COMING SOON! THE JOHN BEAL TRAILER PROJECT

JOHN BEAL

Rating:

Original Review: After years of toiling unnoticed in Hollywood, John Beal is suddenly big news. The funny thing is that virtually everyone who has ever sat in a cinema will have heard his music at some time or another, but 99% of those people will have known nothing about it. Why? Because John Beal is the world's leading provider of music for theatrical teasers and trailers, those tantalising three-minute tasters that tempt unsuspecting viewers back into the multiplexes with promises of swash and buckle, action aplenty, and tears of joy and despair. This mammoth double-CD release from Sonic Images brings together music from nearly 70 original trailers, and includes pieces from many well-known movies such as Conspiracy Theory, Eraser, Ghost, In The Line Of Fire, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Mask and Species II.

Let me say now that John Beal is quite obviously a very talented composer and arranger, with a broad compositional style that ranges from full orchestral themes to urban electronica, hip-hop, jazz and rock. My concerns lie with the fact that some of the trailers included here come so close to sounding like existing scores they border on *genuine* plagiarism - and I'm not talking about nicking a couple of notes or a bar from another score. Tweaking a single note at the end of a melodic line does not an original composition make, and bearing that in mind I feel I have to question the thinking behind releasing this CD as a compilation of "original" work by Beal. However, let me stress also that this is not necessarily John Beal's fault. He freely admits in the excellent liner notes that, nine times out of ten, the studio marketing and publicity executives specifically ask him to mimic the style of a certain composer as closely as possible without being thrown in jail - which is exactly what he does. In fact, he's made a career out of it. To give Beal his due, though, he does say of the composers he is been asked to emulate "I hope you always feel I have treated your inspiration with respect and dignity".

Despite all of the above, some of the cues are excellent, and on the whole the CD makes for an enjoyable couple of hour's listening. In fact, it's actually quite fun trying to work out which scores Beal is mimicking as you listen through them all! Some of the more famous ones I spotted include "Black Beauty Trailer" (Cliffhanger); "For Sir Charlie" (The Rocketeer), "Three Blind Elfmen" (Beetlejuice), "Last Dogman" (Dances With Wolves), "Miracle Trailer" (Home Alone), "Manhattan Night" (Nixon), "Pagemaster Trail" (Hook), "Species Too" (which lifts the opening flourish from Close Encounters), "Somebody Stop Me" (Pee-Wee's Big Adventure) and "Ocean Song" (Titanic). The totally original music is good as well. My own personal highlights are the jazzy textures in "Pseudo Cool World", the frantic stringwork and Omen-style choral elements in "Blessed Dead", the lovely ethereal vocal work by Susan Boyd in "I'll Always Fall In Love With Love", the noble sounding trumpet fanfare at the beginning of "Schooltie", and the lush "Karen's Love Theme", which has been included as a tribute to Beal's wife who died during 1998. It's also nice to finally have Jerry Goldsmith's rousing original trailer music from Judge Dredd available on CD, sitting snugly alongside that perennial disco classic, "Skatetown USA".

As an example of what John Beal has been spending the last fifteen years of his life doing, Coming Soon is an impressive collection. However, those wanting so hear the REAL musical voice of John Beal would do well to check out one or two of the other original scores being released through Intrada in the wake of this CD - The Funhouse, Zork: Grand Inquisitor and Terror in the Aisles.

Track Listing:

DISC ONE DISC TWO 129 minutes 06 seconds

Sonic Images SID-8815 (1998)

Music composed and performed by John Beal. Orchestrations by Joel Rosenbaum, William Kidd, Michael McCuistion, Doug Timm, Jonathan Sacks, Richard Bellis, Jimmy Bryant and Todd Yvega. Recorded and mixed by Tim Boyle, Dennis Sands, John Richards, James Hill, Rick Winquest, Murray McFadden, Larry Forkner, Andy D'Addario, Toby Foster, Joel Stoner and Avi Kipper. Mastered by Bob Fisher. Album produced by Ford A. Thaxton.

Cinemusic Online: Review by Helen San (****)
Filmtracks: Review by Christian Clemmenson (****)
Movie Wave
Score!: Review by Andreas Lindahl (****)
Scorelogue


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