For much of the 20th century, our idea of cinema music was classical,
symphonic, stately even.
MUSIC: "Jumpin' Jack Flash" by The Rolling Stones
But might this also be film music?
A pop hit by The Rolling Stones turned up to full volume,
- driving the action. - # Watch it! #
MARTIN SCORSESE: 'The music I knew, and the music that scored my life,
'is the music I heard growing up.
'And the music that was around me at the time.'
And that was the music that propelled all the action in the story.
Mean Streets was the most extreme expression yet of how
popular music had pushed aside the symphonic tradition
to take hold of the film score.
As new musical genres like rock, pop and disco were born,
they reverberated throughout cinema.
MUSIC: "A Hard Day's Night" by The Beatles
Popular music revitalised the soundtrack,
and indeed the movies themselves.
More distinctive, simpler, more direct, more memorable.
It was music that appealed to a younger audience.
And to a new generation of composers
and directors who knew how to use it.
These composers pushed the film score in fresh, exciting directions.
Composers like John Barry.
MUSIC: "James Bond Theme" by John Barry Orchestra
Those screaming horns are giving us a tremendous sense of power and sex.
And Lalo Schifrin,
whose cool jazz beats gave an inner voice to iconic movie stars.
MUSIC: "Bullitt Theme" by Lalo Schifrin
'Steve McQueen, he said,'
"Bullitt is a very simple guy.
"I want you to write a simple theme."
It was pop arranger Ennio Morricone who orchestrated this.
One of the greatest gunfights in cinema.
Here the characters are choreographed to the music
in an almost operatic way.
But pop has also been used for commercial
rather than creative reasons.
To help fund and promote big budget movies.
MUSIC: "Take My Breath Away" by Berlin
MUSIC: "Misirlou" by Dick Dale
And when the most influential director of his generation
decides he can get rid of original scores altogether,
has the use of popular music in film gone too far?
Is it really possible to cut out the composer
and still make a musically great film?
JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS
In the late 1940s,
cities across America were buzzing with a new style of jazz.
More exciting, less predictable, more like the sound of real life.
But it was far removed from the discipline of
the traditional film score.
And Hollywood cinema wasn't ready for it.
Until a film came along in 1951 which would be the perfect vehicle.
A Streetcar Named Desire boasted the first all-jazz score.
And it's one of those movies I can remember seeing for the first time.
I was completely blown away by the jazz - the immediacy of it.
The physicality, too.
And if it had that effect on me in the 1980s,
think what it did to audiences in 1951.
A Streetcar Named Desire stars Marlon Brando as Stanley.
The arrival of his unstable sister-in-law Blanche,
played by Vivienne Leigh, causes sexual tension,
which leads to her breakdown.
You can hear the seeds of this in the music
from their very first encounter.
SLOW JAZZ MUSIC
The soundtrack was the debut film score of Alex North.
A modernist composer who loved jazz.
And had long wondered
if its essence could be captured in a more classical musical structure.
With Streetcar, North harnessed the rhythms and harmonies of jazz
to emphasise the complex chemistry between the characters.
As soon as Stanley walks in the room,
you get this brilliant jazz riff.
HE PLAYS PIANO
It's got a march to it, a sort of step.
It's like the march of fate - he will be her nemesis.
Over that we get these two gorgeous sax solos.
One of them starts almost straightaway.
Which is kind of Stanley.
- You must be Stanley. I'm Blanche. - Oh, you're Stella's sister.
- Yes. - Oh, hi.
There's a real sense that Stanley's there in all his sweaty glory.
We suddenly hear another sax solo,
which immediately begins to climb higher and higher and higher.
Until it almost gets within a range beyond which it can't go.
That is Blanche.
Hey, you mind if I make myself comfortable?
- My shirt is sticking to me. - Please, please. Please do.
That sax solo is telling us what she's feeling.
And she's already close to breakdown.
These are all moments in the scene that simply couldn't be
put across any other way.
And what the instruments are doing is being played in a way
whereby you can hear the breath, you can hear the notes
moving around, you can hear them being bent and changed.
And it begins to sound like a human voice.
When you add that sound to a scene, there's a real sense of physicality.
Humanity, if you like.
Something which you couldn't get out of classical music.
But which jazz gives you from the first second you hear a note.
But this is no ordinary love triangle.
Despite Blanche's attraction to Stanley, it's Stella, his wife,
with her unavoidable sexual power, who really has a hold over him.
Stella!
Hey, Stella!
North's score in this scene is doing what all great film music does -
telling us more than we can see.
And in this case, more than the characters will actually tell us.
This scene's about desire.
You can hear in every note of that sax how Stanley feels about Stella.
And how she feels about him.
And what binds the two of them together.
ATMOSPHERIC JAZZ MUSIC
And that was the problem.
The Legion Of Decency, a self appointed moral pressure group,
were very powerful at this time.
