10 - Popular Music in The Cinema

Cambridge Books Online
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A History of Film Music
Mervyn Cooke
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814341
Online ISBN: 9780511814341
Hardback ISBN: 9780521811736
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Chapter
10 - Popular music in the cinema pp. 396-421
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814341.011
Cambridge University Press

10 Popular music in the cinema
A large percentage of producers today are so unaware of their pictures they’re looking for a
musical gimmick to lure the public. Like the hit title tune, a harmonica surrounded by a choral
group, the twanging sound of an electric zither, or the wail of a kazoo in an espresso café. Stuff like
that. It only takes away from what’s happening on the screen. ( bernard herrmann, qu ote d
i n hollywood reporter, 1 4 july 19 6 4 )
i am particularly concerned with the need to break away from the old-fashioned
cued-in type of music that we have been using for so long . . . unfortunately for we
artists, we do not have the freedom that we would like to have, because we are catering
to an audience . . . this audience is very different from the one to which we used to
cater; it is young, vigorous and demanding . . . this is why i am asking you to approach
this problem with a receptive and if possible enthusiastic mind. ( alfred hitchcock,
cable to b er na rd her r mann, 4 n ovem b e r 19 6 5 ; qu ote d i n s . s m i t h 19 9 1 ,
2 6 8 –9 )
The Torn Curtain fiasco, in which Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock was
rejected partly owing to pressure from the studio to include a hit song which
the composer refused to provide (see Chapter 5), drew attention to a fun-
damental and seemingly irreconcilable tension in the mid-1960s between
traditional methods of film scoring – increasingly viewed as outdated and
inappropriate as films became more youth-oriented – and a more mod-
ern approach in which up-to-date popular idioms prevailed. Prior to Torn
Curtain, Paramount had already commissioned ‘Que Sera, Sera’ from Jay
Livingstone and Ray Evans for Doris Day to sing in the remake of Hitchcock’s
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956); the song won an Academy Award,
but Herrmann commented ‘What do you want a piece of junk like that in
the picture for?’ (quoted in Pommerance 2001, 56). Herrmann refused to
score Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) when the director insisted he include an easy-
listening tune by his brother-in-law, Bob Harris, and the commission went
to Nelson Riddle instead. Herrmann’s outspokenness against the inclusion
of popular music in film soundtracks throughout the 1960s reinforced his
reputation as a composer-auteur, whose elitist assumptions about the signif-
icance of conventional narrative scoring methods were now being seriously
challenged.
Tension between the use of popular music and classically influenced scor-
ing begins as far back as the silent film, which had retained popular idioms
as an accompanying option as a holdover from one of the medium’s imme-
diate audio-visual ancestors, illustrated songs (see Chapter 1). According to
Clarence E. Sinn, the accompanists of silent films came to find popular songs
useful material, ‘especially in sentimental pictures and comedies’ (Moving
Picture World, 26 November 1910), and the song melodies might serve both
as musical puns playing on the relevance of a song’s title to the film’s subject-
[396] matter and the more general purpose of tapping the spectators’ presumed
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enthusiasm for recent hits. The use of popular song diminished somewhat
in the period c.1910–15 when the medium of film was trying strenuously to
acquire artistic prestige (Altman 2004, 313), but it soon returned, and by the
end of the silent era some film tunes had gained considerable success away
from the movie theatre through sheet-music sales. Record companies also
became aware of the commercial potential of themes associated with the
movies, Columbia Records reminding retail outlets in the 1920s that ‘each
week the tune studded talking picture leaves customers of yours with impres-
sively presented theme songs echoing in their ears’ (Millard 1995, 160).
As studios strove to break away from the punitive synchronization fees for
music levied by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers
(ASCAP), they acquired their own publishing divisions, and the early boom
in sound musicals continued the prototypical synergistic marketing that had
existed between West Coast film studios and East Coast music publishers
during the silent era. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, film producers’
commercial interests in this genre were also closely linked to the media of
radio, theatre and the recording industry. Cartoon shorts provide a good
example of the era’s systematic exploitation of popular songs of which the
rights were owned by film studios: Warner Bros., for example, which had
first bought a publishing interest and record company in 1929–30, later
invested $8.5 million in the Harms-affiliated music publishers and spent
$1 million to purchase the Witmark song catalogue outright (Curtis 1992,
193), thereafter compelling their cartoon composers to use melodies from
these resources in each of their scores (see Chapter 7).
In non-musical features, a number of box-office successes included
memorable popular songs, both pre-existing and specially composed.
Well-known examples include Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942) and
High Noon (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1952); in the case of Laura (dir. Otto
Preminger, 1944), Raksin’s main-title melody became a hit when subse-
quently lyricized – as was later to be the case with movie themes composed
by Henry Mancini, Johnny Mandel and others. Anton Karas’s zither music
for The Third Man (dir. Carol Reed, 1949) showed that catchy instrumental
music could be equally lucrative away from the screen. The monothematic
saturation of scores such as these was a major influence on later romantic
music tracks based largely on single memorable themes cast in a popular
idiom, such as Mancini’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (dir. Blake Edwards, 1961),
Jarre’s Doctor Zhivago (dir. David Lean, 1965), Legrand’s Summer of ’42
(dir. Robert Mulligan, 1971) and Marvin Hamlisch’s The Way We Were
(dir. Sydney Pollack, 1973), all of which won Academy Awards for their
music and/or songs. In the case of Zhivago, Lean reportedly inserted during
postproduction more repetitions of Jarre’s ‘Lara’ theme than had originally
been spotted, with a clear eye towards record sales, which were eventually
398 A history of film music
to number in excess of $2 million for the soundtrack album alone (J. Smith
1998, 17). Casablanca, Laura and The Way We Were all used their principal
themes in conjunction with flashbacks, sometimes moving between diegetic
and nondiegetic uses to underline the fantastic, nostalgic and utopian sug-
gestions of what Caryl Flinn has termed the ‘temporal disphasures’ common
in narrative film (Flinn 1992, 109). Some composers, notably Mancini, Mor-
ricone, Barry and Quincy Jones, combined the strategic repetition of their
own saleable melodies with conventional scoring techniques to create what
Jeff Smith terms the hybrid ‘pop score’ (1998, 11), the development and
current state of which is considered in Chapter 12.
Music of youth and race

A prominent manifestation of popular musical influences on film scoring
during Hollywood’s Golden Age was the rise of soundtracks featuring mod-
ern jazz, both diegetically and nondiegetically (see Chapter 5). These became
significant in the 1950s not only for the stylistic watershed they represented,
but for the direct link they often promoted between popular music, social
problems and youth culture – a potent conjunction most obviously to be
seen in the prototypical ‘generation outrage’ film, the jukebox-dominated
biker movie The Wild One (1954). Rock’n’roll became spectacularly suc-
cessful in film immediately afterwards. The Blackboard Jungle (dir. Richard
Brooks, 1955) showcased Bill Haley and The Comets’ hit ‘Rock Around
the Clock’ in its credit sequences only, but this was more than enough to
cause seats to be ripped out in cinemas on both sides of the Atlantic by
indomitable youths determined to dance to it: such dancing was typically
forbidden in the aisles, so space needed to be cleared for this purpose else-
where in the venue. The excitement was in part caused by the deliberately
high decibel level of the film’s soundtrack, a feature to remain essential
to the visceral appeal of much later rock, pop and dance music. The film,
in which schoolkids symbolically smash a teacher’s collection of jazz 78s,
paved the way for the hysterical response to the follow-up Haley vehicle,
Rock Around the Clock (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1956), which starred The Comets
and other rock’n’roll musicians and was banned by some local authorities
for fear its screening would cause public disorder. The same year produced
several other films cashing in on the craze for the new music: Don’t Knock the
Rock (dir. Sears), including performances by The Comets, Little Richard and
others; The Girl Can’t Help It (dir. Frank Tashlin), featuring Little Richard
and The Platters; Rock Pretty Baby (dir. Richard Bartlett), with its sound-
track overseen by Mancini and Bobby Troup; and Shake, Rattle and Rock!
(dir. Edward L. Cahn), in the plot of which an attempt to ban rock’n’roll
is defiantly contested. These movies laid the foundations for the ‘teen-pic’
formula of youth-oriented commercial cinema still prevalent in the industry
today.
All these rock’n’roll films exploited the popularity of a fashionable musi-
cal style rather than an individual star’s charisma. A shift of emphasis in
favour of the latter came with the wide exposure of Elvis Presley’s singing
and acting in Love Me Tender (dir. Robert D. Webb), Loving You (dir. Hal
Kanter) and Jailhouse Rock (dir. Richard Thorpe), the first also dating from
1956 and the two last both released a year later. The Elvis phenomenon
was paralleled in the UK by the meteoric rise to stardom of Tommy Steele,
whose autobiopic The Tommy Steele Story appeared in 1957 only a matter
of months after his music hit the charts (Medhurst 1995, 62), and by a
series of films starring Cliff Richard: Expresso Bongo (dir. Val Guest, 1959),
a topical continuation of the backstage musical genre notable for the cen-
sor’s retention of its footage of a Soho strip-club on account of the scene’s
documentary feel (Romney and Wootton 1995, 39); The Young Ones (dir.
Sidney J. Furie, 1961), in essence another old-fashioned show musical; and
the perennial British favourite, Summer Holiday (dir. Peter Yates, 1963).
Several of these films were rooted in the British coffee-bar culture in which
Steele and Richard had first made their marks (Donnelly 2001b, 5–6).
The early 1960s brought the twist craze, which ensured that dance scenes
began to proliferate in movies such as Twist All Night (UK title The Young
and the Cool, dir. Allan David and William J. Hole, Jr) and Twist Around the
Clock (dir. Oscar Rudolph), both released in 1961 and the second starring
Chubby Checker. Twist All Night was produced by American International
Pictures (AIP) which, at around the same time, cornered the market for
beach-party films inspired by student antics in Florida and California. The
new genre was launched by MGM’s Where the Boys Are (dir. Henry Levin,
1960; music by George Stoll) and later included Paramount’s The Girls on
the Beach (dir. William Witney, 1965), the only one of many such films
made between 1961 and 1967 that featured The Beach Boys themselves,
who came to prominence as the craze was beginning to wane and managed
to outlive it. Some of AIP’s beach and bikini-boom films grossed ten times
their production costs, their marketing experts having decided that the most
lucrative target audience was nineteen-year-old males. Logic decreed that
a younger youth will watch anything an older one will watch (but not vice
versa), and a girl will watch anything a boy will watch (but not vice versa);
the resulting strategy was dubbed the ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’ (Denisoff and
Romanowski 1991, 118–21).
The early star-persona vehicles were completely eclipsed by the interna-
tional success attained by the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night (dir. Richard
Lester, 1964), which absorbed the fresh cinematographic techniques of the
UK’s Free Cinema movement. As in the far more outrageous work of Godard
in France, which included the politically motivated Rolling Stones docu-
mentary One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil, 1968), popular culture and
avant-garde film-making proved to be potent bedfellows; in the case of the
Beatles, the fresh visual style of A Hard Day’s Night made the group intel-
lectually intriguing and the project therefore seduced both youngsters and
intelligentsia (Denisoff and Romanowski 1991, 136–7), while at the same
time including social commentary by showing modern youths rebelling
against age and class distinctions. Moments of surrealism include a card
game in a train’s baggage compartment that begins with an asynchronous
song on the soundtrack but jump-cuts to the group suddenly playing and
singing the same song diegetically in the same location, before cutting back
to their card game as the music fades out nondiegetically. Elsewhere they
dance to their song ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, and give a diegetic performance
in a theatre marred by some sloppy miming to playback; the music is more
memorable when nondiegetic, as when ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ accompanies
their open-air frolics after they escape from the venue, the photography
including swirling aerial shots. The climactic performance of ‘I Love Her’
in the TV studio is completely lacking in atmosphere: fans are shown in
reaction shot screaming and nearly fainting, but the screams are edited out
so as not to compete with the singing – until the ‘She Loves Me’ finale,
that is, when the screaming is finally included to help intensify the sense of
hysteria, and indeed takes precedence over the music. Vivid crowd and audi-
ence reaction shots such as these help foster star-legends, and they would
be exploited in later films featuring diegetic pop performances.
Phenomenal ticket sales for A Hard Day’s Night at the global box office
were complemented by sales of the soundtrack album netting over three
times the film’s production costs. The album, which sold 1.5 million copies
within two weeks of its release (J. Smith 1998, 55), was prophetic of later
marketing strategies by including songs which did not feature in the film, and
also established the concept of a long-playing record made up of multiple
singles, each potentially an individual hit; this strategy later had spectacular
results for the Bee Gees in Saturday Night Fever (see below). Both A Hard
Day’s Night and the Beatles’ fantasy follow-up, Help! (dir. Lester, 1965),
were lastingly influential on the production techniques of later pop films and
music videos: indeed, the ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ sequence described above was
later shown on MTV as a plausible videoclip (J. Smith 1998, 160). The music
of Help! was as phenomenally successful as that of its predecessor: its song
‘Yesterday’, one of three chart-topping hits from the film, sold more than
one million copies in just ten days (Denisoff and Romanowski 1991, 142).
Both films and their related recordings fared particularly well in the USA,
with United Artists’ considerable financial backing helping to cement the
success of the British Invasion in American popular culture; at the same time,
along with their contemporaneous investment in the James Bond franchise,
UA significantly boosted the commercial fortunes of British cinema. One
home-grown American group, the Monkees, attempted to follow the Beatles’
example in Head (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1968), a psychedelic film that proved a
commercial failure in spite of the huge popularity of the group’s TV series
and their high volume of record sales. Their flop on this occasion may be
accounted for by the film’s boldly non-linear structure and its indulgence
in sometimes cynical self-reflexivity; its tie-in album was their worst seller
up to this time (Ramaeker 2001, 97).
Popular music as an ethnic marker made an international impact with
Black Orpheus (dir. Marcel Camus, 1958), shot in Rio de Janeiro and with a
lively soundtrack that helped initiate the craze for bossa nova pop-jazz in the
early 1960s. Like other types of jazz, and rhythm-and-blues, bossa nova was
quickly taken up by white artists and its cultural origins diluted, and it was
not until the blaxploitation movies of the early 1970s that black music and
culture transferred to the big screen in purer form, though a rhythm-and-
blues soundtrack had served cultural and locational purposes in Nothing
But a Man (dir. Michael Roemer, 1964). In 1963 the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had threatened sanctions
and legal action if more blacks were not employed by the US film industry,
with the result that by c.1972 around one quarter of the country’s film
output was black-oriented (Denisoff and Romanowski 1991, 730–1). Soul
and funk music dominated the prototypical blaxploitation crime thriller
Shaft (dir. Gordon Parks, 1971), with its composer Isaac Hayes nominated
for Academy Awards for both his score and title song (and winning the
latter category with what became a No. 1 hit); his music was retained in
the 2000 remake (dir. John Singleton). According to Kodwo Eshun, the use
of popular music ‘relieves Shaft of his cop status so that he’s free to walk
through Harlem as a regular guy’ (Eshun 1995, 53), though the use of a
black musical idiom in an urban crime context also harked back to earlier
filmic applications of jazz. Another film influential on the emerging genre
was Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (dir. Melvin Van Peebles, 1971), with
music by Maurice White’s Earth, Wind & Fire.
In the immediate wake of these productions came Superfly (dir. Gordon
Parks Jr, 1972; music by Curtis Mayfield), of which the soundtrack double-
album went platinum, Trouble Man (dir. Ivan Dixon, 1972; music by Mar-
vin Gaye) and Black Caesar (dir. Larry Cohen, 1973). James Brown’s music
for the last was recorded without his even bothering to see or discuss the
movie during production, his involvement in the project having clearly been
intended solely to exploit his fame and popular appeal. The blaxploitation
boom was curtailed somewhat by the global disco craze of the late 1970s,
