Films using the soundtrack from other films as their soundtrack

[notjosh]

I got about 3 minutes into the film Copshop last night and had to duck out on principle when the opening credits started and the theme tune to the movie is... the theme from Magnum Force.

Is this just accepted now? Obviously film/TV soundtracks have been borrowing coolness/emotional impact from pre-existing songs at least since Tarantino made it the norm. But using the theme from a famous cop movie as the theme tune to your own cop movie seems to be crossing a line for me. It's like if some SyFy TV movie decided to use the Star Wars theme over the titles. Surely they can afford a composer for that stuff?

[Bad Ambassador]

Michael Mann's The Keep ends with a synthy instrumental version of Walking in the Air.

[Magnum Valentino]

A very memorable part of the Scream 2 score (you could get away with calling it Dewey's Theme, even, it's very prominent) is from the score for Broken Arrow ("Brothers", Hans Zimmer I think) which couldn't have been more than a year or two old at the time.

[beanheadmcginty]

One of Clint's westerns (can't recall which) uses the theme tune to Channel 4 News.

[DJ Bob Hoskins]

One of the pieces from 28 Days Later was used in Kick-Ass, and it has also cropped up in a whole bunch of other stuff:

https://28dayslater.fandom.com/wiki/In_the_House_-_In_a_Heartbeat

[Magnum Valentino]

One of the pieces from 28 Days Later was used in Kick-Ass, and it has also cropped up in a whole bunch of other stuff:

https://28dayslater.fandom.com/wiki/In_the_House_-_In_a_Heartbeat

Except in the south! I saw that film in Sligo and that piece of music was swapped out for a soundalike. I remember thinking at the time how similar it sounded to that 28 Days Later tune and was surprised when I saw the film on DVD that it was there, like it was supposed to be.

[phantom_power]

I got about 3 minutes into the film Copshop last night and had to duck out on principle when the opening credits started and the theme tune to the movie is... the theme from Magnum Force.

Is this just accepted now? Obviously film/TV soundtracks have been borrowing coolness/emotional impact from pre-existing songs at least since Tarantino made it the norm. But using the theme from a famous cop movie as the theme tune to your own cop movie seems to be crossing a line for me. It's like if some SyFy TV movie decided to use the Star Wars theme over the titles. Surely they can afford a composer for that stuff?

I think Superfly features prominently in that film as well, to add insult to injury

[mjwilson]

Swiss Army Man has a bunch of the Jurassic Park theme but that's deliberately quoting, so I'm not sure it's what you had in mind.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Kick Ass also used this tune from Sunshine

Kick Ass? Nick Tracks, more like.

[Replies From View]

I'm quite sure the portion of soundtrack from Aliens when they escape from the planet and nuke the Queen is used in the climax for a ton of other films.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I vaguely remember watching some DVD extra that said it's fairly common practice for directors/editors to use existing tunes while splicing their film together. They then give the rough cut to the composer and ask them to write something similar. This is why a lot of film scores sound generic.

[Replies From View]

I'm pretty sure there was a Doctor Who Confidential that showed an episode of series 5 with some Indiana Jones music used as temporary soundtrack, which they then compared with the final Murray Gold score.

Hey presto the Murray Gold music was much worse.

[badaids]

I'm quite sure the portion of soundtrack from Aliens when they escape from the planet and nuke the Queen is used in the climax for a ton of other films.

The music used in Alien when the acid blood is burning through the deck is another Jerry Goldsmith piece score from the opening credits of another much older film (can't remember which, I think it had George C Scott in).  The editor of Alien used it as a place holder for that scene and Scott preferred to to what Goldsmith had come up with.  Goldsmith got the hump with that.

It sticks out like a sore thumb now, but even before I knew, as well suited as that piece of music is, it wasn't congruent with the rest of the music in the film.

[thenoise]

Neil Richardson's "Approaching Menace" (aka the Mastermind theme) shows up in several dramatic moments in the 1977 former video nasty Delirium.
Its not one of the grislier on the infamous list, but i still appreciated the light relief.

[Magnum Valentino]

I vaguely remember watching some DVD extra that said it's fairly common practice for directors/editors to use existing tunes while splicing their film together. They then give the rough cut to the composer and ask them to write something similar. This is why a lot of film scores sound generic.

Yeah you can tell this definitely happened with the first Star Wars film, there's lifts from a couple of Holst's Planets and a few older (but not THAT old in 1976) film scores too.