They saw the scene, heard the music and took exception to both.
The scene had to be cut, and North had to go back and rescore.
Out went the sax to be replaced by strings.
EMOTIONAL MUSIC
Sentimentality took over from sensuality.
And in the version everybody saw, Stella wanted Stanley back.
But in North's original, Stella just wanted Stanley.
Don't ever leave me, baby.
Through the 1950s, jazz expanded the range of film music in America.
And drove a wave of gritty dramas whose soundtracks captured
the moral complexities of the characters and stories.
MUSIC: "Beat Girl Theme" by John Barry
Across the Atlantic,
Britain was producing its own socially aware dramas
with contemporary scores to match.
Beat Girl was set in the Soho beat scene.
And while its moralistic plot was all a bit trad, its music
harnessed the urgency and energy of jazz-influenced British pop.
Beat Girl was the debut film score by John Barry -
a young composer and arranger who'd had several pop hits
with his own group, The John Barry Seven.
The band's signature sound was driven by catchy guitar riffs
and Barry's own trumpet solos.
Barry's real ambition was to have a career as a pop star.
And he only landed the Beat Girl job
because he shared the same manager as the film's star Adam Faith.
# I diss what you told me... #
But maybe it was predestined.
Barry's father had run a cinema chain
and, as a child, he'd lapped up movies.
John Barry worked here in Soho - the heart of London's film
and music industries. Tin Pan Alley.
He even used a strip club as a rehearsal space for his band,
The John Barry Seven.
I think you can hear those influences in the job that he did.
Arranging and performing the theme to the first James Bond film, Dr No.
MUSIC: "James Bond Theme" by John Barry Orchestra
Dr No's opening titles are animated entirely around the rhythm
of the music - pushing it to the fore.
We can't ignore the swagger of the guitar
and the almost sleazy quality of the horns.
Barry was brought in to arrange this theme from a tune
written by big band singer Monty Norman.
I never saw the movie.
I never met Saltzman and Broccoli. I never met the director.
I never even read a script. I just knew Bond.
I think it was in the Daily Mail,
there was a strip of Bond, which I'd occasionally looked at.
So I knew what it was about.
Monty Norman's theme for Dr No was based on a number
he'd written for musical. And it went like this.
HE PLAYS DR NO MELODY
So what John Barry did in his arrangement, was bring to it
everything he understood about pop and jazz.
First of all, he kept that melody line but he gave it to
the twangy guitar that he understood so well
from The John Barry Seven days.
Then he added a real driver behind it, which is
this deep bass brass sound.
HE PLAYS THEME
Then he added this fabulous middle eight, which takes the music
and the film on to a different level.
HE PLAYS THEME
That screaming horn section
has an extraordinary confidence and raciness.
But it's also deeply pop. It's deeply jazz.
It's got a wonderful kind of mish-mash of all the things
that John Barry understood.
MUSIC: "James Bond Theme" by John Barry Orchestra
John Barry got paid 250 quid for his arrangement of the Bond theme.
And it wasn't until he queued up with everybody else to see
Dr No at the cinema that he realised how ubiquitous his theme was.
He contacted the producers, saying, "I arranged your opening title
"music, I didn't expect to hear it sploshed through the whole film.
"Can I have some more money?"
They said, "No, but you can score the next one.
"If there is a next one."
In fact, Barry went on to score 11 Bond movies.
And you can hear the difference when he's not just an arranger
but a fully-fledged composer in his own right.
MUSIC: "Goldfinger" by Shirley Bassey
For Goldfinger, Barry drew from his pop contacts,
casting Shirley Bassey to sing the title song.
LOUD KISS
# It's the kiss of death
# From Mr Goldfinger... #
From now on, every Bond movie's title number would be
performed by a leading pop star of the day.
And the song would help sell the movie.
# ..His heart is cold
# He loves only gold... #
Having firmly established his Goldfinger theme
in the opening song, Barry runs it
though a series of symphonic variations throughout the film.
As when Bond pursues Goldfinger through the Swiss Alps.
VARIATION ON BOND THEME PLAYS
And here, Barry seamlessly switches from the original Bond theme
to the Goldfinger tune.
MUSIC PLAYS
He's on the move.
Although his music's origins are rooted in pop and jazz,
Barry was also scoring the characters with their own themes -
in a way traditional Hollywood composers would have understood.
Barry's success showed how the worlds of film
and pop music were drawing ever closer together.
But throughout the '60s, although pop was becoming an ally of film,
it also threatened to pull young audiences away from the movies,
overtaking them in popularity.
MUSIC: "Hard Day's Night" by The Beatles
So, with a strident guitar chord and an opening shot that captures
the tidal wave of fan hysteria,
one film set out directly to embrace the pop phenomenon.
A Hard Day's Night - the first film to feature The Beatles,
the world's biggest pop band.
Nobody had ever seen anything like it before.
But then that was the idea.
