Battle of Los Angeles

Millions of dollars and years of pre-production planning, filming, and post-production refinement went into the massive sci-fi blockbuster BATTLE: LOS ANGELES, currently storming theaters across the country; only a small fraction of that expense and time was lavished on its pretender, BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES. Arriving on home video today after a March 12 premier on the SyFy Channel, BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES was made by The Asylum, a movie production company known for making “mockbusters” – low-budget films synthesized quickly to capitalize on the release of the larger films they are imitating. Unlike some of its brethren, however, BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES brought its own style and entertainment quotient to the small screen, like it or not.

The Asylum’s mockbusters are mostly denigrated as quickie knock-offs – in which Spielberg’s WAR OF THE WORLDS begat The Asylum’s H. G. WELLS’ WAR OF THE WORLDS, Stephen Sommers’ VAN HELSING begat The Asylum’s WAY OF THE VAMPIRE, Peter Jackson’s KING KONG begat The Asylum’s KING OF THE LOST WORLD, Michael Bay’s TRANSFORMERS begat The Asylum’s TRANSMORPHERS, Roland Emmerich’s 2012 begat The Asylum’s 2012 DOOMSDAY, Guy Ritchie’s SHERLOCK HOLMES began The Asylum’s SHERLOCK HOLMES, wherein the master detective battles robot dinosaurs – and so on. Despite their frequent critical lambasting, the recurring comparison of The Asylum and SyFy Channel original movies with the B-movies of the 1950s is an apt one, and these cheesy new features fill a place for low-rent cinema among an eager audience of undemanding moviegoers and monster fans.

One area of The Asylum’s films that can usually be admired is that of music. While synthetic and artificially created, their musical scores are notable for their epic verisimilitude and ability to build excitement even in the midst of hackneyed dialog, less than stellar performances, and bargain basement CGI. With BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES, the high-energy and broadly played musical score of Kays Al-Atrakchi and Brian Ralston gives the film a great deal of its muscle and energy.

Kays Al-Atrakchi

Born in Florence, Italy, Kays Al-Atrakchi grew up in Orlando, Florida, switching from an early career in rock and roll and a songwriting partnership with Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas into what he felt was the more secure job field of film music. He moved to Los Angeles in 2004 and has maintained a productive scoring schedule ever since with more than forty feature films, shorts, documentaries, and video game scores to date. His music for CUTTING ROOM (2006), Ian Truitner’s serial killer comedy, earned the Best Soundtrack award at the Milan International Film Festival, and his moody scores for ALIEN RAIDERS (2008) and MIDNIGHT SON (2011) have also been favorably noted.

“I’ve been involved with a lot of horror films and thrillers, but these films generally want an intimate type of scoring and often require what I would describe as a ‘sound design-y’ type of scoring,” said Kays. “BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES offered a great opportunity to just go nuts with a full orchestra, to really let loose and do something that quite honestly I don’t get to do very often.”

Brian Ralston actually started out with a degree in biochemistry, working for a neurologist until he discovered his true passion lay not in the chemical processes of organic matter but in the compositional processes of original music. He put his degree on the shelf and began studying film music at the University of Arizona under film/TV composer Jeff Haskell, completing his graduate studies at the University of Southern California with composers such as Christopher Young and the late Elmer Bernstein, David Raksin, and Buddy Baker. Brian was called in by composer Robert Kral to compose additional music for the fourth season of TV’s ANGEL in 2002, which led to a small handful of feature film scoring assignments, with BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES being one of his most significant so far.

“The Battle of LA score is a very different score than anything I had done in the past,” echoed Ralston. “It also was an opportunity to spread my wings a little bit compositionally, and to try to do some things that I hadn’t done before. There’s one thing I don’t want to do is get typecast into a very specific genre of film. I need to develop my sound as my career develops, but at the same time I don’t want to always be known for one genre of film. So doing a sci-fi action movie that’s pretty bombastic was an opportunity to do that.”

BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES director Mark Atkins had known Kays Al-Atrakchi for some time, but they hadn’t had the chance to work together until Adler got the green light to bring Kays into The Asylum’s version of BATTLE. Knowing the amount and type of music needed, and familiar with the abbreviated timeline the Asylum production would afford him, Kays brought in his friend Brian Ralston, suggesting they collaborate and score the movie together.

“I think it actually was a blessing that we had each other to cover everything, because it is pretty much wall-to-wall music,” said Ralston. “I think it’s a 90-minute film with 89-and-a-half minutes of music!

“I also felt very strongly that my style and Brian’s style were very complementary,” added Kays. “I thought that we could work together because we could probably create a score that seamlessly blended from one cue to the next without feeling like it was two separate composers.”

Working together on BATTLE seemed to replicate the process by which classic Universal B-movies of the 1950s like THIS ISLAND EARTH and IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE were scored, with a team of composers banded together to create compatible film music on deadline. Universal’s composers usually were assigned to score specific reels of film, with two or more composers leapfrogging through the reels until all work was done; Al-Atrakchi and Ralston, on the other hand, tried to integrate their work so that each of their efforts would seamlessly permeate the soundtrack.