Lucas did it for the X-Wing scenes too, using cuts from WW2 dogfight footage, so it wouldn't surprise me.

[Glebe]

The music used in Alien when the acid blood is burning through the deck is another Jerry Goldsmith piece score from the opening credits of another much older film (can't remember which, I think it had George C Scott in).  The editor of Alien used it as a place holder for that scene and Scott preferred to to what Goldsmith had come up with.  Goldsmith got the hump with that.

It sticks out like a sore thumb now, but even before I knew, as well suited as that piece of music is, it wasn't congruent with the rest of the music in the film.

'Charcot's Show' from the film Freud: The Secret Passion, apparently. Wonderfully eerie piece of music. According to Wiki:

The mostly dissonant, atonal score to Freud was one of the early works by composer Jerry Goldsmith with an electronic music sequence by Henk Badings. It garnered Goldsmith his first Oscar nomination. The "Main Title" from Freud, as well as the tracks "Charcot's Show" and "Desperate Case" later were purchased and reused without consent of Goldsmith by director Ridley Scott for the acid blood scene and others in the film Alien (1979), also scored by Goldsmith.

Meanwhile, Quentin Tarantino leaves thread with a load of Ennio Morricone albums.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

Temp tracks are an old practice.

Stanley Kubrick asked composer Alex North (Spartacus, Cleopatra) to come up with a score for 2001: A Space Odyssey, as he had used pieces of classical music as a temporary score. Ultimately, he decided using these pieces, without much bad blood towards North.

Philip Kaufman has quite a reputation regarding temp tracks. When he was in a hot seat because of delays for The Right Stuff, he decided to part with John Barry, who he had used as a scapegoat, and they only had something like three or four weeks to come up with an entirely different score. He got Bill Conti, who and asked him to stick with his temp tracks as reference. That's why the key theme is so close to Tchaikovsky's violin concerto. At some point during these weeks, Kaufman asked repeatedly Conti to make a piece sound more like The Planets. As Conti remembers...

He had Holst in there, and he says "I really like this." I said "Well so do I, it's great - buy it!" He says "No, no, no - try something." That's a six-minute cue, I did try something. When I did it, people were applauding - the musicians. The producers and Phil hated it. He says "It's not close enough, it's not the Holst." I say "I KNOW it's not. It's another way to do it." He wants me to go closer to Holst, so I wrote another six-minute cue that was closer to Holst. It's not close enough. Then I wrote a third one. I did the cue three times. For six minutes I wrote EIGHTEEN minutes of music. The third one that I did, I said "You have to credit Holst", because now this is called PLAGIARISM. The things I did before, in MY mind, were not. If you heard them back to back, it's really interesting.

And Kaufman also used a piece by Henry Mancini from his own White Dawn. Both Holst and Mancini ended up being credited because of Conti.
(Kaufman, talented as he may be, has an horrible reputation. John Barry called their failed collaboration "one of the most dishonest pieces of behavior I've ever encountered in the movie industry", Eastwood fired him during production of The Outlaw Josey Wales because he asked for too many takes, and Bob Rafelson blamed Kaufman's failed snowy western project as the last straw that caused BBS Productions to shut down)

https://moviemusicuk.us/2019/12/16/the-right-stuff-bill-conti/

Also, on the James Bond movie Spectre, Thomas Newman had a full score ready, but Sam Mendes and his editor had used tracks from Skyfall to work on several key scenes, and they kept the tracks in the film, resulting in a very derivative score.

And there's the particular case of stock music. There's an infamous low-budget film called Teenagers from Outer Space. That's the one where the main monster is played by an enlarged lobster (or more accurately its shadow) or where the ray gun used by the aliens turns people into skeletons (one by one, as they only had one skeleton on set). The director paid to use stock music, and most of the pieces he had picked were later recycled in other low-budget films like Red Zone Cuba/Night Train to Mondo Fine, The Killer Shrews and... Night of the Living Dead (the original).

[bushwick]

Bruno Mattei has done this in a few of his films - I forget details but I'm pretty sure Hell Of The Living Dead steals an existing Goblin score, as one example.

As well as library music, these days you have copyright-free samples and phrases such as Apple Loops complicating the issue. My old group used an Apple loop on one song, an ascending-descending "epic" Indiana Jones-type string part, and in the 15 years since I've heard it crop up all over the place - MasterChef use it all the time and I've heard it on an old grime track too. Pretty sure this very part will have been used in multiple films.

