"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Parodi/Fair, "James Bond Theme (GoldenEye Trailer Version)"

Song: "James Bond Theme (GoldenEye Trailer Version)" by Parodi/Fair
Released: 2002 (it was recorded in 1995)
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: The "Rome, Italian Style" block focuses on how musicians outside the film and TV music world interpret '60s and '70s film and TV music. Former Arsenio Hall Show band keyboardist Starr Parodi and her husband Jeff Eden Fair, whose film and TV scoring work as a duo has included the mid-'90s United Artists logo music and the Lifetime cop show The Division, are hardly outsiders, but their arrangement of "The James Bond Theme" from 1962's Dr. No is my favorite cover of that theme that never appeared in a Bond film.

On this date in 1963, "The James Bond Theme" (composed by Monty Norman and arranged by John Barry) entered the American pop charts. It captured the danger and allure of Bond's universe so well that every Eon Productions Bond film since Dr. No has featured it, and every non-Eon Bond film that doesn't feature it is, musically, kind of dickless without it--like Never Say Never Again or The Rock, which I like to think of as a sequel to the Sean Connery 007 installments because Connery was clearly playing Bond again, despite being named "John Mason,"(*) a safe-enough name choice to keep the Ian Fleming estate's lawyers away.

(*) If one likes to think of the name Bond as a mantle that's assumed by many different male MI6 agents instead of Bond being the same orphaned bachelor (and later, widower) from 1962 to 2002 despite five different faces, heights and accents(**), then that was a great way to explain why MI6 replaced the anonymous Scotsman who assumed the Bond identity from 1962 to 1967 and then briefly again in 1971: the U.S. government imprisoned his arse.

(**) Maybe Bond is really a Time Lord. All those STDs he picked up must have caused him to regenerate four times.

In 1995, United Artists recruited Parodi and Fair to do an updated version of "The James Bond Theme" for the GoldenEye teaser trailer, months before filming was completed on Pierce Brosnan's first movie as 007, which was also the first movie in which Eon enlisted Martin Campbell, the New Zealand-born director of the classic British miniseries Edge of Darkness, to rescue the hit-or-miss 007 film series from one of many periods of creative (and this time, also legally related) doldrums.

"We were in a unique and exciting situation because we had been given the assignment of bringing the Bond theme into the 90's," recalled Parodi and Fair on their official site. "Fortunately we were given lots of artistic freedom because the picture of the GoldenEye Teaser was to be edited to our music arrangement. We wanted to give the theme a sense of mystery and tension that would break out with tons of energy that suits the action that Bond films deliver."

The duo succeeded. Their nifty, trip-hop-influenced take on "The James Bond Theme," which constantly changes tempos, announced so effectively to the world during the GoldenEye teaser trailer that Bond was back in action again. It recaptures the danger and allure of Bond's universe in a way that Marvin Hamlisch's fun(***) but not-as-alluring "Bond '77" cover from The Spy Who Loved Me doesn't. Maybe it's due to the trip-hop sound, which is better suited for 007 than the disco sound of "Bond '77" because trip-hop is so influenced by Barry's spy movie scores, and artists from that genre are so fond of sampling those scores too, which is what Parodi and Fair did with the original 1962 recording of "The James Bond Theme" in their teaser trailer music.

(***) It's mostly because of the cowbells.

In 2002, it was nice to finally be able to have on disc the teaser trailer music, which became a staple of MGM/UA's trailers and ads for the Brosnan films. The trailer music made its CD debut on the Best of Bond... James Bond compilation, which Capitol released to mark the film series' 40th anniversary. At that time, the series was stuck in yet another creative rut (Brosnan's films did well at the box office but were becoming increasingly slipshod, script-wise). It wasn't able to come out of this rut until Eon enlisted Campbell again to helm what ended up being the best--and least juvenile--Bond film in decades. Mr. Bond, you have a nasty habit of surviving.

"A Fistful of Soundtracks can be a blast to listen to. Duck, you sucka!"

