The Shore thing
Jeffrey M. Anderson
The San Francisco Examiner

For me, the buck stops right after Bernard Herrmann, Ennio Morricone and Howard Shore.

You wouldn't recognize those names unless you followed the careers of movie soundtrack composers, those unsung geniuses who crank out more music than seems possible in a lifetime.

Morricone has scored some 400-plus movies, from the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns "A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" to Giuseppe Tornatore's recent "Malena."

Herrmann's relatively short career spanned some 50 films, including "Citizen Kane," "Vertigo," "Psycho" and "Taxi Driver."

While Shore's reputation isn't as storied as those guys, his list of scores already has topped 60 titles, which include "After Hours," "Big," "The Silence of the Lambs," "Philadelphia," "Ed Wood," "Seven," "Dogma," "High Fidelity" and "The Score" -- not to mention his lifelong collaboration with director David Cronenberg, for whom he scored the likes of "Scanners," "Dead Ringers," "Naked Lunch" (with jazz legend Ornette Coleman) and "Crash."

This year, Shore advanced another step, finally earning his very first Oscar nomination for "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring."

In a recent phone conversation, Shore explained that the process for scoring each movie works differently.

In the case of "The Lord of the Rings," director Peter Jackson invited him to the set. He met the actors, looked at the set designs and met Alan Lee, the great Tolkien illustrator. He researched "The Lord of the Rings" for four or five months, completely immersing himself in Tolkien's world.

He says, "Tolkein spent 14 years creating 'Lord of the Rings,' and (Jackson and his crew) had studied it for five years before shooting. I needed time to catch up to them."

When working with Cronenberg, however, Shore gets a look at the script long before shooting begins. He and the director discuss casting and production design, and later, Shore will see rough footage after principal photography is finished. After seeing a director's cut, then the pair has what's called a spotting session, during which they go through the film scene by scene.

Shore says, "The important thing is to have a common goal between director and composer -- have the same approach to the film. You've gotta feel that out a bit."

While Shore has completed the score for the first part of the impending "Rings" trilogy, he's committed to a couple of other projects before he returns to part two, "The Two Towers."

They include David Fincher's "Panic Room" and Cronenberg's "Spider," based on a novel by Patrick McGrath about a young man released from a London mental institution in the 1950s.

"We sort of grew up making movies together," Shore says of fellow Canadian Cronenberg. "We've known each other for a really long time. When you work with a group that long, you're always looking forward. He's a tremendous visionary leader. Wherever he's going, you know it's some new place."

In approaching the score to "Spider," Shore says characterization is one of his main considerations. "I think about what [the character] might have heard, what he might have felt, what music his mother might have listened to," he says.

But in period pieces like "The Lord of the Rings," "Spider" and "Naked Lunch," Shore says, "You want to bring the time period out. You want a feeling of antiquity, ancient, old, (to) find the time and place and create that. It's visceral."

For the Hobbiton sequence of "The Lord of the Rings," Shore went with hammer dulcimer, guitar, pennywhistle and a "very sort of natural flute sound -- a very simple sound," he says, to match the Hobbits' simple lifestyle.

But Shore actually began work in the middle of the film, with the Mines of Moria sequence.

"That was a great place to start. It's an all male choir. It's 100 players and 100 singers: a 60-voice choir, a 30-voice boys' choir and 10 international soloists. We started re-reading the text page by page and creating, scene by scene and cut by cut, the composition for that world. We spent a long time in there. And once you'd been in Moria, you could work your way out."

Shore's began his career as a jack-of-all-trades in a theater group, where he acted, wrote and directed. He also played and studied musical instruments: woodwinds, flute, clarinet, all types of saxophone, trumpet, cello, piano. This naturally led to a job on "Saturday Night Live."

As the show's original music director, Shore was in charge of choosing and directing all the musical acts, and writing and conducting the theme music. He was there for Elvis Costello's notorious on-air song-switch in the late 1970s.

"We just went with it," Shore says with a verbal shrug.

Before long, it was time to move on. He says, "I was interested in a lot of music other than TV. As a composer, my ear was in tune to more complex things."

Because he's busy writing creating three or four scores each year, Shore doesn't play music often these days. He doesn't even use a piano to work; he thinks up all his scores in his head and writes them down with pencil and paper.

Shore laughs when reflecting on the fact that he wrote dozens of compositions before landing his first Academy Award nomination. Still, he's pleased that "The Lord of the Rings" score is the one that's earned the extra accolades.

He says, "This film was such a massive undertaking -- it's very personal achievement for me."

HOLLYWOOD (Zap2it.com) - The American Cinema Editors announced their picks for the best edited movies of the year at the 52nd Annual ACE Eddie Awards Sunday night.