but the genre’s blend of streetwise cool, comedy, violence and trendy music
remained influential on action films and hard-hitting urban movies in gen-
eral, including the martial arts genre in Hong Kong (Toop 1995, 77). Outside
America, the 1970s also saw the birth of reggae-flavoured Jamaican cinema,
its launch vehicle The Harder They Come (dir. Perry Henzell, 1972) with a
plot revolving around a reggae musician whose song becomes a hit just as
he turns to drug-related crime.
One of the most enduring musical films made at the end of the 1970s was
John Landis’s The Blues Brothers (1980), which caused controversy because it
represented the popularization of a black musical idiom by white performers
John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. They may well have diluted soul in the
process, but nevertheless helped widen the international market for rhythm-
and-blues (Denisoff and Romanowski 1991, 297). The actors’ characters
Jake and Elwood Blues had been launched on TV’s Saturday Night Live,
and their action-packed big-screen antics revolved around spirited diegetic
performances by the likes of Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown
and the veteran Cab Calloway. Calloway took the role of an orphanage
janitor and had to be dissuaded from the idea of performing ‘Minnie the
Moocher’ in disco style; neither Franklin nor Brown could cope with lip-
synching to pre-recorded songs because they were not used to singing a
number the same way twice. The soundtrack is eclectic, including the hit
tune ‘Everybody Needs Somebody’, Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme and even
Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ to accompany footage of an Illinois neo-
Nazi car crashing to earth amidst Chicago skyscrapers; the spirited diegetic
performances by the Brothers brought together a New York front line and a
Chicago rhythm section. In 1983 Landis went on to direct Michael Jackson’s
short film Thriller, which broke all previous records for the sale of both
soundtrack recording and home-video copies and helped boost the new
medium of MTV (see below).
Towards the end of the 1980s, blaxploitation was both parodied and
reborn. I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka (dir. Keenan Ivory Wayans, 1988) sati-
rized the genre’s heavy reliance on nondiegetic funk by having a character
walk along the street tailed by the eclectic Los Angeles band Fishbone dieget-
ically performing the theme from Superfly. As blaxploitation was replaced
by a rapsploitation rooted in inner-city youth culture, so nondiegetic music
tended to be replaced by rap issuing from diegetic radios (Eshun 1995,
57). The hip-hop scene was first exploited on film in Breakin’ (UK title
Breakdance; dir. Joel Silberg, 1984), and the familiar setting of urban drug-
crime recurred in New Jack City (dir. Mario Van Peebles, 1991), with music
by both its director and Michel Colombier, and a cast including rapper
Ice-T (who had sampled ‘Pusherman’ from Superfly in 1988). Another
rapper-turned-actor, Ice Cube, starred as Dough Boy in Boyz ’n the Hood
(dir. Singleton, 1991; music by Stanley Clarke), set in the South Central
region of Los Angeles notorious for its rigid law enforcement. For all this
film’s historical importance as the first mainstream release with such a set-
ting, its narrative, preoccupation with parental responsibility, dialogue and
cinematography were all utterly conventional, and most of its music was
restricted to ambient diegetic sources apart from a nondiegetic cue that
begins diegetically on a car radio, and another that provides continuity
throughout a montage of troubled romance – both tried and tested Holly-
wood formulae. The climactic shooting is accompanied anempathetically
by placidly repetitive easy-listening music.
Hip-hop musicians and producers active in film since the 1990s have
included Snoop Dogg’s producer Dr Dre, who served as music supervisor
on the sports/drug-crime hybrid Above the Rim (dir. Jeff Pollack, 1994;
original music by Marcus Miller), and Wu-Tang Clang’s guiding spirit, the
RZA. The latter provided music for Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (dir.
Jim Jarmusch, 1999), the work of a New York underground director who in
the 1980s had been well known for his collaboration with Lounge Lizards’
saxophonist John Lurie on a variety of films (Reay 2004, 99–100). The RZA
commented that working with musicians from different backgrounds on
Ghost Dog inspired him to become musically literate, and he learnt as much
from the instrumental characterizations of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf as
from his blaxploitation idols Hayes, Mayfield and Brown (Allina 2004). The
RZA went on to produce music for a number of films, including Tarantino’s
Kill Bill diptych (2003–4) – an appropriate assignment given the kung-fu
orientation of his group, which sampled elements from the soundtracks
to Asian martial-arts films – and the comedy spoof Soul Plane (dir. Jessy
Terrero, 2004), starring a Wu-Tang Clan member, Method Man.
At the white end of the musical spectrum the later 1960s saw a limited
but occasionally creative use of American country music in soundtracks. In
Bonnie and Clyde (dir. Arthur Penn, 1967), Scruggs-style bluegrass music by
Charles Strouse (based in part on ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’) served as
tongue-in-cheek getaway music in spite of the plot’s violent and anti-social
subject-matter, and this was to become a stock application of such music in a
wide range of film, TV and cartoon scores. Songs by Tammy Wynette, Hank
Williams and others were included in the soundtracks of Five Easy Pieces (dir.
Rafelson, 1970) and The Last Picture Show (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1971).
In Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), with its Oscar-winning song ‘I’m Easy’
by Keith Carradine, country music is used ‘to emphasize the disintegration
of America . . . what [the film] has to say about entertainment in America
is a devastating commentary on the shortcomings of bicentennial America
and the folk musical alike’; it does this most obviously by selling its credits
to viewers ‘like cheap records on late-night television. Imitating both the
soundtrack and the garish visuals of these tasteless ads, Nashville identifies
its own commercial nature from the start’ (Altman 1987, 324). The link
between the idiom and venality was perpetuated by the music’s more recent
appearances in the political satire Wag the Dog (dir. Barry Levinson, 1997)
and the polemical documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (dir. Michael Moore, 2004),
both of which linked bluegrass to suggestions of ignorance, corruption and
moral decay. As Barbara Ching notes, country music ‘sounds the American
heart’; it can succeed in ‘affirming the purity of the “American way of life”’ in
mainstream commercial cinema, or in ‘condemning a nation hypocritically
mired in provincial materialism’ in more cynical art films (Ching 2001,
204).
The use of country music in films pales into insignificance alongside the
global impact of disco fever initiated by the phenomenal success of Satur-
day Night Fever (dir. John Badham, 1977), a film remarkable not only for
the charisma of its star John Travolta and its skilfully photographed dance
sequences but also its adult subject-matter. The screenplay’s pessimism, bad
language, dysfunctional family background and treatment of such uncom-
fortable topics as abortion and crisis of religious faith made this the pop
film’s true coming of age: its overriding tone was one of cynicism and survival
in the bleak post-Watergate era, and the production’s initial demographic
appeal was largely to young singles struggling to cope with, and find release
from, the drudgery of urban life (Denisoff and Romanowski 1991, 200,
227). Here physical movement and rhythmic pulsation act together as both
escapist drug and personal expression. In a rebellious gesture reminiscent of
the blatant rejection of outmoded jazz in films such as The Blackboard Jungle
and Jailhouse Rock, Travolta’s character Tony regards Latin dance music as
old-fashioned when it empties the dance floor (‘I can’t dance that shit’);
but the object of his affections, the ambitious Stephanie, likes it and curtly
dismisses Tony as a cliché. Latin music, and the classical ballet which she
rehearses to the accompaniment of Chopin, thus become exotic and ‘Other’
as part of his attraction towards her. The film’s main commercial strength
was its soundtrack songs by the Bee Gees: there was scarcely any need for the
kind of romantic underscoring by David Shire which attempted to under-
line the sentimental conclusion. A poor sequel eventually followed (Staying
Alive, 1983), in which director Sylvester Stallone ‘just puts the newly muscle-
plated Travolta in front of the camera, covers him with what looks like oil
slick, and goes for the whambams’ (Pauline Kael, quoted in J. Walker 2006,
1102); the basic dramatic formula had already been reworked in another
Travolta vehicle, Urban Cowboy (dir. James Bridges, 1980), with a sound-
track of progressive country music that modestly revived the commercial
fortunes of country-and-western in the record store. Saturday Night Fever’s
broader influence was considerable, not merely by initiating an immediate
rash of disco pictures – including, in Britain, the tawdry Joan Collins vehicles
The Stud (dir. Quentin Masters, 1978) and The Bitch (dir. Gerry O’Hara,
1979), both with music by Biddu, and in the USA by Thank God It’s Fri-
day (dir. Robert Klane, 1978) and Can’t Stop the Music (dir. Nancy Walker,
1980), the last with music by Jacques Morali’s Village People – but more
importantly in its commercially efficacious showcasing of hit tunes and its
dance-competition climax, the latter destined to be much imitated.
By contrast, certain films of the late 1970s reflected popular music of
far less widespread appeal, notably the British punk movement which was
prominent in 1976–9 and commemorated in The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle
(dir. Julien Temple, 1980) and Sid and Nancy (dir. Alex Cox, 1986), the latter
a biopic based on the life of the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious. Punk’s lifestyle and
image impacted in particular on the work of independent director Derek
Jarman, most obviously in Jubilee (1977; music by Brian Eno) and his 1980
film based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (see Chapter 4). Fresh trends in
youth culture indicating social change were again to affect mainstream cin-
ema with the advent of acid house and the rave scene in c.1989. The new
dance music coloured films on both sides of the Atlantic, and once again a
popular style became associated with a drugs milieu and other urban crime
problems, notably in The Young Americans (dir. Danny Cannon, 1993), Shop-
ping (dir. Paul Anderson, 1994), Shallow Grave (dir. Danny Boyle, 1994),
Trainspotting (dir. Boyle, 1996) and Human Traffic (dir. Justin Kerrigan,
1999). While the British productions Shallow Grave and Trainspotting both
received critical acclaim, other less impressive films of their ilk were arguably
more powerful by virtue of their dynamic soundtracks than their tired
storylines (Romney and Wootton 1995, 6).
Title songs and interpolated songs

