used to recording in their living rooms, bedrooms, closets, and bathrooms. Many scores that at one time had been thought of as more orchestral endeavors were reconceptualized, namely those for Hillbilly Elegy and the Spongebob and Top Gun sequels. Hans saw it as his responsibility to have a lot of work “because I can keep a lot of musicians busy. Most of my friends had their gigs canceled.” Eventually small groups would be allowed back into recording studios as restrictions loosened up, but not enough for business as usual; Tom Holkenborg would claim it took nine times as long to record one score as it would’ve under normal circumstances, while Steve Mazzaro had to interact with the conductor of the Boss Baby sequel’s orchestra over Skype.
Yet even with those challenges, a lot happened to this musical lineage between mid-2020 and the end of 2022. Lorne became the most freakishly busy composer in Hollywood. Steve Mazzaro scored one of the biggest movies of these years, as did fellow longtime assistant Germaine Franco. Henry kept toggling between symphonic and contemporary worlds. Tom’s adventures with orchestra went on hiatus as he went back to working with filmmakers who didn’t ask for that kind of music. Harry Gregson-Williams worked with familiar faces (Ridley, Antoine, Disneynature, Rupert). Steve Jablonsky wrote things worlds away from the style of his scores for Michael Bay and Peter Berg. Ramin returned to the Marvel Cinematic Universe over a dozen years after Iron Man and also came back to Westeros.
Also continuing was the legacy of mentorship and apprenticeship, something this musical lineage hadn’t invented but had definitely made mainstream. It was one thing when Harry’s initial assistants Steve Jablonsky, Toby Chu, and Stephen Barton started writing their own scores. Now Stephanie Economou, who helped with many of his 2010s works, was doing her own scores and even winning a Grammy! And Henry, part of the third wave of Hans’ MV / RC contributors, was now having someone from his second wave of assistants start to lead his own scores, never mind that his first wave of assistants, Matthew Margeson & Dominic Lewis, teamed up to write one of the best scores from this stretch of time.
Replacement score demands would cannibalize the lineage, as there were two cases where a Remote Control graduate’s music was tossed and another Remote Control graduate was brought in to do something different late in the game. Never mind that Hans had a co-composed score of his get mostly junked, though he at least got to stick around for the re-scoring effort. Wonder Woman 1984, another action score, and music for a reunion with Barry Levinson were done before lockdowns began, but his next team-up with Ron Howard wasn’t. He got a bad case of COVID, then dealt with overlapping obligations to Dune and Top Gun: Maverick for over a year. But this scheduling hell seemed to have been worth the trouble, as Dune won him his second Academy Award for Best Original Score and Maverick was a gargantuan box office success as the pandemic started to wind down in 2022.
If the midpoint between Hannibal and Black Hawk Down in 2001 was when Hans stopped looking like a young man and started looking like he was in middle age, his appearances during the promotional onslaught for the music of Dune showed that he was starting to look old. You’d think a man in his mid-60s might start to take it easy. But he wasn’t acting his age, and he showed no signs of wanting to slow down. He was back on the road in 2022 with his concerts tours and still juggling multiple film score assignments, and even betrayed some anxieties about becoming obsolete in a 2023 piece on 60 Minutes. “When you start out, you have all that stuff that you’ve never done before. Now it becomes harder because I’ve used up so much ammunition. What if [my next movie score] is a complete disaster? People are going, ‘Are you going to retire?’ I’m just getting started! I really think that.”
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His Dark Materials Series 2 (2020) - ****
Lorne Balfe; add’l arrangements Steffen Thum & Max Aruj; orchestrated by Adam Price, Gabriel
Chernick & Harry Brokensha; score technical assistant Alfie Godfrey; Asleigh Kelly as Balfe’s assistant
Series 1 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119853
Apparently not content with 20 legacy melodies, Lorne would craft a bunch of new ideas for the adaptation of Philip Pullman’s second book in the series, all released on another musical anthology album with the best of the bunch being the mysterious The Subtle Knife. Episodic highlights would include a big choral piece for the destruction of the witches’ home. “I wanted to go back to 15th century music. When you watch The Omen it’s very choral-led and it’s very religious-based, and my goodness is it sinister.” If you liked the first season’s music and could handle a slightly darker take on it, you’ll like this too.