“For the most part we tried to space out our cues so that it wasn’t me doing a reel and then Kays doing a reel,” explained Ralston. “There were sections in the film where I might have had a very long section or a cue and Kays might have had another very long section or cue following it, but for the most part we tried our best to alternate what we were doing so that my creative input and his creative input were splattered throughout. And that gave the score a lot of balance, as opposed to the first half being one person and the second half being another person.”

Although BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES was made under the shadow of Jonathan Liebesman’s big-budget Columbia Pictures of BATTLE: LOS ANGELES, the composers never referenced or discussed what was happening with that film or its large-scaled score (composed by Brian Tyler), nor was there a temporary score that either of them had to face in determining their approach to scoring BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES.

“I didn’t even know that there was a studio-produced BATTLE OF LA until we were well into this project!” said Kays. “That shows how out of touch I am! Then I saw a billboard somewhere and I was like, ‘Oh wow!’”

“The Asylum has a business model that really works for them,” explained Ralston. “A lot of their films are made because their distributors and the channels that they distribute to are asking for that. So they are able to quickly respond to what they’re being asked to make. Whereas something like BATTLE: LOS ANGELES has had years and years of development and preproduction and finally production, the distribution chains in the foreign territories that Asylum is dealing with has been sold before the film has even been made. So then they have to quickly turn around and make the movie by the deadline that they agreed to.”

The pair began working on the film right in late November. At that time they only had two weeks to provide their score, since The Asylum had given them a mid-December deadline. Well into post-production, a deal was made with the SyFy Channel so that the cable channel would broadcast BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES as a SyFy Original Movie rather than having it released direct-to-video, in the manner of  The Asylum’s other productions.

“We got a locked edit on the first half of the movie around the first of December,” said Ralston. “We fully had the intent to finish scoring the film by December 15th. When the SyFy movie deal happened it changed our production schedule. Not only did they go back and throw more effort and money into the effects and the edit, they put us on about a one-month delay because the second half of the film [would not be] locked until sometime in February.”

“We were in a holding pattern while they got more footage,” added Kays. “That did give us the time to get our basic ideas down. But as far as working with a locked picture cut where we could actually match the cuts and hit all the dramatic points, that came fairly late into the game.”

Like most Asylum and SyFy Channel film scores, BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES is a fully sampled score, without any real, live instruments. The orchestral music was created synthetically using sounds of symphonic instruments sampled into a digital computer, but treated and mixed in a way that gave the score a fairly credible orchestral sound.

“Kays and I both always prefer to have live musicians when we can, because it just brings a whole other element to the score that a computer can never replicate,” said Ralston. “Having said that, because the turnaround time was so tight on this movie and because the music budget was certainly not what Brian Tyler had on BATTLE: L.A., we didn’t have the resources available to give it the live orchestral 80-member orchestra that it really needed.”

When the two composers first began talking about scoring the film, certain scenes appealed to each of them as a starting point for composing music.

“I remember telling Kays that there was a scene in the middle where Karla comes out with her katana sword, and I really wanted to do that scene!” said Ralston. “And Kays said okay, and I think I’m going to take this scene over here! We didn’t really score in order; we just started going with the scenes that spoke to us first. And then in the end we worked out who was covering what. We did collaborate by writing in a similar key so that if our cues were going to be butting up next to each other they wouldn’t completely clash tonally.”

That scene with Karla, for example, gave Ralston the chance to soar musically with an eloquent heroic theme, while sharing the propulsive, rhythmic drive that Kays had composed for his main title sequence. Kays also wrote the music for the scene with the Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) blast, while Ralston was responsible for the 11-minute epic climax at the end. However, most of the score integrated the work of both composers, even though for the most part they were working alone in their own studios.

“We worked separately and we actually used somewhat different programs,” said Ralston. “I used Digital Performer and Kays writes in Logic and we had to deliver in ProTools. So I would write and record it and mix it in Performer, and send it to Kays. He would do the same in Logic, and then he assembled it.” In addition to composing, Kays also served as music editor, taking his and Brian’s cues and assembling them into the ProTools session that would have to be delivered to the sound mixer.

“I think what really helped for us to create a really smooth process of working together is the fact that we use a lot of the same sound libraries and a lot of the same plug-in effects and things like that,” Kays added. “So even though we were working in different sequencing programs, we could really reference each other’s sound quite easily. I could see that Brian was using certain types of sounds, so I could make my own cues compatible so they sound like they belong in the same score.”

One of the challenges in working on a movie like this, noted Kays, “is that it literally goes from balls-to-the-wall action to even more balls-to-the-wall action! There are not a whole lot of peaks and valleys from a character development or a musical point of view. What does happen, though, is that you get to progressively learn a little bit more about the aliens and why they’re invading Earth. In the early part of the movie, we’re mostly following the humans, so it’s fairly militaristic. We’re following these jet fighters and these soldiers on the ground as they’re trying to make sense of this situation. As the score progresses, we both started introducing textural elements into the music, which represent the aliens. So for me the score goes from a very traditional take on an action film to something that recalls a little bit more of the style that I’ve applied on horror movies, where I start using a little more sound design elements and a little more kind of unusual textures.”

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“I think what makes a composer’s contribution really great is that the composer has to be a film maker themselves,” said Ralston. “They have to understand character and character arc. When a director hires a composer, it’s not just that his liked their style of music, but that he or she is hiring someone who gets filmmaking, understands story, and understands character development. For the music to be effective, you have to understand that underlying message of what’s being said in a scene.”

