There’s long been a fascination with the death of busty, blonde, Marilyn-alike Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield. The fact that it supposedly resulted from a curse by the occult showman and head of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, builds in an element of preposterousness that’s proved irresistible to generations of conspiracy theorists.
The crucial yet almost indefinable role of music in film – it’s a subject ripe for exploration and celebration, from the musicological technicalities of leitmotifs and ostinatos, through to the colourful characters working to bring directors’ sometimes vague musical notions to sonic reality. All of which gets raced through in this jam-packed documentary by first-time director Matt Schrader, a somewhat frenetic, 93-minute dash through the subject.
Schrader has clearly put in a massive amount of work, and Score is very much a labour of love. He’s amassed dozens of interviews, with remarkable access to what seems like every major Hollywood film composer working today, plus directors, film company executives, even Moby and Kalamazoo psychology professor Siu-Lan Tan, offering their expertise on the science and emotional impact of music. Schrader sets out to trace the history of film music – from silent movies to the development of orchestral scores, 1960s experimentalism, 1970s punk and electronica, and the re-emergence of the big orchestral sound. And he intersperses his pithy history lessons with chapters on everything from favourite recording venues to the stress caused by unrealistic deadlines, from wacky instruments to the wonders of electronic sound manipulation.
In true Reithian fashion, there’s plenty here to inform, educate and entertain. But if all that sounds like a lot to digest in just 93 minutes – well, it is. Schrader’s somewhat breathless pace means that many of the areas he tackles hardly get a mention before he’s dashed on to his next subject. A promising exploration of the demands placed on orchestral musicians – who are expected to sightread from scratch for live takes – is curtailed after just a few seconds, for example, while tales of the ghosts of London’s Air Studios from composer David Arnold (pictured below) are disconcertingly allowed far more time.
With his mass of interviews, too, Schrader seems determined to be scrupulously fair in giving speakers roughly equal air time – with the unfortunate result that several more minor figures spend quite a bit of time saying not much at all. Okay, he does focus on a handful of major composers for deeper exploration – John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Thomas Newman and Hans Zimmer – and Zimmer, in particular, is refreshingly candid in expressing his insecurities over where his next music will even come from. Disney executive Mitchell Lieb, too, seems caught off-guard when revealing that each of the company’s movies costing ‘close to half a billion dollars’ to make, with inevitable financial fallout for everyone involved – not least the composer.
Perhaps understandably, Schrader also remains frustratingly light on the technical details of the music itself. Howard Shore moves towards discussing the leitmotifs that structure his Lord of the Rings scores, and Schrader introduces some clever animated sequences showing how the Tolkein characters’ themes evolve across the trilogy. There’s mention, too, of the ubiquitous ostinatos of Zimmer’s repeating string patterns, and of the subtly innovative textures he generates. But Score could do with a lot more discussion of how composers achieve their effects – and whether successful film music is all about simply going for the most obvious emotional hook.
The film leaves quite a lot of unanswered questions, in fact – how directors even choose their composers, for a start; how composers interpret or adjust their music to suit directors’ demands; and why scores simply get ditched at the last minute (as, according to the movie, they often do). A bigger frustration is that Schrader sticks so unvaryingly to mainstream Hollywood movies, as if that’s all there is – or at least all that matters. What about the music written for Soviet cinema, or Toru Takemitsu’s copious scores for Japanese films? Or, aside from Spielberg and Williams, those director/composer partnerships that develop across several films – Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman, or Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonny Greenwood?
It’s not that Schrader’s film isn’t well structured. There’s always a clear sense of where you are, and he jumps nimbly from subject to subject in a way that’s always entertaining. It’s just that his focus is so mind-bogglingly broad that it feels like little is covered in sufficient depth, and his relentlessly frenetic pacing makes the film feel – bizarrely – both rushed and overlong. Score is a hugely ambitious undertaking (probably far too ambitious, in fact) and it’s never less than stimulating and rewarding. But there’s little chance of coming away from it with much more of an awareness of how and why a movie’s music affects you. It seems like it’s aimed at an audience who both love film music and know very little about it – which, given the obsessive dedication many film music fans display, is rather an unlikely combination.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Score
At first glance, the meetings between heart surgeon Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) and a 16-year-old boy, Martin (Barry Keoghan), lead one to fear the worst for the kid. Their stilted exchanges in public places, during which the man gives the teen expensive gifts, don’t suggest a family connection, or a mentor-student relationship, but a secret intimacy that can only be, in some way, dreadfully wrong.
David Lynch’s Hollywood horror film is casually stripped here of what seemed fathomless mystery back in 2001. Former Cahiers du Cinema editor Thierry Jousse kicks off a packed extras disc by using Lynch’s 10 clues on the original DVD case to easily decode its otherwise utterly disorienting last 30 minutes.
You must remember this. It’s December 1941, the month of Pearl Harbour. Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American, probably a Communist, who fought Franco in Spain and ran guns to Ethiopia when Mussolini invaded, has given up the fight against fascism and become the proprietor of Rick’s Café Américain, a casino-nightclub in Casablanca, in unoccupied French Morocco.
