Back in college, I made a short film that parodied John Carpenter’s Escape From New York and Escape From L.A. I had no composer to score the film, so I tracked in music from Shirley Walker and John Carpenter’s score to the second film. Little did I know that, 16 years later, I would revisit the material, but in a more in-depth manner. It turns out that there was a lot of music that had gone unreleased from the original …
Shirley Walker was the nicest lady I ever had the good fortune to meet in Hollywood. She was always smiling, and reminded me of “grandmother” from the fairy tales – she looked like she could bake the best cookies, and was always so warm and kind to everyone she encountered. But beneath her matronly demeanor was a darkness that would come out in her music. She wrote the most ballsy, masculine, orchestral action music heard in Hollywood in the late …
This week, La-La Land Records released a limited expanded edition of the soundtrack to Black Rain. The 1989 film was directed by Ridley Scott, and marked Hans’ first action score. As such, it was a thrill to work on it – but the project didn’t just land in our laps. There are a few projects that require composer approval to explore releasing, and Black Rain was one of them. Thankfully, my years working in the film music industry (as well as the …
In anticipation of this third chapter in the Final Destination series (kinda oxymoronic, no?), I watched the original film again. It had a lot of smart moments, and very clever gags in which the teenage survivors of Flight 180 were dispatched in ways that would make Rube Goldberg proud. The third one was written and directed by the same folks (James Wong and Glen Morgan), and so I was hoping for something close to the same level. Readers of this …
This week I was at the Final Destination 3 scoring session, music composed by Shirley Walker. It was a lotta fun, and the movie looks like a delightful romp of Rube Goldberg-inspired “accidents”. Just remind me not to go to Magic Mountain for a while…. Director Jim Wong signed my Final Destination DVD (couldn’t scan it because of the shiny cover), and I also got Shirley to sign my Batman: Mask of the Phantasm CD, which was very nice of …