The least creative application of popular music common in 1960s sound-
tracks was the showcasing of main-title songs and interpolated songs per-
formed by commercially viable artists. The inclusion of nondiegetic inter-
polated songs was often gratuitous, and a ploy to secure consideration for
an Academy Award for Best Song; the interpolated performance ‘puts the
story on hold while the song has a chance to sell itself’ (Karlin 1994, 225).
Well-known examples are Legrand’s ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ for the
evocative glider sequence in The Thomas Crown Affair (dir. Norman Jewison,
1968), which had been accompanied by the Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields’ in
the temp track (Karlin and Wright 2004, 447); Burt Bacharach’s ‘Raindrops
Keep Fallin’ on My Head’ for the bicycling sequence in Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid (dir. George Roy Hill, 1969); Fred Neil’s ‘Everybody’s
Talkin’’ for the shop-front propositioning scene in Midnight Cowboy (dir.

John Schlesinger, 1969); and Louis Armstrong’s memorable rendition of
John Barry’s ‘We Have All the Time in the World’ in the Bond film On Her
Majesty’s Secret Service (dir. Peter Hunt, 1969), this last example perhaps
one of the most poignantly effective instances of the strategy.
The indestructible Bond series was responsible for eliciting a fine series
of title songs by Barry, each allied to imaginative main-title graphics. The
series was launched in 1962 with Dr No (dir. Terence Young), with its famous
signature tune by Monty Norman (co-writer of the stage show on which
Expresso Bongo had been based), which became the subject of disputed
authorship claims between Norman and Barry that were not to be resolved
in Norman’s favour until he won a libel case against the UK’s Sunday Times
newspaper in 2001. (For further on the dispute, and on the phenomenon of
Bond soundtracks in general, see J. Smith 1998, Chapter 5; see also Leonard
et al. 1995, 15.) Barry, who had already been successful with his instrumental
group The John Barry Seven, assumed full responsibility for the scoring of
the series with From Russia With Love (dir. Young, 1963), with a title song by
Lionel Bart performed by Matt Monro. Three of Barry’s own Bond title songs
were performed by Shirley Bassey: Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton, 1964),
Diamonds Are Forever (dir. Hamilton, 1971) and Moonraker (dir. Lewis
Gilbert, 1979). Other artists who sang them were Tom Jones (Thunderball;
dir. Young, 1965), Nancy Sinatra (You Only Live Twice; dir. Gilbert, 1967),
Lulu (The Man With the Golden Gun; dir. Hamilton, 1974), Rita Coolidge
(Octopussy; dir. John Glen, 1983), Duran Duran (A View to a Kill; dir. Glen,
1985) and a-ha (The Living Daylights; dir. Glen, 1987). The choice of the
last two bands was clearly aimed squarely at a new generation of young
consumers. Many of the earlier songs had achieved modest chart success,
but Duran Duran’s ‘A View To a Kill’ outdid them by becoming a No. 1 hit
in the USA and reaching No. 2 in the UK.
Barry’s occasional absences from the Bond series allowed a number of
other composers and performers to adapt their music to the films’ winning
formula. In 1973, Paul McCartney and Wings recorded a buoyantly sinister
title song for Live and Let Die (dir. Hamilton, 1973), which did well in the
charts, the remainder of the film scored by former Beatles producer George
Martin. For The Spy Who Loved Me (dir. Gilbert, 1977), Hamlisch’s ‘Nobody
Does It Better’ was performed by Carly Simon. The title songs in For Your
Eyes Only (dir. Glen, 1981; music by Bill Conti) and Licence to Kill (dir.
Glen, 1989; music by Michael Kamen) were sung by Sheena Easton and
Gladys Knight respectively. The only Bond film made outside the powerful
franchise of producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. ‘Cubby’ Broccoli was
Never Say Never Again (dir. Irvin Kershner, 1984), with its title song by
Legrand performed by Lani Hall. As the Broccoli lineage extended into the
1990s and beyond, GoldenEye (dir. Martin Campbell, 1995; music by Eric
Serra) received a title song by Tina Turner written by Bono and The Edge,
and Tomorrow Never Dies (dir. Roger Spottiswoode, 1997) one by Sheryl
Crow. British composer David Arnold’s title song for the latter, performed
by k.d.lang, was relegated to the end credits and renamed ‘Surrender’. Arnold
then became the series’ regular composer, scoring The World is Not Enough
(dir. Michael Apted, 1999), Die Another Day (dir. Lee Tamahori, 2002) and
Casino Royale (dir. Martin Campbell, 2006), with title songs performed by
Garbage, Madonna and Chris Cornell respectively.
Many of the Bond films included end-title songs as well as front-title
songs (sometimes simply repeating the opening song at the end of the film),
but in other genres it was to remain more common for a title or tie-in
song to be reserved until the end credits: an odd move in marketing terms,
since audiences tend to quit the cinema as soon as the credits appear on
screen and rarely stay to listen to the play-out music that accompanies
them. Successful title and tie-in songs since the 1980s have included Bryan
Adams’s ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ from Robin Hood: Prince of
Thieves (dir. Kevin Reynolds, 1991), which remained at No. 1 in the UK for
seventeen weeks (Barron 2003, 153), and Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Goes On’
from Titanic (dir. James Cameron, 1997; music by James Horner). Following
a well-worn musical format, the Oscar-winning Titanic song was used as an
instrumental leitmotif during the film and appeared in lyricized form over
the end credits. Other end-title songs conceived largely for cross-marketing
purposes include Annie Lennox’s ‘Love Song for a Vampire’ in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1992); Coco Lee’s ‘A Love Before Time’
in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (dir. Ang Lee, 2000); Faith Hill’s ‘There
You’ll Be’ in Pearl Harbor (dir. Michael Bay, 2001); Enya’s ‘May It Be’ in
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (dir. Peter Jackson, 2001),
and Annie Lennox’s ‘Into the West’ for the Tolkien sequel The Return of the
King (2003), the last winning an Academy Award. Martin Scorsese’s Gangs
of New York (2002), with its end-title song ‘The Hands that Built America’,
performed by U2, is a good example of the stylistic and emotional lurch
that results when a modern pop song suddenly intrudes to play out a drama
notable for its lavish attention to period detail. Music videos of songs of
this general type usually contain images from the films for cross-publicity
purposes (see below).
As the list above shows, many film producers in the last half century have
set their sights on the Academy’s Best Song award as well as on the commer-
cial potential of a song away from the film. The Song award was established
in 1934 at the same time as the award for Original Music Scoring, and until
the success of Hayes’s Shaft in 1971 the Song awards without exception
went to traditional ballad-style standards or numbers from screen musicals.
Controversy arose in 1954 when Dimitri Tiomkin requested Warner Bros.

