The Coolest Job in the World
There are days when I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming. To be able to do what you love and be paid for it is well…..COOL. However there are also times when even i go green with envy at what other people do for a living and I’m not talking bout Ron Jeremy here or how much money they make. That’s not really why most of us do what we do. We could be making a lot more money doing something else.
Michael Mann said it best in “Heat” during that incredible coffee table scene between Pacino and DeNiro which has to be one of the most awesome scenes in the history of cinema.
Vincent Hanna: I don’t know how to do anything else.
Neil McCauley: Neither do I.
Vincent Hanna: I don’t much want to either.
Neil McCauley: Neither do I.
Fucking incredible innit ? And I invoke Michael Mann here for a reason which is entirely germane to the theme of this post.
The job in question I refer to is that of Music Supervisor or Consultant. It pays a shitload of money and it’s literally too good to be true. Lemme explain how it works.
In the world of American films (Studio and Indie), TV and Commercials there is a tendency to use pre-existing music rather than getting music specially composed for the project. The reasons are myriad and varied. It’s not a new trend and some of the most acclaimed filmmakers eschew new music in favor of existing music. The biggest name that comes to mind immediately is the revered Stanley Kubrick. Who can forget the use of Richard Strauss’ “Thus Spake Zarathustra” as a musical motif in the legendary “2001″ or “We’ll meet again” juxtaposed over images of nuclear holocaust in “Dr Strangelove”. Kubrick however generally stuck to classical pieces.
It wasn’t until the 1960’s with the release of “Easy Rider” which had a soundtrack comprising almost exclusively of contemporary rock n roll music that the movement became a revolution. My fav track on it is kinda cliched now with but who doesn’t like Steppenwolf”s “Born to be Wild” ? “Easy Rider” was revolutionary in so many ways and paved the way for what is undisputably the best period in American cinema ever.
Today’s titans like Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson go one step further. Not only do they use their fav songs but they write it into the script itself. That’s the reason music in their films feels so organic and natural. Evidence in support being “Bang Bang” in “Kill Bill” and “Wise Up” in “Magnolia”. The picturization of “Wise Up” still blows me away every time I see it. No wonder PTA went on to drink everyone’s milkshake in cahoots with Daniel Day Lewis.
Coming back to uber-Mann who has taken marrying indelible images with unforgettable music to dizzying heights with both specially composed as wells as found music. Witness the almost completely dialog bereft climatic fight in “The Last of the Mohicans” set to Randy Edelman’s incredible score for an instance of the former and Moby’s “God moving over the face of the waters” in “Heat”‘ for and example of the latter.
Moby is one artist whose body of work is so vast and deliciously ambigous coz of the ambient element inherent in his music that he’s a director’s delight. What could be a better an example of the usage of the very kickass ”Extreme Ways” as the theme song for the entire Bourne trilogy. I mean to use the same song over all three closing credits means that the song has the theme of the film down cold and it pretty much did.
The reason the trend hasn’t caught up in India yet is that we didn’t even have a music industry outside of film soundtracks up until very recently. I remember seeing Strings “Sar kiye yeh pahar” as the first ever hindi/urdu rock video ever on MTV. It’s a situation unlike anywhere else in the world where film soundtracks play a minor role in the industry. I think the Indian situation is really cool coz a lot of times good music salvages bad films. I’ve gone to see hindi films so many times just coz I loved a song and just had to see it on the big screen. If a film is great then an awesome item number just makes it even more fun. I mean how fucking cool is “Koi jaaye toh le aaye” from “Ghatak” ?
But what does all this have to do with the the coolest job ? Well Michael Mann used Mogwai, Linkin Park and Goldfrapp in addition to Moby for “Miami Vice” and he probably had a music supervisor / consultant shortlist some artists and songs for him to listen. That my friends is the coolest job in the world.
Imagine getting paid to explore and discover new music from diff genres and setting them to visuals. In the feature film world the director has more time to spend over what kind of music he would like but in commercials and TV the turnaround time is so short that the music supervisor’s work becomes more important.
What’s really cool is how the usage of an artist’s song in a commercial or TV show just skyrockets their profile. The second “Chasing Cars” was used in Grey’s Anatomy their popularity went through the roof. It exposes new music by relatively unknown bands to a new audience whom they would have probably never reached before.
One of my fav bands right now is an indie group called Shiny Toy Guns and I came across them when one of their songs “Le Disko” was used for a Motorola commercial. I liked the song so much I checked out the rest of their debut album and it was even better than that song. I had “Don’t cry out” on loop for days at a stretch.
But this isn’t as easy as it seems. It takes a lot of thought to marry music and visuals. The hallmark of great cinematic imagery is the use of juxtaposition of sound and images. Juxtaposition is what seperates the great from the ok and so so. Music and dialog should never be on the nose. If a person is feeling sad then him talking bout it makes it and normal and somewhat boring. Him talking about something else altogether makes it great drama.
Let’s take a case study of a commercial for a car and the brief given is to use classic rock n roll. Now if someone were to say Deep Purple the first song that would pop into your head would be “Highway Star” to emphasise certain qualities of the star. Acceptable but somewhat generic. But now what if one were to use “Hush” instead ? Juxtaposition though largely invisible unless you know what you are looking for affects our subconscious in so many ways. Ever wonder why PTA used harsh discordant electronic music in a period piece ? The opening dialog free 20 mins of “There Will be Blood” is pure genius.
