The song in film

Anahid Kassabian argues that a pop song in a film carries the audience’s own life into the theater. In Hearing Film she splits movie music into two kinds of listening. A composed score produces what she calls assimilating identifications, drawing the viewer into the film’s world along a tightly controlled path. A pre-existing pop song produces affiliating identifications: “perceivers can bring their own relationships to the song, the artist, or the genre into their engagement with the filmic text as a whole.” The record arrives carrying somebody’s first dance or breakup, and the film cannot fully govern what the listener brings to the scene.¹ Kassabian is careful that the pairing is only a tendency; a supervisor can compile songs into a straitjacket, and a composer can leave a score open.² But the distinction names the stakes of the whole practice this note covers: the use of self-contained songs as a movie’s music. It is the other half of what a soundtrack can be, and it works by breaking the older half’s founding rule. Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies, the founding text of film-music study, codified classical Hollywood’s principle of inaudibility (“Music is not meant to be heard consciously”), and a song the audience already knows is never unheard.³

The accident that kept happening

The practice predates its name — the needle-drop, a pre-existing record laid against picture — and its founding cases were accidents inside the composed-score system. In 1942’s Casablanca, Max Steiner wanted to cut Dooley Wilson’s performance of “As Time Goes By”, an eleven-year-old Herman Hupfeld show tune, and write his own song. But Ingrid Bergman had already cropped her hair for her next picture, the scenes could not be reshot, and Steiner surrendered and built the score around the song and “La Marseillaise.” “It must have had something to attract so much attention,” he allowed the following year, by which time the song had done something stranger: with the musicians’-union recording ban blocking any new version, RCA reissued Rudy Vallee’s 1931 record, and it went to number one eleven years after its release.⁴ Ten years later High Noon (1952) showed the trade the trick could be run on purpose: after disastrous previews, Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington’s ballad was added over the titles and put out on record ahead of the film. The version by Frankie Laine sold a million copies, the song took the Oscar, and by decade’s end a Western without a title song was the exception.⁵ Three years later, director Richard Brooks borrowed records from his star’s nine-year-old son to hear what young people actually played, opened Blackboard Jungle (1955) with Bill Haley and His Comets’ year-old commercial disappointment “Rock Around the Clock”. Audiences danced in the aisles at the first preview, London Teddy Boys tore up theater seats, and the record spent eight weeks at number one. The rule of the unheard score broke loudest exactly where the music was most heard.⁶

The cutting-room revolution

The compilation score was born as an editing convenience. Mike Nichols cut The Graduate (1967) to existing Simon and Garfunkel records as temporary pacing music until the realization hit him in the shower: “Schmuck! This is your soundtrack!” The one commissioned song arrived as a scrap called “Mrs. Roosevelt” whose syllables happened to fit the film’s seductress, and the completed “Mrs. Robinson” topped the Hot 100 while the soundtrack and Bookends held the number-one album slot for sixteen consecutive weeks between them.⁷ Easy Rider (1969) went further by accident of the same kind: editor Donn Cambern laid records from his own collection (Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild”, the Byrds, the Jimi Hendrix Experience) over eighty hours of motorcycle footage to make the editing bearable, and the temp track was so right that the commissioned score was abandoned. Bob Dylan, declining to license his own recording, scribbled a verse and said, “Give this to McGuinn, he’ll know what to do with it” — and Roger McGuinn finished and sang “Ballad of Easy Rider” over the end titles. The licensing cost roughly a million dollars, about triple the film’s production budget, and the film grossed sixty million.⁸ American Graffiti (1973) systematized the approach: George Lucas wrote each scene around a specific 45 he owned, cleared 41 oldies for roughly $90,000 on a flat-rate offer (RCA refused, which is why there is no Elvis in the film), and the tie-in double album of records mostly thirteen years old went triple platinum.⁹ Jeff Smith’s The Sounds of Commerce is the scholarship that took this economy seriously. Smith’s central claim is that the popular score has served the classic dramatic jobs (mood, character, setting) as capably as the orchestral tradition, while doing commercial work beyond the orchestra’s reach. Commerce and craft, in his history, ride together.¹⁰

The machine

The studios were enforcing that belief before the machine was even built: in November 1965 Alfred Hitchcock wired Bernard Herrmann that his scoring was “out of step with the times,” demanded a Torn Curtain score with a beat and a theme that could sell as a single, and dismissed him mid-session when the composer delivered an orchestra of flutes and horns with nothing to release.¹¹ Superfly had already shown a soundtrack could eclipse its film; Saturday Night Fever (1977) turned the eclipse into an industrial design. RSO’s Robert Stigwood phoned the Bee Gees at a château outside Paris asking for songs for an untitled film, and by the band’s own account the writing took “virtually a single weekend” — a weekend that produced “Stayin’ Alive”, “How Deep Is Your Love,” and “Night Fever.”¹² The double album shipped a month before the film, held number one for twenty-four straight weeks, sold over forty million copies worldwide, produced four number-one singles, and won the only Album of the Year Grammy ever given to a disco record; until Thriller it was the best-selling album of any kind in history.¹³ R. Serge Denisoff and William Romanowski’s Risky Business, the industrial history of rock in film, marks it as the hinge: before Fever, rock was marginal to the movie business; after it, the cross-promoted soundtrack was core studio strategy, and by 1984 ten soundtracks had gone platinum — a run that crested with Prince’s Purple Rain and closed the era at The Bodyguard, still the best-selling movie soundtrack ever made.¹⁴

