John's Thoughts

If there's a bizarre situation, I'll find it. In the lull period between being fired from my day job and Usual Suspects taking off, I was hired to rescore an old John Wayne film, McLintock! A company had bought the rights to the film to release as a video to be sold in department stores. What they didn't get the rights to, however, was the original score. Therefore they needed it replaced with a new one. One catch: all the dialog and sound effects were married to Frank DeVol's original music. So, they went through an extremely elaborate process of replacing all the actors' voices (including Wayne's, Maureen O'Hara's and Jerry Van Dyke's) as well as all the effects, Indian and group walla - everything. The hillarious part of it is that the association looking at the actors speaking was so strong, that you would never imagine in a thousand years they were not real. All in all I wrote about 110 minutes of music, including source, all synthesized and desperately trying to sound real. It would be fun to record parts of that score with the real orchestra someday as well. It was kind of a goofy western score with some big brawl action music as well as some saloon music.