The cinetrix is still wading through the tree's-worth of printed matter that arrived in the post while she was off gallivanting over the holidays. Given her well-documented music-and-movies fixation, you can just imagine her delight upon stumbling across this Entertainment Weekly [sub. req'd] article about Wes Anderson's movie soundtracks. You know how the cinetrix loves to ramble on about the fleetingly perfect convergence of celluloid and pop song.
Anderson, an infamous micromanaging pointillist, comes in for plaudits aplenty for his exquisitely calibrated musical taste. [Quelle shocker. You could almost call him the Jon Brion of filmmaking.] In this week's Onion A.V. Club, to cite another example, Noel Murray is moved to near poetry in his review of The Life Aquatic soundtrack. But here's the bit that got me. What's the opposite of a nut graf again?
Only Anderson (or maybe Quentin Tarantino) would unearth the ethereal "Here's To You," a Joan Baez and Ennio Morricone collaboration from the forgotten 1971 biopic Sacco & Vanzetti. And only Anderson would sum up the deep sadness of a placid character by playing The Zombies' obscurity "The Way I Feel Inside," a solemn wisp of a song that rises from meek whispers to gospel certainty.
See, while it's a lovely review, that assertion's just not true. As the Entertainment Weekly piece unwittingly reveals, Anderson is far from the crate-digging auteur he allows himself to be portrayed as in the press. He's no tin ear, mind. In this, as in most other aspects of his filmmaking, he's an expert at assembling collaborators, namely music supervisor Randall Poster.
Anderson couldn't figure out how to end [Rushmore] until he heard the right song: the Faces' ''Ooh La La.'' ''Randy Poster called me and played it [emphasis added]. I thought, It's perfect! I hung up the phone and wrote the last scene with the song still playing in my head.'' Max and his unrequited love, Miss Cross, wind up dancing to the tune, giving the movie its classic, heart-wrenching ending.
Poster was recently mentioned in a post on that geeky academic list-serv the cinetrix persists in subscribing to. It seems that lad mag Giant, profiling Poster, described what a music supervisor does perfectly: "DJ for the movies, cherrypicking the songs that give heart and soul to celluloid." Assembling a mix that doesn't clear the dancefloor, so to speak, is no mean feat.
[A confession: The cinetrix has secretly wanted to be a music supervisor since reading an article about Jonathan Demme's music editor, Suzana Peric, circa Something Wild and Married to the Mob. Peric's the woman responsible for Damien Rice's song The Blower's Daughter bookending Closer. She knows her shit.]
But to get back to geeking out: The Virgin Suicides, say, wouldn't have the same hazy atmosphere without its Air-supplied soundtrack. Sofia Coppola gets the accolades and the hipster cred, but music supervisor Brian Reitzell made that magic happen. Similarly, Zach Braff is credited prominently under the CD's track listing as the executive soundtrack producer of Garden State. Read the fine print, though, and you'll see that Amanda Sheer-Demme [Ted's widow--what a fearsome musical legacy that family is accruing] and Buck Damon shared the music supervisor responsibilities that gave us Iron and Wine covering "Such Great Heights."
So why then is the work of music supervisors not discussed more often with the same hushed tones of respect granted to cinematographers? Fuckin' A: Sven Nykvist appeared as himself in a television commercial, people. The job that music editors and supervisors do is in many ways just as challenging as that of a traditional soundtrack composer, say. You try creating the right mix of music that harnesses pop's affective power without dragging its external associations into the world of the film.
The cinetrix hereby dubs 2005 the year of the music supervisor. You're all officially on notice. Respect must be paid. [Of course, any supervisor who uses "I Got You [I Feel Good]" under any circumstances whatsoever will be taken behind the woodshed.]
UPDATE: Here's Anthony Lane musing on the music in The Life Aquatic.
At one wondrous point, Steve walks the length of the boat by night, up toward the bow; something has been playing in the background, and now it flames into the open—“Life on Mars?,” in its original form, a song that has had ample time to grow cheesy, but which, by the mysterious workings of pop, has grown more triumphantly sad with the years. What matters is that Steve is still in aftershock; that first encounter with Ned has barely subsided, and all the emotional noise that was tamped down by civilized aplomb is now let loose through Bowie’s keening, interplanetary chorus. Anderson is doing the opposite of what most directors aim for: he is using music not for big, crunch-time scenes but for small, chewy scraps of experience, like a stroll on deck—not to lend them an importance they don’t deserve but to suggest that they might, in retrospect, turn out to be big after all.