The song written for the film

The Academy has awarded Best Original Song since the films of 1934, and its winners run as a parallel history of pop: “The Way We Were” (1973), Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” (1993), Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” (1997) — songs written to order that outgrew their films.¹⁵ The award can honor the small as well as the enormous: Elliott Smith’s “Miss Misery,” nominated for Good Will Hunting, put a fragile indie songwriter on the Oscar stage beside the Titanic juggernaut that beat him.¹⁶ The commissioned song need not be a ballad, either. Spike Lee asked Public Enemy for an anthem for Do the Right Thing, and “Fight the Power” came back, neither love theme nor needle-drop but a piece of protest written to a director’s brief.¹⁷ Two later ceremonies mark the institution catching up to pop’s own history. Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”, after twelve straight weeks atop the Hot 100, became the first hip hop song to win Best Original Song in 2003; Eminem was home asleep, and his co-writer Luis Resto accepted with the line “He’s creative, he has symphonies in his head.”¹⁸ And when Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s “Shallow” won in 2019, the televised performance sent the song from number 21 to number one the following week — the ceremony itself now functions as the biggest sync placement on television.¹⁹ Critics police the boundary between this form and the needle-drop as carefully as the Academy does: The FADER’s needle-drop canon expressly excludes songs written for the film, which is the practice’s own admission that a commissioned anthem and a borrowed record do different work.²⁰

The supervisor

The person who does the borrowing became a profession. In 1992 Quentin Tarantino was determined to score Reservoir Dogs’ torture scene with Stealers Wheel’s chirpy 1972 single “Stuck in the Middle with You”, and the rights had stalled. Karyn Rachtman got the song cleared — which got her hired, and got the modern ironic needle-drop its landmark: an AM-radio bounce set against a razor.²¹ Randall Poster, who began with Wes Anderson on Bottle Rocket and has supervised every Anderson film since, describes the job’s ceiling and its modesty in the same breath: “I collaborate with the director. The director picks the songs,” and, of the vocation’s origins, “The foundation of being a music supervisor is liner notes, right?”²² The director-as-record-collector lineage never disappeared inside the profession: Martin Scorsese has used The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” in three separate films, a personal signature. But the role institutionalized — a Guild of Music Supervisors since 2010, an Emmy category won by its founding president’s lobbying, and, in 2020, the first monograph-length academic study of the profession.²³ Kassabian had seen it coming: her 2001 book already tracked creative authority migrating from the composer to the supervisor and the compiled score.²⁴

The resurrection

The streaming era completed the circle Casablanca opened. When Stranger Things built a season around Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” in 2022, supervisor Nora Felder had prepared elaborate scene descriptions so that Bush, famously selective about licensing, would know exactly what her song would carry; Bush approved, and watched the 1985 single go where it had never been: number one in Britain 44 years after her first chart-topper (the longest gap on record), the oldest female artist ever to top the UK chart at 63, number 3 in America against its original number 30, with a reported $2.3 million in streaming royalties in the first month — most of it hers, because she owns her masters.²⁵ The song, Bush wrote, “is being given a whole new lease of life by the young fans who love the show – I love it too!”²⁶ The 1943 Vallee reissue needed a pressing plant; the 2022 revival needed nothing, because the catalog was already on the platforms and the placement was pure ignition. That is the sync economy in its mature form: every placement of an existing record clears two licenses, composition and master, and the fee scale now runs from a few hundred dollars for an indie film to six figures for a studio picture.²⁷ K.J. Donnelly’s The Spectre of Sound makes the field’s point in its title: music on screen works like a ghost, exerting its power on audiences who rarely turn to look at it — Donnelly had already called film music scholarship’s “hidden heritage” in the anthology that helped found the discipline’s modern wave.²⁸ And Mervyn Cooke’s A History of Film Music gives the practice its own chapter in the standard history, the study of film music having finally rescued the craft, Cooke writes, “from the stigma of hack commercialism.”²⁹ The song in film is where the movie house and the record store learned to meet.

rhapsode

Explorer

The song in film

The accident that kept happening

The cutting-room revolution

The machine

The song written for the film

The supervisor

The resurrection

See also

The shelf behind this

rhapsode

Explorer

The song in film

The accident that kept happening

The cutting-room revolution

The machine

The song written for the film

The supervisor

The resurrection

See also

Footnotes

The shelf behind this