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grade daughter and her friends inspire the producer to throw a song out. So that is the vulnerability of music. Everybody is… Continued from page 52 our projects. So I actually keep a lot of stuff inhouse, and essentially music supervise in-house. How do you find the time with the executive jobs that you have? I’m sure that you spend more time in meetings than you do with music. Patrick: Meetings about the meetings. Yeah. It’s a juggling act—it’s difficult. I’m one of three creative execs in the Fox music department that oversee all the films at Fox. And most of the time we have about eight to ten films that we are each overseeing. So we try to select the films that come on to our desks with enough space between the finishing, so we don’t get into a traffic jam and we are able to kind of bounce around from editing room to editing room and work with each set of filmmakers and help them get the job done. John, when you were at our office a couple of weeks ago, you mentioned that part of your job is appeasement. How many people does a music supervisor typically have to appease, and who are they? John: Well, thinking about the one feature I’m working on now, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, we have two main Lionsgate Film executives on the production side that convinced the company to buy the script and develop the script and did the casting. Their careers can really be made or broken on the success of this movie. And if they have two or three flops, these executives get booted out. So they’re under great pressure to deliver a hit film to their company. So we’ve got at least two studio executives on a day-to-day basis. Then there are one or two outside producers. These are the people that I love. These are the freelance producers who might have three things in development at Disney, one thing in development at Universal, and another at Lions Gate. They’re not beholden to the bosses—the board of Lions Gate—in a direct sense for their jobs, so they really fight for budget overages and more resources put into the film and… You actually do love them. I thought you were being sarcastic. John: No, no, I like them! They’re the people in there giving the marketing department flak if the trailer’s not good enough. But, a lot of people get involved in the music. Music is sort of like a watering hole that everybody gravitates towards. They probably wouldn’t tell the Director of Photography, “I think you’re under-lit in this particular scene. Are you sure you want to use 70 mm lens there? Maybe you should try a 50.” They don’t do that, but when it comes to music, everybody’s got an opinion—everybody’s kids have opinions! I’ve had a producer’s eighth Kevin: They weren’t wrong, though. [laughter] John: And then there’s the director. The director is kind of like the lead singer of the band. You know, there is supposed to be a democracy, but they’re the Axl Rose. They’re the one who is going to be most emotional about things. They often see the film differently than anybody else, because when they see it, it triggers other things that they intended. But, it’s very hard to make a good film, and part of the challenge for us is we have a lot of mediocre scenes that music has to save it, essentially. People will say, “I’m not get-

ting the emotion out of this song.” Even with the score. Julie had a movie where they kept saying there wasn’t enough emotion. The composer was on version seven, and finally he snapped, turned to the director and said, “There is no emotion in this scene. There is nothing in the footage here.” So it’s about six or eight people that can have an opinion. One of the best preparations for being a music supervisor was the fact that I grew up one of five kids in a family. I think I honed my Henry Kissinger-like diplomatic skills just picking a TV show we could all watch. Don’t miss Part Two of this interview in next month’s edition!

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Recording - January 2013

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