We interrupt my work on a drawing of the three members of De La Soul for my currently-in-the-works, to-be-self-published book to bring you this special bulletin.

I don't know what Crutchfield is--the name sounds like a Syfy Original Movie(*) ripoff of Cloverfield--but I'd like to thank the site for a mostly positive review of the Fistful of Soundtracks channel that it posted a few weeks ago.

(*) Speaking of which, Battle of Los Angeles? Really, Syfy? Next time you run out of title ideas for your original movies, how about you take a cue from your own station tagline and imagine greater?

I've seen so many blogs with kind things to say about AFOS--and I always appreciate that--but they always get one or two tidbits about AFOS or me wrong. Crutchfield's review has none of that "every now and then it plays a random old movie trailer" bullshit. The reviewer actually did his homework and took the time to listen closely and note that "they aren't placed at random. If you hear the trailer for Big Trouble in Little China, you can be sure that the next selection will be from the soundtrack of that film." (However, for some odd reason, he never once uses the word "score" in his review to distinguish between "soundtrack" and "score.")

The reviewer wishes my channel had a better-quality bit rate and is probably wondering why it's just 32 kbps. Lengthy answer: I'm broke.

The audacity of Swope

The New York Times said blogging is passé, so I'm not going to blog anymore.

I'm kidding. Actually, I won't be posting stuff for a while (and haven't done so since February 28) because I'm busy working on not just one self-published print compilation of material from A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog but two.

When I allow myself some free time to surf the Web, one site I've been checking out lately is Trailers from Hell, which is run by one of my favorite underappreciated directors, Joe Dante (whose work for TV has been more interesting than his recent film work--I love Dante's anti-Bush Administration Masters of Horror episode "Homecoming"). At Trailers from Hell, Dante's filmmaker and screenwriter friends present trailers of their favorite films and discuss why those films are their favorites.

Trailers from Hell has been on fire lately with some nice commentary tracks about trailers for old films I like, so to keep this blog from looking like it's frozen in time, I've got Whole Wide World and Jolene director Dan Ireland's Trailers from Hell commentrak for the trailer for the 1969 advertising industry satire Putney Swope, which the site posted for Black History Month (the video also gives me an excuse to again post an Obamicon of Putney Swope that was made by me). Ireland's commentrak is followed by History of Violence film adaptation screenwriter Josh Olson's Trailers from Hell commentrak for the trailer for the late Peter Yates' entertaining 1972 adaptation of the Donald E. Westlake caper The Hot Rock. (The Putney Swope and Hot Rock trailers are particularly interesting because they don't contain voiceover narration, which makes them less like the voiceover-heavy and corny trailers of their era and more like the announcer-less and stylish trailers that are more common today and have influenced the CBS prime-time promo department to go announcer-less.)

Putney Swope is the story of an ad agency's token black employee (Arnold Johnson) who gains control of the business, revolutionizes the ad industry with frank and sexually explicit ads and winds up becoming as fatuous and corrupt as the stolid and whitebread Madison Avenue culture he initially fought against (he makes the mistake of getting high on his own supply: himself). Director Robert Downey's most famous flick appeals to my anti-authoritarian side, so I like it and will probably rewatch it when it turns up on cable again, even though the slo-mo titty-baring stewardess ad goes on way too long (it's nice to look at though), the film falls apart at the end and Downey's redubbing of his own lead actor sounds terrible. Johnson constantly bungled his lines, so Downey erased Johnson's voice from the soundtrack and inserted his own. He sounds less like an old black man and more like Cleavon Little when he pretended to take himself hostage and imitated a white thug in Blazing Saddles ("Hold it! Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it!"). The elder Downey's performance is an odd precursor to his actor son's portrayal of a movie star pretending to be black in Tropic Thunder.

I like to think of Putney Swope as a spinoff of Mad Men in which one of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce's rival businesses gets taken over by the militant friends of Hollis the elevator operator. I agree with Hammer to Nail that the film is dead-on about how "people will be cruel and craven no matter what side of the power dynamic they occupy," which makes it as relevant now as it was in 1969.




