Soundtracks are an integral part of movies and their promotion. Scott Hughes traces their track record
They’d never done it before. But, with a screening of some rough footage, and, no doubt, a big white grin, Tom Cruise managed to persuade United States rock giants Metallica – for the first time in their two-decade career – to lend new material to a film.
Their song I Disappear is the lead-off cut from the soundtrack to the Cruise- starring Mission: Impossible II, which two weeks ago entered the US album chart at No 2, though the film has yet to appear.
“If you are going to associate yourself with a movie, this is the perfect one,” enthused the band’s Lars Ulrich. “Everything about it is big. We love it.”
Well, everybody else is doing it – why shouldn’t they? This year alone, U2 have knocked out new tunes for Wim Wenders’s The Million Dollar Hotel, while Madonna has warmed over Don McLean’s American Pie for her latest vehicle, The Next Best Thing.
And, as yet more pop stars attempt to launch movie careers, we find three- quarters of All Saints warbling Motown classics on the soundtrack to Honest (their debut acting gig), and the unstoppable Geri Halliwell announcing she will both star in and provide much of the music for a new British film, Therapy.
It’s little wonder artists are so keen to get themselves on to these discs: a hit movie theme can be just what a big act needs to keep things ticking over between tours and studio albums. What’s more, soundtracks have been the sleeper album chart success story of the last decade. In 1996 an America industry survey found that US music buyers were snapping up four times as many soundtrack albums as they had been 10 years before.
Over there, 15 soundtracks (unlike in the United Kingdom, they are included in the main album chart) accounted for 73 weeks at No 1 between the start of 1990 and the close of 1999, 20 of those weeks being registered by the album for The Bodyguard – the catalyst perhaps for the massive interest being witnessed now. Over here, two film themes – Bryan Adams’s Everything I Do (I Do It for You) from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and Wet Wet Wet’s Love Is All Around (Four Weddings and a Funeral) – became the longest-running singles chart No 1s ever.
Evidently, movie music in recent times has moved a lot of people, if only in the direction of the nearest HMV. Big theme songs, invariably belted out by big names, have increasingly been issued to radio before anybody has even seen the films from which they are taken – purpose-built to dominate the airwaves in the weeks before to the film’s release and play their part in creating a “buzz”. Put simply, soundtracks have shifted from being a mere film tie-in to a powerful, up-front marketing tool.
When distributor Miramax decided in 1994 to spend 1-million giving a hip soundtrack to Kevin Smith’s debut Clerks – a film which cost $27E000 to make – it seemed to be trying to launch a film off the back of a record rather than vice versa. Put big stars in your movie, put big stars on your soundtrack, the credo now seems to be, and sit back as hopefully one helps sell the other.
It goes without saying that Hollywood and the music business have always been good pals: Bond movies, for instance, have long relied on a brassy theme song by a top-drawer artist, and producer Robert Stigwood commissioned songs for Saturday Night Fever before the script and director were in place. But in recent years this friendship has become even closer – a development easily explained by the fact that Hollywood and the music business are now pretty much one and the same entity.
Warner, DreamWorks and Sony/Columbia all produce records with one arm and films with another; in fact, of the major studios, only Fox and Paramount do not have an affiliated record label.
So when, say, a film is deemed to need a pop-oriented rather than score soundtrack (some have both), one of three things tends to happen. If the studio’s associated record label is prepared to shell out serious cash, it gets its top artists to record new songs, producing a compilation that puts forward its biggest and best.
Last year’s Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, as a New Line Cinema release (a Warner subsidiary), got a soundtrack featuring Warner big guns such as Madonna, Lenny Kravitz, Green Day and REM.
Madonna’s specially written track Beautiful Stranger was chosen to launch the album (released on Maverick, Madonna’s own label and a Warner imprint), and its heavy airplay no doubt played a key part in creating advance awareness of the film. But the really clever move on the part of the record company was that, while Beautiful Stranger reached No 2 in the UK chart, it was not issued as a single in the US – increasingly common practice in an effort to shift more albums (which make big profits) rather than singles (which don’t). This meant that anyone wanting to own the track would have to buy the entire album, and 1,3-million did.
