Volume 8, Number 8 Original Music Soundtracks for Movies & Television Rock On! pg. 10 LOVE thEBOOB TUBE Cool new music for Alias, Boomtown, Monk, Carnivàle, Penn & Teller’s B.S. FSM picks 100+ great great TTV themes plus Indiana Jones JO JOhN WIllIAMs’’ FOR FORtuNE an and GlORY Dragonslayer on DVD WORKING WORKING WIth A AlEX NORth CD Reviews A ALL THE L LAtEST $4.95 U.S. • $5.95 Canada CONTENTS SEPTEMBER 2003 DEPARTMENTS COVER STORY 2 Editorial 20 We Love the Boob Tube The Man From F.S.M. Video store geeks shouldn’t have all the fun; that’s why we decided to gather the staff picks for our by-no- 4 News means-complete list of favorite TV themes. Music Swappers, the By the FSM staff Emmys and more. 5 Record Label 24 Still Kicking Round-up Think there’s no more good music being written for tele- What’s on the way. vision? Think again. We talk to five composers who are 5 Now Playing taking on tough deadlines and tight budgets, and still The Man in the hat. Movies and CDs in coming up with interesting scores. 12 release. By Jeff Bond 7 Upcoming Film Assignments 24 Alias Who’s writing what 25 Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! for whom. 8 The Shopping List 27 Malcolm in the Middle Recent releases worth a second look. 28 Carnivale & Monk 8 Pukas 29 Boomtown The Appleseed Saga, Part 1. FEATURES 9 Mail Bag The Last Bond 12 Fortune and Glory Letter Ever. The man in the hat is back—the Indiana Jones trilogy has been issued on DVD! To commemorate this event, we’re 24 The girl in the blue dress. 11 Downbeat presenting an exhaustive analysis of the score to Indiana School of Rock. Jones and the Temple of Doom, complete with musical exam- ples and a discography. 29 Score By John Takis The latest CD reviews, including S.W.A.T., The 46 On Leathern Wings and Shiny Discs League of Extraordinary Writer/director Matthew Robbins talks about the scoring Gentlemen and Terminator process of his fantasy films Dragonslayer (released this 3: Rise of the Machines. month on DVD) and *batteries not included. By Dennis Schmidt 36 FSM Marketplace 46 The dragon in the cave. ON THE COVER: TV TUNES! Film Score Monthly (ISSN 1077-4289) is published ten times a year (with double issues in May/June and November/December) for $36.95 per year by Vineyard Haven LLC., 8503 Washington Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232. Periodicals postage paid at Culver City, CA and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Film Score Monthly, 8503 Washington Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232 FILM SCORE MONTHLY 1 SEPTEMBER 2003 EDITORIAL The Man From F.S.M. VOLUME 8 Your humble editor chimes with his favorite TV tunes. NUMBER 8 EDITORIAL STAFF his month you can read about the movies are mass-blasted to the entire world Editor & Publisher favorite TV themes of everyone on for a single weekend, while TV shows have to LUKAS KENDALL T the staff—except me. I have a few be good in order to stand out of the “vast Executive Editor psychological defects and one of them is the wasteland” of 500 channels. JONATHAN Z. KAPLAN inability to do anything halfway. Ask me to Armed with TiVo, I watch a fair number of Managing Editor make a list of my favorite TV themes and you current series: The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The TIM CURRAN might ask well ask me to list my favorite rel- Wire—essentially, everything HBO—plus The Design Director atives, or the favorite things I have ever eaten Shield, The West Wing (at least, I used to) and JOE SIKORYAK in my life—it’s that big a production. Law and Order: Criminal Intent. You could say I Supervising Content Consultant The reality is, I love have an interest in criminal justice, and it was AL KAPLAN TV themes. I have on pretty solidly reinvented for the tube some Editor-at-Large JEFF BOND numerous occasions time ago by Hill Street Blues and Law & Order in Copyeditor popped in all seven of particular. (Laws, not fisticuffs, now beat the STEVE GILMARTIN those TeeVee Toons bad guys.) Professional Listmaker albums (bad sound The only debit is that virtually none of SCOTT BETTENCOURT quality and all) and these modern-day shows have music! They Contributing Writers scanned them with have themes, but there’s an inverse relation- STEPHEN ARMSTRONG glee, stopping only ship between the quality of the show and the LUKE GOLJAN when they got to inane use of underscore—to the point where The ANDREW GRANADE sitcom themes of the Shield, The Wire and The Sopranos have no origi- STEVEN GREAVES ’90s. Some of my nal music at all. And their themes reflect a MARK GRIFFIN favorite obscure themes: John Parker’s twin world where rock and roll and not symphon- STEVEN A. KENNEDY NICK JOY opuses of Trapper John, M.D. and CHiPs ic music—or even jazz—is the dominant idiom. DARREN MACDONALD (although the Alan Silvestri second-season But that’s a whole ’nother editorial. DENNIS SCHMIDT arrangement of the latter is better); Pat JOHN TAKIS Williams’ jazz violin theme for The Days and On a related note, allow me to direct your IAN D. THOMAS Nights of Molly Dodd (for which I would stay up attention to this month’s Silver Age CD CARY WONG late just for the theme); and a whole bunch of release, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.