A young generation could tell straightaway,
this was a movie aimed directly at them.
# So why on earth should I moan
# Cos when I get you alone
# You know I feel OK... #
Director Richard Lester faced a unique challenge.
He had to choose songs which had already been
recorded by The Beatles before a script had even been written.
And somehow construct a film that made sense.
We were given ten songs and I rejected two.
You sit down,
given this bag of toys, of wonderful songs,
and you think,
"I can't see where this can go."
The only thing that bound these songs together was the band.
So Lester looked to the Beatles themselves for ideas about how
to build his sequences.
They all had a fairly developed sense of the surreal.
The first thing I tried to do with the film is to let the audience
know that things were not going to be a straightforward documentary
narrative of a day in the life of The Beatles.
Aye, aye, the Liverpool shuffle.
In this scene,
the band magically switch from playing cards to playing a song.
MUSIC: "When I Get Home" by The Beatles
# Whoa-whoa I... #
It was saying to the audience, "You see, life is not as you think it is.
"There is a surreal quality to them."
# Can't you see? Can't you see? #
The whole of Hard Day's Night was starting out of them
being ordered about in small spaces.
And no messing about.
Lennon, put those girls down or I'll tell your mother on you.
'Being yelled at and being chased by people,
'and that sudden sense of relief.'
We're out!
MUSIC: "Can't Buy Me Love" by The Beatles
'When they break out and run down a staircase and out into a field.'
# I'll buy you a diamond ring... #
CHEERING
The success of A Hard Day's Night showed how pop music
could get younger audiences flocking to the cinema.
Hollywood had also seen how the wind was blowing.
And leading the way was Walt Disney.
Looking to appeal to children and parents alike,
Disney realised his new composers had to be au fait with the pop song.
He signed up the song-writing duo, brothers Richard
and Robert Sherman, creators of the smash hit You're Sixteen.
My dad challenged us to write pop music.
And we started writing pop songs.
And we had some big number one hits with rock 'n' roll songs.
Uncle Walt wanted the brothers to bring their song-writing magic
to a new Disney movie.
He said, "You know what a nanny is?" We said, "Oh, yeah, it's a goat.
"You want to do an animated film about a nanny goat?"
"No, no, no," he says. "It's an English nursemaid."
"Oh, yeah, sure. We can..."
So we read this enchanting series of stories.
The challenge facing the brothers was not only to compose
the songs for Mary Poppins, but to construct a story from these books.
We were reading them with great alarm because we'd say,
"Well what's the plot? I mean, where is the storyline?"
It was not a storyline at all.
It was just wonderful adventures with this magical nanny
who comes in and does great stuff, and then she leaves.
So we knew we had to do some quick thinking.
Let's come in with a storyline.
MUSIC: "Boiled Beef And Carrots" by Harry Champion
The brothers fused American pop with a more surprising tradition -
English music hall.
# Boiled beef and carrots
# Boiled beef and carrots... #
Their passion for these songs would be
the inspiration behind the film's score.
With the movie set in Edwardian London.
I've always been a fan of English music hall.
Those wonderful old songs. Boiled Beef And Carrots.
All those things like that.
Walt bought that right away. He knew what I was talking about.
We were called in and there were Walt Disney, all of them
singing Knees Up Mother Brown, kicking their feet up in the air.
And they were all out of breath.
And Walt said, "Now, I want you to write me a song like this, right?"
We said, "Yes, Walt, we'll write you a song like that."
So we started with...
# Step in time, step in time
# You never need a reason, never need a rhyme
# Step in time you step in time... #
Link your elbows!
# Link your elbows, step in time
# Link your elbows, link your elbows
# Link your elbows... #
That little piece went for 12 minutes.
You know, one of the greatest scenes you've ever seen.
And the Shermans would mix all the ingredients that make a classic
pop song - a memorable lyric, a catchy melody and a potent hook -
to create the film's most-loved tune.
We came up with this nonsense word,
which we decided would be a great gift for Mary Poppins
to give to the children.
So we said, "Let's give them
"a really, funny, crazy, obnoxious word."
And we started, we said, "It's got to be super colossal."
And super colossal...well, anybody would write super colossal.
So we said, "Super something, super crazy,
"super caga...flava...slava...
"Supercali... supercalifragilistic! A-ha!" And then, we had...
# Um diddle diddle um diddle ay Um diddle diddle diddle um
# Because I was afraid to speak When I was just a lad
# Me father gave me nose a tweak And told me I was bad...
# But then one day I learned a word That saved me aching nose
# The biggest word you ever heard And this is how it goes, oh!
# Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
# Even though the sound of it Is something quite atrocious
# If you say it loud enough You'll always sound precocious
# Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
# Um diddle diddle um diddle ay # Um diddle diddle um diddle ay... #
These songs earned the Sherman Brothers two Academy Awards.
