OUT OF ORDER AND FROM THE ARCHIVES: Movie Ideas That Will Make Me Rich
originally published April 28, 2009
I’m really, really tired of Hollywood constantly poking the nostalgia part of my brain in an effort to make me watch their shitty movies and TV shows.
Ever since they figured out that it’s mostly males in their 30s who spend money on entertainment, we’ve been barraged with retreads of ’80s intellectual properties: Freddy vs. Jason, Aliens vs. Predator, a new Battlestar Galactica series, the Transformers movie, the GI Joe movie, new Terminator and Knight Rider on TV, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Fraggle Rock on the big manipulative screen…the list keeps going.
Goddamn! Leave my nostalgia receptors alone!
But I think I’m gonna cash in on this nostalgia-porn craze with my own shitty re-imagining. This is solid gold. Check this out:
Coming next summer…
To a theater (theatre?) near you…
From producer Eric Summer…
Lego Airwolf vs. Karate Kid!
It’s gonna be awesome. Lego Jan-Michael Vincent and his neo-retro helicopter made entirely out of Legos, shooting little Lego bits at a middle-aged Ralph Macchio and the Weekend at Bernie’s II-style reanimated corpse of academy award nominee Noriyuki “Pat” Morita. I’m gonna make so much damn money. Everybody might as well start emailing me with suggestions on how to spend my guaranteed fortune.
Why I Don’t Do This Anymore, Part II: Eric’s Breaking Point!
by Eric Summer
When I left you, my loyal threes of readers, hanging two weeks ago, I was rambling on about potential career paths for music school graduates and how I’d arrived at the conclusion that I didn’t want to do any of them. If you remember, there was a fascinating tutorial about symphony playing, chamber music, weddings, and studio playing. If you don’t remember the “fascinating” aspect, then you’re just not remembering it right. I’m pretty sure I put “fascinating” in there somewhere. It’s OK if you don’t remember; memory can be a funny thing. I won’t fault you for it.
Anyway, I’d neglected at that point to mention one interesting offshoot of studio playing, which is called “sidelining.” That’s when some movie or TV show or commercial needs an orchestra on-screen, and the music has already been recorded. It’s basically just musical pantomime. You just fake playing along to the recorded track. I did a few of those–a few music videos and a car commercial or two, I think. The best money I ever made was on a sidelining gig. On the flipside, a different sidelining gig was pretty much the penultimate straw for me as a professional musician. Let me describe it for you: it was a music video for a John Legend song, directed by the acclaimed director Kanye West, so there was already a talent-vacuum in the room that could have snuffed out the creative fire of Beethoven, John Lennon, and Stephen Spielberg combined. But that wasn’t really what set me off, nor was the grand-canyon-sized disparity between the amount of money the sideliners were paid and the middle-finger-shaped pile of gold the Kanye-Legend juggernaut no doubt made on the deal. It was just one guy who did it, but he was a guy I was familiar with in many forms over the course of hundreds of gigs. It was Professor Cranio-rectum (real name unknown). This was a guy who didn’t know what he was talking about, but wanted everybody on the gig to know he really had something to show us rookies. So he advanced the notion that since we were playing pop music, we shouldn’t use vibrato. There was no vibrato in pop music, according to the Professor. (more…)
Why I Don’t Do This Stuff Anymore (Part I)
So, what does one do when one’s just finished a degree or two in music? It may come as a surprise, but the combination of writing sort-of-amusing internet columns, doing a sort-of-amusing internet radio show, and crowbarring an instrument usually exclusive to classical music into an indie-rock context, all largely pro bono, are not among the standard career paths for music school graduates. Can’t imagine why, really, but “Musical Polemics 401,” “Handjob Jokes: A Musicological Primer,” and “Smoke Your Way to a Radio Voice” are not on the curricula of most accredited music schools. But with music schools churning out eager graduates at the rate of hapless thousands each year, all of whom are forced to compete with previous years’ hapless thousands for about four jobs nationwide, one has to get a bit creative if one doesn’t want to end up blowing that treasure trove of musical information out the back of one’s head and all over that nice clean diploma. See, music schools exist for those one or two people in every class who are freakish prodigies, or attractive and marketable (by classical-musician standards, at least)(the really lucky ones are both), but one or two people’s tuition money just ain’t enough to keep any kind of school running–even at USC prices. So they have to sell the hopeful, starry-eyed rank-and-file on the idea that they too can make a career out of something only a lucky few people can make a career of. At least until the checks clear, and then they’re on their own. So, as one of the rankest and filiest, before I settled on my chosen field of Doing Musical Stuff For Free (But Also With Complete Autonomy), I tried just about every standard path to post-music-school glory. Following is a list of them, and the reasons they eventually made me want to vomit. (more…)