to include the lyrics to his title song for The High and the Mighty in a single
copy of the release print screened in Los Angeles specifically so that the song
might qualify for the award. (It did not win.) In 1968 the song category was
renamed as Song: Original to the Picture, the rider subsequently abolished in
1973; a more cumbersome and politically correct renaming as Achievement
in Music in Connection with Motion Pictures: Original Song was briefly in
force in 2001. The Bee Gees were not even nominated for Saturday Night
Fever in 1977 (in spite of protests from producer Robert Stigwood), and the
first genuinely modern winner of the award came a year later with Donna
Summer’s performance of Paul Jabara’s disco hit ‘Lance Dance’ from Thank
God It’s Friday. The smallest number of nominations came in 1988 when
fewer than the stipulated minimum of 25 songs were eligible and the short-
list was consequently restricted to three entries. In addition to the awards for
Original Score and Original Song, the Academy has at various times made
awards in a separate Song Score category (see below), primarily designed to
cater for musicals; the potential unfairness caused by the suspension of this
category in 1985 was shown in 2006 when no fewer than three of the five
Original Song nominations (all of them unsuccessful) came from the same
screen musical (Dreamgirls, dir. Bill Condon).
To be considered for the Original Song award, the song must consist ‘of
words and music, both of which are original and written specifically for the
film. There must be a clearly audible, intelligible, substantive rendition (not
necessarily visually presented) of both lyric and melody, used in the body of
the film or as the first music cue in the end credits’ (AMPAS 2006; bold type
in original). In 1992, Stevie Wonder’s songs from Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever
were deemed ineligible owing to their poor audibility (Karlin 1994, 212).
The Academy’s rules stress that ‘The measure of the work’s qualification
shall be its effectiveness, craftsmanship, creative substance and relevance to
the dramatic whole’; the song must be ‘recorded for use in the film prior
to any other usage including public performance or exploitation through
any media whatsoever’, and scores ‘diluted by the use of tracked themes or
other pre-existing music’, or ‘diminished in impact by the predominant use
of songs’, or ‘assembled from the music of more than one composer’ are all
ineligible.
Compilation scores and original song scores

Bolder than attempts to secure airwave advertising and record sales by
the inclusion of individual title songs was the compilation score, a music
track heavily (but not necessarily exclusively) reliant on a sequence of
self-contained pop songs. Such scores generally avoided the accusations

of gratuitousness and narrative stasis with which some critics greeted iso-
lated interpolated songs, though (as discussed below) the compilation score
raised other controversial aesthetic issues of its own. The prototypical music
tracks of this kind were those compiled for The Graduate (dir. Mike Nichols,
1967) and Easy Rider (dir. Dennis Hopper, 1969); neither film received
Academy recognition for its music tracks, with Best Song nominations in
those years going instead to up-front interpolations and numbers from con-
ventional musicals. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel nevertheless won three
Grammy awards for their Graduate songs, four of which had been extracted
from pre-existing albums for use on the film’s temp track and were sub-
sequently retained; the only new song required was ‘Mrs Robinson’, which
they reworked as a No. 1 hit. The film, which began the trend of using pop
lyrics to suggest a character’s otherwise unvoiced preoccupations – most
notably in its use of ‘Sounds of Silence’ in the swimming-pool montage as
a ‘motif of withdrawal’ (Reay 2004, 57) – represented the first attempt to
integrate multiple nondiegetic songs with a linear narrative. It proved to be
the third highest grossing release to that date, beaten at the box office only
by The Sound of Music and Gone With the Wind (Denisoff and Romanowski
1991, 166–7).
Easy Rider was more provocative in its subject-matter, and received an
anthology score compiled from pre-existing songs by various artists. The
film tapped into a niche market for biker films (a bandwagon onto which
AIP had jumped when the bottom fell out of the beach-party genre), and
took the form of a road movie amounting to ‘a countercultural reversal
of the Hollywood classic western’ (Denisoff and Romanowski 1991, 169):
drugs replaced the pioneering explorer spirit as a means of seeking out
new frontiers of experience. Easy Rider’s soundtrack memorably showcased
Steppenwolf ’s ‘Born to Be Wild’ in its title sequence and elsewhere included
music by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Byrds and others; influential
not only for its music but also its improvisational style and strong violence
typical of dramatic trends emerging in cinema at the time, the film grossed
$60 million to repay its tiny production budget of only $565,000. Both The
Graduate and Easy Rider had clearly struck a powerful chord with youthful
audiences for what R. Barton Palmer describes as a stance ‘predictably Oedi-
pal, staging compromised rebellions, in the tradition of J. D. Salinger, against
middle-class values and institutions (marriage, settling down, productive
employment, “responsibility”) in the name of an ever-elusive personal free-
dom, a quest that could be shaped into either a comic or tragic conclusion’
(Kolker 2006, 15).
A compilation score also accompanied Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Zabriskie Point (1969). His earlier Zeitgeist film Blow-Up (1966; score by
Herbie Hancock) had featured The Yardbirds giving a diegetic performance