“Something like BATTLE OF LA doesn’t need much musical subtlety and it didn’t really need much mood-setting, because it’s a very intensely visual film,” Kays concluded. “Right from frame one, you’re pretty much thrust into this world full of space ships and laser blasts and aliens and gunfire. So the role of the score in this type of a film is not so much to build the mood as to reinforce it and to add to the excitement and the kinetic motion of the film. You’re already very primed and excited to see these guys fighting for their lives against aliens, and the music is just reinforcing that.”

For more information on the composers, see:

• www.musicbykays.com/
• http://www.brianralston.com/

The Asylum’s DVD of BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES hit store shelves on March 15th. The Blu-Ray will follow on March 22.

Related posts:

1. Battle: Los Angeles – March 11
2. ‘Battle: Los Angeles’ Trailer

Barry was an emotionally introspective and poetic composer whose haunting themes and pulsing atmospheric rhythms gained him far reaching notoriety.  He was also a five time Oscar winner (BORN FREE – both score and song; THE LION IN WINTER; OUT OF AFRICA; DANCES WITH WOLVES), a Grammy winner (DANCES WITH WOLVES), and two time BAFTA winner (The Lion in Winter and the Academy Fellowship).  In addition to his many other nominations he was nominated for 11 Golden Globe awards, taking home a win for OUT OF AFRICA. Though his work was far from limited to the genre, he contributed several excellent scores to science fiction, fantasy, and horror films – including, of course, several Bond films.

Born John Barry Prendergast in 1933, this son of a movie theater owner in York, England, would grow up to become a sentimental favorite composer of film and film music fans all over the world.

On a somewhat personal note, I was strongly affected by his work when I was very young; it was Barry who instilled within me a deep love for film music that has been with me most of my life.  My parents had a collection of record albums that included an interesting mix of musical genres and within that mix were two quite specific albums that captured my attention: GOLDFINGER and YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, two very famous James Bond scores.  At the time I was too young to really know anything about James Bond, but once I discovered these two treasures I was altogether captivated.  I even wrote my own stories to some of my favorite TV shows at the time and recorded my little dramas onto cassette using these two albums as the ‘scores’ for what I considered my ‘radio dramas.’  For me there has always been an acute connection to Mr. Barry’s work.  And in this I know I am far from alone.

Barry would go on to score eleven of those Ian Fleming-based secret agent films and in so doing would cement a very solid position in the history of his profession.  Musician-composer Monty Norman did score the first Bond film, DR. NO; however, Barry arranged and performed the version of the 007 theme heard in the film, which arguably would become the most famous theme music in the history of cinema, as well as one of the most re-recorded.  (Some have speculated that Barry actually composed the theme — although the piece is credited to Norman. It certainly fits Barry’s style like a glove.)

In a 1996 interview with Film Score Monthly, Barry credited big band leader Stan Kenton with the inspiration for the Bond style.  “I think the genesis of the Bond sound was most certainly that Kentonesque sharp attack,” he said, pointing out Kenton’s brassy sound and notes that hit extreme highs and lows.

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS would be his final Bond installment in 1987, and in 2006 when asked by the The Sunday Express of London why he never scored another in the series he replied, “I gave up after (that).  I’d exhausted all my ideas, rung all the changes possible.  It was a formula that had run its course.  The best had been done as far as I was concerned.”

Though he is perhaps best known for the work he did on the Bond series, those scores are merely a fraction of his body of work.  He would eventually write the music for well over a hundred productions.  And in that there would be television, stage and radio – not to mention very personal efforts – that would beckon him to put pencil to music sheet.  For instance, in 2006 he would work with ten well-known tenors on an album titled HERE’S TO THE HEROES.  In that effort lyrics were written by lyricist and friend Don Black for Barry themes and a very pleasant, well-selling listening experience was the result.

John Barry was one of the most romantic film composers of his or any generation.  Even his action cues have a romantic, moody quality which beg multiple listenings.  And several films owe much of their critical and audience liking to his sweeping, moving style.  OUT OF AFRICA and DANCES WITH WOLVES are two clear examples.  These scores simply ascend with a lush beauty that instantly envelopes the viewer/listener and conjures something in the heart that refuses to be denied.

Many composers, especially modern ones, have a style that, although not bad, can be fairly easily interchanged.  Barry, however, was wholly himself.  No one has ever sounded quite like him.  And though he has on occasion been criticized for works which sound too similar, he consistently turned out material that continues to delight, stimulate and yet at the same time sooth the soul.   The imagination of audiences and listeners of his music will continue to bloom as time marches on.

We all have our inspirations in life and Kenton wasn’t the only influence on Barry’s.  In fact, it all inadvertently started with his father and those theater chains.  As a teen Barry operated the projectors in some of those movie houses and fell in love with cinema and especially its music.  He cites composers like Bernard Herrmann, Erich Korngold and Max Stern as some of those who worked their magic on him.

