Rejected film scores

[LMcD]

I'd forgotten - if indeed I ever knew - that Alex North wrote a score for '2001 A Space Odyssey' which Stanley Kubrick then rejected. I hadn't forgotten that almost all of William Walton's score for 'Battle of Britain' was discarded in favour of a score by Ron Goodwin. Presumably there are other examples of this?

[Richard Barrett]

I'd forgotten - if indeed I ever knew - that Alex North wrote a score for '2001 A Space Odyssey' which Stanley Kubrick then rejected.

Have you heard it? North's brief for the opening must have been "do something like the beginning of Also Sprach Zarathustra, since IIRC the materials eventually used in the film were used during production as placeholders. This is common practice I think. The only time I've ever been involved in making music for a film (a highly obscure and non-commercial one, I should add!) there was already a soundtrack using music by Satie and Messiaen which was to be replaced.

[LMcD]

Have you heard it? North's brief for the opening must have been "do something like the beginning of Also Sprach Zarathustra, since IIRC the materials eventually used in the film were used during production as placeholders. This is common practice I think. The only time I've ever been involved in making music for a film (a highly obscure and non-commercial one, I should add!) there was already a soundtrack using music by Satie and Messiaen which was to be replaced.

Not yet - but I'll definitely give it a listen.

[MrGongGong]

Patrick Gowers told a tale of writing a score for 'The Go Between' which was rejected.

[Belgrove]

Hitchcock rejected the scores of Bernard Herrmann for Torn Curtain and Henry Mancini for Frenzy. Apparently William Friedkin wanted Herrmann to score The Exorcist, but they couldn't agree terms, whereupon Lalo Schifrin was hired but produced a score that didn't satisfy the director. In the end the temporary track music of Krzysztof Penderecki and a snippet of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells was retained.
Phillip Lambro's score for Chinatown was rejected by Roman Polanski, being replaced by Jerry Goldsmith, who had just ten days to compose it. Not all of Goldsmith's superb score for Alien was used, the closing credits being accompanied by Howard Hanson's 2nd Symphony, a welcome balm after all that mayhem.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Aaron Copland's score for Jack Garfein's film Something Wild replaced one already completed by Morton Feldman. Feldman's work sounds ... Feldmanesque, and would have provided an unsettling "counterpoint" to what was seen on screen. Garfein himself was "unsettled" by it; "My wife is getting raped and you write for celesta?!" he is said to have exclaimed (his then wife Carroll Baker was the star of the film) - a response (together with hearing Copland's much more conventional score) which has always made me wonder why he chose Feldman in the first place!

[doversoul1]

Back in 1959 (re: wiki) Villa-Lobos was commissioned to write a score for Green Mansion (one of a few Audrey Hepburn’s forgettable films) but apparently got too excited and the music became too rumbling for the director or the producer’s taste and was rejected or mostly rejected. Years ago, I heard it on Radio3 and couldn’t disagree with the director even though he (Mel Ferrer) wasn’t much of a director or an actor.

[Nick Armstrong]

Patrick Gowers told a tale of writing a score for 'The Go Between' which was rejected.

The score for The Go-Between which was famously rejected was by Richard Rodney Bennett... Don't know if Patrick Gowers had a crack too, before Michel Legrand got his mitts on the project. (RRB was apparently very sniffy about the Legrand score, but it's one of my favourite film scores of all...).

There's a book about this whole area of interest: Torn Music: Rejected Film Scores. A Selected History

Ibert replacing the ailing Ravel for Pabst's 1933 Don Quixote is a good (though sad) one!

[gurnemanz]

I'd forgotten - if indeed I ever knew - that Alex North wrote a score for '2001 A Space Odyssey' which Stanley Kubrick then rejected. I hadn't forgotten that almost all of William Walton's score for 'Battle of Britain' was discarded in favour of a score by Ron Goodwin. Presumably there are other examples of this?

I vaguely remember something about Benjamin Britten being the first to be offered Battle of Britten and rejecting it, suggesting that it would be more up "Willy" Walton's street . This is an old memory and may or may not be accurate. I can't find any reference online.

PS Another random memory: I was in Germany as a student doing my year abroad as a part of my German degree when the film came out and remember seeing the film ("Luftschlacht um England") dubbed into German - rather a bizarre experience.

[Bryn]

Aaron Copland's score for Jack Garfein's film Something Wild replaced one already completed by Morton Feldman. Feldman's work sounds ... Feldmanesque, and would have provided an unsettling "counterpoint" to what was seen on screen. Garfein himself was "unsettled" by it; "My wife is getting raped and you write for celesta?!" he is said to have exclaimed (his then wife Carroll Baker was the star of the film) - a response (together with hearing Copland's much more conventional score) which has always made me wonder why he chose Feldman in the first place!

Not that difficult to grasp why it was rejected, though no less apposite, in its way, than "Singing in the rain", surely?

[Tevot]

Hello there,

Reading about Alex North's score for 2001 reminded me of another composer, Dominic Muldowney and another film about a significant year - 1984. The film as you'll know starred John Hurt as Winston Smith and Richard Burton (his last role) as O'Brien. The director Michael Radford loved Muldowney's score. Virgin Films who funded the film didn't. Hence the introduction of music by Eurythmics into the released version much to Radford's chagrin.

The score is on YouTube - see the link below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qU1DFPhrO4

Best Wishes,

Tevot

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Not that difficult to grasp why it was rejected, though no less apposite, in its way, than "Singing in the rain", surely?

I'd've said so - and with regard to both films in which SitR appears!

[LMcD]

I vaguely remember something about Benjamin Britten being the first to be offered Battle of Britten and rejecting it, suggesting that it would be more up "Willy" Walton's street . This is an old memory and may or may not be accurate. I can't find any reference online.

PS Another random memory: I was in Germany as a student doing my year abroad as a part of my German degree when the film came out and remember seeing the film ("Luftschlacht um England") dubbed into German - rather a bizarre experience.

I did a semester in Salzburg in the late 1960s and used to watch 2 episodes a week from different series of 'Mit Schirm, Charme and Melone', one from OTV (for some reason I can't do an upper case U umlaut...) and one from Bayerische Rundfunk.

[Serial_Apologist]

I did a semester in Salzburg in the late 1960s and used to watch 2 episodes a week from different series of 'Mit Schirm, Charme and Melone', one from OTV (for some reason I can't do an upper case U umlaut...) and one from Bayerische Rundfunk.

Yes, "The Avengers" in German. I remember watching that while working in Zurich, in 1967/8!

[Boilk]

Well that celesta intro/outro has strong echoes of a certain theme in the finale of Sibelius 5 ...not that Sibelius had a patent on it!