# I've reached the top And had to stop
# And that's what bothering me... #
Their knack for writing pop tunes would underlay the huge success
they went on to enjoy with other classic Disney movies,
like The Jungle Book.
# ..I'm tired of monkeying around!
# Oh, oobee doo
# I wanna be like you
# I wanna walk like you Talk like you... #
The Shermans had applied their pop sensibility
to reinvigorate the animated musical.
But in Europe, an entirely different film genre
would unexpectedly be changed by a pop composer.
This is the opening of A Fistful Of Dollars,
its bold graphics and striking music a declaration
that the Spaghetti Western had arrived.
Italian filmmakers were giving new life
to one the oldest genres of cinema.
Written by Ennio Morricone,
this title theme boasts the kind of elements
that made his sound so distinctive -
the melody, the whistles,
the recording of a whip crack.
HORSE TROTTING
GUNSHOTS
This use of real world sounds came from Morricone's time
as an arranger of Italian pop records.
TRANSLATION FROM ITALIAN:
The music for A Fistful Of Dollars was based on a pop record
that Morricone had arranged called Pastures Of Plenty,
which had impressed director Sergio Leone.
# We come with the dust
# And we're gone with the wind
# Oh, oooh, oooh, oooh... #
Leone and Morricone had been friends since childhood,
but Leone also knew that the innovation Morricone had shown
on his pop records could deliver something special
despite a tight budget.
Morricone brings his own sensibility to the Western,
he mixes his kind of idea of '60s music and modern sounds
and very individualistic sounds with the idea of the Old West,
the Spanish guitar, the whistle, this sense of folk music.
And here, he combines this with the 19th-century European device
of the leitmotif.
So out of that title music, when we first see Clint Eastwood,
The Man With No Name,
he gets his own little motif.
FLUTE PLAYS
Just a little flute...
But then, when he is spotted by the villain, you get this.
PIANO PLAYS
And it's got a little bit more of a sense of danger about it.
PIANO PLAYS
And above that comes the Japanese flute,
which to me says, you know,
Yojimbo, which is the Japanese epic
on which this film was entirely based.
So now, Eastwood is a samurai.
This is what Morricone does,
he drops these tiny musical ideas into the film throughout,
giving us a different feel, a different sound each time,
sometimes very, very short, just a couple of notes.
Here we have the other great gift that Morricone has,
a gift for melody, and not just melody,
a melody that will break your heart.
MELODY PLAYS
Get three coffins ready.
But often, a melody that is placed
either before or during the most violent moments of these films,
it gives them an extraordinary texture. Listen to this.
MELANCHOLIC PIANO PIECE
MELODY CONTINUES
It's actually still quite a thin sound,
it's a single melodic instrument over a string section,
so it's not full orchestra.
This is partially because of budget,
but also because I think Morricone understands
that we want to hear small textures working under these moments,
but it really makes us root for Clint Eastwood
and gives Clint Eastwood's character a soft side
which is simply not there in the way that he plays it.
By the time we get to the final shootout,
that theme of Eastwood's has become huge.
We now have a trumpet on the lead line,
very Spanish, beautiful.
We have strings behind, we have the voices behind,
so it has an amazing strength.
FULL MELODY PLAYS
And we're now in a world of ritual.
It's as if the music is making the characters choreographed.
They appear to move in time with the music.
MELODY INTENSIFIES
And it gives it that timeless quality,
but it also gives it an operatic quality -
this shootout was inevitable from the first moment of the film
and now the music is giving us the arena within which it can happen.
Scenes like these placed Morricone in the great tradition of composers
who shaped not just the sound of a movie,
but its very construction.
In these and his subsequent films with director Sergio Leone,
Morricone was a fully-fledged artistic collaborator
in creating the cinematic drama.
The Spaghetti Western established a trend for increasingly violent films
with almost wordless heroes,
whose inner nature was expressed through the music.
This method of scoring characters
would make its way into American cinema
through a film shot here, on the West Coast.
I'm driving through San Francisco, it's a beautiful sunny day.
And thanks to the movies,
these are some of the most recognisable streets in the world.
But there's something missing.
JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS
That's more like it.
This is the soundtrack to the movie Bullitt,
set in San Francisco and starring Steve McQueen.
Bullitt was scored by Lalo Schifrin,
an Argentinian-born composer
who trained in both classical and jazz music.
He'd worked in Hollywood since the early '60s
and was best known for his theme to TV series Mission: Impossible.
Schifrin had also been mentored by the jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie,
playing with him in New York in the '50s,
and he wanted to inject some of those jazz rhythms and beats
into the soundtrack for Bullitt.
Like Clint Eastwood's gunslinger,
Steve McQueen's detective Frank Bullitt rarely speaks,
but Schifrin's score is his voice.
Steve McQueen, he said,
"Bullitt is a very simple guy.
"I want you to write a simple theme."
McQueen's charisma is that of an ordinary man
required to do extraordinary things.
