Boombox Serenade

Film-Music Moment of the Day: Wintour's Touch

"What you touch you don't feel
Do not know what you steal
Destroy everything you touch today
Please destroy me this way."  —Ladytron, Witching Hour (2005)

Well, R.J. Cutler came out with guns blazing for this, his first theater release in some time. Within minutes The September Issue launches into New York Fashion Week footage while Ladytron's darkly glamorous "Destroy Everything You Touch" plays through a flashbulb-spangled montage in which Candy Patts Price describes Anna Wintour as the Pope of fashion and Andre Leon Talley bemoans a "famine of beauty" for the season. In stark contrast to these loud, glorious eccentrics is the preternaturally composed Anna Wintour observing and absorbing the runway shows, wearing her trademark fur and sunglasses. The Ladytron track was made for it.

Enter Grace Coddington, American Vogue's creative director, who serves as creative counterpoint to Wintour's withering eye. The Galliano-loving Grace is everything that Wintour is not: animated, romantic, accepting of physical imperfections, celebrity averse. Cutler captures several of her shoots, each more fantastic than the last and culminating in a Paris couture assignment that elicited gasps from the people sitting next to me. It was beyond gorgeous—impossibly exquisite concoctions, fantasies of color. This is the sequence in which it becomes clear that Grace is an outright magician, and also where my respect for Wintour grew because of the sheer nerve it would take to pare back such peerless work. Wintour is an editor, after all, and her job is defined largely by a manifest not to create, but to discard and delete. Many are saying that Grace emerges as the unexpected star of The September Issue, but my impression is that Anna knew exactly what she was doing throughout, keeping quarter where she always has: above the fray.

This is not to say that there aren't moments of insight into Wintour's personality. She radiates adoration for her children and lights up when describing London in the early 60's, citing the birth control pill and the end of the class system as the reasons behind the social energy of the time. With a twinkle in her eye she observes,"You'd have had to be wearing an Irving Penn sack on your head not to know there was something going on." She also overtly acknowledges that Coddington is a genius, and understands that her own is of a very different nature. When asked what her strength is, she replies, "My decisiveness," a word that has its roots in the old French verb "cædere" meaning, "to cut."

In the end, what is so striking about this documentary is how perfectly it captures the creative process, largely as a manifestation of the healthy friction between two opposites, Grace and Anna. It also benefits hugely from Cutler's unwillingness to waste time manufacturing a kinder, gentler Anna Wintour; instead he celebrates her cool detachment and opacity as key strengths of this formidable editor.

He did a good job with the music in the film too, although he should have been more willing to turn up the volume at times and allow it to take over the scene for awhile. With such rich visual material, I would have liked for there to be at least a few passages allowed to be pure sound and image events. As it was, Cutler seemed afraid to stray from the talking heads for too long, and is a bit reticent with the music as a result. He had some great tracks though, no doubt thanks to some help from Music Supervisor Margaret Yen (Juno, The Hangover, Passion of the Christ). We'll definitely be checking out his future work.

Thomas Mars of French Band Phoenix to Contribute Original Music to Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere"

Sofia Coppola's go-to sound designer, Richard Beggs, reports that her significant other, Thomas Mars, will be contributing original music to her upcoming film, "Somewhere," to be released in late 2010. This continues Coppola's track record of tapping leading edge pop and rock musicians to do score for her films, versus traditional composers. 

On "The Virgin Suicides" she collaborated with the French downtempo electronic band, AIR, and on "Lost in Translation" it was Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine. Brian Reitzell is her favorite music supervisor, although it's not clear yet whether or not he's working on "Somewhere." It seems impossible, though, that Sofia will be able to resist slipping in some licensed tracks, so his presence is anticipated.

Beggs described "Somewhere" as "airy, open, transparent" and seemed very taken with the broad canvas it's provided for sound design. He described his own style of sound design as having grown "sparser and sparser" over the years.

Film-Music Moment of the Day: The Peyote Song at the Center of Barry Levinson's "Sleepers" (1996)

 

Thanks to the San Francisco Film Society I recently had the pleasure of sitting at the feet of master sound designer Richard Beggs for an evening. He talked about his work with directors like Alfonso Cuaron, Spike Jonze, and Sofia Coppola, and showed a few clips of some of his best known films. We sat rapt at the famous opening montage of Apocalypse Now and he explained how Francis Ford Coppola was fascinated with the role technology played in the Vietnam War and how this affected his own approach to the soundtrack, like his idea to use a Moog to create the sound of a helicopter blade and a house fly, instead of more natural or "believable" sources.

(Later I'd learn that Apocalypse Now was in fact the first film to grant the title of "Sound Designer" to anyone (Walter Murch in this case). It was the first time that much tangible creative authority was given over to the person in charge of the soundtrack. Beggs was a sound recordist on that film, the very first of his career—a fact he described as "sort of a distorting experience.")

One of the most affecting clips Beggs showed was from Barry Levinson's 1996 film, Sleepers, about a group of boys who endure sexual abuse at a state detention center in upstate New York. The clip depicted the moment when John Reilly (played by Ron Eldard) is hanging out at a bar some twenty years later and suddenly spots one of the guards who abused him (played by Kevin Bacon). At this point the action morphs into slow motion and sounds become heightened. Richard pointed out that you can hear the sound of a pull chain clinking against a lightbulb throughout this interlude—an acoustic detail taken from memories of the basement room where the guards would take the boys to rape them. It's the perfect example of Beggs' detailed, almost Freudian approach to sound design, one—he says—that is not meant to be perceived on a conscious level.

The music too grows louder in this pivotal moment, moving from an anonymous wash of bar rock to a more conspicuous presence. The song is a near-hit of the 1960's called "Witchi Tai To" by a short-lived group called Everything is Everything, fronted by jazz fusion pioneer Jim Pepper. Pepper was of Kaw and Creek heritage, and "Witchi Tai To" is a traditional peyote song—one typically performed during the ceremonial taking of peyote—and it has a mystical, meditative quality that is oddly perfect for this scene; its ceremonial sound casts a powerful spell, making it a heightened and strangely hallowed moment. When Reilly goes into the bathroom to collect himself Levinson and Beggs ratchet things up a notch further. As Reilly stares into the mirror, the music moves from heightened source to full soundtrack—a relentless loop laid over his entire consciousness—the repetition of its central chant like the memories that have been abruptly dragged to the fore.

It's a three step treatment of one song that reflects the subjective experience of the character without ever pandering to it. Instead of the tense strings we'd get from most score composers, we get a lilting, jazz inflected blessing.

Water spirit feelings
Springin' round my head
Makes me feel glad
That I'm not dead

Richard Beggs shared a wealth of other fascinating stuff that night, and I'll definitely be writing about it more over the coming weeks. In the meantime, give Sleepers another look now that more than ten years have gone by since it was made. And don't forget to listen for the lightbulb chain.