Hillbilly Elegy (2020) - ***
Hans Zimmer & David Fleming; add’l music by Ben Powell; guitar Derek Trucks, Vivian Milanova & Nile Marr;
cello Tina Guo; winds Pedro Eustache; technical score engineer Chuck Choi; technical assistants James
Grimwade, Aldo Arechar, Steven Doar & Fabio Marks; digital instrument design Mark Wherry; digital instrument
preparation Taurees Habib, Raul Vega, David Naroth & Paul Salerno; music editor Nate Underkuffler; RC studio
manager Shalini Singh; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant; thank you to Satnam Ramgotra & Atli Örvarsson
TBTF discovery #81.
Dave Fleming thought Hans looked overscheduled in fall 2019 and swooped in to assist with Ron Howard’s adaptation of J.D. Vance’s memoir. When Hans “got sick as a dog the heavy lifting fell to Dave.” The intent was to record a mix of soloists and a big orchestra, but lockdowns would kibosh that, so instead it became a smaller-scale endeavor with various artists recording wherever they were holed up - Texas, the U.K., Jacksonville. It revisited the now-familiar RC brand of understated drama music, basically the polar opposite of the rambunctious country-fried sound Hans used on 1995’s Something To Talk About and much closer to the subdued Rebuilding Paradise. But a slight folksy edge to the proceedings and a subtle sense of regional flavor elevate its ambience above mere wallpaper without tipping over into cliche. As a standalone listen, the album’s a bit abstract, but it’s worth exploring for the tracks from the end of the film (Steel in Our Veins and Transformation) which provide more space for the soloists, and if nothing else it was nice to hear Hans do a jam band score for the first time in a while.
Also: a Nate Underkuffler sighting!
Cherry (2021) - ***
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Alex Belcher & Jack Doman; score technical engineers Maverick Dugger, Felipe
Pacheco & John Paul Lefebvre; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman; Sasha Patpatia as Jackman’s assistant
TBTF discovery #82.
Principal photography on this Russo-directed adaptation of a novel about a veteran robbing banks to support his drug habit wrapped in February 2020, but its post-production mainly took place during the pandemic. You’d think that would’ve forced Henry Jackman’s hand with regards to what score he could come up with, but he indicated they were leaning in an electronic direction anyway. “The first conversations emphasized something experimental. COVID [forced] me deep into the laboratory like some mad professor assigned to Warp Records.” Dreamy synths occupy a lot of the runtime, but they’re also juxtaposed with music closer to Jackman’s Winter Soldier material, a variety of solo cello sounds, a “Chopin-esque piano sonata,” tape scratches, and quirky bits including a garbled version of America’s national anthem hilariously called Star-Mangled Banner. Its lengthy album may overstay its welcome for many traditionalist score fans, but for others it’ll be a fascinating diversion from the composer’s usual offerings, and I encourage everyone to at least seek out the lengthy, cathartic finale piece The Comedown.
Ron’s Gone Wrong (2021) - ***
Henry Jackman; add’l music by by Halli Cauthery, Alex Kovacs & Anthony Willis; orchestrated by
Stephen Coleman, Andrew Kinney & Michael J. Lloyd; add’l orchestration by Edward Trybek,
Henri Wilkinson & Jonathan Beard; conducted by Matt Dunkley; featured guitarist Alex Belcher; score
technicians Maverick Dugger, John Paul Lefebvre & Felipe Pacheco; ‘New Friends’ by Jackman & Dave Bayley
Henry’s more kid-centric score of 2021 played like an outrageously chipper version of his electronic antics from the Ralph movies and Big Hero 6, all in an effort to realize what one of the animated film’s directors called “a modern John Hughes movie soundtrack.” There’s definitely a symphonic element, but Henry admitted “I probably spent as much time with classic analog synths as I did with the orchestra.” It’s a reliably entertaining extension of Jackman’s animated style, though the pop-adjacent carefree joy of it all may drive some listeners absolutely insane.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021) - ***
Henry Jackman; add’l music by Alex Belcher, Evan Goldman & Jeff Morrow; score technicians
Maverick Dugger & Felipe Pacheco; orchestrated by Michael J. Lloyd & Stephen Coleman;
conducted by Bernard Wünsch; ‘Star Spangled Man’ produced by Kevin Briggs
TBTF discovery #83.
