June 6, 2016

It’s been amazing to see the sudden renascence of the work of John Carpenter, not just as a director and arguably the “master of horror,” but in particular for all the music he’s composed for his movies. He’s currently in the middle of a world tour in support of his two albums “Lost Themes” and “Lost Themes II,” where he’s also performing live reinterpretations of some of his most famous film themes. I was fortunate enough to catch his “warm up” show at the Bootleg Theater here in Los Angeles, which kicked off the tour and I was pleasantly surprised by one of the evening’s set list picks.

Toward the latter half of his show, Carpenter paid tribute to legendary composer Ennio Morricone and performed his main theme for John’s 1982 remake of THE THING. It was one of those surreal moments where I never thought I’d hear someone pull off a cover of a Morricone tune, let alone it being Carpenter, himself! It got me thinking about how special THE THING is, both in John’s filmography, but also musically. For the most part, only on the rare occasion did Carpenter not compose his own score.

In the case of THE THING, his first major studio movie for Universal, Carpenter had his hands full with the complexity of the actual shoot, itself. Keep in mind, we’re all familiar now with the finished product, and we’re used to the jaw-dropping FX done by Rob Bottin and the gorgeous compositions of Dean Cundey’s photography that capture the cold, isolated feeling of their shooting locations, but imagine trying to pre-visualize how to pull that all off before shooting began! The last thing Carpenter needed to worry about was scoring the film too.

Producer Stuart Cohen shed some light in a very detailed post on his personal blog. He says, “In a perfect world, given unlimited time and resources, I think John would have preferred to compose the music for THE THING himself. The realities of the work yet to be done, however, combined with the need for a more expansive and layered approach to the score led us to consider other options. We initially offered the film to Jerry Goldsmith who was unavailable, doing both POLTERGEIST and TWILIGHT ZONE for Spielberg. Availability on musician John Corigliano (ALTERED STATES) was checked. The legendary Alex North read the script, had ideas, and wanted to meet but at that point I felt the only composer John would possibly entrust his film to other than himself was Ennio Morricone.”

The composer and director only met once, and Morricone saw a very early version of the film without any of the exteriors or completed FX. Partly because of this and because of the language barrier between the two, approaching the score was a challenge. Producer Cohen explains that John had a brief 2 day trip to meet with Morricone in Italy, “In early January, 1982, a conversation was done through translators which made things difficult. Matters improved slightly when John sat down at the piano and began tinkering, searching for a way of communicating the feeling of what he was after, with Morricone listening intently. This was the first time John had ceded control of the music to any of his films, and I believe the experience was extremely difficult. It was agreed that due to the shortness of time Morricone would provide the music in a series of thematic suites, with both electronic and orchestral elements present, that we would then later edit to fit – this would simplify things, save time and eliminate the need to conventionally “spot” the film.”

“John played for Morricone the score we did for ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK,” explained Alan Howarth in a 2011 composer roundtable interview as part of the Sound Of Fear event at London’s Southbank Centre. “Ennio gave it out two passes. John comes from the other side; he says: ‘Hmm, there’s a couple of things I really need. You mind if we just kind of go to the studio for a day and sneak this one in?’ We did three more cues, making it more John Carpenter-esque…’”

Morricone himself said the following about his work on THE THING: “Regarding THE THING, by John Carpenter, I’ve asked him, as he was preparing some electronic music with an assistant to edit on the film, “Why did you call me, if you want to do it on your own?” He surprised me, he said – “I got married to your music. This is why I’ve called you.” I was quite amazed, he called me because he had my music at his wedding. Then when he showed me the film, later when I wrote the music, we didn’t exchange ideas. He ran away, nearly ashamed of showing it to me. I wrote the music on my own without his advice. Naturally, as I had become quite clever since 1982, I’ve written several scores relating to my life. And I had written one, which was electronic music. And [Carpenter] took the electronic score.”

In the book JOHN CARPENTER: THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS by Giles Boulenger, John himself clarified his and Alan’s contributions as compared to what Ennio had done. “[Morricone] had written several pieces for THE THING, and I told him that he was using too many notes for the title track and that he should simplify it. He did simplify it, and the title track that you hear is his. He did all the orchestrations and recorded for me 20 minutes of music I could use wherever I wished but without seeing any footage. I cut his music into the film and realized that there were places, mostly scenes of tension, in which his music would not work.”

“Since we needed something, I secretly ran off and recorded in a couple of days a few pieces to use. My pieces were very simple electronic pieces – it was almost tones. It was not really music at all but just background sounds, something today you might even consider as sound effects. I used these pieces as unifying moments because structurally we had to redo THE THING at one point in the center. I put them in there to glue together the film, but in no way was I trying to compete with Ennio’s score. The score is his.”

Interestingly enough, the cues that Morricone did for THE THING that weren’t in the actual film did get used eventually – in Quentin Tarantino’s 2015 feature THE HATEFUL EIGHT. In a post-screening Q & A with fellow director Christopher Nolan, Tarantino explained (and paraphrased Morricone), “‘I wrote a whole orchestra score [for THE THING], and I wrote a whole synthesizer score, because I knew that was what [John Carpenter] was used to and I gave him everything, and the only thing he used in the entire movie was the synthesizer main title [track].’ So basically, if you stay away from the synthesizer main title, all that music that’s on the soundtrack album has never been used in a movie ever. So, he goes, ‘What I can do is I’ll write the theme… and with the other THING pieces of music, now you have your original score that’s never been used in a movie before.’”

Morricone composed 25 minutes of new music for THE HATEFUL EIGHT, paired up with his un-used cues from THE THING, along with some other of Tarantino’s favorite bits of music, including one of Morricone’s pieces from THE EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC! Morricone won his first Oscar for his score on THE HATEFUL EIGHT.

When I think back to THE THING, one of the aspects that is forever embedded in my mind is that melancholy, bleak theme. It’s one of those rare cases in cinema where everything works. While the movie wasn’t well received by critics or audiences when it came out in 1982, it is now most certainly celebrated as a masterpiece of sci-fi/horror cinema. Let’s enjoy Ennio Morricone’s main theme for John Carpenter’s THE THING!