CHAPTER 20 | FILM MUSIC GOES POSTMODERN 501
in a nonmusical fi lm. By the 1980s it had become a common practice to have at
least one scene in a movie, often a wordless montage, that used a song in a rock or
dance-oriented style, typically unrelated to the rest of the movie’s soundtrack. Hit
songs launched in this way included Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” (The Karate
Kid, 1983), Patti LaBelle’s “New Attitude” (Beverly Hills Cop, 1984), and Orchestral
Manoeuvers in the Dark’s “If You Leave” (Pretty in Pink, 1986).
Linking a movie with a hit song was just one aspect of the commercial prac-
tice of fi lm tie-ins. A blockbuster movie could also generate sales of T-shirts,
action fi gures, fast-food promos, and a variety of other ancillary products, which
in turn acted as advertising to promote the fi lm; the corporate term for this kind
of marketing was “synergy.” Central to the strategy was the idea of the “high
concept” fi lm, easily marketed on the strength of its stars and a premise that
is either already familiar to moviegoers or reducible to a few words or a single
image. A classic high-concept movie poster of the 1980s showed the diminu-
tive Danny DeVito and muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger, in matching suits
and sunglasses, under a one-word title: Tw i n s. That was all audiences needed to
understand the comedy’s premise. Filmmakers, critics, and moviegoers inter-
ested in the medium’s artistic potential deplored high-concept fi lms and their
synergistic marketing. Veteran fi lm composers in particular denounced studio
pressure to incorporate a hit song as a commercially driven ploy that made a
musically coherent sound world for the picture unlikely.DANNY ELFMAN: REINTERPRETING THE GOLDEN AGE
In at least one high-concept fi lm of the 1980s, however, a composer took the stu-
dios’ demands for synergy as an artistic challenge and found a postmodernist
solution that involved both golden era–style underscoring and songs by a cur-
rent pop star. For his 1989 movie Batman, the fi rst in a long-running fi lm series,
director Tim Burton turned to two musicians to create the soundtrack. The
Minneapolis-born pop star Prince, one of the decade’s most successful musi-
cians, wrote a series of danceable songs, one of which, “Batdance,” rose to the top
of the pop charts before the fi lm had been released. At the same time, Burton’s
longtime collaborator Danny Elfman composed an orchestral score in a style
closely linked to 1980s superhero adventure movies.
From one point of view, Elfman’s background made him ideally suited for
the job. As a youth growing up in Los Angeles, he was inspired by golden-age
fi lm composers (he cites Herrmann’s music for The Day the Earth Stood Still as a
particularly strong childhood infl uence), and alongside his early fi lm work he
played in a quirky, eclectic New Wave band called Oingo Boingo.
But Elfman, much like Irving Berlin, lacked many of the tools that come
with academic training. His music reading and notation skills are limited; for
example, he reads and writes only in the treble clef (not unusual for a guitarist),
and his command of standard music notation is faulty. Some industry insiders
accuse him of being a “hummer”: the kind of musician who relies on ghostwrit-
ers to fi ll out his meager musical ideas. But his track record over a long career
suggests otherwise. Even when he works with different orchestrators, Elfman’s
music has distinctive stylistic traits.
Elfman’s fi rst feature fi lm scores for Tim Burton—two Pee Wee Herman mov-
ies and Beetlejuice—recall classic cartoon music: manaically, energetic, colorfullymarketing synergyElfman and Tim Burton172028_20_495-513_r3_sd.indd 501 23/01/13 11:15 AM