Unlike the Academy Awards, the organization breaks up the feature films into two categories. "Moulin Rouge," edited by Jill Bilcock, scored top honors for Comedy or Musical, while "Black Hawk Down," edited by Pietro Scalia, was named the best-edited Dramatic feature. Both movies are also up for the Oscar, competing with "A Beautiful Mind," "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" and "Memento."

Director Barry Levinson ("Bandits"), who won an Oscar for "Rain Man," was honored as the ACE Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year, an award that his "Good Morning, Vietnam" and "Toys" star and friend Robin Williams presented to him.

Lifetime Career Achievement Awards went to veteran editors George Watters, A.C.E. ("Enter the Dragon") and Antony Gibbs, A.C.E. ("Ronin," "Dune"), who also walked away with an Eddie for Best Edited Motion Picture for Non-Commercial Television for his work on the TNT biopic "James Dean."

The art of coarse Oscaring
Sarah Dempster
Scotsman.com

Ever wondered what it takes to win an Academy Award? You have? Cogitate no more. By carefully observing the following guidelines, you too may find yourself the subject of an embarrassing interpretative dance routine at next month’s celeb-soaked ceremony. It’s simple when you know how ...

Be English

Ask the Academy what it thinks of the English and it’ll probably blurt out something about the Queen Mother, crumpets and bowler hats. Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, Jim Broadbent, Helen Mirren, Kate Winslet and Maggie Smith have all been nominated for awards this year, many for no other reason than the fact that they’re not American. If you’re not lucky enough to be English, you can increase your chances of getting on Oscar’s good side by doing your best impression of Princess Anne, as Renée Zellweger demonstrated in the risible Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Play a disabled character

The Academy loves to reward those who portray the disadvantaged, handing out nominations to these brave souls in the same way a charity worker would distribute blankets among the homeless. It’s the Academy’s way of showing the world it cares; its chance to "give something back". Four of this year’s nominees play characters beset by serious illness. Sean Penn plays a retarded father in I Am Sam, Will Smith portrays Parkinson’s-afflicted boxing champ Muhammad Ali, Russell Crowe plays schizophrenic maths genius John Nash, and Judi Dench portrays Alzheimer’s suffering novelist Iris Murdoch. With such a preponderance of suffering, expect the ceremony to be awash with more tears than a Greek funeral.

Play a historical figure

Hollywood is a sucker for fact. Reality reassures the Academy that its life has meaning and is not merely an echoing void of spurious self-indulgence and Adam Sandler movies. This is why biopics are traditionally showered with awards; the Academy views a vote for a history-based epic as akin to donating a blank cheque to the Vatican. Factual films naturally have a knock-on effect on their stars, often fooling the Academy into thinking their roles are in some way more important than those of the other nominees. So great is this effect, in fact, that playing a lamppost in Ali would make you around 32 times more likely to win an Oscar than had you recited the entire works of TS Eliot while juggling lap-dogs in Gosford Park.

Play a patriot

In the same way that Hugh Hefner surrounds himself with nubile nymphets, the Academy prefers the company of films that remind it of what it does best - being American. And America likes nothing more than tear-spattered, back-slapping, flag-waving patriotism. Will Smith first demonstrated how much he loved America by punching an alien in the face in Independence Day. His portrayal of Ali is the final proof that he’s as American as Tom Hanks and bad sitcoms. Ditto Denzel Washington, who portrays a government ass-whupper in the screamingly American Training Day. Patriotism does not, of course, apply to this year’s rash of British contenders though, as always, any foreigner who decides to get jiggy wit’ Uncle Sam (such as Ridley Scott has with his sock-it-to-’em war flick Black Hawk Down) will be greeted like a prodigal son.

Play a disabled historical patriot

This is the Holy Grail of movie roles. Land one of these babies and you can consider yourself safely on board a one-way train to Oscarville. What’s more, the role often acts itself, as anyone unlucky enough to witness Tom Cruise’s moustache-heavy "performance" in Born on The Fourth Of July will attest. This year, both Smith and Crowe demonstrate the Oscar-attracting power of the disabled histor-ical patriot while chewing through more furniture than recalcitrant puppies.

Smith’s portrayal of Ali is an exercise in fervent Yankee Doodleism, while Crowe’s character proves he’s an all-American boy by not only scooping a Nobel Prize, but also wearing a ridiculous grey wig.

Stretch your dramatic horizons

In the Academy’s eyes, there is nothing more rousing than the sight of an actor leaping out of his/her comfort zone. Nicole Kidman proved she wasn’t only a vaguely competent actress by trilling like an injured budgie in Moulin Rouge. Ian McKellen donned a cape and got thrown around Lord Of The Rings. But nobody demonstrated their devotion better than Renée Zellweger, who shocked America by ballooning to a staggering, healthendangering size 12 for Bridget Jones’s Diary. The poor, brave lamb.