MARC STREITENFELD

PROMETHEUS may well be my MUST SEE movie this year.

I suspect the score will be 'sound design' like, anyway I'm more interested in the film than the music.

I'll be skipping both. Litterally, no interest.

In fact, I've never cared for any of the Alien films.

Every ticket ads up.

And now Harry Gregson-Williams is apparently on board as well. Perhaps Tyler Bates could join in too, to complete the holy trinity.

Can I secretly hope that this turns out to be as good as the last time HGW randomly came on board a big-budget sci-fi film to help a quasi-RC composer (1998)?

Enemy of the State? Was that sci-fi?

...And Jablonsky apparently had something to do with the film opening too, because the track is on his film music promo

"the best action cue ever written"

...and I caught a 485Ib pike the other day but it got away.

I know

Yeah, I don't thik I know the story about 'the rock'. And as I actually really like that soundtrack, i'm interested to find it out.

Sorry if that will bring people to sigh.

Elin

PS: And Pawel if you want to tell the story in the appropriate thread (Hans Zimmer?) I'll read it there. i don't want to heist this thread.

Probably based on his additional work on Bad Boys a year earlier (and maybe with a recommendation from the Z man himself, that I don't know) the man hired first to write the score to The Rock was Nick Glennie-Smith. He took Harry Gregson-Williams as his main additional man. Glennie-Smith turned his demos in.

It turned out that Bay loved the arrangement, but hated the themes. On the verge of rejection or maybe due to Simpson (provided he was still alive at that point, the man overdosed on drugs early enough for the movie to be dedicated to him) and Bruckheimer begging him for help, Hans Zimmer was brought in to help out on it. Hans caved in and due to hyperfast schedule, he took a few composers not really famous for working for Media Ventures at the time (like Russ Landau) or other collaborators from the studio, not really known from his own scores (Don Harper was a Mark Mancina assistant at the time; he would also help out on Broken Arrow later or earlier, I only know the recording session dates for Broken Arrow).

Zimmer added one main theme (the beginning of the first cue is Zimmer on his own) and one/two secondary themes, rescored a few scenes in the movie. The score album features James Newton Howard in thank yous, the official at least version (as told by JNH's assistant Stu Thomas) is that Zimmer basically phoned him and asked if he can rip him off for a cue (that cue would be the one where the choppers start and the SEALs and our characters enter the Rock itself), to which Howard agree, the unofficial version would go that JNH actually ghostwrote the cue (officially credited to Hans) for the movie. We'll never know what happened, but Hans and JNH have been friends since Hans borrowed and helped program synthesizer sounds for Waterworld, when it was Howard who asked for help (a friend of mine has a theory that Hans actually ghostwrote the theme playing in Deacon's Speech, but while nice, it's not something I would seriously believe until given some more proof than a stylistical similarity to an anthem).

Harry Gregson-Williams kept doing the additional music for the movie and some of his cues are retained on the album (namely Rocket Away is a big cue by him). After the movie was done Hans asked for his name to be taken from the film credits (as he would point out later "it was always Nick's score"), but Bruckheimer refused to comply, so the FILM credits state Music Composed by Nick Glennie-Smith and Hans Zimmer.

Glennie-Smith compiled the album and to the composer's shock added Harry Gregson-Williams (who has the prominent, and actually single, additional music credit in the movie) to the main credits (Music Composed and Arranged by Nick-Glennie-Smith, Hans Zimmer and Harry Gregson-Williams).

Now to my theory. Nick Glennie-Smith hasn't composed much since working on The Rock. Basically he built a pretty steady relationship with Randall Wallace (more famous - or in the latter case rather INfamous - for his Braveheart and Pearl Harbor scripts), for whom he scored all his directorial outputs. Glennie-Smith right now is happy conducting the RCP scores and doing some "ace-in-the-sleeves" additional music help mostly for Hans. They have been friends since late 70s.

I think the reason for it was that the work on The Rock was a traumatic experience for the composer, which is a pity.

Sadly, Ramin Djawadi keeps actively doing scores after Hans had to pull off the same trick when Djawadi's Iron Man score was on the verge of rejection and Hans and a team of four other composers went in to save the project. If anyone likes the first track from the Iron Man score... That's Hans.