Trailers from Hell also did an entry on The Hot Rock, which contains an enjoyable Quincy Jones score that Jones considers one of his favorites and was sampled by Eminem in "Like Toy Soldiers," as well as cameo appearances by a then-under-construction World Trade Center and a young Christopher Guest. Afghanistan banana stand.

Who's That Voice on A Fistful of Soundtracks? #4: Hugh Morgan

Hugh Morgan
Who is he?: Not to be confused with Fun Lovin' Criminals frontman Hugh "Huey" Morgan, former WQXR classical music radio DJ and Face the Nation announcer Hugh Morgan has one of the most distinctive voices from the current crop of trailer announcers. His delivery is like a cross between George Takei and an accent-less, not-so-mumbly Sylvester Stallone.
Most memorable voice work: "Scooby Snacks." Kidding!
Back to seriousness. Most memorable voice work: It's a toss-up between Morgan's voiceovers for the Matrix TV spots and his narration during the White Noise trailers and ads, the most eerie of Morgan's many horror trailer voiceovers.
When can you hear him on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel?: The trailers for The Matrix Revolutions, Rosewood, The Last of the Mohicans and Heat. As I said once before, when I was a university freshman, Heat's tantalizing trailers and TV spots got me sold on the teaming of Pacino, De Niro and Michael Mann. But having to buy that Pacino could kick Henry Rollins' ass--not so much.



Previous "Who's That Voice?" bios:
Paul Frees
Percy Rodrigues
Adolph Caesar

Who's That Voice on A Fistful of Soundtracks? #3: Paul Frees

Paul Frees
Who is he?: Boris Badenov. Burgermeister Meisterburger. Toshiro Mifune's substitute voice in Grand Prix and Midway. The voice that accompanied countless old Disneyland attractions and the most depressing ending in a G-rated movie ever (Beneath the Planet of the Apes).
When can you hear him on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel?: The trailers for Sweet Smell of Success and Patton.



Previous "Who's That Voice?" bios:
Percy Rodrigues
Adolph Caesar

Who's That Voice on A Fistful of Soundtracks? #2: Percy Rodrigues

Percy Rodrigues
Who is he?: As an announcer, this African Canadian actor and Peyton Place cast member was best known for scaring millions of white people away from the water during the Jaws trailers and ads (he's one of the interviewees in The Shark Is Still Working, a 2006 documentary about the making of Jaws that also marks the actor's final public appearance before his death). But because the release of the original Jaws was before my time, I know Rodrigues best from the She's Having a Baby trailer ("I stopped taking the pill") and the Alien³ trailer, where he declared that "the bitch is back." I like how he could sound ominous one moment and then be tongue-in-cheek seconds later--or be both at the same time, like in the She's Having a Baby and Alien³ previews.
Most memorable on-screen role: On the original Star Trek, Rodrigues guest-starred as a Starfleet commodore whose voice must have frightened Dr. McCoy away from the Enterprise swimming pool.
When can you hear him on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel?: The trailers for Taxi Driver, Lifeforce and The Empire Strikes Back: Special Edition.



Previous "Who's That Voice?" bio:
Adolph Caesar

Who's That Voice on A Fistful of Soundtracks? #1: Adolph Caesar

I haven't blogged in ages because I'm busy with my webcomic (although I've been doing occasional microblogging), so to keep the blog from looking like it's frozen in time, here's the first in a series of posts that identifies the legendary voices that turn up often during either the Fistful of Soundtracks channel's programming or the movie/TV trailer clips that function as intros to the tunes that are part of the channel's "Assorted Fistful" block.