Once bitten by the bug Barry went on to study piano and composition, and then played trumpet in dance bands and later in a military band.  Eventually he formed his own successful band, The John Barry Seven, and wound up playing backup for a popular BBC program.  The band’s style was rather jazzy and sassy, which was just what the current crop of directors was looking for.  He began getting film engagements and with FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (the Bond producers didn’t forget his stylish DR. NO contribution) in 1963, and ZULU and GOLDFINGER (which pushed the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night off the top spot of the album charts and won Barry a gold disc) in 1964, he was off and running in cinema.  Eventually he would go on to score potent and very memorable works for films like MIDNIGHT COWBOY; THE LAST VALLEY; WALKABOUT; MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS; ROBIN AND MARIAN; KING KONG (from 1976); THE DEEP; HANOVER STREET; THE BLACK HOLE; RAISE THE TITANIC; FRANCIS; BODY HEAT; HIGH ROAD TO CHINA; Francis Ford Coppola’s THE COTTON CLUB (which won a Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental); Oscar nominated CHAPLIN, and the list goes on and on.

His work for a modestly budgeted fantasy film in 1980 called SOMEWHERE IN TIME helped place that film in cult classic status.  Starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, it didn’t garner much attention from audiences or critics upon its initial release, but its video release and airing on television gave it new life, with many thanks due to the beautiful melodies Barry wrote for it.  It is one of his most beloved works.  This is the type of almost spiritual elevation he could bring to a motion picture.

Director Sydney Pollack once said, “You can’t listen to his music without seeing movies in your head.”  It is hard to imagine a better compliment, or epitaph, than that for a film composer.

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1. Filmscore CD—’The Golden Child’
2. John Barry remembered; Pet Sematary reopened; Jeff Bridges, exorcist: Cinefantastique Round Table Podcast 2:6
3. Lois Maxwell – Bond’s Miss Moneypenny – dies

Australian composer Rafael May has made down-under horror cinema his own, with a trio of very powerful, very persuasive, and very scary Australian horror movie scores. He made a significant splash with his second feature film score, 2007’s BLACK WATER, an intensively suspenseful and powerfully directed film about a rogue saltwater crocodile, threatening three vacationers in the Australian outback after overturning their boat. May’s score is marvelously textured and claustrophobically atmospheric, giving the literate and well-performed film much of its tension. He did the same for 2010’s ROAD KILL (recently released on DVD in the Fangoria Fright Fest series), about a rogue truck terrorizing the South Australian highways, and has just begun work on THE REEF, about a rogue shark munching on trapped divers on the Great Barrier Reef. His music is modern and compelling, building a provocatively scary attitude over which these films play their stories.

May’s background included the normal piano interest as a youth segueing into a classical education, which gave him the background for the variety of music he would be accomplishing today. In his late teens he began to get commissions to write electronic music for a small theatre company, and found himself setting music to drama. “A lot of this was fairly intense music for plays like Equus and Caucasion Chalk Circle,” said May. “I then built a business as a music producer and composer for commercials. The first chance for a feature score was a nightclub/youth film called SAMPLE PEOPLE. The next and better chance was when commercial turned feature producer, Michael Robertson approached me to do the score for BLACK WATER. Our previous work together had won the London International Advertising Award for best music.”

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In BLACK WATER, a trio of young folk – a married couple and their younger sister – set off on a backwater sightseeing expedition, which turns very bad when their boat is overturned by the crocodile, which eats their guide. The trio takes refuge up a mangrove tree in the swamp, but with the croc hanging around, have no where no go. The thrust of the story is how each of them musters the fortitude to work together – or alone – to survive and escape. May’s score opens with the breezy atmosphere of cello and dobro, which sets the group off in a benign mood. It doesn’t last long. When the croc strikes, the score overturns along with the boat. May creates an severe amount of suspense and panic with clamorous, rapid fire drumming, sudden, sliding strokes of strings, howls of abrasive, rushing synth, reflective squeaking noises, steel gongs, a rising wake of increasing sound mass, and other threatening noises evoking a propulsive, queasy tension that makes the scene quite real and threatening.

“The two directors’ vision was originally that there should not be a music score in any recognizable way,” said May. “Their ideas were based on the documentary feel in which they shot BLACK WATER. Once we had a cut, I argued successfully that we needed a stronger music thread; also that the music nature had to have an organic element and not overpower the scale of the images and story. I wanted an electronic background with a solid identifiable core. We agreed that cello fitted the emotional bill – though never any violins or viola.”

Once composer and directors had agreed on the necessity of a cello core, May spent some time creating the rest of his pallet of sounds with which to construct the score. “I didn’t want to be playing standard synth patches,” May said. “I took samples of electric guitar feedback and plucks and experimented with playing them down two or three octaves. There is a repeating element of unsettling weird bells every time the characters descend into the water which is those electric guitar plucks played beyond recognition. There are a set of moaning sounds which are similarly displaced Indian flutes. The cello provided the lyrical content with dobro and acoustic guitars which were played as keyboard parts and then replaced by real instruments just before the final mixing. I scored the cello as mostly three part close and sliding harmonies that were extremely hard to play but gratifying and claustrophobic.”

May’s ominous, underplayed sonic tonalities generate an increasingly potent amount of visceral suspense, maintaining a persistent awareness of the growing danger of the crocodile when it’s off screen with a continually sustained tonality of menace, dappled with occasional shimmers, tones, and audible glimmers, with escalating wails and extruding synth tones. His recurring cello motif, very organic and emotive, evokes the human anguish felt by the surviving sisters.