The most recent kickass example of amazing musical juxtaposition used to layer a story and tell you things about the character is the last 5 mins of the pilot episode of the now cancelled series “New Amsterdam”. It literally blew me away. The show is basically about this guy who has been cursed/ blessed to live forever until he finds his one true love at which point he will regain his mortality and die. When we meet him he’s been alive for 400 years and still looks 30 years old. He’s seen New York City grow from a Dutch colonial outpost to the greatest city on the planet. Currently he’s working as a Detective for the NYPD. Over the years he’s had many wives and seen his children grow old and die in front of his eyes. Yet he has never found the one who will make him mortal again which he’s desperate to be.
I love the theme of this show as it’s archetypical and found in all cultures all across the world. It’s been a source of inspiration for writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers for a long long time. Even Godard couldn’t resist himself when he used the this unforgettable bit of dialog from “Breathless”
Patricia Franchini: What is your greatest ambition in life?
Parvulesco: To become immortal… and then die.
Pretty cool huh ? Of course not once in the show is the lead character’s inevitable melancholy of losing soo many loved ones over the centuries is mentioned in dialog. Not until the final 5 mins of the pilot when Death Cab for Cutie’s “Your Heart is an Empty Room” is played against an mindblowing time lapse sequence of the evolution of NYC. I love Death Cab for Cutie and when I heard that song which is essentially aboout something else altogether used to show his state of mind I was floored. If I had a hat I would take it off to the person who came up with it.
The show is available to watch on free on hulu.com . Check it out and I guaraante you will be amazed by that one sequence and how dialogs, exposition and backstory can be rendered redundant by the power of music. That is cinematic storytelling in my opinion and the person who does that for a living has the coolest job in the world.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Speaking of Michael Mann and his choice of music, he uses Audioslave a lot in his movies. Miami Vice, Collateral for example. One of my all-time soundtrack favorite scene/music combination is the scene from Collateral when Jamie Foxx’s character stops the cab to watch the coyotes cross the road and Audioslave’s ‘Shadow of the Sun’ starts playing in the background.
wasn’t “THE GRADUATE” the first film to use pre-existing songs for their film?
donnie darko owns in this department.
Mitch: didn’t know there was a full fledged job going for this. That opening sequence of TWB is incredible.
Mitch, I’d heard that PT Anderson and Amie Mann are friends and that she’d given him her new songs to listen to. He apparently was inspired enough to kinda based the script of ‘Magnolia’ on the songs.
Love the way the songs work in the film, esp. ‘Wise Up’.
@Satchit
I’m not really into Audioslave so never noticed it before. I love the Mark Romanek video for Cochise though. Very very badass.
@Rick
If I’m not mistaken the songs for Graduate were specially written by Simon and Garfunkel or maybe not. I’m sure there must have been earlier films which used found music but Easy Rider really started the trend. I read that Hopper actually cut the film to the temp music and fell in love with it so much he kept those in place.
Nowadays it would be hideously expensive to do something like that coz of music rights. For “I am Sam” the total bill to use to Beatles catalog came to around 5 million dollars so that’s why Sean Penn had to rely on cover versions instead of the originals. In my opnion it worked out very well coz I love the Rufus Wainwright version of “Across the Universe” even more than the original.
@dabba
Never did much like the film. The scifi element in it is very weak and confusing. Kelly followed it up with a very bad script for Domino and the utterly stupefying Southland Tales.
@Subrat
In the case of TWBB loved Greenwood’s music in Bodysong so much he asked him to compose the score. He would have probably won the Oscar for it if it weren’t for the fact that they used existing pieces of music and worked on it.
@Navdeep
PTA is the man. Have u read the Boogie Nights script ? The songs and where they are gonna be played are put down on paper itself. I try to identify a key image or song for every project I’m ideating on and take that as the main inspiration. I’m sure a lot of people do it as well. It just seems so natural.
Mitch, nope, should dig that script out. Love PT Anderson’s work plus was shit jealous that he was seeing Fiona Apple (Yeah, I’ve got strange tastes in women)
Yup, pretty much use music and key images, myself.
I learnt it from you after all :-)
How does one get this job?
you deal heroin to the hollywood players
How does one get any job in Hollywood or Bollywood ? U gotta know people and u gotta be real lucky.
I was never quite able to explain to anyone why the scene in the ‘The Departed’ where Comfortably Numb plays is one of the most outstanding ones…now I can. I’ll get them to read this post.
Thanks.
That was the worst use of Pink Floyd & Comfortably Numb in the history of mankind.
agreed with Mainak. i thought it was a terrible choice of song for that situation. Even when they used it in the trailers, it just stuck out like Hrithik’s 6th finger. a case of focus on the lyrics, when the aural ambience of the piece is at a cross with the content of the scene.
Strange. I’ve been listening to Cochise for more than a year now, but I saw the video for the first time today! thanks. :-) Btw. I thought the Coen Bros. did a great job with the soundtrack of The Big Lebowski.
The highlight on the Departed soundtrack was using the Dropkick Murphys.
“Witness the almost completely dialog bereft climatic fight in “The Last of the Mohicans” set to Randy Edelman’s incredible score…”
Michael Mann actually hired Trevor Jones first, and then had Randy Edelman score other parts of the movie; Jones’s music is by far the more memorable (and it was he who did the climax).
I stand corrected. Thanks for the info.
If I’m not mistaken the songs for Graduate were specially written by Simon and Garfunkel or maybe not. I’m sure there must have been earlier films which used found music but Easy Rider really started the trend. I read that Hopper actually cut the film to the temp music and fell in love with it so much he kept those in place.