Stupid stupid Hollywood executives!
May. 16th, 2004 03:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rosiesparkI kept seeing references to James Horner's score for Troy and going huh? Wasn't Gabriel Yared credited for the score in the trailers I'd seen? Well, it seems Yared was contracted in early 2003 by the studio (Warner) to write the score, and spent almost a year writing and recording, working closely with Wolfgang Peterson. And was then replaced at the last minute, a month and a half before the release of the film, following a test screening at which a "focus group" decided his music was too "overpowering and too big, old-fashioned and dated the film".
Now I haven't seen the film yet, but I can't see how a score lovingly crafted over a period of a year, working in collaboration with the film's director, can possibly be ditched in favour of something cobbled together in the last month. No wonder I've been hearing negative comments about the score! James Horner's previous scores don't rate very highly for originality - some of the music for Enemy at the Gates, frex, was uncomfortably close to pieces from Titanic. And anyone who can cobble together a film score in little more than a month seems to me to deserve to be called a hack! And the director's a wimp for letting this happen - if he was happy with the score while it was being developed, he should have stuck to his guns and told the studio to go to hell. Dammit, I love Gabriel Yared's music for The English Patient, and was really pleased he was doing Troy.
Extracts from Yared's unfinished score and his account of the debacle can be found here. He also talks about his inspirations for the music he wrote, some of which sound fascinating. ::mourns lost score::
Now I haven't seen the film yet, but I can't see how a score lovingly crafted over a period of a year, working in collaboration with the film's director, can possibly be ditched in favour of something cobbled together in the last month. No wonder I've been hearing negative comments about the score! James Horner's previous scores don't rate very highly for originality - some of the music for Enemy at the Gates, frex, was uncomfortably close to pieces from Titanic. And anyone who can cobble together a film score in little more than a month seems to me to deserve to be called a hack! And the director's a wimp for letting this happen - if he was happy with the score while it was being developed, he should have stuck to his guns and told the studio to go to hell. Dammit, I love Gabriel Yared's music for The English Patient, and was really pleased he was doing Troy.
Extracts from Yared's unfinished score and his account of the debacle can be found here. He also talks about his inspirations for the music he wrote, some of which sound fascinating. ::mourns lost score::