His almost wordless performance means that we are relying a lot
on how he looks for that charisma.
However, Lalo Schifrin's music gives his every moment,
no matter how mundane, a cool energy.
Bullitt's most famous sequence is ten minutes long
and contains no dialogue, but an awful lot of driving.
What makes it compelling is Lalo Schifrin's score,
which through a couple of very precise gear changes
turns a street game of cat and mouse
into something altogether more deadly.
Here, Schifrin's music focuses
on Bullitt's intense concentration
as he tails a pair of mobsters through the busy streets.
It is insistent but tightly controlled,
as we feel the pressure building up for the inevitable chase.
MUSIC PLAYS
So what will the score do next?
'The director, he asked me to write music for the chase.
'I said, "No."'
"Why not?"
"Because you are going to orchestrate the chase
"with sound effects, you don't need music."
'When Bullitt is in the car and changes gears,
'that's when the chase starts and I build music up to that point,
'and at that moment, stop.'
MUSIC STOPS
TYRES SQUEAL
CAR ENGINE RUMBLES
And yet people congratulate you
on your scoring of the chase, I believe.
Yes, they say, I love the music over the chase."
And there's no music.
Three years after Bullitt, Schifrin was invited
to score another, altogether more violent, thriller
set in San Francisco.
And with Dirty Harry,
director Don Siegel offered Schifrin considerable scope to experiment.
And he said, "I have a new film," and he said,
"I want you to write the music for it."
And he gave me complete freedom.
He didn't tell me what to do.
While the dramatic centre of Dirty Harry is Clint Eastwood,
much of Schifrin's music actually accompanies Scorpio,
the crazed serial killer he pursues.
I love, particularly, right from the very start in Dirty Harry,
the first thing we have is Scorpio up on the roof
- with his gun trained. - Yeah.
And the music has a terrific power to it.
TENSE MUSIC PLAYS
Scorpio came with the idea of voices.
Very frenetic,
kind of...hysterical voices.
Schifrin uses unusual sounds, such as rubbing the rim of a glass,
to take us inside Scorpio's psychotic mind.
EERIE MUSIC PLAYS
There's also a sense that Scorpio
represents the end of the '60s dream,
a countercultural figure turned psychopath.
Schifrin captures that idea in this scene with acid-rock guitar riffs.
ROCK MUSIC PLAYS
In Bullitt, I have electric guitar playing jazz or jazz style.
In...in Dirty Harry, I used, for Scorpio,
electric guitars playing kind of acid rock
because I wanted to make a difference.
ROCK MUSIC PLAYS
Again, it's unpredictable.
Yeah, and menacing, a little bit menacing.
Schifrin had taken the popular-music influenced score
to a new level of sophistication.
But he was still working in the classic mould
of a film composer trusted by the director
to take charge of how a film sounded.
But by the 1970s, a new generation of directors was coming into cinema
who'd grown up with pop music as the soundtrack to their lives
and wanted to reflect this far more directly in their films.
In 1973, the greatest of these directors
began a journey back into his own youth.
Here, on the streets of New York's Little Italy.
Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets was a film about the New York Mafia.
It followed in the wake of The Godfather,
but concerned small-time criminals
and drew extensively on
Scorsese's own memories.
Scorsese made it on a small budget
raised independently of the big studios.
But it meant he had creative control
and he made the key decision to leave out the composer entirely
drawing the film soundtrack from his own record collection.
'It wasn't even a question.'
I could never have a composer, like Bernard Herrmann or Elmer Bernstein
or...that was out of the question.
You know, I knew I was going to make films somehow,
but when I did, the soundtrack's up to me.
And the music I knew and the music that scored my life,
and still does to a certain extent,
is the music I heard while growing up.
So music was very, very much part of a expression
of who you are and how you feel.
You know, in reality,
Mean Streets really takes place between '61 and '63,
even though we shot it in '72.
There was Phil Spector and there was the Wall Of Sound.
And that's the sound I hear in my head.
And that was the music that propelled
all the action in the story
and because that's what was playing in the middle of the night
in those after-hour joints that we were in.
Cos there were jukeboxes in these places, you see.
And especially in the summertime, that music would just echo through.
And when you're living in a tenement area,
everybody's out and everybody knows what everybody else is doing.
Right from the pre-title sequence,
Scorsese used a record he loved
to accompany the lead character, Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel.
'I imagined the opening of the picture,
'he looks at himself in the mirror, wonders who the hell he is'
and then, he puts his head back on the pillow
and as we do that, we cut three times into the beat.
So that was all worked out in my head way, way in advance.
MUSIC: "Be My Baby," by The Ronettes
'The first beats of Be My Baby,
'they just emerged'
and they're with me all the time.
So it's...even when I'm on set, it's always...
HE TAPS THE SONG'S RHYTHM
And they know, everybody looks at me, "Yeah, OK?"
And it's just, it's just what I do.