“The music is critical to the emotional response,” said May. “Most of the effective parts of the score are so embedded into the picture that people feel the fear or horror and don’t hear that the music is there and guiding the way. The sense of scale was always at the heart of BLACK WATER. You had to believe you were stuck there in a small and ever-more dangerous environment with a creeping sense of dread. I found that any overplaying of the score broke the sense of belief and that most elements of the music had a sense of brittle delicacy and humanity. On the other hand when the crocodile attacks were imminent, the music could be extremely on edge and loud, and still be accepted as part of a natural sonic environment.”

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For ROAD KILL (originally titled ROAD TRAIN), May contrasted the vast, dry country of South Australia with the harsher, industrial menace of the supernatural vehicle as it roared, DUEL-like, across the highways and menaced a group of vacationing teens. Like DUEL, there’s a sense of the supernatural evoked in the presence and behavior of the three-trailered truck, which eventually captures the teens and trapped them in its careening, driverless cab. “I wanted a strong music character for the ROAD KILL, a sort of possessed and possessive giant truck,” said May. “It needed discordant metallic resonance. There is a continual grinding metallic unease from the moment the ROAD KILL starts taunting and attacking the characters on their backpacking holiday in the middle of nowhere. There is a strong dirty pop element as a language in the film featuring bleeding distortions and vocal manipulations.”

May crafted an intricate instrumental texture to enhance ROAD KILL’s propulsive suspense and terror. “I grabbed a bunch of metal industrial oil drums and dragged them into my studio to be hit by metal pipes,” he said. “At one point I unbolted the front gate of the house to be used as additional percussion. Most of these sounds were recorded and distorted. There were keyboard sounds also fed into a raft of different and ever-changing distortions to become the character of the ROAD KILL. The director had strong views on bringing out the sub text of the narrative requiring a love theme of sorts: a lyrical, distressed piano which feels more and more pain as the film progresses.” Added to the mix are some showpiece tracks meant to come out of the truck’s cab: one of them is “an abrasive trucker’s ode played on very cheap, detuned guitars, recorded into a cheap amp with reoccurring manipulations of screaming and distorted maniacal laughing.”

May was just starting to score THE REEF when I spoke to him. Directed by BLACK WATER’s Andrew Traucki, the film is about an overturned sailboat whose occupants are gradually picked off by a hungry shark, â la OPEN WATER with a reef landscape. “So far (and it is a little early), it looks like there will be a lot of strings in the score with a slew of gentler elements that start taking a sinister turn,” said May. “The film starts at a point of beauty that turns sour, through to terror with an emotional thread.” Aware of the standard set by JAWS and concentrating on avoiding any similarities, May is focusing his score not on the predatory fish but on the tense, personal situation surrounding the characters as they are attacked. “The precedent is a tricky one. I don’t think that the shark will have a musical motif: more the situation surrounding the characters as they are attacked and get taken one by one.”

May has found each of these scores challenging but feels he has been able to come up with an approach that offers the genre something new, musically, while giving these films the right kind of music necessary to enrich their emotional impact. “The first track you produce does so much to frame the film,” May said. “Everything that you can do is propelled from that. In BLACK WATER it was find an emotional language that you wouldn’t question belonged to the world you were in. For ROAD KILL it was more about creating a new sonic world of dread.” While both scores challenged him, when completed they provided him with a sense of satisfaction. “The rewards are about creating the seamless connection between score and visual story,” said May. “The satisfaction is closing a chapter in what’s possible for each new project. “

May’s film music output has so far found itself concentrating on horror subjects; time will tell if this will remain the case of if opportunities will expand to further cinematic horizons. “I’ve really enjoyed these films so far,” he said. “There’s no doubt that the range of musical possibilities are huge for horror. The music is rarely benign and often foreground. I think that these films and their scores speak to the depth of the human condition and human fears. Having said that, my journey as a composer won’t be complete without working on a wider pallet of films to see what other senses I can evoke.”

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Cheerfully embracing its scientific illogic, SHARKTOPUS swamp, scuttled, and tentacle-walked across the seas and shores of sunny Mexico consuming swimmers, sun-bathers, boaters, bungee-jumpers and various other species of eye candy, ruthlessly shedding its origin as a military weapon to munch on the local populace like so much popcorn chicken. Meanwhile, name star Eric Roberts chews up similar amounts of scenery as the hybrid monster’s creator, who harbors his own hidden agenda even while trying to recapture his escaped aquatic Frankenstein. Directed by SyFy Channel alumni Declan O’Brien (ROCK MONSTER, MONSTER ARK, CYCLOPS), the film flaunts the sheer audacity of its titular monster, which was clearly intended to out mega any MegaShark and out size any Giant Octopus previously seen in the cable channel’s oeuvre. Enthusiastically promoted, SHARKTOPUS became the talk of the ‘net for months before the movie actually premiered.

It was somehow poetic that SHARKTOPUS was produced by Roger Corman – the latest of several that he has provided for SyFy. The film revels in its absurdity even while lampooning its own formulaic inconsistency to achieve the sense of undemanding fun Corman is best known for. One aspect of Corman’s films as producer, from 1954’s MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR to 2010’s DINOCROC VS. SUPERGATOR and the hundreds in between, have been supportive and effective musical scores that often made up for their film’s lack of story excitement and believable special effect. In many cases, the music provided that extra dynamic that helped audiences forgive discrepancies in the internal logic of their scripts, in deficiencies of performance by their casts, and in the insufficiencies of set design or special effect – all while providing a layer of inexpensive yet effectual musical support that gave these films their needed dimension of emotive expression and excitement.

