Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Ripping off "Gladiator" music

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Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 11-10-2003, 05:22 PM:

Seems like everytime I go to the theater I see some new trailer that is ripping off the music from Gladiator. What's with that? Do they think no one will remember? Sunday when we went to see Matrix 3 there it was, I wish I could remember the trailer/movie name. And I don't mean it sounded kinda like it, I mean note for note exact music. It even had that woman singing/moaning along. I leaned over to the wife and said HEY Gladiator music.
What's going on?

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 11-10-2003, 05:40 PM:

When trailers are made, the final musical score for the film is often unfinished. It's fairly common to "borrow" temporary music for the trailer from another film or some other source. Yesterday during MovieTunes I recognized music from the "Peter Pan" trailer, "Clocks" by the group Coldplay.

Posted by Mike Heenan (Member # 392) on 11-10-2003, 08:04 PM:

I was disapointed that for the Gladiator teaser, they decided to use the score from Conan the Barbarian. Fortunately they didn't do it for the movie itself.

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 11-10-2003, 08:50 PM:

For a long time the music from "Backdraft", also by Hans Zimmer, seemed to be on every action movie trailer.

Posted by Martin Brooks (Member # 1269) on 11-10-2003, 09:32 PM:

I think that Coldplay track works quite well for Peter Pan.

And I always thought that John Williams' theme for Star Wars was a rip-off of John Barry's theme from "Born Free".

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 11-10-2003, 09:46 PM:

Can you post or link to a recording of that? That would be really interesting to hear.

Posted by Jim Leko (Member # 1287) on 11-10-2003, 10:55 PM:

I have heard it in trailers too, but what about Pirates of the Caribbean? Hans copied his own work. The action music sounded almost identical to Gladiator.

Posted by Chris Hipp (Member # 1788) on 11-11-2003, 12:12 AM:

There is one song from Pay it Forward that is used in so many movies. I cant remember what else it has been on though. I think the life of David gale, but it gets old hearing the same dumbs tune.

Posted by William Hooper (Member # 71) on 11-11-2003, 12:28 AM:

quote:
And I always thought that John Williams' theme for Star Wars was a rip-off of John Barry's theme from "Born Free".

All of John Williams' music is either ripped of from someone else, or completely forgettable. He is the scum on the bottom of the barrel of film composers, not just because he's often bad, but because he has no ideas. There hasn't been a score he's done that hasn't made me grind my teeth or want to just shut it off. It's either just po', or it's like he's running "Name That Tune" while you're trying to watch a movie.

Enjoy the march from Prokofiev's "Love for Three Oranges"

Or heck, if you like making those weird little bogus trailers for nonexistent Star Wars movies, pull a whole soundtrack:
http://www.iclassics.com/iclassics/album.jsp?selectionId=4069

I've never understood the intense fascination & attachments people have made to the Star Wars movies. When the first one came out, I thought it was a clever pastiche, & the young folks who glommed onto it just fell into a demographic crack when there were no longer so many old Prince Valiant, western, & George Pal movies running all the time on TV.

The music drove me up a wall, though. When the hero got into his space ship with the little robot to go attack the evil Death Star, I just *knew* the soundtrack was going to break into "Peter & the Wolf". I could HEAR it.

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 11-11-2003, 03:14 AM:

Born Free and Star Wars do have some things in common but they are quite different.

The first two notes are similar. "Star Wars" begins with a half-note followed by a whole note while "Born Free" opens with a dotted half tied to an eighth. I think the step is a fifth in both tunes. However, in "Born Free" the tune goes up-down whereas in "Star Wars" it goes down-up. Both are then followed by triplet quarter notes.

They're similar but quite different when you also take into consideration the orchestrations. Williams works the hell out of a full orchestra. The tempo is also more energetic and majestic than the somewhat relaxed "Born Free."

Did Williams use "Born Free" as a starting point? I would doubt it because there is nothing in "Star Wars" (movie) that could logically make anyone think of "Born Free" (movie). And, besides, Williams starts several other themes in fifths (E.T., SUPERMAN and JURASSIC PARK, for instance).

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 11-11-2003, 06:09 AM:

quote:
All of John Williams' music is either ripped of from someone else, or completely forgettable. He is the scum on the bottom of the barrel of film composers, not just because he's often bad, but because he has no ideas.

That is really an unfair statement, and also one which leaves some doubt about your understanding of how the creative process in music (or maybe in general) works. There is no such thing as complete originality in music. Everything has been there before, only in different form and stylistic context.
A lot of great musical ideas are very similar to others which have been there before, what makes a musical composition "new" or "original" is the way in which it is "composed", meaning in which way the material is synthesized into a new composition.

