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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Profitability of HBO mini-series?

arrinick said:
"According to VB research, the miniseries has raked in some $168 million in DVD revenue (at $119.98 SRP per set)--in a little more than four months. Making back that reported $120 million budget? No problem."

That should give you an idea....
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It does indeed. Thanks. Where did you get that quote?
 
Thanks for posting the link Tom; I am a huge BoB fan. Hanks and Spielberg spearheading the project was a match made in heaven with SPR.
 
Craig Ryan said:
hogwash man.

Zimmer has written some of the most exciting,heart pounding scores of all time.
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Which basically all go back to Richard Wagner. For Melodramatism he is pathetic enough though. Well, I'm not the simple minded Jerry Bruckheimer fanatic.
 
The Thin Red Line is a beautiful score.
 
Yannick Hagman said:
Which basically all go back to Richard Wagner. For Melodramatism he is pathetic enough though. Well, I'm not the simple minded Jerry Bruckheimer fanatic.
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But virtually all movie music comes out of Wagner, Stravinsky, Mahler and Puccini, and the engine of virtually all movies is melodrama. You could even say Wagner and Stravinsky wrote the most beautiful movie music ever, though not for the movies.

Reject this heritage, and what's left?
 
A lot of these guys simply do too much composing as well, and they end up falling back on familiar themes. Horner is supremely guilty of that.

But with Zimmer, on The Thin Red Line, he was pushed by Malick and had a lot of time to do it. He spent more than a year composing that score, and said it was the most difficult and rewarding of his life. Horner probably did something similar with his Braveheart score, which he's been ripping off from himself ever since.
 
Tom said:
The Thin Red Line is a beautiful score.
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Okay, you got me on that one.

I often find him falling back on the same theme though. If it's Lion King, The Rock or whatever. Maybe I have heard the stuff too much, because it's in nearly every trailer.

Melodrama is widely spread in hollywood movies, I agree. Sometimes I feel like to see something more diverse and not exactly what the composer or director wants the audience to feel like. Thin Red Line is a good example for a more open interpretation.

I actually like Max Richter a lot.
http://www.maxrichter.com/
 
I think clint mansell is the most impressive newcomer to music scoring. A lot of his stuff is totally unlike anything I've heard before.

Keep in mind that with The Thin Red Line, Zimmer was forced to score that picture without even having seen it, even a rough cut. He had to compose in a more traditional way.
 
Tom said:
The Thin Red Line is a beautiful score.
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It was so good, in fact, he could have dispensed altogether with the voice-overs.... You have to wonder if the studios insist on it, or if he really likes those stream-of-consciousness musings.
 
I don't know much about film composing, but it occurs to me that if a composer is handed a finished cut of a film and told, "Here, score this," it might be easy to fall into a situation where you are doing kind of a "paint by numbers" thing, a form of connect the dots, instead of having to dig deep for the bigger, abstract themes that more traditional composing can produce.

jpp, voiceovers are part of Malick's cinematic language. they are as important to his films as the images and music - it alls ties together, which is why he has to spend years editing.
 
Tom said:
jpp, voiceovers are part of Malick's cinematic language.
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That's just it! I don't think they are. To my ear, it's extraneous and often intrusive.

The Badlands voice-over worked very well. Days of Heaven, less so. After that, I wished he just turned it off.

One man's opinion, anyway.
 
Like you say, art is in the eye of the beholder.

One example of how much effort Malick puts into tying these three things together - music, image and voiceover - can be found by comparing the original (Oscar screener) cut of The New World, to the later, more refined theatrical version. The amount of attention to detail here is mind-boggling to me.

Original:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbEf4J6HXyk

Theatrical:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn7hHKVrTMY

Malick was forced to rush out the Oscar screener, but given a couple extra months, I think the shorter cut actually flows more artistically.
 
Yannick Hagman said:
Melodrama is widely spread in hollywood movies, I agree.
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Art films too! Even the masters of abstraction and understatement.

What you may really be objecting to is manipulative musical scores, cheating to get effects that were unachieved by the filmmaking itself. Or undeveloped musical taste in the filmmakers. Bernard Hermann used to complain that the only director he ever worked with, with even rudimentary understanding of music was Orson Welles.

But this is a long way from HBO dvd revenues.
 
jpp said:
What you may really be objecting is manipulative musical scores, cheating to get effects that were unachieved by the filmmaking itself.
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It seems like this could be the result of someone trying to score a film that is already cut.
 
jpp said:
Art films too! Even the masters of abstraction and understatement.

What you may really be objecting to is manipulative musical scores, cheating to get effects that were unachieved by the filmmaking itself. Or undeveloped musical taste in the filmmakers. Bernard Hermann used to complain that the only director he ever worked with, with even rudimentary understanding of music was Orson Welles.
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Orchestra music almost always becomes to dominant for me. That manipulation doesn't stop with the score. I could say the same thing for direction or cinematography of Jerry Bruckheimer flicks. You don't even have to press the mute button to become aware of the fact that you are watching nothing more than an expensive soap opera.

But this is a long way from HBO dvd revenues.
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True. :)
 
Yannick Hagman said:
Which basically all go back to Richard Wagner. For Melodramatism he is pathetic enough though. Well, I'm not the simple minded Jerry Bruckheimer fanatic.
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"Damn fool, I KNEW you were going to say that!"

Sorry Yannick, don't take this personally but you've just personified a real pet peeve of mine.

I'm quite annoyed that whenever the topic of film composers comes up, Wagner undoubtedly will come up; look, we all know Wagner, Ravel, and the rest of the Romanticism age composers were the original innovators of romantic themes and melodramatic material. But to refute the works of modern artists is just folly. Are we to discredit every other type of artist for reusing the same techniques as their formers as well? I wouldn't think so; if they are successful in creating an appropriate mood to what's on screen and making the music more of a subconscious part of the whole film, then they are doing their job. There's a difference between rehashing, and obvious homage as well. I've yet to hear a composer truly rehash another composer's work to the extent that's described often.

Most of Zimmer's body of work happens to fall in the area of action spectacle blockbusters, so for the most part, his work is going to be of a similar nature; larger than life, long chord progressions, then fast 3/4 time signatures, percussive beats, and of course a monstrous bass. Zimmer has clearly defined his style; just as John Williams, Goldsmith, Herrmann, etc. In most cases, Zimmer probably was instructed to do what he does best, and not deviate. In some cases, like The Thin Red Line, he obviously was given some liberty. We just have to remind ourselves that composers are not always given 100% liberty to do what they want, they have to listen to the filmmakers for what THEY want.

/end rant
 
I'm not aware of any composer, who copies from Wagner as excessively as Zimmer in a way that almost gets borring enough to avoid the movies altogether. If you said patriotic action spectacle I could have made up an analogy to Leni Riefenstahls propaganda movies. But although it's funny that many US citizens and more than a hand full of Germans still feel attracted by the concept of it, he surpasses successfully my understanding of any kind of homage. He surely must earn a lot of money with it. But as an artist he isn't close to a guy like Max Richter (a young composer who is probably half his age) in my opinion.
 
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