[dissolute ocelot]

Meanwhile, Quentin Tarantino leaves thread with a load of Ennio Morricone albums.

Morricone was a master of reusing scores. Aside from Hateful Eight, one of the most famous/obvious was his ditty Chi Mai:

It was used in the films Maddalena directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz (1971) and Le Professionnel directed by Georges Lautner (1981), as well as in the television series An Englishman's Castle (1978). In 1981, it was used as the theme music for the BBC series The Life and Times of David Lloyd George and the BBC release of the theme reached number 2 on the UK Singles Chart.

[Glebe]

Ah right, interesting!

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

Morricone was a master of reusing scores. Aside from Hateful Eight, one of the most famous/obvious was his ditty Chi Mai:

For some film experts I know, it's even worse than that.

The piece was actually written before Maddalena. It was originally a background piece that played in the sound system of some museum or during an exhibition, then he reused it for the soundtrack of the film. I'll try to get details from them.

[lipsink]

Tarantino is the King of this, isn't he? Quite a few of Morricone pieces from other films were used in Kill Bill and Inglorious Basterds. I'm sure there's others too.

[zomgmouse]

Tarantino is the King of this, isn't he? Quite a few of Morricone pieces from other films were used in Kill Bill and Inglorious Basterds. I'm sure there's others too.

he had some of Morricone's unused The Thing score in The Hateful Eight for example

[Glebe]

he had some of Morricone's unused The Thing score in The Hateful Eight for example

Love this:

[McChesney Duntz]

There were plenty of borrowed cues (from 8 1/2 and others) in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, if memory serves...

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

I've checked on my source. Ennio Morricone had indeed written Chi Mai as background music for a German museum dedicated to coal, months before it was used in Maddalena, and a decade before the Belmondo movie.

Morricone was obviously very talented, but was even more prolific, with a few quality control issues. He would record a lot of stuff indiscriminatingly, and wasn't always the best judge of his work. Hence one of his best themes starting life as a throwaway track. That's where the friendship with Sergio Leone (they were in primary school together) was essential to put him on the map. Leone was able to determine very early, when Morricone was pitching him musical ideas, which themes had potential, and that's why his Leone efforts were a step above most of his other work.

By the way, Nino Rota was disqualified from competing in the Oscars for The Godfather, because the main theme was found to be lifted from his own 1958 score for "Fortunella" (it kicks around the 0:57 mark on the excerpt).

The same track also contains the seeds of the main theme for La Dolce Vita, in addition to reusing some elements from Rota's own score for Il Bidone (Fortunella starred Giuletta Masina and was written by Fellini and his usual collaborators).

And due to some weird rule (or something changed on purpose for him), Rota ultimately won the Oscar for The Godfather II.

[McChesney Duntz]

Speaking of Nino Rota, large portions of his 8 1/2 score and a few others were used in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.

[Bad Ambassador]

One of Clint's westerns (can't recall which) uses the theme tune to Channel 4 News.

The theme from News at Ten also appears in the opening of largely forgotten animation Journey Back to Oz, which stars Judy Garland's daughter Liza Minnelli as the voice of Dorothy and Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch in the 1939 film) as Auntie Em.

https://youtu.be/wfdkXvaRNWA?t=429

The "dramatic" music from the opening titles of Monty Python and the Holy Grail later appears in Dawn of the Dead.

https://youtu.be/BbcU-qW7Zvo?t=6844

https://youtu.be/djKPvXDwXcs

[Glebe]

The theme from News at Ten also appears in the opening of largely forgotten animation Journey Back to Oz, which stars Judy Garland's daughter Liza Minnelli as the voice of Dorothy and Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch in the 1939 film) as Auntie Em.

https://youtu.be/wfdkXvaRNWA?t=429

The "dramatic" music from the opening titles of Monty Python and the Holy Grail later appears in Dawn of the Dead.

https://youtu.be/BbcU-qW7Zvo?t=6844

https://youtu.be/djKPvXDwXcs

My hat has just received a jolly good rodgering!

[holyzombiejesus]

Ghost World uses a song (Jaan Pehechan Ho) and the excerpt from the Bollywood film Gumnaam that the song was from, as part of its opening titles.