RYAN SHORE on Composing for VULGAR
Just how does one score the rape of a clown? The existing lexicon is limited, and the appropriate bits from Deliverance or Pulp Fiction are not underscored. Besides, this is a comedy. This was just one of the many challenges which fell to Ryan Shore, composer of View Askew's production of Vulgar, slated for August 24th release by Lion's Gate Films.
Composer Shore explains the set-up, "The main character, Will, is a kid's party clown using the moniker Flappy, and when work isn't going well for him he decides to market his skills in a new way. He gets this idea to do bachelor parties dressed as a clown but in addition he's got on fishnets, a garter belt and high heels. He adopts the name of Vulgar, "it will be like a joke - they will be expecting a stripper, but instead he shows up and twenty minutes later the real stripper shows up and it's a good laugh. But on his first gig, instead of there being a group of party-goers, it's a father and his two sons, and everything goes horribly wrong - as wrong as you could ever possibly imagine." Ryan adds, "and that's just the beginning, the introduction of the characters".
Shore's introduction to the characters occurred while he was doing orchestrational duties for Howard Shore's score to Dogma in London. "I had met the producers, Kevin Smith, Monica Hampton and Scott Mosier, and they told me about this movie and asked if I would be interested in taking a look at it. When we got back to the states I watched the film at their offices in Red Bank, NJ. The irony is, they were laughing hysterically at the film but as a newcomer it was looking pretty graphic to me; the antagonists were pretty scary. So I came up with the idea of doing a jazz score as a way to give it some levity, but I also wanted to write a dark jazz score since it was a dark comedy." To this end Shore chose to create a score for tenor and baritone saxophones, trumpet, flugelhorn, trombone (each with mutes), strings and an extended rhythm section of upright bass/electric bass, electric guitar, piano, organ, vibraphone and percussion.
Ryan Shore is no stranger to the jazz idiom. Though he studied film music composition at Berklee College of Music, he also spent a considerable amount of time playing saxophone, an instrument he had picked up in 7th grade and continues to play to this day. Shore recently played a US tour with the band Matchbox Twenty which included an appearance on "Letterman". Jazz composition assisted Shore in matching musically the many twists and turns of the story. Cues range from a title sequence featuring slightly demented circus music to 70s action drama and even a comic nod to the Keystone Cops. "Scorewise, the common thread is the jazz instrumentation, but it takes on many different styles. Sometimes its structured and sometimes its very free and wild, but the instrumentation is always the same. In many ways the instruments take the same journey as the lead character".
Shore first met with Bryan Johnson, the film's writer and director, at the spotting sessions. Bryan admitted that he had grown attached to the temp score and needed to listen to Shore's piano preview with fresh ears. Despite this, and the fact that Shore had only 2 days to record roughly 40 minutes of music, the sessions themselves went quite smoothly, "They gave me a lot of freedom to create the sound of the score. Through our meetings we knew that we were thinking of the music in the same way. When we got to the sessions they were very open, it was a great working environment".
This environment afforded Shore an opportunity to tackle the aforementioned rape sequence in a most unique way: improvising the music on the spot at the recording session. "My feeling from the beginning was to take that approach but I felt odd going into the session without any written music. So I composed a piece that was much more methodical and we did a take of it, but the filmmakers wanted something much looser, nothing you could hang your hat on-- which is true since the character's life is being turned inside out. I said 'I think that's great'. The problem, though, is even when jazz musicians play random and free they still feed off of each other and I didn't want any kind of interplay between the musicians to occur. So what I did was I recorded each player individually, and I gave them directions over the headphones as I watched the screen. I did that with the drums, the bass, guitar and horns - getting their personal take from the directions I gave them.
In the end when we brought it together it was a complete cacophony, the only relation being the intensity and the energy. It turned out to be very effective".
Though Shore admits that Vulgar may not be "for the whole family", he is quick to add that it is well written and directed and possesses a gritty almost pulpy feel which lends itself to composing for a smaller ensemble. "There's a lot of interesting things that can be done with small groups", Shore says, " In particular - and one of the reasons I love it --is each musician plays a more integral role in the score. Each voice has a more unique stamp".
Shore has since completed several projects after Vulgar, including "Lift" and James Toback's "Harvard Man". Each movie resulted in scores completely different from the other- ranging from orchestral to LSD rock. It points up Shore's versatility as a composer, and his dedication to the work at hand "if you are open to the film, it will tell you what to write, you just need to be aware of the picture's needs. Because of that, I find that I come up with things that I may not have had I been composing independent of a movie. That's what I love about composing for film, the discovery".
-Mark Leneker, Film Score Monthly