A Heartwarming Autobiographical Confession
A Heartwarming Autobiographical Confessional Story of Personal Growth and the Overcoming of Fierce Obstacles and Adversity against Overwhelming Odds on the Path to Artistic Glory and Fame beyond Imagining
The effective confessional autobiography is something few people can pull off convincingly. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk–do jokes diminish it? Does a tone of humility make it sound false? Is there too much self-importance in it to be effective? But whatever the consequence, which may involve people typing “fail” onto a computer somewhere, I think I’m gonna have to attempt a little bit of it. Because in a few days (at least a week ago, by the time this sees the light of computer screens across the internet), my first viola teacher will be 100 years old, and the reaching of an age one can, without grammar-fascist reprisal, type in numeral form (instead of spelling it out in words) is a pretty significant event.
The natural impulse in describing one’s childhood, I think, is probably to begin with a description of the hometown. But I’m discarding that straight away as being too Garrison Keillory. Suffice to say that I now live in Los Angeles, in an apartment with an infant shrieking from the next apartment over, and I used to live in Montana, where most of the shrieking was coming out of my chosen instrument. When I was ten years old, I was lucky enough to live in a place where the school system had a decent orchestra program. My ten-year-old brain immediately sensed that orchestral musicianship was the most obvious route to worldwide fame and riches beyond imagining, free cocktails at exclusive parties thrown by the cultural elite, and food that didn’t come from a microwave oven, so naturally I signed up. I had to choose an instrument, and after hearing Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, I decided to choose the ginger stepchild of the orchestra–the one that even the bassists and tuba players had jokes about. It wasn’t just that I was uncool enough to be in the orchestra; I picked arguably the uncoolest of all the instruments in it. Not even uncool enough to be cool: the viola sprints through uncool, races past cool, and arrives solidly back at uncool again.
But whatever! At ten, my thumb-thick tortoiseshell glasses and favorite pink polo shirt were more than enough to ensure my place in the Pantheon of Uncool. No point in worrying about the subtle gradations. We’re talking about ART here, not reality-show stardom. So with my status affirmed as a social and musical pariah, I needed a teacher. (more…)
Music as Background Noise
Damn You, Hollywood. Again.
Cast your mind back a few weeks. The air was cleaner, the world made sense, and herds of adorable golden retriever puppies roamed the streets spreading good will. And a younger, fresher-faced Eric Summer wrote an internet column which happened to mention that he thought most people didn’t really like music all that much–that they regarded it as little more than background noise.
Well, the long weeks have passed, and I have spent my time in quiet contemplation as I’ve grown older, and I think I have it pinned down as to why people think of music as background noise. As is usually the case in these matters, I blame Hollywood.
This train of thought began, as most of my trains of thought do, with Star Wars. I was driving home from work one day and I heard John Williams’ Star Wars score on the radio. I was happy to hear it. I like Star Wars. A lot. And as I listened, I realized I remembered exactly where most of the dialogue from the movies fit with the score. It was uncanny. So I drove on home, quoting Star Wars happily to myself and thinking. And then it dawned on me, clear and bright as a summer cliché: this score is inextricably tied with the movie it belongs to. It is simply impossible to separate the two. Any merit it has as a piece of music is completely dependent upon the pictures that go with it.
Which is not to say that it’s ineffective; far from it. It is a wonderful movie score, filled with memorable themes and underlining the emotional context of each scene it supports. But it doesn’t work without the movie. (more…)