Vintage Sand Episode 28: Everybody Knows the Score

Vintage Sand

Welcome to Episode 28 of Vintage Sand, your Film History podcast. In this episode, Everybody Knows the Score, we explore some of the best soundtracks in the history of film. For our purposes this time out, we are focusing strictly on non-diagetic (“background”) music written for instruments and/or voice for a particular film. So we are not focusing on… • …songs written for a soundtrack. This rules out both musicals and collections ranging from Isaac Hayes’ music for Shaft to Aimee Mann’s original songs for Magnolia. • …curated collections of songs by various artists. We call this the T-Bone Burnett Rule. Choosing songs for a film is an art in itself, and such directors as Scorsese, Tarantino, both our favorite Andersons and the Coen Brothers are among the masters. A worthy endeavor if done well, but another art form entirely. • …collections of classical pieces by one composer (Manhattan, for example) or multiple composers (think 2001 and The Tree of Life) So we range from Golden Age Hollywood masters like Max Steiner, Dmitri Tiomkin and Franz Waxman, all the way through the best work being done today, from Alexandre Desplat and Carter Burwell to Reznor/ Ross and Jonny Greenwood. We also try to establish that the collaboration between director and composer can be among the most crucial in making bad films good and good ones classics. So don’t be surprised if a lot of work that these partnerships produced appears among our faves: Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock, John Williams and Steven Spielberg/George Lucas, Nino Rota and Francis Coppola, Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone and Danny Elfman and Tim Burton, to name but a few. Fair warning—between our atrocious humming skills and copyright issues, you may not hear much actual music. But you will surely know the score.