Adolph Caesar
Who is he?: A New York stage actor whose classy baritone was all over trailers and ads for blaxploitation flicks, Caesar earned acclaim late in life for some of his acting work both on stage and screen before dying from a heart attack in 1986.
Most memorable on-screen role: A role he reprised from the stage: the self-hating light-skinned black sergeant in A Soldier's Story who, in the above snapshot, is preparing to whup the ass of some future double Oscar winner.
Most memorable voiceover work: The trailers and TV/radio spots for the original Dawn of the Dead ("When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth").
When can you hear him on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel?: The trailers for Superfly and Hell Up in Harlem and the radio spots for Trouble Man, Slaughter, Three Tough Guys, Black Caesar, Truck Turner, Foxy Brown and Claudine.

The Inception trailer music is as awesome as that shot of the city street folding like a slice of New York pizza

Though I'm still not sure what exactly Christopher Nolan's Inception is about (it looks like The Lathe of Heaven meets Being John Malkovich), I'm dying to see it because of the trailers' trippy visuals of floating gunmen and folding cityscapes (which look stunning in IMAX) and Nolan's solid track record with psychological thriller material ever since Memento. That Dark Knight-esque piece of music during the new Inception trailer and TV spot sounds amazing. At first, I thought it was a cue from Hans Zimmer's Inception score, but it was actually composed by Zack Hemsey, who says he plans to make his Inception trailer piece (entitled "Mind Heist") available for sale on his site.

Danny Trejo's so tough Freddy has nightmares about him

The talk of the Internets is AICN's Cinco de Mayo posting of the trailer for Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse spinoff Machete--a movie that originated as a fake trailer, much like Black Dynamite and Spaceballs, which swam out of the spaceballsack that was "Jews in Space" from History of the World: Part I.

I loved the original fake trailer, and so did the audience during one of the cleverest DVD audio tracks I've heard, the Planet Terror DVD's "Audience Reaction Track." With a cast that includes three Losties, Machete looks like a Lost flash-sideways on acid. The all-star 20th Century Fox revenge flick drops on Labor Day Weekend. Let the "Danny Trejo's so tough..." meme begin.

The new Machete trailer opens with "This is Machete with a special Cinco de Mayo message... to Arizona!" I wish Machete added, "And to the putos at my distributor's 'news' channel!"

Trailers from hell (yeah)

A Tumblrer recommends listening to A Fistful of Soundtracks if you need to get your screenwriting mojo back. His favorite part of my channel is the movie trailer clips I've inserted into the "Assorted Fistful" block:

The coolest thing is that every now and then it plays a random old movie trailer. I just heard one for an old kung-fu flick. It sounds like the ones you’d hear on an old VHS tape before the feature presentation.

There's a reason why I included trailer clips during "Assorted Fistful." Four years ago, the names of the tracks during "Assorted Fistful" weren't being posted on iTunes Radio's ticker for some inexplicable reason, which made the block a difficult listening experience for iTunes listeners who wanted to know the track names. So to help those folks out, I started attaching audio clips of trailers or radio/TV spots to tracks from the movies that were promoted in those trailers or spots because I didn't want to go through the trouble of switching on both my mic and GoldWave and recording a back-announcement for every single track.

First, I experimented with attaching the vintage radio spots for Black Caesar and Foxy Brown to the themes from those movies and liked how the old ads sounded as intros (any old ad or trailer that features the voice of either the late, great Adolph Caesar or the equally late and great Percy Rodrigues is always fun to listen to). Then shortly thereafter, the Batman Begins soundtrack came out, and I was looking for an effective and ominous way to announce "This next track is from the Batman Begins score" without having to say those words. I found it in an audio clip of the Batman Begins TV spot that consisted solely of the bat swarm graphics from the film's opening titles and thought that was an even niftier intro than the blaxploitation radio ads, so from then on, I attached trailer or promo clips to almost every single "Assorted Fistful" track (in another example, each score cue from Battlestar Galactica seasons two, three and four that's in rotation during "Assorted Fistful" opens with the TV spot for the Galactica episode from which the cue was taken from).

Here are two trailers that can be heard during "Assorted Fistful"--the trailers for two of my favorite flicks, the original Assault on Precinct 13...



