Torn Music: Rejected Film Scores. A Selected History - Tapa blanda

A film is finished and almost ready to make its way into theaters, but one or more of its prime movers (producer, director, studio brass) contends that it doesn't feel right. What can be almost instantaneously changed to give it a new "feel"? The last element that was added--its music! So, often regardless of whether a film actually needs a new score, a new composer is hired at the last minute to quickly replace a previous composer's often-heartfelt work. In Hollywood and around the world, scores have been rejected and replaced for every conceivable reason--style, quality, composer's name recognition, test-audience's reaction, a picture's reediting, etc. Sometimes new music improves a film; sometimes it doesn't. Such score replacements, which are more common than one might imagine, affect the work of the most famous and respected composers in the business as much as they do novice and unknown composers. In Torn Music (which takes its title from one of the most famous score replacements, the film Torn Curtain, which put an end to the long and fruitful collaboration of director Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann), author Gergely Hubai presents the often strange, and sometimes wild, stories behind 300 rejected and replaced film scores from the 1930s through the 2000s. In these pages are behind-the-scenes tales about the music for popular films and forgotten films, high cinema art and lowbrow exploitation movies, as well as television programs and even a video game.

Gergely Hubai holds degrees in American Studies and American History from Eötvös Loránd University, in Budapest, Hungary, where he teaches courses in film music history. He has written on film music for various periodicals, including Film Score Monthly and the Hungarian film journal Prizma, and is the author of liner notes for a number of film score recordings. Hubai’s doctoral thesis was on the rejected film scores of composers outside the Hollywood system, focusing on the work of George Antheil, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alexandre Tansman. He is an expert on the music of James Bond films and is currently at work on a book on the film music of Miklós Rózsa.