An increasingly fractious America could take a leaf from the ravishing opening sequence of La La Land. A cross-section of drivers caught in LA freeway gridlock forsake their vehicles to become a dizzyingly frolicsome community that look capable of leaping their way to the stars. Road rage and rancour? Not for a second, just a shared belief in the buoyancy that happens when your body simply needs to dance.
That overriding vivacity proves an apt point of departure for Damien Chazelle's film, which cleaned up at Sunday night's Golden Globes (seven awards in all) and is poised to do the same at next month's Oscars. Cynics might say that Hollywood is merely honouring its own. But such a response is to undersell Chazelle's formidable ability to make a film about dreamers set in a city of dreams that leaves you floating out of the cinema as if on a cloud. An original movie musical of the likes they weren't supposed to make any more, La La Land arrives in time to be the cultural tonic needed for our troubled times: it's wise and witty but underlyingly wistful, even melancholic as well.
For that, credit the boy wonder that is Chazelle, 32 next week, whose breakout film Whiplash finds its perfect complement here. Whereas the earlier film came with a furious beat that simply would not be stilled (its Oscar-winning star, JK Simmons, gets a neat cameo this time out), La La Land has a disarming intimacy that gets under the skin. Indeed, those who associate movie musicals with canned razzmatazz that makes you wonder what these people are singing about in the first place will instead find a haunting, sometimes hilarious portrait of two creators who career towards each other only to discover that life and art don't always align. 
Those aspirants are Mia (Emma Stone), an audition-weary actress, and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a softly-spoken jazz musician she chances upon in a bar. They embark on one of those screen romances in which music and dance arise entirely naturally from personality: caught up in the emotion and heat of the moment, what other choice is there?
And with a deftness that nods to the likes of Astaire and Rogers, Jacques Demy, and (the director revealed only last week) a 1927 Janet Gaynor starrer called Seventh Heaven, Chazelle makes retro chic feel richly contemporary. After all, if the pair are going to go on a date to the Griffith Observatory - the LA planetarium - why shouldn't they also find themselves dancing high atop the city? It's magic in the moonlight, if there ever was such a phrase.
Stone had a well-received Broadway run (replacing Michelle Williams) in the recent Broadway revival of Cabaret, so her singing chops don't entirely come as a surprise. Singing "Audition (The Fools Who Dream)", which in theatre would be called the 11 o'clock number, she impresses precisely because she lacks that hard, vaguely shellacked edge that catapults many a lesser entertainer into the spotlight. By contrast, hers is a plaintive, ruminative presence in a film that believes in the sudden raptures of love but also its ruination. The Justin Hurwitz score, with lyrics by Broadway's current golden boys Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hansen), is sprightly and vigorous where needed but also knows when to come to rest, and there's no equivalent of the go-for-broke power ballad that one finds with a more calculated type of movie musical such as Frozen.
And in a film which lacks many supporting characters - John Legend (pictured above) is among the few other names on view, as the leader of the band Sebastian joins - Gosling proves a debonair delight as arguably the more surprisingly cast of the two leads. (Emma Watson and Miles Teller were the first tapped to play these roles.) His withheld power and quiet charm are well suited to the Star is Born-like trajectory of a character who valiantly holds out against the smothering sameness of the culture that the film itself resists. The movie ends with a postscript that ramps up the pathos, and why not? Set in a town famous for crash landings, La La Land offers the promise that, in the right circumstances, a few do get the chance and the space to soar.
RYAN GOSLING'S FILMOGRAPHY
Blue Valentine (2010). A controversial break-up melodrama sees things from the male point of view
Drive (2011). Ryan Gosling's brilliant, bruising ride into LA darkness (pictured)
Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011). Ryan Gosling teaches Steve Carell how to score in a film that doesn't
The Ides of March (2011). George Clooney's star-packed morality tale superbly anatomises political chicanery
The Place Beyond the Pines (2013). Derek Cianfrance and Ryan Gosling follow Blue Valentine with an epic tale of cops and robbers
Gangster Squad (2013). Ruben Fleischer swaps zombies for gangsters with mixed results
Only God Forgives (2013). Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling follow Drive with a simmering tale of vengeance
The Big Short (2015). Director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis
The Nice Guys (2016). Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling buddy up to crack jokes, bones and crime in 70s LA
La La Land (2017). Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (pictured above) will have you floating out of the cinema on a cloud
Tinseltown's relationship to its more sophisticated, older New York brother is analogous to Ethan Mordden's engagement by Oxford University Press. The presentation is a sober, if slim, academic tome with an austere assemblage of black-and-white photos in the middle; what we get in the text is undoubtedly erudite but also racy, gossipy, anecdotal, list-inclined, sometimes camp and a tad hit and miss.
An amplified crunch in the dark, sound without vision, kicks off this take on Moss Hart and George S Kaufman's light comedy about the advent of the talking pictures. It's a typical Richard Jones leitmotif, not as fraught with horror as the baked beans of his Wozzeck or the spinning top in his Royal Opera Boris Godunov. This, bathetically, is merely the noise of "Indian" nuts being consumed by the play's holy fool George Lewis, an idiot everyone thinks is savant. The effect is sparely operated thereafter.