Poor Jerry Goldsmith. I can't think of any other great Hollywood composer who got stuck with as many turds as he did. And he always gave his best effort, even when the movie was undeserving -- the Swarm is actually one of his better scores!
Maybe that's why his late-career music was less inspired. He used-up all his inspiration on rubbish like this.
THE SWARM Coming on Blu-Ray
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Paul MacLean
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Re: THE SWARM Coming on Blu-Ray
Goldsmith had his good days and his bad days. Like any other composers, he sometimes needed more inspiration than he could find.
I love his score for "Capricorn One", and I say that knowing the movie is a silly mess.
I love the descriptions given by him and by Richard Donner around the score for "The Omen", where Donner wanted a high end composer like Goldsmith for it and rejoiced in the choral performances he got for his movie. (I particularly have enjoyed Donner's descriptions of liking the choral work so much that he asked Goldsmith to use more of that in sections where Goldsmith could have used the orchestra. And I enjoyed Goldsmith's pleasure in finding a place for silence in the moment where Thorn finds the birthmark, followed by the next moment where, as Goldsmith says "all Hell breaks loose" and the orchestra goes wild. Goldsmith was always great with tacits.)
To be honest, I saw John Williams get stuck with more than a few turkeys in his day, and let's not even get into James Horner on that front...
But your point is well taken. A career trying to come up with something interesting for the latest sequel to whatever will drain anyone...
I love his score for "Capricorn One", and I say that knowing the movie is a silly mess.
I love the descriptions given by him and by Richard Donner around the score for "The Omen", where Donner wanted a high end composer like Goldsmith for it and rejoiced in the choral performances he got for his movie. (I particularly have enjoyed Donner's descriptions of liking the choral work so much that he asked Goldsmith to use more of that in sections where Goldsmith could have used the orchestra. And I enjoyed Goldsmith's pleasure in finding a place for silence in the moment where Thorn finds the birthmark, followed by the next moment where, as Goldsmith says "all Hell breaks loose" and the orchestra goes wild. Goldsmith was always great with tacits.)
To be honest, I saw John Williams get stuck with more than a few turkeys in his day, and let's not even get into James Horner on that front...
But your point is well taken. A career trying to come up with something interesting for the latest sequel to whatever will drain anyone...
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Eric Paddon
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Re: THE SWARM Coming on Blu-Ray
I had a chance to read the original 1974 novel "The Swarm" and after going through it I can see why we ended up with such a ridiculous script. The novel is a very serious "tech-thriller" in the tradition of "Andromeda Strain" which means we get a LOT and a TON of exposition about the hard science (indeed the author goes to the trouble of having a scientist theorize something and go into a scientific background explanation of the point complete with footnotes to real scientific journal articles) involved with why are the African bees attacking (in random spots throughout the country), why they are now massing, why are they more aggressive and then once the danger starts what can be done about them. A lay person trying to turn this into a script would have likely glazed over and thrown the book across the room and said with frustration that he couldn't do this in a million years for a big budget action movie! There are no standout characters in the novel. And the climax which has the bees swarming on New York and bringing things to a halt while the military can't come up with solutions now that all previous scientific efforts have seemingly failed, involves the bees suddenly committing mass suicide by drowning themselves because lo and behold, a scientific experiment in genetically altering the bees that our lead scientists thought had failed (because the geneticist involved has had a stroke and isn't able to explain clearly what he's done!) suddenly out of nowhere works!
This was all from the book that made it into the film.
-There is an attack on a small town called Maryville, but it's in upstate NY not Texas. We do have a family attacked with parents killed while a picnic goes on but it's a case where one child dies a little later, and the other two die in the next big attack. (and the big attack on the town rest assured is NOT because one of the revenge minded kids unleashes the hive!)
-Henry Fonda's scene of administering a would-be antidote and recording his lifesigns before he drops dead is one of the very few items lifted direct from the book.
-The Richard Widmark General character is only a minor character in the book, turning up in the later stages for the defense of NY. He's generally not competent but not ridiculously bullheaded.
-The only other two name characters in the book are Fonda (but his character in the book is the geneticist, not the one who keels over trying an antidote) and Chamberlain (who in the book is more a Sam Jaffe type senior scientist boss of the nominal white-bread lead character, "John Wood". He dies in an accident in the lab trying to come up with a solution, not some silly melodramatic bit in a nuclear power plant!)