... and Heat. I like the Hugh Morgan-voiceovered Heat trailer so much that I didn't shorten it for broadcast (unlike other trailers I've shortened because either they don't translate well to radio or they're too lengthy), so the trailer airs in its entirety before the Kronos Quartet's Heat suite begins. The trailer includes a couple of deleted scenes, which are a bit of a treat for Heat fans like myself (footage of De Niro's crew at what appears to be a dinner celebration and additional dialogue between De Niro and Jeremy Piven):



In June 2007, iTunes finally got its act together and started posting my channel's track names in the ticker, so I was thinking of getting rid of the trailer clips, but because listeners have told me they always enjoy hearing those clips, I haven't removed them. (I'm surprised AFOS listeners enjoy the trailer clips because people on the Film Score Monthly boards always complain about the movie dialogue clips that XM's Cinemagic channel intersperses between tracks.)

However, one listener once wanted me to get rid of the Black Caesar radio spot because he was offended by the clip of Fred Williamson referring to himself as a "jungle bunny"--and this listener was clearly a white guy. Listena please. I'm not going to censor or remove something from my channel just because one listener can't stomach it. That's such a stupid request. I hate censorship in any form.

Show me your taglines: My favorite movie poster slogans

In a world where movie taglines are corny or tepid, sometimes there are taglines that are genuinely witty and clever.

Fox just launched an eye-catching "Snakes on a cane" teaser promotion for House--it's as cryptic as ABC's "What did you see?" springtime promos for John Cho's FlashForward--and the IMDb Hit List recently linked to a blog post about the greatest bits of poster or trailer copy. Both items got me thinking about which taglines are good ones (and aren't just reiterations of lines from the movie, like the Dark Knight teaser campaign's "Why so serious?" or the original Dawn of the Dead's "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth").

Michael Aushenker, who e-interviewed me for his Cartoon Flophouse blog, used to be a tagline writer. He came up with Eve's Bayou's tagline: "The secrets that hold us together can also tear us apart."

In no particular order, here are my favorites.


This Is Spinal Tap: "Spinal Tap... does for sex, drugs and rock n' roll what Sound of Music did for hills."

Southern Comfort: "It's the land of hospitality... unless you don't belong there."

Back to the Future: "He was never in time for his classes... He wasn't in time for his dinner... Then one day... he wasn't in his time at all."

Shaun of the Dead: "This September aim for the head."


Planet Terror teaser campaign: "You might feel a little prick."

The War of the Roses: "Once in a lifetime comes a motion picture that makes you feel like falling in love all over again. This is not that movie."

Wet Hot American Summer: "It was the last day of summer. It was the first day of the third week in August."


Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay teaser campaign: "What would NPH do?"

Alien vs. Predator: "Whoever wins... we lose." A great tagline doesn't always lure me to the movie, especially one with Paul W.S. Anderson's name on it. That's why I still haven't seen AVP.

The Thing (1982): "Man is the warmest place to hide."


Here's a bonus favorite tagline, from the fake Machete trailer that precedes Planet Terror: "But they soon realized they just fucked with the wrong Mexican!"

The Judge Dredd trailer music is like Jerry Goldsmith's two-minute Ramones song

I included the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's out-of-print performance of the late film music legend's kickass theme for the much-maligned 1995 Judge Dredd feature film's trailer in one of this month's A Fistful of Soundtracks mini-playlists. I've also cobbled together the trailer theme and some photos of Goldsmith at work as a conductor for my not-so-active YouTube channel--it's the first video I ever made on Adobe Premiere, which I've used since 1999 to edit together anything I record for AFOS. At under a minute, the hard-hitting, energetic theme is way too short. A film composer who's got the brass ones to tackle Goldsmith ought to take this too-brief Goldsmith masterpiece and write an expanded concert version.

Most listeners' first exposure to the Judge Dredd trailer theme was the trailer itself, but I first noticed the theme when it was used in the 1997 Lost in Space teaser trailer, where it wasn't drowned out so much by gunfire noise and a shouty Sylvester Stallone that you could barely hear Goldsmith's music.