It's part of, it's become part of my DNA.
And then, the thing was to go to home movies.
And then, intercut with actual eight-millimetre films
that my brother took of his first son's christening, that was 1965.
- # ..Say you'll be my darling - Be my, be my baby
# Be my baby now
# Whoa whoa whoa whoa... #
Mean Streets tells how Charlie's attempts
to get ahead in the local mafia
are complicated by Catholic guilt
and his loyalty to his irresponsible friend Johnny Boy,
played by Robert De Niro.
Scorsese carefully makes us wait
before showing us the two friends together.
Girls, after you.
'All right, OK, thanks a lot, Lord, thanks a lot for opening my eyes...'
Charlie is waiting at the bar for Johnny Boy,
what could Scorsese possibly do with such an ordinary scene?
Well, what he does is to pull off
possibly the greatest musical cue of the whole movie.
MUSIC: "Jumpin' Jack Flash", by The Rolling Stones
The music leaps into the foreground
and, suddenly, Johnny Boy IS Jumpin' Jack Flash
and he's a gas, gas, gas.
And we know Charlie can't trust him.
Look at Charlie's face - he knows Johnny Boy is going to be trouble.
SONG CONTINUES
It's a world in which there is a conformity and a tradition,
a tradition which is underworld.
Johnny is anarchy
and is Jumpin' Jack Flash.
And I knew it had to be in slow motion,
but what we found when I cut to Harvey
and when he put that glass of liquor down, it just worked beautifully
with the music and he moves back to the edge of the bar
and there's a woman sitting there, I don't know who she is,
but she looks like a ghost.
SONG CONTINUES
I guess, basically, you know,
that was the movie, that was the one,
I put it all in there.
And if anyone was ever to wonder what that life was like or...
..or what that world sounded like and felt like, you know,
they can check out that picture.
Scorsese had proved that a serious, dramatic film
could cut out the composer altogether.
That same year another of this new wave of young directors,
George Lucas, explored his boyhood experiences in American Graffiti
to a soundtrack consisting entirely
of '50s and early '60s pop classics.
But through the '70s, pop music itself was changing,
evolving new styles and genres.
For film producers canny enough to ride this wave,
there was serious money to be made.
In 1977, a film was released that was shot here, in Brooklyn,
and used the latest pop music to tell us about the dreams
and hopes of its characters.
Not a back catalogue of '50s and '60s hits,
but a phenomenon that was sweeping the country
and would burn very brightly, if a little briefly.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you disco.
MUSIC: "Night Fever", by the Bee Gees
The producers of Saturday Night Fever wanted to build its soundtrack
around six songs that had already been recorded by the Bee Gees.
To provide additional tracks and incidental music,
David Shire was called in.
With a theatre and jazz background,
Shire had written scores for key '70s films
like All The President's Men.
He now had to find a way of working within the disco style.
I guess that's what I liked about disco.
You could take anything, you could take Beethoven,
you could take Rimsky-Korsakov, you could take Mussorgsky,
and just put 120 beats-per-minute to it and a rhythm section,
and it would kind of work.
For this sequence,
Shire adapted a classical piece Night on a Bare Mountain
by the 19th-century Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky.
MUSIC: "Night on a Bare Mountain" by Mussorgsky, adaptation David Shire
Shire gives it a disco twist, which enhances the tune's
and the scene's dizzying, dangerous feel.
MAN SHOUTING
And it turned out to be the most lucrative film job I've ever had.
The least composing but the most rewarding, financially.
The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack sold 15 million copies
and spent six months at number one.
The film itself earned more than 90m at the US Box Office,
a huge sum for the time.
Hollywood studios would now seek to exploit this cash cow,
with an eye firmly on the commercial rather than the artistic
possibilities of pop songs.
In the 1980s, with American cinema ticket sales topping
a billion-a-year,
Hollywood and the pop industry became increasingly co-dependent.
Big budget movies like Top Gun were indiscriminately filled with
pop and rock tracks.
Video were used to market movies on MTV,
while the films were used to promote the artists themselves.
MUSIC: "Take My Breath Away", by Berlin
Against this corporate background,
it would take a director of singular vision to make popular music
mean more than the sum of its lyrics.
MUSIC: "Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton
Right from exaggeratedly idyllic opening of Blue Velvet,
David Lynch uses '50s pop songs to create a dream-like atmosphere.
For Lynch, classic pop is like necromancy,
bringing to life a world of strange,
chilling encounters between people on the edge, as in this scene
where the title song is performed by the film's star Isabella Rossellini.
# Blue velvet... #
Here, Lynch's sinister alchemy twists a seemingly innocent
love song to highlight the growing obsession of the film's
protagonist Geoffrey with Rossellini's character.
# ..was the night from the stars... #
To help Rossellini with her vocal performance,
the producers called songwriter and composer Angelo Badalamenti.
And I meet with Isabella.