of ‘Stroll On’ in a cellar club and typified the decade’s swinging London
scene. By contrast, Zabriskie Point examined the radical politics and hippie
love of Californian students and, although the use of music in the film is
fairly muted until one of them steals a plane and escapes to the desert, it
placed its detailed song credits prominently in the main titles: the artists
included Pink Floyd, Youngbloods, Kaleidoscope and The Grateful Dead.
The cinematography espoused a quasi-vérité handheld-camera style during
the opening student debate, with crude swish pans and abrupt zooms mir-
roring the improvisational acting, and this attempted realism was perhaps
partly responsible for the avoidance of prominent nondiegetic music.
More durable and widely appealing was George Lucas’s American Graffiti
(1973), a commercial success story comparable to Easy Rider for netting
nearly 100 times its meagre budget in box-office takings. Set nostalgically in
the car culture of California in the early 1960s, the film’s plot was a typical
rite-of-passage concerning four high-school boys about to go to college. Its
music track of ‘golden oldies’ initiated a perceptible shift in fashion from
the rebellious films of the previous decade to what has been termed the
‘complacent 1970s Me Decade’ (Denisoff and Romanowski 1991, 176), in
which the desire to entertain rather than shock became paramount. The film
was also notable for its use of songs as structural units, each scene broadly
corresponding to the length of the song featured in it. Lucas’s modest budget
precluded the use of songs for which the licensing fees were expensive, and
this affected the eventual choice of music in the compilation score, much of
which (including ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’)
was unashamedly nostalgic in intent, though occasionally used creatively –
as when Booker T and the MGs’ ‘Green Onions’ at first appears to be a
nondiegetic prelude to a chicken-run car race but is subsequently heard
continuing diegetically as it issues faintly from a wrecked car’s radio once the
vehicle has gone out of control. Although it has been repeatedly claimed that
the songs selected were deliberately chosen for the dramatic ironies inherent
in their titles, both Lucas and his sound-montage supervisor Walter Murch
claimed that any strong song would have worked equally well for any scene
(J. Smith 2001, 410) – an approach that when adopted by other directors
would inevitably result in some haphazard conjunctions of music and image,
again laying film-makers wide open to claims that pop songs were being
included in film soundtracks gratuitously.
Later rites-of-passage movies with compilation scores included The Big
Chill (dir. Lawrence Kasdan, 1983), with its plot centring on a college reunion
at a funeral, featuring music by Marvin Gaye and Procol Harum’s ‘Whiter
Shade of Pale’ (Carey and Hannan 2003, 167–9). Kasdan had experienced
studio resistance because his golden oldies promised to be insufficiently
lucrative, but the soundtrack album sold 750,000 in eight weeks with little
use of radio or video plugging (Denisoff and Romanowski 1991, 387, 392).
The film’s formula was reworked in St Elmo’s Fire (dir. Joel Schumacher,
1985) which launched a number of ‘Brat Pack’ acting careers, as did the
same year’s The Breakfast Club (dir. John Hughes). Compilation scores con-
taining pop hits from yesteryear provided both a convenient method of
establishing historical periods and a means to promote nostalgic personal
identification, and this widespread device was used most systematically in
the hugely lucrative Forrest Gump (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 1994). Films of the
1990s at times looked back to the 1970s and 1980s for inspiration, Boogie
Nights (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997) using lyrics of 1970s songs for a
postmodern and occasionally esoteric sexual suggestiveness rather different
from their original associations (J. Smith 2001, 423–8), while The Wedding
Singer (dir. Frank Coraci, 1998) drew on a wide range of hits appropri-
ate to its 1985 setting. In Australia, pop hits from the 1970s made Muriel’s
Wedding (dir. P. J. Hogan, 1994) a good example of a trend towards ‘deliber-
ately outdated camp soundtracks’ (Wojcik and Knight 2001, 1). Through-
out the 1980s and 1990s, both rites-of-passage films and romantic come-
dies frequently used golden-oldie song titles as their own titles in order
to tap nostalgic associations in audiences even before the projector began
turning.
The first golden-oldie compilation score in British cinema was That’ll Be
the Day (dir. Claude Whatham, 1973), and scores of this type were to remain
successful in the UK where undemanding pop soundtracks for modern
romantic comedies such as Peter’s Friends (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1992) and
Four Weddings and a Funeral (dir. Mike Newell, 1994) fared equally well
abroad. The Four Weddings soundtrack included Wet Wet Wet’s ‘Love Is All
Around’, which remained at the No. 1 slot for fifteen weeks in the British
charts. The film catapulted British actor Hugh Grant to an international
stardom later ruthlessly and unimaginatively exploited by the producers of
Notting Hill (dir. Roger Michell, 1999) and About A Boy (dir. Paul and Chris
Weitz, 2002), with songs by Elvis Costello and Badly Drawn Boy respectively,
and the so-called ‘chick flicks’ Bridget Jones’s Diary (dir. Sharon Maguire,
2001), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (dir. Beeban Kidron, 2004) and
Love Actually (dir. Richard Curtis, 2003), all furnished with easy-going pop
scoring. Far more extreme was 9 Songs (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2004),
a sexually explicit love story intercut with a collection of diegetic concert
performances by various artists, of which the hard-core images probably
sold far more tickets and DVDs than the film’s musical content; the overall
result (according to Times critic James Christopher) was ‘a bad piece of
pornography that seems to have got fatally mixed up with [the director’s]
record collection’ (quoted in J. Walker 2006, 832).
Since the end of the 1960s, both individual pop songs and historically res-
onant compilation scores have come to redefine the genre of the war movie
for the post-Vietnam age, helping it move beyond its traditional heroic
and patriotic vein to far darker and disturbing messages of protest laced
with bitter satire. Robert Altman’s black comedy M∗ A∗ S∗ H (1970) came as
the greatest possible contrast to the well-made but emotionally empty and
expensive Second World War epics Patton and Tora! Tora! Tora! then in pro-
duction (and both scored conventionally by Jerry Goldsmith). Set in a US
mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War of 1950–53 and shot
to a low budget in starkly realist style, M∗ A∗ S∗ H deliberately cultivated the
look of the Vietnam war to strike a chord with audiences disaffected by the
ongoing conflict in South East Asia: the implications were so obvious that
the studio forced the director to insert a ‘Korea’ title card at the beginning of
the film, a stipulation that inspired a nose-thumbing gesture in the sound-
track as the gratuitous piece of locational information is accompanied by a
morphing of the Twentieth Century-Fox fanfare into an inane ceremonial
march. The film’s evocative main-title footage of medevac helicopters was
accompanied by Johnny Mandel’s song ‘Suicide is Painless’, originally writ-
ten (with lyrics by the director’s son Michael) to serve a diegetic function
later in the film when it is performed by voice and guitar to accompany the
fake suicide of a dental surgeon nicknamed Painless, a scene consciously
parodying Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper. In spite of its
essentially parodic conception, the song (covered years later by the Manic
Street Preachers, in 1992) was not initially a hit away from the film because
radio stations and record companies refused to entertain lyrics referring to
suicide. It did, however, top the UK pop charts in 1980 on the back of the
successful and long-running TV spin-off series, though as a signature tune it
was adapted as an instrumental version that culminated in a lightweight tag
ending typical of sitcom music on the small screen. The soundtrack of Fran-
cis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) subsequently linked the Vietnam
War to the rock music of its age by including The Doors’ ‘The End’ and the
Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’, while music by the Beatles and the Stones fea-
tured in the Vietnam movies Coming Home (dir. Hal Ashby, 1978) and the
Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’ appeared on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s Full
Metal Jacket (1987). Apart from their obvious historical and generational
appropriateness, the Vietnam War being associated with the heyday of rock
just as the Second World War had been inextricably linked with swing bands,
pop songs in war films thereafter continued to provide a sense of irony and
distanciation singularly lacking in old-fashioned heroic orchestral scores
(Romney and Wootton 1995, 16).
As multiple pop songs came to be used on the soundtrack of a single film
to replace conventional instrumental scoring, so the aesthetic functions of
traditional film music came to be undermined, questioned and ultimately

reconsidered. The closed form of popular song at first seemed ill-suited to
film music’s longstanding duty to provide narrative continuity in the short,
medium and long terms, and popular styles seemed incapable of monu-
mentalizing banal subject-matter through the classical aggrandizement and
emotional hyperbole of the conventional romantic underscore; neither did
featured or otherwise isolated songs seem capable of promoting the (admit-
tedly sometimes specious) sense of overall structural coherence suggested
by classical thematic developments and long-term harmonic relationships.
On the other hand, pop songs were undoubtedly effective in the interests of
realism when heard diegetically, and as blatant signifiers of historical period,
ethnic group or other culture, as well as political messages both overt and
covert (as, for instance, in the black-militancy parameter of Spike Lee’s 1989
film, Do the Right Thing; see Wright 2003, 17). They were also by far the
most convenient (and therefore often lazy) method of ensuring the com-
mercial success of both a film and its soundtrack in the youth and nostalgia
sectors of the market. Pop songs could not often undertake the age-old
musical function of mickey-mousing physical gestures because they could
only be synchronized to movement if pre-recorded and played back on set
during shooting, as occurred in the treatment of Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It
Through the Grapevine’ in The Big Chill, which opens and later punctu-
ates the film. But pacing and momentum could be suggested by a dynamic
song in certain situations, notably moving vehicles, as at the start of Easy
Rider where the (in reality rather slowly moving) motorbikes seem propelled
onwards by Steppenwolf ’s repetitive and hard-driving rhythms, strong bass
line and powerful rock sonorities; not surprisingly, music with these ingre-
dients continued to feature heavily in the genre of the road movie.
In contrast to classically derived instrumental scoring, the lyrics of pop
songs made them uniquely suited to promoting both audience distanciation
or personal involvement, for exploiting emotional and situational anempa-
thy, or for unequivocally underlining unspoken aspects of character and
motivation. As with the filmic use of well-known pieces of classical music,
however, there remained a danger that once recognized a song might dis-
tract a viewer’s attention from the intended dramatic function owing to
his or her personal feelings about it: after all, ‘every viewer comes to the
cinema carrying his or her own jukebox ready loaded, waiting only for the
film-maker to hit the right buttons’ (Romney and Wootton 1995, 2), and
even a snatch of a familiar melody can call up a paradigmatic memory of an
entire song and its associations. If not causing unplanned distractions, song
lyrics – especially when rendered nondiegetically – can nevertheless ‘pro-
vide a unique opportunity to editorialize and to focus audience attention’
(Altman 2001, 26).
Because the use of pre-existing hits is a safer commercial bet than

attempting to predict what will be a hit at the time of a film’s release, origi-
nal song-based music tracks (other than conventional musicals) remained
relatively rare. This is reflected in the chequered history of the Academy
Awards in the Song Score category, which has at times showed a reluctance
to regard the creative pop score as something with a unique identity. The
category of Original Song Score and/or Adaptation was instituted in 1938 so
that dramatic scores and musicals would not compete for the same award,
and in 1941 the Song Score award was renamed to refer only to Musical
Pictures. In 1957 a single Score category was briefly reinstated but the sep-
arate Musical award was resurrected in 1958 (when it was won by Gigi).
With transfers of existing stage musicals to the big screen now far more
common than original screen musicals, in 1962 the Musical award again
became one for Adaptation or Treatment, and in 1968 it changed once
more to Score of a Musical Picture (Original or Adaptation). In 1970 the
Beatles’ documentary Let It Be (dir. Michael Lindsay-Hogg) won the freshly
renamed Original Song Score category, but in the following year a conven-
tional musical (Fiddler on the Roof) succeeded in the yet further renamed
Adaptation and Original Song Score category. The success of The Sting in
the 1973 competition for Original Song Score and/or Adaptation, with its
music track a compilation of dramatically anachronistic arrangements of
Scott Joplin’s piano rags, demonstrated that it was unnecessary for catchy
tunes to be newly composed in order to succeed.
The Song Score/Adaptation category was dropped in 1980 but reacti-
vated in 1982 before being dropped again three years later. In 1995 musicals
were considered under the same heading as original scores for comedies,
with a separate award offered for Original Dramatic Score, but these cat-
egories were again combined in 1999 when the original 1930s two-award
scheme for Music (simply Song and Score) was reinstituted. A third award
for Original Musical can still be activated, but ‘only by special request of
the Music Branch Executive Committee to the Board of Governors in a
year when the field of eligible submissions is determined to be of sufficient
quantity and quality to justify award competition’. The definition of ‘Musi-
cal’ is now formulated to apply equally to original Song Scores, in that in
order to qualify a music track must consist ‘of not fewer than five original
songs . . . by the same writer or team of writers either used as voice-overs
or visually performed. Each of these songs must be substantively rendered,
clearly audible, intelligible, and must further the storyline. What is simply
an arbitrary group of songs unessential to the storyline of the film will not
be considered eligible’ (AMPAS 2006). Since 1984, when Prince’s Purple
Rain won the Song Score award, the only song score (apart from those for
Disney’s animated musicals) to have received an Academy Award was that