That also goes for Prokofiev, who was a very "original" composer, but whose ideas can in turn be traced back to other music before him. What made him such a great composer was his very sure hand in applying various stylistical techniques to his material. That, by the way, is not my opinion - Prokofiev himself commented extensively on this subject.

The "creative" quality is basically a sensitivity to the expressive and stylistical potential of melody, harmony, rhythm, color, and the ability to combine these elements into a musical shape which captures a certain "mood" well or fits into a stylistical context.
For this reason, musical composition can be seen as much as a craft than a creative art. John Williams certainly has a knack for selecting the right material for his scores, and shaping it into very striking musical material. That may not make him one of the greatest and most "original" composers, but it certainly makes him an excellent and versatile composer for film music.
Other than music which is composed as a statement by itself, theatre and film music first and foremost of all has to underline the emotional world of the given film or play.

In fact, a lot of musical masterpieces are based on very simple motifs. If you look at another piece used in films and "ripped off" many times, Richard Strauss`introduction to "Also sprach Zarathustra" (heard in "2001"), from an analytical point of view is a relatively simple C major cadenza, and the famous rising motif is nothing but C-G-C, the most basic sequence of fundamental, first harmonic, and octave. What makes it such an enormous experience to hear is not which notes Strauss "came up with", but how he treats this material in its musical context.

quote:
"Star Wars" begins with a half-note followed by a whole note while "Born Free" opens with a dotted half tied to an eighth.

I don`t know which Star Wars theme you mean, but the one at the beginning of all movies opens with a 8th note triplet, two half notes, another triplet on the beat, a half and a quarter note and so on. A dotted half + an 8th note doesn`t make a full bar. Does anyone have a link to a recording or the music for "born free"? I seem to hear an echo of that in the back of my head, but its been decades since I heard it.

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 11-11-2003, 11:22 AM:

Michael -- There is a band arrangement which is slightly different from the original. I just listened to the soundtrack and it is indeed as you describe. Still, the two pieces of music -- SW & BF -- are similar sounding.

Other soundtracks that got overused...

THE ROCKETEER
THE MISSION

Posted by Bill Gabel (Member # 1105) on 11-11-2003, 12:45 PM:

I went to a screening of a work print of "Romancing the Stone" at the Zanuck Theatre on the Fox lot. They used temp music from Raidiers of the Lost Ark and Thief.

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 11-11-2003, 05:29 PM:

Just checked out the "Born Free" theme (thanks to Aaron for sending me the file). But it doesn`t have much in common with the Star Wars main theme, except for the falling fourth at the beginning (which in Star Wars is in the 2nd bar) and the descending triplet. But the triplet is entirely different notes (in relation to the tonic) in both themes and they resolve to different harmonies.
Both themes have in common the very basic musical gesture of triumphant, "undiluted" major scale melodies centered on fifths and fourths - like about 3,2 billion other themes written throughout music history.
Still, I wouldn`t be surprised if Williams thought of this theme when he wrote Star Wars, but maybe also of many other fanfare-like themes.
Interesting detail in "Born Free": the harmonies dissolved into woodwind motifs. Very nice, but again not "original" or "ripped off", simply one of many stylistical techniques to embellish musical ideas. Prokofiev (again!) was also very fond of this and used it often.

Posted by William Hooper (Member # 71) on 11-12-2003, 01:46 AM:

quote:
That is really an unfair statement, and also one which leaves some doubt about your understanding of how the creative process in music (or maybe in general) works.

I think *that* is unfair to composers who toil to create original works. It's an implication that it always begins with association, & a further one that creativity does not imply a drive towards originality.

Williams just seems to spot films by association with music he's familiar with, & then use schoolbook variation techniques to disquise it slightly. And then add some VERY lame bridging material. He's even an insult to composers who work by creating compiled scores, which is the oldest film accompaniment technique. Carl Davis' score of a video issue of Thief of Bagdad doesn't say "Score by Carl Davis", it says "Score by Carl Davis from themes by Rimsky-Korsakov". (His entirely original scores are excellent too, except the man cannot effectively score a chase or comedy to save his life.) Film composers who worked largely in compiled scores, probably the most familiar being Carl Stalling, are honest about their quotations, & almost all better composers of original material, too. One Road Runner score is more manipulative, original, & effective than any Williams dreck I can think of.

quote:
There is no such thing as complete originality in music. Everything has been there before, only in different form and stylistic context.