—Volume 2. It’s cartoon stuff. There was a time in the 1980s our first CD “sequel” and we’re pleased to BUSINESS STAFF when I had an action-adventure show to bring it to you. It’s true that Volume 1 was our Editorial & Subscriptions watch on every night of the week: The A-Team, best-selling release of 2002, but mainly, pro- 8503 Washington Blvd Knight Rider, The Dukes of Hazzard—ah, such driv- ducer Jon Burlingame ran out of room on the Culver City, CA 90232 el—and Saturday morning was meant for TV first album. So we now bring you two more PH. 310-253-9595 and TV alone. discs of the jazziest, most creative series scor- FAX 310-253-9588 Twenty years later, I haven’t stopped ing of all time—by a handful of names very E-MAIL [email protected] watching TV. In fact, I watch it more nowa- familiar to TV tune aficianados. If only some- Sales & Marketing Manager days than I go to see movies. (I see so many one could hire that roster for the current sea- BOB HEBERT movies producing our CD series that it spoils son of shows... 8503 Washington Blvd my appetite.) But TV has grown up, too. In Culver City, CA 90232 the last 30 years, TV and movies have PH. 323-962-6077 switched roles: It used to be that movies had FAX 310-253-9588 Sales Associate to be good because they were released slow- DYLAN MAULUCCI ly and relied upon word of mouth to build Supervising Mail Order Handler awareness. TV, on the other hand, was con- Lukas Kendall, Editor-in-Chief MAILMAN AL trolled by three networks, and nothing had to Our Website be good because the audience was held PS: If you’re looking for TV themes that you can’t find Is updated five times weekly! hostage. (A friend of mine explained why anywhere else, check out SoundAmerica.com. The site’s Point your browser at: made-for-TV movies are no good: They don’t a bit finnicky, but the audio files are okay and you won’t WWW.FILMSCOREMONTHLY.COM have to be. By the time anyone figures out it be disappointed by the selection, that’s for sure. © 2003 Vineyard Haven LLC. stinks, they’ve got the rating.) Nowadays, http://soundamerica.com/sounds/themes/Television/ SEPTEMBER 2003 2 FILM SCORE MONTHLY NOW PLAYING RECORD LABEL ROUND-UP THE SHOPPING LIST NEWS UPCOMING FILM ASSIGNMENTS for an Oscar against his own the cult classic Ray Harryhausen Poseidon Adventure, but he lost to dinosaur western featuring Charlie Chaplin and company for Jerome Moross’ spectacular Limelight). score. They’ll also release two ■ PARAMOUNT WILL RELEASE more stop-motion monster another Williams-scored thriller, flicks, The Beast From 20,000 the Thomas Harris adaptation Fathoms (David Buttolph) and The Black Sunday, which features what Black Scorpion (Paul Sawtell, Bert is perhaps Williams’ most Shefter). Goldsmithian score. The studio ■ ON HIS WEBSITE, LEONARD will also release Captain Kronos, Maltin has reviewed FSM’s CD one of the finest productions The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Britain’s Hammer Films, (Jerome Moross) as well as some Vampire Hunter (Laurie Johnson) other labels’ CDs (including and Frankenstein and the Monster Screen Archives’ two-disc set of The Emmys Take Place! From Hell (James Bernard). Captain From Castile). ■ see www.leonardmaltin.com he Academy of Television Music Composition for a Series— WARN E R HOME VIDEO —Scott Bettencourt TArts & Sciences’ decision to Dramatic Underscore will release The Valley of Gwangi, hire multiple hosts for the general- 24 (10 p.m.–11 p.m.) ly boring 55th Annual Primetime SEAN CALLERY Emmy Awards did produce a few Main Title Theme Music Harlene Stein’s in Da (Court) House entertaining bits. Unfortunately, Monk comedian Wanda Sykes’ awkward arlene Stein, widow of film Conscience” contains “an interpo- JEFF BEAL “man on the street” celebrity Hcomposer Ron Stein, is lation” of Stein’s work, the com- interviews and wanton promotion Music Direction suing rapper Eminem and pro- poser is not credited; moreover, of her own series didn’t make the 75th Annual Academy Awards ducer Dr.