accompanying The Full Monty (dir. Peter Cattaneo, 1997).
Synergistic marketing
Quite independent from considerations of artistic quality and dramatic
appropriateness were the strenuous attempts to sell films on the back of hit
songs, and vice versa. An early example of such synergistic marketing was the
song ‘Ramona’, written for the film of the same title and promoted on tour
and in radio broadcasts by Dolores Del Rio and Paul Whiteman in 1927–8
in advance of the film’s release; it was subsequently recorded by Gene Austin
for RCA and sold two million copies (MacDonald 1998, 17). The late silent-
film era established the principle of vertical integration in which control of
a film’s production, distribution and exhibition were directly linked, and in
1929 Photoplay remarked: ‘Is the motion picture industry a subsidiary of the
music publishing business – or have film producers gone into the business
of marketing songs?’ (quoted in Mundy 1999, 51). Although sheet-music
sales flourished during the Second World War, they permanently slumped
during the boom in record sales following the introduction of the 33 13 rpm
LP by Columbia in 1948 and the 45rpm single by RCA in the following
year. The success of the recording industry at this time helped accelerate
the acquisition of record companies by film studios, and vice versa: Decca
bought Universal in 1952, then MCA bought them both in 1959, for example,
and United Artists started its own record company from scratch in 1957,
with Warner Bros., Twentieth Century-Fox and Columbia following suit a
year later so that the West Coast became a significant new rival to New York
in the recording business (J. Smith 1998, 33–4). In 1960, UA began to sell
its soundtrack albums in the foyers of movie theatres.
A few film soundtrack recordings and spin-off singles had already been
bestsellers, notably music from Spellbound (1945) and The Third Man
(1949). Success at the box office would naturally ensure huge sales of record-
ings of the song or instrumental theme in question, and main-title songs
became a simple method for film producers to ensure that their produc-
tion’s title would receive a mention whenever the song was broadcast. Elmer
Bernstein lamented that the colossal record sales of his music for The Man
with the Golden Arm in 1956 were specifically responsible for the devel-
opment of pop-oriented strategies in film music, through which a film is
scored ‘in such a way that it will make records that sell, rather than what it
does for the film . . . This trend was, I think, absolutely ruinous for the art of
film music’ (quoted in J. Smith 1998, 45). It was during the 1950s that, to
this end, singles started to be released in advance of the movies to which

they were attached. Just how lucrative effective cross-promotion could be
was shown by Saturday Night Fever in 1977, thanks largely to the busi-
ness instincts of Stigwood (who had already worked on the film versions of
the rock operas Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar, and in the 1980s would
be responsible for constantly swelling Paramount’s coffers). Fever revital-
ized the career of the Bee Gees by giving them four consecutive singles at
No. 1, thereby breaking the Beatles’ previous record of three in 1964: the
soundtrack album (which eventually sold a staggering 25 million copies)
was released six weeks in advance of the film and the individual singles were
gradually released as it took hold at the box office. Because of the adult
nature of the originally released R-rated film, a PG-rated version was also
made for TV, and so that the production could be further targeted at an
under-seventeen audience in a theatrical re-release in 1979 (Denisoff and
Romanowski 1991, 231–2). The film resulted in worldwide disco fever, and
the Bee Gees’ Robin Gibb concluded that it was more important for film
songs to be hits in their own right – or sound as if they were – than to be
dramatically appropriate to the film to which they were attached, a view with
which many producers had concurred since at least the success of American
Graffiti a few years before.
In the early 1980s, cross-promotion became a sure-hit affair once Music
Television (MTV) began to flourish as a cable and satellite service conceived
for a new generation of impressionable consumers. Launched in the USA
in 1982 and in Europe five years later, the MTV concept replaced old-
fashioned radio programming (then aimed largely at those over the age of
c.25) with slick, modern video presentations of pop songs for a younger
audience. MTV’s Executive Vice-President, Robert Pittman, stressed the
novelty of the audio-visual experience the channel offered, with its emphasis
on mood and emotion, and a distinctive style of ‘quick-edit communication’
deliberately aimed at limited attention spans (Denisoff and Romanowski
1991, 346). The medium of music video broke new ground in its ‘breakdown
of linear narrativity, of causal logic, and of temporal and spatial coherence’
(Björnberg 2000, 348), these characteristics producing a strong sense of
fragmentation and eclecticism. Exposure of such videos on MTV boosted
sales of recordings significantly, and the videos were also an ideal medium
in which to promote new films, functioning both as a trailer seen in the
home rather than the theatre, and as an appetite-whetter for a featured
song. Videos had already helped promote hits such as Joe Cocker’s and
Jennifer Warnes’s Oscar-winning ‘Up Where We Belong’ from An Officer
and a Gentleman (dir. Taylor Hackford, 1982; music by Jack Nitzsche).
In MTV’s ‘heavy rotation’ programming, a video was assured four daily
airings, a level of exposure which immediately benefited films such as
Footloose (dir. Herbert Ross, 1984) and The Breakfast Club, the former net-
ting two Academy Award song nominations and the latter’s ‘Don’t You
(Forget About Me)’ by Simple Minds topping the US charts in 1985. Typ-
ical of the mixing of pop and film iconography to promote both song and
movie simultaneously was the video of Duran Duran’s 1985 title song to A
View To a Kill, which showed the band posing as secret agents in Paris. Nev-
ertheless, Cocktail (dir. Roger Donaldson, 1988) demonstrated that more
conventional marketing strategies, in which songs and soundtrack albums
were launched only after a film’s theatrical release, could still pay significant
dividends – and even revive flagging musical careers, as happened when the
Beach Boys’ ‘Kokomo’ became a US No. 1. After the introduction of the
compact disc in the early 1980s, the new medium’s practicality and fashion-
ableness further boosted sales of soundtrack albums and film-related songs,
one of the first hits to benefit significantly from CD sales being Bill Medley’s
and Jennifer Warnes’s Oscar-winning ‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’ from
Dirty Dancing (dir. Emile Ardolino, 1987), which made No. 1 in the USA
and No. 6 in the UK in spite of its jarringly anachronistic style for a movie
purportedly set in 1963.
MTV’s vivid audio-visual style had a significant impact on cinematog-
raphy and montage on the big screen, and some of its characteristics had
already been adumbrated by Alan Parker’s film of Pink Floyd’s album The
Wall (1982), which pushed the boundaries of the rock-opera genre by
treating its central Freudian subject of a psychological isolation induced
by childhood experiences as a combination of startling animations (by
Gerald Scarfe) and a rather self-conscious artiness in live-action montage
that significantly lacked narrative-furthering dialogue. An early manifesta-
tion of the specific MTV influence came soon after in the shape of Flashdance
(dir. Adrian Lyne, 1983), with its clearly sectionalized structure, ticket sales
for which were boosted by Michael Sembello’s ‘Maniac’ videoclip on MTV;
Irene Cara’s title song ‘What a Feeling’, composed by Giorgio Moroder,
achieved the No. 1 slot in the USA (where it won an Oscar) and was also
No. 2 in the UK. The end-credit sequence of the box-office smash hit Ghost-
busters (dir. Ivan Reitman, 1984) comprised Ray Parker Jr’s title song pre-
sented in MTV style – a sequence effective enough in situ, but with the added
advantage of being ideal for wholesale excision for separate exhibition as
a promo video. Moroder, who during this period was hired by producer
Jerry Bruckheimer specifically to create potential hit songs rather than for
compelling dramatic reasons, again netted an Academy Award with his song
‘Take My Breath Away’ in Top Gun (dir. Tony Scott, 1986), an exhilarating
glamorization of the work of US Navy fighter pilots slickly edited with a deaf-
ening soundtrack; the film grossed $300 million globally, and its album went
quadruple platinum. Top Gun also benefited (as had Prince’s Purple Rain
two years earlier) from the new market in home-video sales, moving two
million units thanks to a low-price cross-promo advertising deal with Pepsi
and netting $40 million in its first week on sale (Denisoff and Romanowski
1991, 626; Thompson and Bordwell 2003, 680). In the 1990s, the flamboy-
ant audio-visual style of Australian director Baz Luhrmann directly reflected
music-video techniques, even in the hallowed realms of filmed Shakespeare
and the period musical (see Chapter 4). In addition to its impact on the big
screen, MTV’s montage style also affected mainstream TV drama, beginning
with Miami Vice (1984–9).
Pop (stars) in performance

