The door was now open for rock & roll pop songs to find their way into films and onto soundtracks. Haley had been struggling for over a year to gain any attention with the track, but after its presence in the film (featured four times in three different arrangements), the song shot to number one on the charts, demonstrating the effectiveness of film as a marketing tool for song (Elvis, anyone?). The first film to do so, 1955’s Blackboard Jungle, added legitimacy to the genre with its inclusion of Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”. When rock & roll emerged in the early 1950s, many forward-thinking film and music makers sought for ways to use the new, popular and often controversial style in their films and scores. When modernist composers began incorporating musical elements from popular culture, including jazz (the pop music before rhythm & blues and rock & roll) and blues, audiences were able to make a connection to the films they were watching that was not necessarily present in the days of the more traditionally “classical sounding” scores. In other words, what we think of today when the term soundtrack is mentioned. Following the soundtrack’s release, a third category of soundtrack was developed – a collection of pop songs heard in the background of non-musicals that may or may not have been written specifically for the film. Prior to the release of the Easy Rider soundtrack in 1970, the soundtrack genre could be neatly categorized into two types: musicals which concentrated mainly on the songs, such as Chicago, Singin’ In the Rain, and Rodgers and Hammerstein productions, and film scores showcasing the incidental and background music from non-musical films like Gone With the Wind, Star Wars, and The Godfather. In eschewing a traditional film score, the film’s creators were able to musically narrate their film in a creative new way, opening a door to an entirely new method of scoring and music supervising films, while at the same time maintaining a tradition extending back to the earliest days of cinema. According to Hopper, Easy Rider was the first film to forgo the use of a traditional score. Much has been written about the film Easy Rider and its subsequent effect on Hollywood however, little has been written on the film’s groundbreaking soundtrack. Unafraid of stepping on the toes of conventionality, Dennis Hopper’s directorial debut certainly helped usher in a new approach to filmmaking. Filmed in the early part of 1968 and released in the summer of 1969, Easy Rider was a surprise box-office hit, pulling in over $19 million dollars (~111 million in 2010 dollars) in its initial run.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |