Christopher Guest’s comic epic “For Your Consideration” features an eclectic score by longtime Spectrasonics user and composer-extraordinaire CJ Vanston.
Guest’s role as Nigel Tufel in the famous 80�s mockumentary “Spinal Tap” vaulted him into a permanent place of honor for most musicians, and music has played a huge role in his subsequent films. In 2003 with “A Mighty Wind,” a fun poke at the 1960’s folk scene, Guest scored a musical hit again with CJ Vanston, the film’s music was nominated for three Grammys and an Oscar - and won a Grammy. Guest’s longtime composer CJ Vanston has worked on all four comic masterpieces with the director including “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show.”
CJ used Stylus RMX, Trilogy and Atmosphere in many areas of the latest score, and composing process.
For his composing set up, Vanston tells us, �I use Logic exclusively, using almost 100% virtual synths. There are a few Jazz cues in this movie, including the opening credits, and I ended up using Trilogy for all the upright bass parts. People sometimes tell me ‘You’re my favorite bass player!’ I love playing bass parts, and Trilogy is a no-compromise dream for this task. I seem to start out thinking I’ll replace the bass, but Chris always stops me, saying ‘you’re not touching that!’. Ed Cherney mixed the score and said ‘I could never get a real upright to sound this good!’ Trilogy just rocks. I have also set up Christopher with Logic and Trilogy at his home, he loves it.”
In the film, there is a fake hip hop TV show called “Chillaxin” (”Chillin’ and Relaxin’” as CJ explains to us) where Harry Shearer’s character appears, somewhat uncomfortably, to promote “Home For Purim.” “Chris and I wrote a hip hop theme using Stylus RMX for the drum loops and DJ effects, Trilogy for the synth bass and Atmosphere for the synth parts. Besides Chris’ rapping and funk guitar, that track is 100% Spectrasonics. Eric Persing is a madman, and these plug-ins are the best in the business in my opinion.”
“I’m involved from the beginning of Christopher’s movies. I’m on the set throughout the shooting, and end up sitting in on almost every aspect, from editing, color timing, poster and web design, all the way to the dubbing stage. I enjoy being around for the entire process, I think it has a quantifiable positive effect on the final product. I operate with boutique sensibility, keeping my operation very small and 100% hands-on, like the movies themselves. Working on these films is sometimes like building a ship in a bottle, with a lot of attention to small details, as Chris is a stickler for musical authenticity. On top of all of that, the cast and crew has been together for all four movies, so it is a family environment, which is rare in this industry. This all adds up to a unique and rich experience that hopefully is passed on to the viewer.”
And how does CJ go about composing the music for Christopher Guest’s movies? “These movies don’t have a script per se, most of the scenes are completely improvised, so we start from the general shoot outline and prepare whatever music we need for the film shoot itself. The rest happens in post-production. Chris generally shoots around 70 hours of footage, which needs to be edited down to around 90 minutes. This is a long and sometimes painful process, as unbelievably funny stuff (and music) hits the cutting room floor to keep the story concise. We constantly tweak and find places where music is needed, and I deliver little demos in spurts so Chris can drop them in and see how they work. The Spectrasonics plug-ins get heavy use in this phase, I don’t know how I’d live without them. There are obvious cues, built into the concept, but also many not so obvious ones, and many times I’m left to my own devices to try things, Chris is very open to that. It’s a very fine line we walk with on these films, as to what is source and what is score.”
Vanston tells us that Guest’s mantra is “you can’t have two jokes.” For this type of comedy to work, the music tends to take on the role of the straight man. “My concept is that the music doesn’t get how out of touch with reality these characters really are. No trombone slides, penny whistles or timpani allowed.”
“All the music is completely sketched out ahead of time as a synth mockup, so Chris can hear it and we can agree that it’s right,” states Vanston. “As a session player through the years, I developed the ability to mock almost any instrument, which all pays off here. I use Atmosphere all the time to sketch out strings with the “Hollywood Strings” patch. “For Your Consideration” has more styles of music than any project I’ve ever done, from Country, Rap and Jazz to Jewish, Classical and Hawaiian. My chameleon-like, jingle- writing background in Chicago really came in handy here.”
Vanston explains, “There are several made-up TV shows within the movie, take-offs of entertainment television, late night TV and even a hip-hop dance show. I wrote themes for each of these, but then altered the themes in a subtle way to influence and highlight emotions in the characters, paying close attention to the dialog. So the themes inside the movie act as subtle score devices also. The other thing to remember is that all of these themes should sound like they were written by different composers, some of them wonderfully horrible hacks.
Vanston reveals another inside tip: “Christopher is a great musician. Not many people know he studied clarinet at the Royal Academy of Music. He has an uncanny knowledge of all styles of music, music history, composers, musicians, vintage guitars, etc. My little Hitchcock joke is to include a clarinet solo in each movie for Chris to play; but we always end up leaving my part in, as Chris says “I can’t play that.” Chris also plays piano, guitar, sings, writes…a dream director to work for. I’m spoiled.”
“I do a ton of research for music for Christopher’s movies. We needed some Hawaiian music for an infomercial for a workout product called “Hula Balls” that appears in the movie. Chris of course knew all of the slack key guitar masters, it’s really rather sickening. So I again did my research so these cues would sound authentic. I wrote the pieces, mocked them up using Stylus RMX and Trilogy, and Dean Parks ended up coming in and re-playing the guitar parts.”
Finally, Vanston reveals a special part of the score, possibly hidden for most viewers and listeners. “The basic premise of ‘For Your Consideration’ is the production of a movie called “Home for Purim,” which is a period piece, implausibly based on a Jewish family with a gay daughter and dying mother living in the south during WWII. The film starts behind the scenes on the actual movie set, but we end up zooming in, until we’re actually inside the movie. To enhance those scenes I wrote some weepy “We’re-going-to-lose-the-ranch,” Bette Davis movie-ish, classic movie score music.
“I researched the best early film composers like Erich Korngold, Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin and others to get my head in that period to write the score pieces for “Home For Purim.” These composers where the groundbreakers in Hollywood. I also researched Jewish folk songs. By the way, “For Your Consideration” contains the first official “score” of these four Christopher Guest movies (another Guest/Vanston collaboration was “Almost Heroes,” starring Chris Farley and Mathew Perry, which featured a full score with 60 piece orchestra). After I mocked everything up and got them approved, I hired “The Section,” a string quartet in LA to record most of it, but ended up leaving in the Atmosphere [string] parts, they sounded so good. Then I got my friend and legend Jerry Goodman to play the solo violin parts over that, he was incredible. It�s outside the realm of reality that the score would be played while a scene is being filmed, so it is a ‘cheat.’ But it ended up being very effective, emotionally pulling you into this horrible movie within a movie, until Chris’ character (he plays the director) yells ‘cut!’ with a mouthful of food and wakes you up to reality. What a blast”