MTV’s ascendancy quickly killed off the more traditional performance-
rooted pop films that had continued to be made on the back of the success
of A Hard Day’s Night. As Andy Medhurst notes:
television always did better pop anyway. Pop TV had no need to try to
shoe-horn the music into outdated formats, it had less rules to break and
more freedom to move, it was quick, cheap and immediate, just like the
music itself. The pop film was quicker than any other genre in poaching
personnel and learning tricks from TV . . . but its attempts to keep pace
were doomed to failure . . . The truly cinematic option, the arty Pop Art
knowingness kickstarted by Catch Us If You Can [US title Having a Wild
Weekend; dir. John Boorman, 1965], led only to a declining spiral of
self-referentiality and pretension, a hermetically sealed, gestural cinema that
imploded into Performance [dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1970] – a key film of its
times, to be sure, but scarcely worth five seconds of Mick Jagger singing
“Honky Tonk Women” on [BBC TV’s] Top of the Pops. (Medhurst 1995, 69)
Performance had undoubtedly reflected ‘the self-destructiveness and

nihilism at the edges of pop music culture that were becoming evident
at the end of the 1960s’ (Donnelly 2001b, 23), while demonstrating Jagger’s
abilities as actor rather than singer.
Since the Golden Age, with the big-screen acting appearances of Frank
Sinatra and Bing Crosby, popular singers had – with varying degrees of suc-
cess – attempted to forge such dual careers for themselves. After the 1950s
the heavy emphasis on star persona in marketing individual musical careers
meant that singers were not always able or willing to submerge their per-
sonalities in acting roles, which for marketing reasons they felt needed to
remain both prominent and immediately recognizable. Among the more
successful musicians on the big screen since the 1970s have been The Who’s
Roger Daltrey (Tommy, Lisztomania), David Essex (That’ll Be The Day,
Stardust), David Bowie (The Man Who Fell to Earth, Merry Christman Mr
Lawrence), Bob Geldof (Pink Floyd The Wall), Madonna (Body of Evidence,
Desperately Seeking Susan, Evita), Prince (Purple Rain) and Sting (Dune,
Quadrophenia, Plenty). Whitney Houston’s screen debut in The Bodyguard
(dir. Mick Jackson, 1992) significantly boosted her singing career via the
film’s two Oscar-nominated songs, a No. 1 hit in the shape of her cover ver-
sion of Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ and sales of the soundtrack
album in excess of 27 million (Reay 2004, 101). If Houston clearly repre-
sented the commercial bias of pop-influenced films, at the other extreme was
Björk’s haunting contribution (in both acting and soundtrack) to Lars Von
Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000), one of the boldest and least-conventional
film projects to have featured a star pop performer. Taking the role of an
East European single mother working in 1960s America and striving to save
her son from the illness which is making her go blind, and ending her life
brutally on the gallows, Björk’s character Selma lives vicariously through the
utopian escapism of stage musicals; the film appropriately ‘combines a doc-
umentary home-video style, with its associations of simplicity, domesticity
and naturalness, with the intricate, highly stylized (“artificial”) choreogra-
phy of a thirties Hollywood musical using contemporary (post-Madonna)
pop-video techniques’ (Grimley 2005, 38). Since the 1990s less notable dual
careers have been commonplace, with minor pop stars routinely switching
between TV soap-opera roles and the recording studio and musical stage,
performing artists lending authenticity to rapsploitation films by acting in
them, and the now expected crossover between popular cultural activities
extending to the involvement of several internationally prominent foot-
ballers in minor acting roles on the big screen.
As fictional films featuring pop groups or showcasing the talents of
individual singers dwindled, the documentary genre nevertheless produced
occasional portraits of real-life musicians that attained creative excellence.
In the mid-1960s the Direct Cinema movement, an offshoot of photojour-
nalism, ensured that several of these films achieved a fresh cinéma-vérité
style (Thompson and Bordwell 2003, 483–5). Early examples were made
by the Maysles brothers, who filmed What’s Happening! The Beatles in New
York (1964) and the Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter (1970),
and by a team lead by directors Don Pennebaker and Richard Leacock,
whose Don’t Look Back (1966) examined Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of the
UK, and Monterey Pop (made for television but released theatrically) fea-
tured Jimi Hendrix and others performing at the Californian venue in 1967.
Woodstock (dir. Michael Wadleigh, 1970) was a mammoth account of the
legendary 1969 festival important not only for its stunningly – and some-
times manipulatively – edited musical performances but also as a powerful
10.1 The eponymous heavy-metal band performs in Rob Reiner’s spoof rockumentary This is Spinal Tap (1984).
Left to right: Harry Shearer (as Derek Smalls), Christopher Guest (as Nigel Tufnel) and Michael McKean (as
David St Hubbins).
document of its era that can be read as both a social narrative and even as
a carefully structured musical (Altman 1987, 102–3). A more straightfor-
ward concert film, distinguished director Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making
Sense (1985) vividly captured Talking Heads’ David Byrne on stage at the
height of his creative powers. In Bed with Madonna (US title Madonna:
Truth or Dare; dir. Alek Keshishian, 1991) was an account of the eponymous
singer’s ‘Blond Ambition’ tour in which colour MTV-style concert perfor-
mances were intercut with more intimate vérité-style monochrome scenes
concerned with the singer’s private world.
Dramatized films based on pop stars’ lives, typically as distorted in their
romanticized portrayals of their subjects as were the many biopics set in
jazz and classical milieux (discussed elsewhere), achieved a strange blend of
verisimilitude and inauthenticity when actors re-recorded the relevant songs
themselves: examples include The Doors (dir. Olive Stone, 1991), starring
Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison; Backbeat (dir. Iain Softley, 1994) with its re-
creation of the Beatles’ singing; and Walk the Line (dir. James Mangold,
2005), featuring Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash.
Perhaps the finest rock-milieu film of all was an out-and-out par-
ody, the deliciously silly This is Spinal Tap (dir. Rob Reiner, 1984) in
which an eminently likeable and inept heavy-metal band are given a spoof
documentary profile, the film’s success aided by brilliant pastiche song per-
formances, the humour of which functions on several levels (Covach 1995),
and a soundtrack marketing campaign that itself parodied the commer-
cial strategies discussed above – down to the last detail of album cover
design and tongue-in-cheek video promos. The spoof band became a suc-
cess in its own right, making live appearances and garnering a significant cult
following.

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Cambridge Books Online

A History of Film Music

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814341

Online ISBN: 9780511814341

Hardback ISBN: 9780521811736

Paperback ISBN: 9780521010481

10 - Popular music in the cinema pp. 396-421

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814341.011

Cambridge University Press

Music of youth and race

Title songs and interpolated songs

Talkin’’ for the shop-front propositioning scene in Midnight Cowboy (dir.

Controversy arose in 1954 when Dimitri Tiomkin requested Warner Bros.

Compilation scores and original song scores

self-contained pop songs. Such scores generally avoided the accusations

Herbie Hancock) had featured The Yardbirds giving a diegetic performance

traditional film music came to be undermined, questioned and ultimately

Because the use of pre-existing hits is a safer commercial bet than

Disney’s animated musicals) to have received an Academy Award was that

this end, singles started to be released in advance of the movies to which

Pop (stars) in performance

Performance had undoubtedly reflected ‘the self-destructiveness and

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