We work on the song Blue Velvet.
We then record it.
David puts the earphones on,
he listens to the whole thing,
takes the earphones off and he says,
"This is peachy keen.
"That's the ticket."
But that wasn't the end of it.
Lynch wanted to use a track by the band This Mortal Coil in the film,
but the producers couldn't afford to licence it.
Instead, they suggested Badalamenti should write an original song.
So I said, "OK, but I need a lyric. I'm not a lyric writer.
"Why don't you tell your director to write a lyric?"
And I'm recording Isabella now on Blue Velvet,
and she comes in with this little piece of paper,
and on it, on the top, says, "Mysteries of Love."
And I'm reading it, "And sometimes the wind blows,
"and you and I float in the darkness and kiss for ever..."
blah, blah, blah.
I'm thinking, "This is awful."
So, what do I do? I call David and I say,
"David, I'm just curious. What kind of music do you hear for it?"
"Oh, Angelo, just let it float. Make it like the tides of the ocean.
"Make it kind of cosmic and..." No clue, right?
I take the lyric, I put it on the piano...
- I'll play it for you, if you like. - Sure. Please.
# Sometimes a wind blows
# And you and I...
- WOMAN'S VOICE: - # ..float... #
In this scene, the song Mysteries of Love epitomises the purity of love,
not the morbid desire Geoffrey felt for Rossellini's character
when Blue Velvet played.
The lyric forced me to...
Even David's description...
Just something floating and no real times,
no rhymes, no hooks.
# ..And the mysteries of love... #
Lynch had started out wanting to include one pop track in his film
and ended up co-writing a brand-new one but, more importantly,
he'd found himself a musical soul mate.
Angelo Badalamenti has gone on to score pretty much
all of Lynch's films since
and I think there's a reason for that.
His music is the sound of Lynch's world with all its paradoxes.
It's cold but, at the same time, it's very warm.
It's nostalgic and yet it's very, very modern.
And, to be frank, for me,
David Lynch's films couldn't work without Badalamenti's music.
One day in 1989, the pair sat down at Badalamenti's piano
and, in a single take,
wrote the theme for a groundbreaking new television series.
David comes in. "Angelo, now we're really pals."
And he says, "We're in a dark wood."
And I'm going like...
PLAYS MOODY PIANO MUSIC
"No, Angelo, those are beautiful notes but can you do them slower?"
OK.
PLAYS PIANO SLOWER
"No, no, Angelo, slower."
I said, "David, if we do it any slower,
"I'm going to play in reverse."
"OK, Angelo, now there's a girl named Laura Palmer...
"She's a very troubled teenager,
"and she's in the dark woods and she's coming out
"behind some trees.
"She's very beautiful, too.
"Give me something that's her."
SAD PIANO MUSIC PLAYS
"That's it, Angelo.
"Now let it build, cos she's coming closer and she's so troubled.
"She's got tears in her eyes. Angelo, it's so sad. Reach a climax.
"That's it. Just keep it going.
"Beautiful. Beautiful. Now, start coming down
"but fall slowly. Come slowly, slowly down, down.
"That's it.
"Quiet.
"Now, Angelo, go back into the dark woods...
"..and stay there.
"There's an owl in the background."
He said, "Angelo, you just wrote Twin Peaks."
From a starting point in pop, Badalamenti
and Lynch formed a fertile partnership of director
and composer almost unparalleled in contemporary cinema.
But could a truly creative director ever insist, in effect,
that he wouldn't touch a composer with a barge pole?
As a composer, I rather took against Quentin Tarantino,
gifted filmmaker though he is,
when he reportedly said that he doesn't use composers
because he wouldn't trust one with his movies.
But then, maybe it's my prejudices I should be challenging.
Maybe he's right.
Let's see what he gains by not using a composer.
Tarantino's 1992 debut Reservoir Dogs features
a soundtrack solely consisting of old pop
and rock songs that the characters hear on a local radio station.
(RADIO PRESENTER) ..super sounds of the '70s continues.
This embeds the music in the film
and enables the characters to interact with it,
as in this notorious torture scene.
MUSIC: "Stuck In The Middle With You" by Stealers Wheel
By playing the catchy Stuck In The Middle With You,
written by Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan,
Tarantino lulls the audience into being charmed by Mr Blonde.
Singing along to the song despite the feeling of imminent danger.
# ..Stuck in the middle with you
# Yes I'm stuck in the middle with you... #
Then, when the violence hits, it's all the more shocking.
The violence of Reservoir Dogs divided the audiences and critics,
but its soundtrack was hailed as
one of the finest uses of pop music in a generation.
So, how does Tarantino get round the tricky issue of being
allowed to use someone's music in this way?
Enter music supervisor Karyn Rachtman.
What does a music supervisor do on a movie?
Your job can be as basic as licensing every track,
and just handling the negotiations
and making sure that you take care of all the rights.
