In a sense, it’s an old story, the struggle between the artists and the businessmen who run the movie industry the plight of those whose vision has inspired and crafted a motion picture and the heavy-handed interference of those whose interests deal only with profit margins and maximum yield the conflict between artistic integrity and the business-sense the movie industry needs in order to maintain itself. What follows, then, is a look at and behind the scoring of LEGEND, from the perspective of all three primary participants. However, Hollywood correspondent David Kraft brought to our attention an interview with Goldsmith about the LEGEND score in the Los Angeles Reader, which author Jonathan Benair has kindly allowed us to reprint. Goldsmith declined our invitation for an interview, apparently out of an understandable mixture of displeasure regarding the whole incident and a desire to move onto further projects. Ridley Scott was queried by our British correspondent, David Stoner. Edgar Froese was interviewed by our editor via telephone from his studio in Berlin. Both scores are available on record, Tangerine Dream’s on MCA and Goldsmith’s on an independent British label named Filmtrax (and already out of print).ĬinemaScore decided to investigate the LEGEND score and the developments leading to Goldsmith’s evisceration, yet keeping an open-minded interest in the approach taken by Tangerine Dream to create their own musical expression. Happily the music this group provided for the film was highly effective, per-haps their best work for films thus far, even though the visual style of the film seemed much more suited to the airiness of Goldsmith’s score. And what may have been lost, cinematically, will matter to really only a small few.Īmong the few are the hardcore film music fans, many of whom approached the rescored LEGEND with a strong prejudice against the Tangerine Dream score. The films will yield bountifully and the records will sell mightily, and the executives will rest upon the wisdom of their decisions and the practice will continue everlastingly. Most moviegoers will probably never know these things, or care. It was one more textbook case of studio commercial-minded heavy-handedness interfering with the artistic representation of a filmmaker, rein-forcing a disturbing trend toward blatant commercialism that has become all-too prevalent in contemporary moviemaking. One source close to the film claimed the Goldsmith score was removed and replaced with Tangerine Dream in order to make the film more “accessible” to the teenage movie-going audience.įilm music fans were outraged, and Goldsmith himself was none too pleased about it. The film was released by 20th Century Fox in England and Europe with the Goldsmith score, but audiences in America and Japan, where the film was distributed by Universal, heard a completely different score, by the German electronic band, Tangerine Dream. Originally, Jerry Goldsmith provided a lush symphonic score utilizing strings, woodwinds and a striking use of choir, a score that the composer, and not a few of his colleagues including Ridley Scott himself, felt was among Goldsmith’s best work. Larsonįew film scores have aroused such controversy among moviegoers as that of Ridley Scott’s 1986 fantasy, LEGEND. Text reproduced by kind permission of the editor and publisher, Randall D. Originally published in CinemaScore #15 (Spring / Summer 1987)
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