With Backdraft finally getting a complete album release, I decided to use the opportunity to revisit what I wrote for that work as part of the MV/RC rundown (i.e., if I’d been taking it more seriously from the get-go) before digging into my thoughts on the new Intrada release.
If you want a quick reference on how hilariously (embarrassingly?) light some of the commentary was back at the start of that listening project, here ya go - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=107376
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Backdraft (1991) - ****˝
Hans Zimmer; orchestrated by Shirley Walker; add’l orchestrations by Bruce Fowler &
Larry Rench; produced by Zimmer & Jay Rifkin; album mix by George Martin
After Black Rain was done, Hans thought he’d written a score the director liked and that was that. But after his music had shown up in trailers for movies like Ghost and Presumed Innocent, he realized how wrong he was. “I thought I'd done something cool and reinvented the way those things sound. By the time the year was over, every action movie had stolen that style. They were all doing the drummy thing. Black Rain sounded like the hundred scores that came after it.”
He was (and still is) not alone in that frustration. The bane of film composers’ lives is what is referred to as the temp track or just the temp. In postproduction, many directors, producers, and editors often load a rough cut of a film with temporary music to help inform pacing and tone, which is typically preexisting film music but can also be classical or pop music. Sometimes the filmmakers can get hooked on the temp and not like when the composer veers too far from it. The temp can take on problematic dimensions when it’s populated with a composer’s own music and they’re asked to repeat themselves. And if a work-in-progress film with temp music gets a test screening that goes well, often the composer will be asked to duplicate the feel of that music, if not do everything but copy it outright.
On Peter Weir’s 1990 immigration rom-com Green Card, Hans had to contend with a temp track that included a lot of new-age music by the Irish singer-songwriter Enya. Now, deep in postproduction on a 1991 firefighter movie, he was running into a new problem. “Backdraft is a perfect example of that trailer shit. Somebody put together fire footage and he put one piece of Black Rain underneath it and said this made the fires emotional. I think that’s how I got the job.” Hans felt he was pretty close to getting tossed by director Ron Howard after some time working on the music, in part because he wasn’t coming close enough to the sound of Black Rain. In a bit of bad luck, a car cassette player also destroyed a demo tape that Hans had intended Ron and producer Brian Grazer to hear. However, after decades of reflection Hans would also point out he originally wasn’t getting the kind of emotionality Ron wanted and credited music editor Becky Mancuso-Winding for clarifying that Ron’s request for something romantic didn’t mean he wanted Romantic-era classical music. “That basically stopped me from getting fired.” Hans would work with Barry Levinson, Ridley Scott, and Tony Scott again in the near term, but he wouldn’t work with Ron Howard again for the rest of the decade.
The Black Rain influence was indeed obvious in places, including a few moments of action accompanied by an eruption of drums and a climactic section informed by the chopping string idea that appeared in those aforementioned trailers. Still, it is nowhere near a wholesale copy-paste, and it’s the parts of Backdraft that weren’t like Black Rain that have led to the score being so fondly remembered. Hans blended his contemporary style with the dramatic orchestral swells of Fools of Fortune to produce some remarkable bombast, all rendered by the largest ensemble of Hans’ career to date, “this lumbering thing with 96 players and six percussionists.” There were surprising examples of more symphonic structures, with Hans using the end of the film to have his marital firefighter theme and more sensitive brothers theme play concurrently, the largely self-taught musician later patting himself on the back for finally showing he could do “proper counterpoint” on a grand scale.
And it was the first time the composer had written anything for a film that could be appropriately characterized as rousing. “I got to write something overtly American, which I’d never done before. You can truly root for firemen. There’s no ambiguous feelings about the heroism.” Tracks like the main titles piece (Fighting 17th on the album mixed by George Martin, the former manager of The Beatles and Hans’ onetime boss) managed to embed their way into the public consciousness, even showing up in unexpected places like early seasons of the cooking competition show Iron Chef and a regularly recurring portion of Notre Dame home football games stretching into the 2010s, and it remains perhaps the only enduring element from the film. Hans wasn’t wrong when he said in a featurette done for the film’s release on DVD fifteen years later that Backdraft was “the sum total of what I knew up to that point.”
Original album - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqnnuEVGcRQxvQX6g4r93xAkJVGF3SVuR
Interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf_2JUdofOw
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Several folks on this board and elsewhere have rightly pointed out that the score in the film appeared to have a greater emphasis on electronics relative to the mix heard on Martin’s album program, and that is indeed obvious from the start of Intrada’s terrific new expanded CD release when synths accompany the start of the heroic main titles piece (Hans joked in the booklet interview that he just couldn’t help himself in that era). Such aspects are heard elsewhere, including the dramatic pulses in the new track In Another Life and various passages of the climactic fire sequence that were edited out of the original album. That’s not to say the symphonic portions are in any way diminished, but more that the work reveals itself to be a bit more of a hybrid work instead of the largely orchestral composition suggested on the original CD.
The score runtime is nearly doubled, and there are plenty of new variations on the score’s core themes contained within. You also get more of a sense of the Black Rain temp track, including the flurry of drums in Tim Burns and Swayzak’s OK as well as some metallic suspense in the latter cue. There’s also an amusing moment where a climactic action motif is explored much earlier in Burnt Out Beamer (accompanying the scene where William Baldwin’s character runs to catch up with his crew’s departing fire truck) with instrumentation that more suggests Hans’ earlier Rain Man score than anything else in Backdraft.
The most substantial addition by far to the listening experience is the ten minutes across Mannequin Fire and Save My Baby, with a relentless drumbeat introducing the film’s macho action vibes as well as some elements that would appear in a grander fashion in the finale; those thrilling moments are arguably worth the price of the release on their own. Longtime listeners may also get a nostalgic kick out of how the record label pulled a real old school Zimmer move and made the climactic fire sequence music (three edited tracks totaling around 13 minutes on the original album) just one bigass 19-minute track.
Behold, the archival release of the year to date, not only because of its music but also because the booklet includes a terrific interview with Hans facilitated by Kaya Savas.
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Prior 2024 album posts
- Live and Let Die - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=131612
- Octopussy - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=131627
- Hellboy II - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=131961
- HTTYD: The Hidden World - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=132742
- Top Gun - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=132758
- Rock-a-Doodle - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=132825
- Something Wicked This Way Comes - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=134359
- Night Passage - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=134397
- Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=134671
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