What happens if you have to then go and say,
"We may not be able to clear the rights"?
It happens all the time.
85% of the movies I've worked on,
you do not get every song you want.
During Reservoir Dogs,
Quentin, when he wrote that script, he had written in the songs.
Especially with the scene Stuck In The Middle With You,
that was being shot to.
So, he has a music supervisor on the film who told him,
"You can't use any '70s songs." Quentin was devastated.
And I said, "I will get you Stuck In The Middle With You."
And I had to get on the phone with Joe Egan
because I needed him to call the publisher.
He didn't want to do it and I had to reference things like
Singing In The Rain used in Clockwork Orange,
and how we're paying homage to his song,
even though somebody's getting their ear cut off by a sick freak.
You have to tell him the scene, I assume.
You have to tell him the scene. Yeah, of course.
After I got him Stuck In The Middle With You,
Quentin said, "What can I do for you? I appreciate it so much."
And I said, "You can fire your other music supervisor."
Karyn Rachtman worked with Tarantino on his follow-up
to Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction,
which again featured characters interacting with songs.
But he didn't think he was going to put a song
when Bruce Willis was driving in the car
and he said, "Get me a song."
# Flowers on the wall... #
Flowers On The Wall ended up there.
I just guess I was picturing Bruce Willis
singing along to something funny.
With Quentin's movies, the music sometimes let's you go...
EXHALES DEEPLY
But this fun musical sing along is just
a moment of respite before the violence starts again.
Motherfucker.
TYRES SCREECH
Tarantino's more recent films show that his drive to feature
the music he loves doesn't just stop with pop and rock.
He might not want to employ film composers,
but he seems to own plenty of their soundtracks.
Listen to this scene from Kill Bill.
WOMAN WHISTLES
The tune Daryl Hannah is whistling was
written by Bernard Herrmann for the 1968 film Twisted Nerve.
And remember this one?
SPAGHETTI WESTERN MUSIC PLAYS
Ennio Morricone's music for the climactic
shoot-out in A Fistful Of Dollars.
Tarantino, a master of utilising the pop song,
uses composers all right,
but only when their music is already iconic,
revealing the debt even he owes to the history of the movie soundtrack.
When it comes to respecting tradition,
one cinema franchise more than any other requires its composed
to acknowledge its musical heritage.
For Casino Royale, composer David Arnold faced the challenge
rebooting the legacy of John Barry for a contemporary audience,
20 Bond movies on from Dr No.
It was kind of classic back to sort of Barry,
back to basics, the spirit of it.
The wailing brass, the seductive strings,
but knowing it's a different world.
Casino Royale would be the first Bond movie to star Daniel Craig.
Arnold's score had to reflect this tougher and more physical 007.
The music was modelled on Daniel's movement and muscularity.
His attitude, the way he looked...
So, you're actually scoring body language...
Bond's not one for saying an awful lot.
The music is accompanying him moving.
But Casino Royale is also an origin tale,
explaining how Bond becomes a fully-fledged super spy.
This presented Arnold with an interesting opportunity to
work with a classic Bond theme.
He deliberately didn't play the Bond theme during that
film in its entirety until the very end of the picture.
Erm...
because it felt like he wasn't that character yet.
When he wins the DB5 in the game of cards,
the first time you kind of hint at that...
HE HUMS GENTLY
The first time he puts the dinner jacket on.
He gets the tuxedo and he straighten his tie,
and he looks at himself in the mirror and you think,
"OK, that's a bit closer."
SHE LAUGHS
And then ultimately, at the end of the film,
when he says, "The name's Bond - James Bond."
There you are. Hello.
The name's Bond - James Bond.
It's only when these four seconds of black appear that we hear
the Bond theme in full, just in time for the credits to roll.
BOND THEME PLAYS
David's Arnold's music
helped give the Bond franchise a new lease of life.
And, in, 2013, Skyfall, performed and co-written by Adele,
became the first Bond song to win an Academy Award.
# Let the sky fall
# When it crumbles
# We will stand tall... #
The song carries its heritage proudly.
The powerful chorus...
# ..Let the sky fall
# When it crumbles
# We will stand tall... #
The classic Bond chord progression it incorporates...
# ..That sky falls
# That sky falls... #
And, crucially, the careful casting of the performer.
Following a tradition that began with Shirley Bassey and Goldfinger.
I don't think you would necessarily expect to see Adele in a scene
but the sound of her voice says, "This could belong in Bond's world."
Pop may once have been a cinematic upstart,
but now it's so well established it can draw on its own tradition.
Today's audience enjoys films that can move seamlessly
between the orchestral score and the energy of popular music,
making soundtracks more diverse, forceful and relevant.
This has become the modern sound of cinema.
Next time, the film score goes electronic.
How technology pushed the boundaries of the soundtrack.
MUSIC: "Skyfall" by Adele, instrumental arrangement
Subtitles By Red Bee Media Ltd