Alternatively, a record company can take a song from a recent or upcoming release, perhaps by a nascent or struggling act who would benefit from the exposure afforded by a film. When a Columbia rep caught the live act of Nashville quintet Sixpence None The Richer, he hawked their ballad Kiss Me around various film producers until meeting with interest from the makers of 1999 teen sleeper She’s All That.
An official soundtrack was never released, but ads for the movie used the cut, and the video featured leads Freddie Prinze Jr and Rachael Leigh Cooke, consolidating the film- music crossover. The result? Eight years after their formation, the band’s 1997 album vaulted up the US chart.
Naturally, though, the most cost- effective soundtrack albums are for those movies which don’t require new recordings. Nostalgia-fests such as New Line’s 1985-set The Wedding Singer gave Warner the opportunity to repackage various new romantic hits from its archive and sell them again to a generation who’d never heard of Dead or Alive or Culture Club. Also riding the retro wave, the recent rash of 1970s-set films (Boogie Nights, 54, Summer Of Sam) has caused the market to be flooded with uninspired disco compilations.
But at least the songs featured on such soundtracks might be said to have successfully evoked an era. Albums such as those for Mission: Impossible II and last year’s The Matrix have predictably traded on the films’ young male appeal to showcase hard rock or rap acts (Marilyn Manson, Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine) but have only the most tenuous of links to the plot. Some records are even billed as “songs inspired by the motion picture”, which generally seems to herald a collection of tunes whose inclusion is not only hard to justify artistically, but of which many are not even heard in the film.
Soundtrack albums are now less about complementing a director’s vision than about overall brand strengthening, and, ultimately, seeking to be hit records in their own right. The very shape of a film is increasingly being dictated by the records a film producer or music supervisor has at his disposal. When they secured use of Britney Spears’s hit (You Drive Me) Crazy, the makers of Close To You (a forthcoming Fox teen flick starring Melissa Joan Hart of Sabrina the Teenage Witch fame) promptly changed the movie’s title to Drive Me Crazy.
It’s enough to make one wonder just who is getting to choose what we hear in films. It’s certainly not very often the director. Tom Cruise’s involvement in the Mission: Impossible II soundtrack would just seem to signal yet another aspect of film production falling under the control of an A-list star.
John Cusack had a hand in compiling the soundtrack to his new film, High Fidelity. For more dance-oriented soundtracks, the latest trend seems to be to have a top DJ put a set together: Pete Tong (working with director Danny Boyle) was music supervisor for The Beach, while Judge Jules worked on the album for Ibiza romp Kevin and Perry Go Large.
Some auteurs, though, are resisting the drive to choose movie music that will easily translate into hit records. Curtis Hanson, director of LA Confidential, insisted on control of the music for that film, assembling songs during writing and shooting, and has chosen four tracks by Bob Dylan (including one new recording) for his new offering, Wonder Boys.
Martin Scorsese famously edits scenes to the music he has picked to help tell his story; it’s then the label’s job to hunt down and acquire the rights from various music publishers to what he has chosen.
And, encouragingly, some musicians are taking a more active role in the creation of movie music, by actually writing scores rather than just supplying one or two radio-friendly hits. Damon Albarn provided songs and score material for this year’s UK thriller Ordinary Decent Criminal, REM did the same for Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, and Air lent their dreamy electronica to The Virgin Suicides, while Magnolia was “inspired by Aimee Mann’s songs”.
Record companies would argue that soundtrack albums, however distant from the films they supposedly support, still represent good value for money for the record buyer. And maybe they have a point. The listener may be getting 10 to 15 tracks from a variety of artists for 13 – a cheaper option than searching out the albums they were taken from, or buying the singles.
But, as record companies, like film studios, wheel out ever bigger stars, the cost of producing these albums is spiralling, making assembling these records as much of a high-stakes business as film production itself.
Bodyguards and Saturday Night Fevers are very few and far between: a great many of these albums will end up not in the record books, but in the bargain bin.