New trailer proves movie version of '70s cartoon show Star Trek doesn't look promising

By special guest blogger Sonny Gautier

One of my favorite TV shows is the Saturday morning cartoon Star Trek, which NBC first broadcast in 1973. It aired right after Hanna-Barbera's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids cartoon and followed the adventures of Captain Kirk and the crew of a "starship" called the U.S.S. Enterprise. Their mission was to explore outer space. Along the way, the crew would butt heads with evil Klingon commanders, Orion pirates and dangerous energy cloud monsters.


The captain was bad. I dug that episode when he fought that turkey from the Orion pirate ship over a shipment of medicine for a sick Mr. Spock, his pointy-eared first officer from the planet Vulcan.


The Vulcan soul brother was an even badder dude than Kirk. He could read minds and he was always calm and cool like another hero of mine, John Shaft. When Spock traveled back in time to his childhood on his homeworld, he took down a wild Vulcan tiger by pinching it in the neck, which was some sort of mystical Vulcan ass-whupping move. That was bad. With moves like that, Spock will never die!


I also dug how the ship had a black crewmember manning the switchboard. I especially liked when Lt. Uhura got to be captain for a whole story because all the men from the Enterprise were captured by an all-female planet. Black folks don't often get such high positions of power on TV like Uhura did in that Star Trek episode.


So because I'm a fan of this forgotten cartoon, I was ecstatic about Paramount Pictures' upcoming major motion picture based on Star Trek.

That is until I saw the preview for it.

The movie doesn't look quite right. It doesn't look like the Star Trek I remember.


First of all, who cares about what Kirk and Spock were like as kids? The cartoon already showed us that Spock had a hard life as a mutt on Vulcan. His mama was human, his dad was Vulcan and the other Vulcan kids wanted to beat his ass. Why do we have to be told again how Spock came up? What else do we need to know, man? Can we just cut to the chase and see what the title says they're supposed to be doing, which is exploring space?


Kirk looks too young to be captain. He looks more like a cadet. And what the hell happened to his Orange Kool-Aid-colored hair?


The new Enterprise is too fast a ship now! In the animated show, the Enterprise was never that fast! This will take some getting used to.


Why is Spock trying to pimp-slap Kirk? He never pimp-slapped anybody in the cartoon.


One thing I dig about the preview is Uhura. She looks outta sight! Uhura was the finest sister on Saturday morning TV since Valerie from Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space. Because Star Trek was a Saturday morning cartoon, I never got to see her in a bra. Now I finally get to. Right on!


Another thing I like is the brief footage of starships at war. The cartoon was never that intense and it never had so many things blow up. Man, I never saw so many ships attack each other like that!


There's not a lot of face-to-face dialogue in the preview. In the cartoon, everyone talked to each other all the time and did it real close to the camera. Real close. And only their eyes and mouths moved.


Where's the orange skinny dude with three arms? Where's the alien cat lady? Where are those forcefield belts that the Enterprise crew wore whenever they walked out into space? It's not Star Trek without them.


Often, a preview isn't really helpful in telling you if the flick is any good or not (that Superfly T.N.T. preview didn't prepare me for how much of a letdown that movie was), so I guess I'll reserve judgment until I see the entire Star Trek movie, which comes out this May. I hope it lives up to the cartoon.

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Sonny Gautier is a new Fistful of Soundtracks listener from Bed-Stuy and he offered to review the new Star Trek trailer for my blog. Due to brain damage caused by exposure to too many Sid and Marty Krofft shows, a then-adolescent Sonny lapsed into a coma in 1974 and didn't wake up until last month, which means he missed the 10 Star Trek feature films and four Trek live-action spinoff shows that followed the cartoon. Because Sonny's only taste of Trek was the Saturday morning version before he slipped into his coma, he didn't know Trek originated as a live-action show until I pointed it out to him via e-mail a couple of hours ago. Because he doesn't want to be laughed at for his mistakes, Sonny has demanded that I remove his post. Yeah right, like I'm gonna remove it. This shit's too funny.