Wednesday 26 January 2005

Fox Music chief urges better film tunes

Movie studios must take some of the blame for the decline in popularity of film soundtrack albums, the president of Fox Music said Tuesday. "After the success of Titanic, soundtrack albums were made for every film, and songs were crow-barred into films," Robert Kraft said during a panel discussion at the Midem music market. "Soundtracks were bogus. Songs are often just marketing vehicles, and the music gets forgotten. The music must serve the film."

The Grammy-nominated song soundtrack to the movie "Garden State" has been a recent success, but Kraft said it was because the featured tracks were particular to the film. "The director (Zach Braff) picked all the songs himself," he said.

Panelist Jason Bentley, who is a disc jockey on Los Angeles radio station KCRW-FM and also works as a film music supervisor ("The Matrix"), said the soundtrack to "Garden State" succeeded where "Spider-Man 2", for example, did not. "You need music that's organic to the film and that resonates and makes people feel the movie. Garden State did that," Bentley said.

He said that the soundtrack to the first "Matrix" film was a mix of songs by Prodigy and Rage Against the Machine and a score by Don Davis. It sold well but the two-CD set issued for the sequel, which featured one album of songs and one of score, didn't do well and the third "Matrix" film, which was all orchestral, did worse still.

Writer-director Wolfgang Becker, who completed the panel, said that while his film "Good Bye Lenin!" had 6.6 million admissions in Germany, its score by Yann Tiersen was not popular. "It did not catch on at all and I don't know why. It was strange because you heard Yann's score for Amelie everywhere. I even heard it at the Moscow airport," Becker said.

Kraft said that trailers for movies had become popular ways for songs to get exposure but it was the studio's marketing department and not the film department that made the decision. "I wanted Mariah Carey for a film once but she wouldn't do it unless I promised that she'd be in every trailer. That was something I could not promise, so she wasn't in the film," Kraft said.

He said that licensing tracks remained a problem. "We wanted a specific song that we knew would play in a film seven times, so it would be heard a lot. The one we had in mind would have been perfect, so we went to the artist and the publisher and they said 'No way'. The artist said it would cheapen the copyright," said Kraft.

(Reuters/Hollywood Reporter)



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