Feature filmmakers are showing an increasing willingness to give spot composers the opportunity to try their hand at scoring their movies. And many spot composers are leaping at the chance.
An interesting thing my lawyer told me as I started doing Belly [a feature film] last year is that a lot more directors and production companies are interested in working with composers coming from a commercial background, says Stephen Cullo, a freelance composer who has done the majority of his work in the New York office of bicoastal Bang. As everything becomes more of a business and more deadline and budget oriented, if youre a successful commercial composer, youre definitely used to meeting deadlines under all conditions on a daily basis. The discipline of commercials has definitely helped me out on the feature end.
As they have made the move, spot composers have been both pleased and at times dismayed at how the feature side of the music world works. It is difficult to break into, and dues have to be paid. The money can be excellent, provided the assignment is for a major studio or a high budget independent film, and terrible for low budget movies. Art often takes a back seat to commerce. And just like in the spot world, the amount of creative freedom they are allowed depends on who is hiring them.
Indie Ladder
Transitioning from spots to scoring features tends to be a progression up the indie ladder into the higher budget studio films. Few make the studio A-list and the big bucks without first paying their dues in the independent film market. Andy Milburn, president of bicoastal tomandandy, whose first feature assignment was to score the assassination scenes in director Oliver Stones JFK, is the exception.
More typical is Jeff Koz, owner/creative director at HUM Music+Sound Design, Santa Monica, who was invited by composer friend Jesse Frederick to participate in the scoring of the not-so-classic B-movie The Fanatic in the early 80s. Jesse had this contact with the director and had done a few other films for him, and basically invited me to participate in scoring a movie with him, recalls Koz.
Many land their first feature scoring assignments through music video directors or agency creatives who make the leap from advertising to features. Michael Montes, principal/creative director at Sacred Noise, New York, drew the scoring assignment for Whipped from director Peter Cohen, a former agency producer at J. Walter Thompson, N.Y. Montes also scored two other edgy indie films, The Headhunters Sister (1997) and Mugshot (1995), directed by Scott Saunders and Matt Mahurin, respectively. Saunders, is a friend who, like Montes, is active in New Yorks Lower East Side art scene.
As the long form credits accrue, the assignments tend to move up the pecking order to higher budget indies and major studio films. Milburns latest feature projects include two mainstream Hollywood efforts slated to be distributed by Polygram. One is Lakeshore Entertainments soon-to-be-widely-released Arlington Road, a thriller about a terrorist living next door, directed by Mark Pellington, who is represented for spots by bicoastal Crossroads, which also maintains an office in Chicago. The second, Waking the Dead which Keith Gordon directed for Jodie Fosters Egg Pictures, is about a politician who wins office while simultaneously experiencing a nervous breakdown.
Sacred Noise composer Robert Miller scored his first feature, the 1997 indie production Pants On Fire. A short animated film, Tightrope, which Miller scored for Scott Ross, a principal at effects house Digital Domain in Venice, recently copped an Imagina award for best film score. The Imagina showed up on Hollywoods radar and now Miller is busy making the rounds in L.A., talking with studios about upcoming projects. He is also up for another Digital Domain project, a tale about a passionate WW II love affair that is scheduled to go before the cameras later this year.
In between writing music for spots such as Nikes Los Toros and Sante Fe Kids for Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore., and writing/producing songs for brother Dave Koz CDs for Capitol Records, Jeff Koz managed to find time to score the David Elliot/Mark Huppin directed indie feature The Idea of Sex last year, and just completed work on a new ABC hour-long series due to hit the air in April.
Long-time spot composer Cullo, whose recent credits include a Revitalique spot, New Age of Beauty, via the Intuition Group, New York, scored his first feature, the aforementioned Belly, this past summer for Artisan Entertainment and director Hype Williams, one of the most influential hip hop/R&B music video directors for the past five years. Cullo has also been tapped to score the upcoming Killin Time later this year for writer turned director Adam Glass.
Andrew Sherman, principal at SFS in New York, recently completed the score for Personals, an indie feature directed by Mike Sargent. Sherman also lists Game Day, directed by Steve Klein for Core Productions, on his feature credit sheet.
Payola
According to the composers SHOOT spoke with, feature pay scales depend on who the paymaster is. Fees for scoring major studio features run from $200,000 to $1 million or more for composers on Hollywoods A-list. Indies typically pay far less. Composing fees range between a dinner and drinks for a credit card financed movie to low-six figures for the occasional $10 million budget indie prod.
While no one is complaining, composers who have scored releases for the majors caution others not to be deceived by the mid-six to seven figure fees, because all of those golden eggs dont wind up in one basket. Hollywood studios usually make the composer responsible for paying for session players and studio time, and sometimes for all or part of the cost of the final mix. The studios also tend to insist that the composer do most of the recording and finishing in facilities of their choosing on the West Coast.