That's a common reduction to absurdity: "There are only 12 notes; there's nothing new except how they're put together". Let's try: "There is no such thing as originality in painting or photography; there only three colors, the only thing different is how they're put together." The 2009 Honda Prelude has already been invented. The ancestry of Eminem's music is the German baroque. These are silly, & easy.

quote:
That also goes for Prokofiev, who was a very "original" composer, but whose ideas can in turn be traced back to other music before him. What made him such a great composer was his very sure hand in applying various stylistical techniques to his material. That, by the way, is not my opinion - Prokofiev himself commented extensively on this subject.

Oh, come on. Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies are Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, inspired by folk melodies, not transcriptions with mildly obscuring touches. George Harrison's famous plagiarism case of "My Sweet Lord" was plainly "He's So Fine", unconscious though the lift may have been. Oasis & Jeff Lynne like to work within a genre of Beatles-sounding composition techniques; they're not PDQ Bach. And Peter Schickele is millions of miles surpassing in originality & cleverness than slimy John Williams.

How did I have this premonition that if I went to Google's usenet archive & typed in "John Williams hack" that it would turn up the bazillion hits it did?

quote:
The "creative" quality is basically a sensitivity to the expressive and stylistical potential of melody, harmony, rhythm, color, and the ability to combine these elements into a musical shape which captures a certain "mood" well or fits into a stylistical context.

Note that "originality" isn't included in your assessment.

quote:
For this reason, musical composition can be seen as much as a craft than a creative art

It's a craft because it requires knowledge & work. Work without originality, and poor work, is hack work.

I am always distressed by people who dislike an artist personally because they simply have no taste for their work. Anybody can be not so good or their work just not to someone's taste. But for John Williams, I not only dislike the junk he emits, but the lazy, dissembling mind that produces it. I don't like him. I hope he has a hard stool tomorrow morning. I hope the people in the next block hear his anguished screams.

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 11-12-2003, 02:14 AM:

quote:
Note that "originality" isn't included in your assessment.

That was the point of the whole post. Define "originality".
Where did Williams steal the Star Wars theme from?

Posted by Christian Appelt (Member # 1067) on 11-12-2003, 04:27 PM:

quote:
All of John Williams' music is either ripped of from someone else, or completely forgettable. He is the scum on the bottom of the barrel of film composers, not just because he's often bad, but because he has no ideas. [QUOTE]

William,

I do not like John Williams` work either, but IMHO your description seems to fit Hans Zimmer much better. Reading the end credits of PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN I said to a musician friend: "I would have taken a bet that such a shitty score could only come from Hans Zimmer." He pointed to the screen where some other name appeared, but then we had a good laugh when the credit line "Music produced by Hans Zimmer" followed...

[Big Grin]

Posted by Gracia L. Babbidge (Member # 582) on 11-12-2003, 10:20 PM:

W. Hooper ranted:

quote:
But for John Williams, I not only dislike the junk he emits, but the lazy, dissembling mind that produces it. I don't like him. I hope he has a hard stool tomorrow morning. I hope the people in the next block hear his anguished screams.

Tsk. Tsk.
Like an artist's work or no; like the artist or no; it is wrong to wish ill on anyone. [Razz]

That which you do revisits you threefold, which is a good reason to cause no harm.

Posted by William Hooper (Member # 71) on 11-13-2003, 05:36 AM:

quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note that "originality" isn't included in your assessment.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That was the point of the whole post

I was going to ignore the descent into puerility & ego conservation, but as long as it's deteriorated into Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, what the hey.

You have a need for your defense of Williams to define creativity in a way which excludes meaningful originality, which is what the point was - that Williams stuff is unoriginal. You can make a photocopy of a piece of sheet music, the result is a new thing, but it's not new music unless you play with words to the point of absurdity. I'm very appreciative of works which don't have to be declared completely original to have their own merit: in the big band era, bands used to have their own arrangements of hits which were themselves distinct; new classical recordings are mostly of a limited number of works. The difference is that they do not claim aspects of their work as distinctly their own, as in the composition of a new score.

quote:
Define "originality".

In this Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary:
"1: the quality or state of being original. 2: freshness of aspect, design, or style 3: the power of independent thought or constructive imagination"

2 & 3 do NOT describe the work of John Williams. It describes the work of many other film composers, Waxman, Steiner, Davis, more. It is not the description of a score through all of which you hear & think "Where have I heard this before?"

quote:
Where did Williams steal the Star Wars theme from?