The Winter Soldier was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117220
Captain America: Civil War was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117577
“If you rewound to Iron Man, and then clicked your fingers to where we are now with WandaVision and this show, you'd be like, ‘How did they get there?’ It's sort of a minor miracle.”
Henry found it overwhelming to have to write “twice as much [music] as [you would on] an Avengers film, and all in the middle of a pandemic” for this Disney+ Marvel series, but at least he had a wealth of material from his earlier Captain America scores to fall back on: the Winter Soldier screams and clangs, the Zemo villain theme, his own Captain America idea which he’d make “off-key [and] less convincing” to represent the less stable man now wearing the mantle, and the three-note Falcon motif which got to evolve into a full-fledged hero theme with nods to the character’s background. “There’s a little fanfare in Winter Soldier, but he would always disappear and the action would move on. I wanted to get this whole non-classical element in, with the blues guitar and the Hammond. Do the big, aspirational orchestra, but then combine it with the groove-based Louisiana vibe.” Outside of the fun credits piece, the expanded Falcon theme would largely operate in Jackman’s First Class action style.
New material was a mixed bag. A “civilian Bucky” theme for the deprogrammed Winter Soldier would be appropriately understated but hard to notice on the album. The mid-series appearance of Wakandan soldiers would give Jackman an opportunity to briefly play around with the distinctive drum sounds from Black Panther. The one truly intolerable aspect was the “music” for the new Flag-Smashers villains (a contender for the lamest enemies in an MCU property to date), who are often treated to ear-splitting noise that makes some of Jackman’s Winter Soldier material seem a bit tame by comparison. ”We don't know too much about [them], so it was interesting to make abstract, dystopian, techie textures that represent them being anarchic and young.” But the series would also contain one of the scoring highlights of 2021: a new take on the Star Spangled Man song Alan Menken had written for a war bonds montage in the original 2010 film, now with some downright funky production by Kevin Briggs (the guy who gave us the TLC hit No Scrubs) used as the new Captain America John Walker is introduced to the nation on a football field. “Jazzy brass layers to get some extra zhuzh in there without compromising a dish that already works.'
Red Notice (2021) - ****
Steve Jablonsky; add’l music by Sven Faulconer, Jared Fry & Roger Suen; add’l arrangements
by Elisa Alloway & Sophia Blake; orchestrated by Penka Kouneva, Larry Rench, Liz Finch, Steven
Rader & Tim Williams; conducted by Jasper Randall; flute Pedro Eustache; drums Jon Jablonsky
One might’ve thought a reunion of Steve Jablonsky with director Rawson Marshall Thurber and actor Dwayne Johnson would result in music just like Skyscraper had. But instead this Netflix action-comedy was treated to exotic, snazzy material that carried the caper antics and jazzy spirit of Henry Mancini and Lalo Schifrin into the contemporary orchestral action realm - almost like something Brian Tyler might’ve written. “We love The Pink Panther, and this has a bit of that, but we’re trying to do our own thing.” Steve hadn’t had a chance to write anything this upbeat since 2009’s The Sims 3, and the result was one of the biggest film music surprises of the year and a great opportunity for the composer to break out of the anthemic and sound design typecasting he’d been in for much of his career. Steve did have to work through the challenges several of his peers had dealt with on action-comedies though. “It was a tricky balance where to play the comedy and how serious to play the action. I may have taken things too seriously to begin with. Rawson would say, ‘It’s good, but it feels too dark.’ Maybe if I add one instrument [or] pizzicato strings in this scene it will make it a bit lighter. [Another time] Rawson said it was too fun. It’s a collaboration.”
Fun fact: That’s Jablonsky’s brother featured on drums!
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Next time: “I said let's not do an orchestral score and he said thank God!”
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