Basically, Silliphant I'm sure just jotted down two or three things he felt he could use and then said, "the hell with this!" for the rest of it with its tech-realism emphasis and decided old sci-fi movies of the 50s could give him a simpler cinematic blueprint. So it may not have been a case of trying to be tongue in cheek, but it was a distinctly lazy approach to the material and boy did it show. By contrast, when Silliphant had to compress *two* novels to come up with the script for "The Towering Inferno" a lot of recognizable elements from both novels ended up in the final film so if you were familiar with both you'd know where they came from.
This was all from the book that made it into the film.
-There is an attack on a small town called Maryville, but it's in upstate NY not Texas. We do have a family attacked with parents killed while a picnic goes on but it's a case where one child dies a little later, and the other two die in the next big attack. (and the big attack on the town rest assured is NOT because one of the revenge minded kids unleashes the hive!)
-Henry Fonda's scene of administering a would-be antidote and recording his lifesigns before he drops dead is one of the very few items lifted direct from the book.
-The Richard Widmark General character is only a minor character in the book, turning up in the later stages for the defense of NY. He's generally not competent but not ridiculously bullheaded.
-The only other two name characters in the book are Fonda (but his character in the book is the geneticist, not the one who keels over trying an antidote) and Chamberlain (who in the book is more a Sam Jaffe type senior scientist boss of the nominal white-bread lead character, "John Wood". He dies in an accident in the lab trying to come up with a solution, not some silly melodramatic bit in a nuclear power plant!)
Basically, Silliphant I'm sure just jotted down two or three things he felt he could use and then said, "the hell with this!" for the rest of it with its tech-realism emphasis and decided old sci-fi movies of the 50s could give him a simpler cinematic blueprint. So it may not have been a case of trying to be tongue in cheek, but it was a distinctly lazy approach to the material and boy did it show. By contrast, when Silliphant had to compress *two* novels to come up with the script for "The Towering Inferno" a lot of recognizable elements from both novels ended up in the final film so if you were familiar with both you'd know where they came from.
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Paul MacLean
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Re: THE SWARM Coming on Blu-Ray
Interesting. Thanks for that background on the book, Eric. I had never heard any of that!
Oh...and here's something out of left field. Zooba (who, we know from the FSM board) reads the liner notes from the Swarm original LP!
Oh...and here's something out of left field. Zooba (who, we know from the FSM board) reads the liner notes from the Swarm original LP!
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Edmund Kattak
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Re: THE SWARM Coming on Blu-Ray
Yes, thank to heavens for Tony Habib's wonderful quote of Jerry's "pathos" regarding THE SWARM.Paul MacLean wrote: ↑Fri Jul 27, 2018 8:39 pm Interesting. Thanks for that background on the book, Eric. I had never heard any of that!
Oh...and here's something out of left field. Zooba (who, we know from the FSM board) reads the liner notes from the Swarm original LP!
Indeed,
Ed
Ed
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Eric Paddon
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Re: THE SWARM Coming on Blu-Ray
Another reason why Irwin was misguided with this film. We had already had two TV movies dealing with "killer bees".
First, there was this 1974 TV movie "Killer Bees" with Kate Jackson and Gloria Swanson which is loaded with rip-offs of "The Birds" and uses the bees as a pseudo-metaphor for demonic possession.
And then we had "The Savage Bees" a 1976 TV-movie with Ben Johnson, Michael Parks and Gretchen Corbett ("Rockford Files") in which a localized threat around New Orleans culminates with destroying all the bees (which all conveniently affix themselves to Corbett's car) being moved inside the Superdome and being destroyed by the stadium air conditioning! (and they actually got permission to film inside the Superdome).
First, there was this 1974 TV movie "Killer Bees" with Kate Jackson and Gloria Swanson which is loaded with rip-offs of "The Birds" and uses the bees as a pseudo-metaphor for demonic possession.
And then we had "The Savage Bees" a 1976 TV-movie with Ben Johnson, Michael Parks and Gretchen Corbett ("Rockford Files") in which a localized threat around New Orleans culminates with destroying all the bees (which all conveniently affix themselves to Corbett's car) being moved inside the Superdome and being destroyed by the stadium air conditioning! (and they actually got permission to film inside the Superdome).