If you've seen
Gary Leva's 2007 documentary,
Fog City Mavericks, you may have heard a few people in it assert that George Lucas' 1973 film,
American Graffiti, had the first ever pop music soundtrack. But while
American Graffiti was among the earlier films to take that route, it wasn't the first. Not by a long shot.
All throughout the sixties, in fact, directors were moving toward a more pop oriented approach. Bruce Conner's 1962 short, COSMIC RAY—featuring atomic bomb newsreel mixed with original footage—was set to Ray Charles' "What'd I Say," and was a significant early step away from the old Irving Berlin sensibility about music in film. Many consider COSMIC RAY, in fact, to be the first real music video, an attribution that Conners himself denies, saying that if he's the father of the genre then he'd like a "paternity test." Whether he's responsible for MTV or not though, he was definitely exhibiting a new willingness to use album-released tracks by real, label-backed musicians as an atmospheric
element on par with visual composition, lighting, score, and other, cinematic elements. His work also leveraged the subculture's growing suspicion of traditional American vernacular in general.
Around the same time Conners was making COSMIC RAY, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn composed music for the 1961 film Paris Blues and were nominated for an Academy Award for it, but several pieces of the "score" (a term the Academy now defines as music written specifically for the film) were actually jazz standards that Ellington had recorded several decades before, such as "Take the A Train" and 'Mood Indigo." It was, by that time, commonplace for big budget Hollywood films like White Christmas to spawn chart-toppers in popular culture, but with Paris Blues that direction began to reverse a bit, and existing music started to find a larger audience through film.
On the flip side, the sixties also provide some interesting examples of just how score-happy the industry was at the time. The
1965 film The Knack...and How to Get It is about the sexual revolution among "mods and rockers" of mid-sixties London, but instead of a mod or rock soundtrack it had a score—a choice that would be fairly unthinkable for equivalent storylines today (can you imagine a score for High Fidelity?). Other quasi-edgy films of the 60's like Alfie and Breakfast at Tiffany's almost definitely would have had pop soundtracks had it been a more common practice
at the time. During that same period From Russia With Love was released and was the first to use that Bond strategy of featuring a distinct title track, but it was written by Lionel Bart who came directly from the musical theater world. The result is a buttery Matt Monro number wholly untouched by Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, or rock and roll. Even fairly racy subject matter was still getting the ol' Irving Berlin treatment.
Then, things began to change. In 1966
Michelangelo Antonioni released Blow Up, featuring score
by Herbie Hancock, but also pop songs by the The Lovin'
Spoonful, The Yardbirds, and Tomorrow (featuring a pre-Yes Steve Howe). In 1967, Mike Nichols busted out with The Graduate, and showed the world, definitively, just how powerful a non-score soundtrack could be in a work of serious cinema. Paul Simon had actually written two songs specifically for the film ("Punky's Dilemma" and "A Hazy Shade of Winter") but Nichols rejected both and instead chose "Mrs. Robinson," a song not written for the movie, but one that Simon had already been writing and had originally called "Mrs. Roosevelt," after Eleanor Roosevelt. The song became a hit after the film was released, once again showing film's ability to magnify existing works of music, instead of the more top-down approach of making hits out of music written specifically for a film.
The year 1968 was significant for the release of Yellow Submarine, which furthered and fueled—as many Beatles
projects did—the public's appetite for rock set
to fantastic images. Then Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider came along in 1969, featuring a full blown "various artists" soundtrack including Steppenwolf, The Byrds, The Band, Jimi Hendrix, Little Eva, and many others. Rock as counterculture was at its peak by then, and Easy Rider's soundtrack was inextricably linked to its power and cultural significance as a film.
While that soundtrack was certainly groundbreaking, however, a lot of the credit for the approach should actually go to Italian director, Dino Risi. That's because from title to finale, Easy Rider was based on Dino Risi's 1962 film, Il Sorpasso ("The Easy Life") which had a full pop soundtrack featuring snappy Italian hits such as "Saint Tropez Twist" by Peppino di Capri, "Quando Quando Quando" by Emilio Pericoli, "Guarda come Dondolo" and "Pinne Fucili ed Occhiali" by Edoardo Vianello, and "Vecchio Frac" by Domenico Modugno.
Not coincidentally, Il Sorpasso is also considered the first truly modern road movie, with no back projections, no studio work, and no grand old automobiles. Its kicky early 60's sensibility differs dramatically from the late 60's psychedelia of Easy Rider, but several strong similarities are there too, including themes of how a nation chooses to recover from an era of war and repression. (If Il Sorpasso is any indication, Italians recovered by doing the Twist absolutely everywhere.)
By the time American Graffiti came along in 1973, its pop music soundtrack was still a new enough approach to signify George Lucas' sense of adventure as a director, but not so new that it was visionary. Other significant non-score soundtracks leading up to American Graffiti include Midnight Cowboy, Zabriskie Point, and Alice's Restaurant, but it's important to remember that Dino Risi's Il Sorpasso presaged all of these, including Easy Rider, and was truly a breakthrough in that sense.