Quite so, SHARKTOPUS. Like those musical maestros of Corman’s AIP years, Les Baxter and Ronald Stein, who could work wonders with the barest of orchestral and electronic essentials, SHARKTOPUS features a powerful score that gives the film a wonderful sense of gravitas and energizes its drama while adding a good deal of coherency to the story.  The main and end titles surge  with a splendid rock tune written by New York rock band The Cheetah Whores, but it’s the dramatic underscore by composer Tom Hiel that really gave this torrid tale of teeth and tentacles its expressive ebb and flow.

Composer Tom Hiel

Tom Hiel is an award-winning composer best known for his work on the television show, THE PRACTICE (2000-04). He began his career working as an assistant for composers such as Mark Mothersbaugh and Michael Giacchino, while also finding some movies to score on his own. One of the first scores to gain Hiel some notoriety was SWIMMING WITH SHARKS (1994), starring Kevin Spacey (a perhaps ironic counterpoint to his experience sixteen years later when swimming with Sharktopus).

Hiel’s first science fiction score was Erik Fleming’s CYBER BANDITS (1995), although his next foray into the genre came a dozen years later with the made-for-video movie DOOMED (2007), a futuristic story about death row inmates given a chance for freedom by becoming contestants on a SURVIVOR-style reality show on an island full of zombies. “That was just straight ahead pseudo-orchestral music,” Hiel recalled recently. “There were a lot of percussive loops and various atonal figurations you can use to accentuate the horror. Nothing deeper than that.”

As with most of the SyFy Channel film scores, budgets do not accommodate actual orchestras, requiring composers like Hiel to rely on synthesizers and sampled symphonic wave files in order to closely if not perfectly replicate a live orchestral performance on his keyboard. This approach gives films like SHARKTOPUS the dynamic of a full-blown symphonic score without the expense, and also takes advantage of the synthesizer’s ability to create unnerving and unusual musical sounds.

Original reports from SyFy back in February, 2010, suggested that Roger Corman would both direct and produce SHARKTOPUS, but the film went before the cameras with Declan O’Brien at the helm, Corman serving only as producer, along with his wife Julie.

“I never knew about Roger directing it,” Hiel said. “Declan told me there was another guy who was directing or maybe co-directing with Roger, and he quit. That’s when Declan got called in because he had worked with Roger on the CYCLOPS movie; Roger loves that movie and thinks it’s one of his better efforts.” Hiel had scored both of O’Brien’s previous original movies for the SyFy Channel, ROCK MONSTER and CYCLOPS (both 2008), so they already had a successful working relationship that allowed Hiel to launch right into the music for SHARKTOPUS.

Hiel produced a well-crafted fantasy-horror score that gave the CGI-enlivened carcharodon-cephalopod a vivid sense of reality. When the sharktopus first escapes its captivity, the music builds to a rising tide with its central motif, surrounded by tentacular eddies of swirling accentuations.

“SHARKTOPUS is a little more of a straight drama except for the horrific elements when it attacks,” said Hiel. “There are also some straight ahead dramatic themes coming into play as they’re looking for the creature. In a way it’s a low-budget JAWS. I don’t necessarily think the music’s reflecting that; I think there is a throwback to straight-ahead orchestral scoring in this one. Due to the budget, of course, it was all done with electronics.”

Hiel’s SHARKTOPUS score is rooted in a recurring 4-note, rising motif that is heard each time the Sharktopus is threatening or about to attack.

“Many times I was able to build that motif for a while as the attacks became imminent. When the Sharktopus did attack, I tended to use rising chromatic stabs over brass chords (alternating from lower brass to horns and trumpets) and heavy percussion loops. Also I used glissando effects and sampled sounds (a garden rake across metal) to accentuate the horrific elements of the attacks. After the attacks or when the action was slow, but where I wanted the audience to think Sharktopus might be around, I used this electronic pulsing loop that really adds another sonic dimension of creepiness for me.”

"I always score it straight," says Hiel of working on low-budget sci-fi.

That pulsing synth loop in SHARKTOPUS becomes Hiel’s JAWS ostinato, a recurring measure that adds a strident undercurrent of menace as the story plays out. That loop was actually created for a demo score Hiel had written in 2002 when he was being considered for the TV series, WITHOUT A TRACE. The studio wound up going with a different composer, so Hiel held onto his demo music until he found a suitable project for it, parts of which gave SHARKTOPUS much of its powerful propellant.

Hiel also provided a vivid action melody in the horns, punctuated by a string and wind ostinato on top, along with a driving percussion beat to push the action when Eric Roberts’ and his crew try to recapture the creature. For Roberts’ character himself, Hiel used a repetitive motif in the lower strings and brass along with another percussive loop which emphasized his own relentless pursuit of his own ends – inevitably Roberts’ theme and that for the Sharktopus merge, enhanced by electric guitars, as the two have their final encounter at a yacht harbor.

