Filmtracks: 2 Days in the Valley (Jerry Goldsmith/Anthony Marinelli)

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Written 8/22/24

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Buy it... on the 2012 album with Jerry Goldsmith's rejected score to hear one of the composer's more curious diversions of the 1990's with a dose of familiar comfort.

Avoid it... if you believe that Anthony Marinelli's alternative score of thrashing rock and minimal intelligence is a better fit for this terrible, trashy flick.

Goldsmith

2 Days in the Valley: (Jerry Goldsmith/Anthony Marinelli) You sometimes see independent films that capture so much interested from many actors that the project takes on a life of its own before a studio has even committed to it. Such was the birth of 2 Days in the Valley, a violently comedic crime story that drew interest from a slew of character actors in part because the screenplay takes place in Los Angeles and makes fun of down-and-out industry types and, of course, hitmen. There is no overarching logic to the story, a dozen random characters all going about their wretched lives and converging at the end in ways that yield plenty of gunfire and death. There's a pair of hitmen and two female accomplices, and after one hitman tries to kill the other, the two women end up in a death fight as well. Two cops eventually find their way into the equation, just like a television director who stumbles into a hostage situation at a random house involving the surviving hitman. The characters are all pathetic or downright nasty to some degree, and you almost wish they'd all be shot at the end. By the time the 1996 film was done, the ensemble cast enthusiasm gave way to producer panic as realization of the project's terrible quality set in. Years later, 2 Days in the Valley is mostly remembered for its clumsy catfight between the two evil women of the tale, audiences indulging in seeing actresses Teri Hatcher and a very young Charlize Theron tear, claw, punch, and shoot at each other while also causing plenty of property damage. The personality of the movie made its soundtrack a bit more difficult to strategize, the Pulp Fiction approach obviously in mind for song placements. Finding the right tone for its original score was a crapshoot, in part because the story couldn't decide how silly or seriously to take its own humor. Veteran composer Jerry Goldsmith wanted to tackle an indie-styled film in his otherwise mainstream schedule of 1996 and approached 2 Days in the Valley with an orchestral blend of comedy and straight drama and suspense, the latter two a bit tongue in cheek but not seeking outright parody modes.

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After Goldsmith had recorded his score, the producers of 2 Days in the Valley started looking for reasons why the movie wasn't clicking. The composer grew frustrated with the filmmakers' responses to his approach to the plotline, which he felt was right. Inevitably, however, Goldsmith's music was tossed in its entirely, and a remarkable amount of the film's budget went with it. To achieve a far grungier approach to unsuccessfully boost the project, the filmmakers hired song producer, arranger, and synthesizer performer Anthony Marinelli for a hard-edged rock and blues alternative. Marinelli had come from the Giorgio Moroder and Quincy Jones line of soundtrack production, and he tackled numerous scores solo in the 1990's and 2000's. While his work eventually strayed into the orchestral realm with better results, his approach to 2 Days in the Valley is hip, raw, and unrefined by design. His roughly half hour of music in the picture consists of frequently aggressive electric guitar strumming. When cranking up the intensity, the tone of Marinelli's performances sometimes go wildly over the top. The opening execution scene involving the villains resorts to wailing vocal layering that is so ridiculous and brief that you can't help but scratch your head. In his "Catfight" cue for the famed battle between the women, his guitar work doesn't capture the back and forth with any precision, bumbling along for the ride without enhancing the moment. A surprising amount of the movie was left unscored by the time Marinelli was finished, the replacement composer not scoring the full breadth that Goldsmith had addressed. The difference in the intelligence level between the two scores could not be more different, Goldsmith applying clever devices to certain subsets of the characters and developing them from start to end. The instrumentation consists of his standard orchestral shades with electronic keyboarding and will sound mostly familiar to his 1990's sound, perhaps aside from the mafia comedy part. Because Goldsmith opted against one overarching theme to cover the general depravity of the story, both his melodies and instrumentation are fragmented into three distinct and equal parts of the score, a few unique motifs hanging around the periphery.

The smoothest of Goldsmith's three themes for 2 Days in the Valley is the bluesy trumpet and string identity for the suicidal television director, Teddy Peppers. Defined immediately in the album arrangement's opening track, "Theme From 2 Days in the Valley," this theme is wistful and solitary like the famous identity for Chinatown and will remind some listeners of similar shades in L.A. Confidential, but it's warmer in personality, straying relatively close to reprising the tone of The Russia House and the rejected score for The Public Eye. There is a depth of drama that is missing from this theme's performances, however, perhaps an intentional byproduct of the shallow nature of everything and everyone in this movie. Keyboards and trumpet return with more loneliness for this idea in "One Last Walk" and "1982 Emmy Award" while the muted trumpet solo offers it at the start of "Teddy's Bad Reviews." The director's theme is diminished on depressed but elegant piano in the latter half of "The Cemetery," explores a variant on the trumpet and other familiar tones in "Lights Out," prevails with some resolution in "Teddy's Redemption," and barely impacts the start of "Teddy and Audrey" before yielding to the hitman material. It reprises the opening suite-like performance in "End Credits" to bookend the album without taking any real effort to alter the arrangement of the theme for a different performance inflection. Completely different in tone is the Dosmo Pizzo theme, representing the pathetic hitman with an Italian mafia tilt, Goldsmith's comedic accordion and generally Sicilian motif of the score. The idea's humorous waltz format is established in "Dosmo's Theme," becoming exuberant with Latin flavor late in the cue. It turns to the full orchestra in the plucky "Hello Dosmo," becomes forced into a grand suspense form in "Dosmo and Mark" with almost the force of The Shadow, and returns to its silly roots on clarinet and blurting brass in "Rapini." The charm of this material yields to more ominous bass string layering in "House Negotiating" but reduces again to lighter comical shades in "Street Convergence" and enjoys an almost carnivalesque sense of playfulness in "Toupee or Not Toupee."

Enthusiasts of Goldsmith's darker 1990's mode will gravitate towards the cues for the lead hitman and villain, Lee Woods. His propulsive, throbbing motif for the 60-second countdowns to death that he prefers in his executions previews the approach to the villain in Star Trek: Nemesis. Strings, flutes, synthetics, and, most notably, dominant chimes perform ascending phrases for this theme, introduced with malice in "The Arrival." The assassin's theme turns more suspenseful with dissonant string lines over the top in "Roy's Minute," almost clicking like a clock in the accelerated "Helga's Minute" and using slurred string effects akin to Basic Instinct that become more prominent later in the plot. Those Basic Instinct influences flourish in "Becky and Helga," though the idea's rhythmic effect turns to chimes and Hollow Man-like synthetics in "Cigarette Pack." This material culminates in the action climax of "Street Convergence." Goldsmith sprinkles a handful of other motifs into the score between the three above, the most divergent of which being a vaguely oriental identity of High Velocity roots in "Alvin's Badge" for a secondary character pair. A motif for the Becky character is belatedly revealed on keyboard in "Becky Reaches for the Gold," and the composer's typical action meters come forth in "Becky Warms Up" and "We are the Police." Ultimately, Goldsmith's score is an odd duck in that it rotates between its totally distinct thirds without any connective elements on the overarching level. It's a work that begs you to pick out whatever mode you want to combine onto a compilation of like Goldsmith music. While most people will take a preference for the main theme for the director, it's hard not to smirk at the Dosmo theme's amusing rhythms, as they definitely stand out as the best personality in the work. It's difficult to say of Goldsmith's score was actually a better fit for the movie than the trashy thrashing of Marinelli's guitar performances. In some ways, Goldsmith may indeed have provided too much intellectual thought to yet another movie that simply didn't deserve such musical care. The Marinelli score only exists outside of the film as rare bootlegs, but the Goldsmith alternative was officially released by Intrada Records in 2012 and offers the original, ill-fated, 46-minute album arrangement in beautiful sound quality. It's one of Goldsmith's more curious diversions with a dose of familiar comfort. *** @Amazon.com: CD or Download

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For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.23 (in 140 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.25 (in 154,807 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

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