For instance, Lakeshore mandated that Milburn perform the final polishing and mix the music track for Arlington Road at George Lucas Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, Calif. despite the fact that tomandandy has a West Coast studio.
Skywalker Ranch is a beautiful facility, but it aint cheap, Milburn says. Even with musicians fees and studio costs subtracted out, however, composers admit scoring big budget studio releases can prove lucrative.
Its not quite as cushy as it appears on the surface, but its pretty good, Milburn continues. There are a lot of revisions and going back and changing things at the eleventh hour. That stuff adds up.
Scoring independent films is an entirely different octave on the musical scale. By definition, indie directors and producers who come calling usuallyabut not alwaysado so with hat in hand because they lack access to Hollywoods deep pockets. The much lower fees they can offer composers reflect this fact.
Motives for accepting lousy paydays on indie films hit every point between altruism and calculated careerism. Montes, whose spot work includes credits for Mastercard and International Paper, prefers working on edgy, artistically driven films. He pays little attention to the money and has no desire to write tracks for mainstream Hollywood pictures. Miller, in contrast, has his sights set on scoring major features and takes on indie prods and shorts to build his long-form reel with the intent of catching Hollywoods eye. He sees this ambition as anything but an artistic cop out.
Michael [Montes] does prefer independent films and things that are a little more offbeat and East Coast. I dont feel so strongly about it, says Miller, whose recent commercial work includes ads for Sony and Diet Dr Pepper. I think there are a lot of great films that come out of Hollywood.
Movie Style
Composers find the process of scoring films remarkably similar to scoring spots. The client is a producer/director rather than an agency. The producer/directoralike an agencyasupplies a tape, sometimes with a temp or click track tacked on, and from there it is simply a matter of writing music to picture.
Its surprisingly similar, says Milburn, who has acted as a creative director on spots for clients such as Intel and Fanta. The length is whats different. You have the ability to use recurring elements in the music in a way thats just not available to you in a :30 or :60 window, so you wind up thinking about larger scale construction and repetition in a way that you dont at a smaller level. But thats it. Thats really the only difference.
In a lot of ways, they [features and spots] tend to be similar, Sherman concurs. Film pieces are obviously longer, and youre working off the emotion thats on the screen. You do a lot less scoring to motion and you dont do stings as much in movies.
To me music is music. If its a :30 piece or a 4 hour piece, it doesnt matter as much to me as what the piece is for, the kind of music Im getting to create and the relationship I have with the client, Koz agrees.
Miller is a contrary voice on this point. He believes that the two disciplines are radically different and much prefers the extra creative elbow room of a feature. A commercial can only capture the sensibility of one moment and try to get across strongly one emotion, he says. Sometimes commercials are filmic, but you dont have to draw upon your skills to develop characters, to get inside the counterpoint between characters. Youre really just creating a snapshot of something immediate.
What is surprising is that some composers feel they have more freedom to stretch their creative muscles in spot work than features. Milburn, with the most experience scoring big Hollywood movies (i.e. Natural Born Killers, JFK) finds scoring movies at times akin to putting on a creative strait jacket. Feature filmmakers, he says, tend to be too in love with traditional orchestral scoring.
There seems to me to be a generally more conservative approach to film scoring compared to advertising. In advertising, the creatives have learned to avail themselves of any resource, any style and genre, any way of manipulating the viewer. In film scoring in general, though our specific directors have been a little different, there are some pretty traditional ruts, Milburn explains. Another advantage spots have over features is that the work goes quick and tends to offer more variety in styles. Once a feature is in the shop, the composer has to live with the particular style for months versus spots that are in and out in a few days.
If theres anything I can pick out that I enjoy about commercials, its that theres a new thing every week. Theres always a new project coming in, a new vibe you can catch on, says Sherman.
Despite their high regard for the advantages that the commercial world has to offer, and provided the paychecks are equal, if forced to pick between the two disciplines most of the composers would leave scoring spots behind for working on featuresawith the exception of Milburn.
Im doing commercials to pay the rent. Im doing films because I like the genre. And Im doing as much of my own personal music as possible. Thats the only way I can stay emotionally balanced, Montes says.
If I could do studio features and obviously those that have a higher price tag associated with them, then Id definitely give up the commercials, says Sherman. Until youre on a level where theyre calling and depending on you for big projects, its not a lot of dough to do movies. Its a time consuming thing that works out to be a labor of love.
But, then, why choose at all?
Frankly, I think features are where my interests are strongest, and where my talents are best suited, says Miller. But, I think Ill always do commercials, especially the things I think Im suited for because Ive had a great time doing it. Being a composer in the late 20th century, there are many, many forms you can work in. The technique involved in scoring commercials is definitely different from films and concert work, but I actually believe Ill be able to do it all.k