All of these elements come together nicely and give SHARKTOPUS a rich musical backdrop, not to mention an added production value for its otherwise simplistic story and scope. In addition, SHARKTOPUS’ vigorous orchestral sound belies the fact that its score is wholly electronic. Nowadays, virtual music libraries, which can be licensed or purchased, give composers the sonic sensibilities of renowned symphony orchestras at their fingertips and, though not conveying the true fidelity of acoustic performance, nevertheless provide a fairly persuasive approximation of symphonic sound. With SHARKTOPUS, Hiel took advantage of his experience in helping Mark Mothersbaugh and Marco Beltrami compile temporary mock-ups of their scores for director approval.

“These mock-ups have to sound very realistic, and I learned how to do that when I worked for them,” said Hiel. For SHARKTOPUS, he used a combination of sound elements from the East West Platinum sample library, the Vienna Symphonic Library, some music he’d inherited from Beltrami associate Buck Sanders, and original electronic material he’d created himself to give the score a sense of originality.

“For the melodic strings I used an old Roland string sample,” said Hiel. “It was made for the Roland 760 and I still use it for the long string sections.”

The process of composing a movie score for computerized music files – versus having an orchestra full of real players performing at a recording session – creates a different kind of challenge for composers like Hiel.

“You have to be more inclusive in your composing,” Hiel said. “When you know you’re going out to an orchestra and you know you’re going to orchestrate it yourself or you have an orchestrator do it for you, a lot of times when you’re in the writing process you can just say, ‘Oh, make sure to double the cello lines with bassoons’ or ‘double this with whatever,’ but when you’re actually doing this type of thing with samples you have to go back over and synth-orchestrate as you go, as it were – adding to the cello lines some French horns or bassoon, just things you do when you’re orchestrating to make it sound as thick as possible. You really have to be more in tune with that. I also add electronics – for SHARKTOPUS I was given free reign, thankfully, and so some of those pulsing electronic pads come in and they add so much.”

Hiel said his biggest challenge in scoring SHARKTOPUS was simply  getting the right feel for each of the creature’s attacks.

“It’s easy to be heavy handed,” he said. “Each attack tended to be different enough where you couldn’t cut-and-paste the same motifs. Sometimes you needed a building progression – I would use that chromatic ostinato thing – it’s in the dive sequence, for example, where the strings would play in clusters, and that goes on for a while sometimes, where he’s dragging the body off. But that ended up being fairly challenging, just finding the right tone for each attack.”

Hiel’s scores have thus far remained in the low-budget realm – although, with the rise of computer graphic imagery and computerized music, low-budget movies look and sound a lot better these days.

“I think the stigma has come from low-budget music for low-budget films that has traditionally sounded hysterically bad,” said Hiel. “I think it’s come a long way from that now. Now, you can write music and record music even at a low-budget level that sounds pretty believable and big-budgeted. That’s the goal, anyway. It’s a little tricky to make it sound like the real thing. Half the battle is just to make the synthesizers sound the same as what you’re going to be doing orchestrally. We all have tricks of the trade that have been in play for awhile now.”

Putting those tricks to play when a film is clearly less than stellar provides its own challenge, although composers like Hiel give each assignment their best effort.

“I always score it straight and just try to pump it up,” said Hiel. “In SHARKTOPUS, for example, sometimes the monster was bigger than life, other times it looked more the size of a normal shark, so there were some size and spacial issues going on. But I didn’t score those scenes any differently – it’s just a big monster and he’s trying to attack. I just tried to make it as believable as possible. There’s a scene where Eric Roberts dies, and that whole scene takes forever. But I got a little chance to do my thing there, and I just scored it straight.”

Hiel recognizes the part that music can play in making even the lowest-budgeted movie expressive and involving, and especially in enhancing films of science fiction and fantasy.

“Music plays a huge role in helping the audience with their suspension of disbelief in these movies,” he said. “In ROCK MONSTER, it’s the big, fantastical music that really accentuates the whole storytelling aspect of the movie. There’s definitely more music in these films – I had something like seventy minutes of score in SHARKTOPUS; CYCLOPS was wall-to-wall. I think music plays a strong role in film in general, but it’s really going to accentuate science fiction and fantasy. It has to be carefully crafted, though. The wrong music, or cheap music, can lessen the whole experience.”

For more information on Tom Hiel, see: www.tomhiel.com

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Comedy has always been contrapuntal to chillers in John Debney’s career. The composer began in the early 1980s scoring Disney television and cartoon shows like SCOOBY-DOO and features such as JETSONS: THE MOVIE.  These lighthearted scores were offset against Debney’s darker side, which revealed itself in such venues as the relentless horror music of THE RELIC and KOMODO, the vividly swashbuckling CUTTHROAT ISLAND, and the cataclysmic speculation of END OF DAYS.

Now, after many years during which he focused on comedy films, along with the occasional profoundly heartfelt drama such as THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, Debney has returned to heavy action and adventure with his scores to IRON MAN 2 and PREDATORS, both of which allow his more energetic expressiveness to come to the fore.

Debney was actually was considered for the first IRON MAN, since he had established a working relationship with its director, Jon Favreau, on the films ELF and ZATHURA. Circumstances didn’t work out on the first IRON MAN, but Debney was thrilled to be called in for IRON MAN 2.

