Composers John Powell and Germaine Franco took top honors at this week’s ASCAP Screen Music Awards. Powell won the Henry Mancini award for lifetime achievement as a film composer (for such scores as How to Train Your Dragon, The Bourne Identity and Solo: A Star Wars Story), while Franco (songwriter for Coco, currently scoring TV’s Vida) received the Shirley Walker award for contributing to “the diversity of film and television music.” Other honorees included Gordy Haab and Dave Porter; a full rundown of the evening is in my Variety story here.
Monthly Archives: May 2018
John Powell talks about his “Solo” score
Composer John Powell, the much-respected Oscar nominee for How to Train Your Dragon (and such other delightful animated scores as Happy Feet, Rio and Ferdinand), reviewed the entire Solo: A Star Wars Story experience with me for this Variety story, which ran the day before the film opened. It’s a fascinating odyssey that involves collaboration with John Williams (who penned “The Adventures of Han” theme used throughout Powell’s score), the creation of several new themes, and an unusual trip to Bulgaria to record a women’s choir for the score.
The R-rated “Deadpool 2” score
According to the Sony Classical label which released it, the soundtrack album for Deadpool 2 is the first score soundtrack in history to be released with a “parental advisory” warning on its front cover. That alone was reason enough to check out the movie, the score and the album, and composer Tyler Bates was kind enough to spend a few minutes talking, and laughing, about it for this story in Variety. Bates, perhaps best known for his Guardians of the Galaxy scores, invited director David Leitch to pen a few profane lyrics — entirely appropriate for the endlessly irreverent comic-book hero — for a Hollywood choir to sing.
John Williams accepts top BMI award
Composer John Williams has won practically every award possible in his long and distinguished career — Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, even the Kennedy Center Honor and the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award. So Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), one of the nation’s leading performing-rights societies — which had already given him its top honor in 1999 — gave him an even higher honor by naming a new award after him. It was a particularly star-studded evening, as I tried to convey in this Variety story about the society’s annual Film, TV and Visual Media Awards in Beverly Hills.
New Oscar “shortlist” for songs, scores
The Academy never stops tinkering with the music rules. The latest addition is actually a throwback to an earlier era: There will now be an Oscar “shortlist” for best song and best score of the year, a 15-film list for each category from which the final five nominees will be chosen. It’s a process the Academy music-branch used to follow, back in the ’60s and ’70s, but long ago abandoned. Academy governors refused to discuss the reinstatement of the concept, but I obtained an in-house document and talked to Academy insiders about what it means and how it will be accomplished for this Variety story.