11/26/22
Newletter170
The Crack of Dawn
I love the scoring part of filmmaking. When we were kids, we used to score our films with pre-existing music. For a while I tried to not use movie scores, and that was kind of interesting for a few films. I did my best scoring job on Sam Raimi’s Super-8 extravaganza, The Happy Valley Kid (1978). Because the story was set at a college – Michigan State University – I thought a classical score would fit, and Sam agreed and just let me do it. What was slightly magical about this process is that you’d choose a piece of music, start the music and picture at the same time and just see what happened. Often, we’d get what was known as “random synch,” when the picture and the music would synch up of their own accord. Sam and I were both a bit shocked as one classical piece after another synched up perfectly with his picture. I was able to get into his film: Beethoven’s 5th, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The music really gives the film a sense of intelligence and wit. Watching these pieces of music randomly synch up with the picture amused the hell out of me every time I saw the film.
But we made a lot of Super-8 films, and classical or rock were mostly inappropriate. Therefore, we fell back on movie scores, which worked shockingly well. For any kind of suspense scene, we could always depend on Herbie Hancock’s terrific score for Death Wish (1974). Another dependable suspense score that fit many occasions was Denny Zeitlin’s creepy score for the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). In my film, Stryker’s War (1979), I have so many different film scores that I actually got to the point of crudely mixing two scores together. I took John Williams’s score for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, sped it up from 331/3 to 45, then put Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting score for Patton (1970) on top of it, and it worked ridiculously well.
For a short time, when the idea of selling our movies first occurred to us, we bought stock music, so we’d have the rights. My short film, Cleveland Smith Bounty Hunter (1981), is scored entirely with stock music. I didn’t realize that there are any number of feature films over the course of the 1950s and ‘60s that also just used stock music and skipped the price of a composer and scoring. Well, there are a couple of music cues in Cleveland Smith that I’ve heard in a half-dozen other movies, one of which is The Badlanders (1958), an A-movie with Alan Ladd and Ernest Borgnine. I guess they had spent their whole budget when it came time to score the film, so they used cheap stock stuff. It was weird watching this ‘50s western, which is pretty good, with big movie stars, and all of sudden there’s the music from my cheapo short film.
I can only remember one of these right now, but there are more. In a scene in Splash (1984) between Tom Hanks and Darryl Hannah on the street in New York, directly between their two faces is a movie marquee across the street showing Evil Dead. In About a Boy (2002), Hugh Grant and the kid are watching TV and it’s an episode of Xena. It could be an episode I did, I can’t tell. The best, longest, craziest reference to one of our films (and I include myself in those first three Evil Dead movies) is by far in High Fidelity (2000). I just browsed the script to see what this reference looked like in script form, and it’s outrageous. Here it is:
SFX: BARRY'S VOICE FADES OUT. Rob's mouth slacks and he
stares off.
ROB (V.O.)
There's something different about
the sound of her voice... And what
did she mean last night, she hasn't
slept with him yet. Yet. What
does "yet" mean, anyway? "I haven't
seen... Evil Dead II yet." What
does that mean? It means you're
going to go, doesn't it?
SFX: BACK TO THE ROOM.
BARRY
-- You're like a little squirrel of
music, storing away dead little
nuts of old garbage music, musical
lint, old shit, shit, shit --
ROB
-- Barry, if I were to say to you I
haven't seen Evil Dead II yet, what
would that mean?
Barry just looks at Rob. He pulls out a Game Boy and begins
playing.
ROB (CONT'D)
Just... come on, what would it mean
to you? That sentence? "I haven't
seen Evil Dead II yet?"
BARRY
To me, it would mean that you're a
liar. You saw it twice. Once with
Laura -- oops -- once with me and
Dick. We had that conversation
about the possibilities of the guy
making ammo off-screen in the
Fourteenth Century.
ROB
Yeah, yeah, I know. But say I
hadn't seen it and I said to you,
"I haven't seen Evil Dead II yet,"
what would you think?
Barry shuts off the Game Boy.
BARRY
I'd think you were a cinematic
idiot. And I'd feel sorry for you.
ROB
No, but would you think, from that
one sentence. That I was going to
see it?
BARRY
I'm sorry, Rob, but I'm struggling
here. I don't understand any part
of this conversation. You're
asking me what I would think if you
told me that you hadn't seen a film
that you've seen. What am I
supposed to say?
ROB
Just listen to me. If I said to
you --
BARRY
"-- I haven't seen Evil Dead II
yet," yeah, yeah, I hear you --
ROB
Would you... would you get the
impression that I wanted to see it?
BARRY
Well... you couldn't have been
desperate to see it, otherwise
you'd have already gone...
Rob brightens. Barry finally considers.
BARRY
...But the word "yet..." Yeah, you
know what, I'd get the impression
that you wanted to see it.
Otherwise you'd say you didn't
really want to.
ROB
But in your opinion, would I
definitely go?
BARRY
How the fuck am I supposed to know
that? You might get sick of people
telling you you've really gotta go
see the movie.
Rob darkens.
ROB
Why would they care?
BARRY
Because it's a brilliant film.
It's funny, violent, and the
soundtrack kicks fucking ass.
They look at each other for a strange moment.
BARRY (CONT'D)
I never thought I would say this,
but can I go work now?
May we all have a jolly-fuckin’-day.