“It was a joy to be working with Jon Favreau again,” Debney said. “I knew going in that IRON MAN 2 was going to be a different scoren and it was. IRON MAN 2 is a more complex, layered film than the first one, so the music had to play a different role. There were also many more characters and the music had to highlight these new characters.”

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Following the lead, if not the themes, of Ramin Djawadi on the first IRON MAN, Debney’s score thunders with iron and steel – bolstered by heavy metal guitars and a thick, orchestral vocabulary, while also recognizing the beating heart within the metal. Debney’s music becomes the sheet-plated, iron-wrought, clamped-on metallic suit that gives the movie its life, just as the galvanized garb keeps Tony Stark’s heart beating and endows him with enhanced strength.

“I enjoyed the first score but the second score had to be different, per the film. The two scores share a common pedigree but are generally different,” Debney said. “They are different scores with different results.”

What they share is a similar pedigree of rock and roll which is powerfully integrated – like sizzling molten metal dipped into a smooth liquid fluid – through the role of the electric guitar, which continues to evoke the prowess of Iron Man and his metal suite, as it had in Djawadi’s score. Guitarist Tom Morello, best known from the bands Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave, came in to perform the shredding for IRON MAN 2’s soundtrack. The score integrates Morello’s electric guitars with Debney’s large-scaled orchestra and choir material to both evoke the characters and support the film’s action – while all the time leaving room for the AC/DC songs that were to be prominently displayed throughout the movie.

“Being a huge fan of Morello, I knew we had to work together on this film,” Debney said. “Jon is a friend of Tom’s and asked if I’d be interested in working with Tom. I, of course, said yes, and Tom was an absolute joy and wonderful collaborator. I’d work with him again in a heartbeat.”

The main challenge for Debney on IRON MAN 2 was to compose a theme that captured the duality of the Tony Stark/Iron Man character while providing an original flavor in view of the many large-scaled superhero movies produced recently, each of which needed very dominant, muscular themes.

“IRON MAN 2 was odd in that there were not a lot of places where a true superhero theme could be played,” said Debney. “Tony Stark is uber cool even as Iron Man, so, musically, we couldn’t state a full-blown superhero theme. The strains of Iron Man’s theme are heard only in a few spots by design. I’m hoping with future films, Iron Man might get his full-blown theme played aggressively.”

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IRON MAN 2 was followed by an equally aggressive score for PREDATORS (2010). This sequel to the original 1987 PREDATOR used an array of instrumental flavors that includes Tibetan long horns, Shakuhachi flute, a battery of ethnic wooden and metal percussion, and a phalanx of specially-engineered synth sounds and voicings, providing textures of the truly alien and mechanical to this relentless battle music.

“The ethnic instruments create a tribal feel while the metallic sounding motifs represent the predators,” said Debney. “They are both alien yet tribal.”

Debney’s most important decision on this score was to include music from the first PREDATOR, integrating Alan Silvestri’s original conceptualizations and combining them with Debney’s own music to match director Nimród Antal’s  vision of the story. The result is a unique partnership of musical ideas spread 23 years apart, yet seamlessly integrated into the sound design as if they were the product of a single composer.

“I knew going in that I wanted to incorporate Alan’s themes for this film,” said Debney. “PREDATORS is a true sequel in my opinion, and thus, I thought it right that we included Alan’s material. I wanted to pay homage to Alan Silvestri’s original PREDATOR score, but I also wanted to add my signature. Alan is a friend, and I feel he is also a brilliant composer.”

Debney said that he enjoyed extrapolating musical elements from Silvestri’s score, and creating his own vision of what the music should sound like for this new incarnation of the story.

“I love scores from the ‘80s and I felt we had a score without the highly synthesized, overproduced scores we sometimes get these days,” he said. “So by design, I wanted to harken back to the days of big scores and much orchestral fireworks.”

In recent years, a man epic action/super-hero/spectacular science fiction films have tended to follow (or composers have been asked to follow) the hybrid rhythm-based example established earlier in the decade by the music of successful films of Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer, and the like. A composer even of Debney’s stature cannot help being mindful of this contemporary vogue even while seeking to proffer his own voice.

“There are a lot of truly unique scores out there and some that aren’t,” Debney said. “Of course for action movies, a film may be temp-scored with the type of score you describe. I like to listen to the temp for the emotion the director is trying to convey and, hopefully, write something that is unique. In the case of PREDATORS, I used an approach where I paid homage to Alan Silvestri’s original score as well as incorporated an original score.”

With nearly 140 film scores in thirty years, Debney has explored every genre and every style of music making, yet the fantastic genre continues to raise its growling head on his filmography almost every year.

“It is a joy to work on a wide variety of films,” he said. “If one does only one thing, it can get very stale. I love working in these non-comedic areas, as it is great to explore the darker side of my personality.”

Debney has gone on to add another action notch on the side of his baton with an iconic score for MACHETE, the feature film based on the faux trailer of the same name in the Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez collaboration, GRINDHOUSE, with Danny Trejo as an ex-Federale known for his coat of many scabbards, seeking revenge against his former boss. Another turn for Rodriguez will follow next year with SIN CITY 2.

Thanks to Ray Costa and Andy Perez at Costa Communications – and to John Debney for taking time out of an increasingly busy schedule to chat with me about these scores.

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