Steal is a word that's so ugly & legally actionable by people with boatloads of lawyers & money.

Here's a link to a CD & audio clip on Amazon of a symphonic suite arranged from Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score for King's Row
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000003TF5/qid=1068717087/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_2/102-5673317-8928137 ?v=glance&s=music&n=507846

Well, listen to that! And it's just the walkup & the HOOK, the hardest, most significant part to write. That's all. In the Star Wars theme, what happens then? Turns the walkup around, repeats the hook, then does the whole thing over. Such a bog-standard method for writing a variation or completing a line that composers AVOID using it. The technique itself is so hoary that it is itself as recognizable as any particular line.

Williams mentioned after Star Wars (not "busted") that he was "influenced" by Korngold. That in particular, in this case! Not composed in the manner of, or with a quotation from, but via a lift. So who else would Williams have been influenced by? Steiner, Waxman, Rosza? He only sounds like them when he pulls pieces from them. It's not work in an idiom, it's like PDQ Bach without the honest, acknowledging wink. His scores are chunks from other things, with variations that are transparent enough to maintain as much as possible of the effectiveness of the originals. Waxman's scores didn't sound like Riesenfeld, they sounded like Waxman; same for Steiner, Davis, start picking some more respected, original composers. Williams' scores are salvage yard bolt & weld-ups, like the car Johnny Cash assembled in One Piece At A Time.

quote:
That which you do revisits you threefold

Ha, ha, Gracia! I eat only chocolate & no high fiber foods, & as it is written, you cannot make bricks without straw.

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 11-13-2003, 03:36 PM:

The excerpt from "Kings Row" is very interesting. Williams definitely was familiar with this music. What is really fascinating is that here the upbeat-rising 5th-motif occurs in a final cadenza (with a lot of chord progrssions Korngold obviously lifted from Rakhmaninov) while in Star Wars it is further developed to become an opening fanfare.
Remember that part of the stylistic challenge for this movie score was to write music in the style of the old Hollywood scores. Korngold himself was an interesting composer, but there`s nothing in his music either that you can`t see in other composers`works before. That doesn`t make him a hack either.
Try not to become too aggressive. I can see that you know a little more then most people about music. But you need to learn a whole lot more to better understand the stylistic developments that go through music history.
In the meantime, here is some other "discovery" you can impress your friends with: Beethoven was a hack too. The famous opening motif from the 5th symphony occurs in a choral work by Cherubini that Beethoven most likely knew because he was a big fan of the French revolutionary music. There is also a symphony in g minor by his contemporary Mehule which uses this upbeat motif. Shocking!

Posted by Natasha Romel Arens (Member # 2020) on 11-26-2003, 04:43 PM:

I remember the moment I cued up two cd players to the star wars theme and Holst's Mars;Bringer of War. I laughed then did it for everyone i knew. Obviously Williams borrows, appreciates, steels whatever warms your heart but I won't say his music is a disservice to movie goers. Williams music is the biggest exposure to classical music that a lot of our patrons will have (i don't count the rape of tunes for commercials as valid exposure) Because williams uses so many references in his music i have never considered him a great composer but instead i do feel he is an accomplished arranger. It would be nice if when he receives awards if he thanked and gave notice to his sources, and maybe it would encourage some to expand their musical libraries...so please check out holst planets.

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 11-27-2003, 01:36 AM:

Which part of "Mars - Bringer of War" did you match up to which part of "Star Wars"? That is quite a feat, considering that the opening theme in "SW" is in 4, and "Mars" is in 5 beats throughout.
"The Planets", a marvellous orchestral showpiece and nothing but pure fun to listen to (provided the orchestra is up to the task, some of the parts are enormously difficult to play), itself "borrows" heavily from other music of the late 19th and early 20th century - Debussy, Ravel, Strauss, Stravinsky, Saint-Saens, Dukas, and others. Holst has also been accused of "stealing" from other composers. I prefer to see it as a brilliant anthology of late romantic orchestral techniques.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 11-27-2003, 03:11 AM:

quote:
I remember the moment I cued up two cd players to the star wars theme and Holst's Mars;Bringer of War.

Which in turn has an uncanny resemblance to the opening of the final movement of Bruckner's 8th symphony.

Posted by Natasha Romel Arens (Member # 2020) on 11-27-2003, 09:54 PM:

i guess "cued up" was the wrong terminology, unfortunatly my music is in storage so when i'm settled i'll listen to mars again and compare. Mars is a great piece to play (i played the viola doo doo do do do doo do do over and over) I guess i was just trying to add to the list of "borrowed music".