Almost a month after streams of the There Will Be Blood score were posted on a Paramount Vantage page, and then promptly disappeared, The Playlist has a preview of two tracks composed by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood for the film. I’ve embedded the MP3 player above. Also, a new trailer for the film is getting everyone all excited.

The 15 year-old version of Karina is jumping up and down at the news that Brad Laner of Medicine is composing the score for Beautiful Noise. I swear I’ve written about this film before, but I can’t find a previous post on Spout about it, so here’s the rundown: directed by Eric Green, Noise is a documentary about shoegaze, the British flash-in-the-pan trend that, or a couple of years in the late 80s, sort of united stoney, droney bands like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Lush and Jesus and Mary Chain, before a press backlash made uttering the very name of the trend anathema.

(If that syndrome sounds familiar, check out the Wikipedia sections on both the shoegaze movement and its backlash, which attribute the genre’s collapse to a single Melody Maker story which referred to the genre as “The Scene Which Celebrates Itself.” After that story, shoegazers “became perceived by critics as over-privileged, self-indulgent and middle-class.” Ho-hum.)

Anyway.

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Last night, a number of music blogs reported that portions of Jonny Greenwood’s score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood were streaming on a Paramount Vantage promotional site. So this morning, we clicked the link, followed the “Score” tab…and found nothing. The streams are nowhere to be found, the page in question blank but for the teaser that something unspecified will be “coming soon.”  Did traffic from Pitchfork overwhelm the Paramount Vantage servers? What else could have happened in the intervening 14 hours to make the stream disappear? Oh, wait — it is Halloween. Spooky!

Anyway, all is not lost. The Playlist has been on this soundtrack like John Edwards on Hillary Clinton’s inconsistencies. They’ve got the track listing for the Blood soundtrack, which reveals that two of the “songs” used in the film are excerpts recycled from Greenwood’s 18-minute orchestral composition, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, which was commissioned by the BBC in 2006. They have a link to a Real Audio download of that on the BBC’s website.

Meanwhile, The Bathysphere apparently had a chance to listen to the stream before it vanished from the Vantage site. They point to this episode of Henry Rollins’ IFC show, in which the director says he listened to “a lot of crazy Polish pirate music” like Krzysztof Penderecki while writing the film (Rollins does a wide-eyed double-take at this tidbit that’s pretty priceless). The Bathysphere points to this MP3 of Penderecki’s Threnody To The Victims Of Hiroshima, which was also used in Children of Men, and which sounds *a lot* like the music that backed the twenty-minute reel of Blood shown at Telluride.

I just left the Telluride tribute to the master editor Walter Murch (The Godfather, The Conversation, The English Patient). So much wonderful filmmaking knowledge came from his lips. If it were not prohibited to record these sessions, I would have podcast the Q&A. But I’ll share the highlights I found most meaningful.

As an editor, the hardest thing to do is to remember the emotional resonance of a scene after viewing it day after day. To maintain that emotion, when Murch first sees the shots he’ll be working with, he writes in free association anything he thinks or feels while watching. He then keeps those notes open as he goes into the process of editing those shots over and over again into various scenes.

Murch is always looking for the visceral moment. He shared a quote about how if the novelist is smarter than the novel, they should move on to another profession. The work should always be beyond the reach of intellect. One way of identifying these visceral moments is to watch a shot and stop it at a moment he strongly reacts to. He then marks the time code and watches the shot again. If he hits stop again and it’s at the exact same spot in the time code, he knows there’s something there to be included in the film.

As any good editor, Murch’s thinking wanders back and forth between the technical and the creative. The result of one study he’s done across many films shows an average action sequence having a minimum of fourteen different camera angles, while dialogue scenes have about four. Four camera angles in an action sequence is too slow, and fourteen angles during dialogue would distract from what anybody’s saying.

In speaking about the various modes of viewing film now (from theater to video iPod), Murch defined the “cinematic experience.” At home, the viewer is king and the television is a jester coming into the room; if the king doesn’t like what he sees, off with the jester’s head. However, the cinematic experience is uncontrollable. The film starts when it starts and ends when it ends and the viewer has no control. It’s also collaborative viewing where one person’s laughter in one corner of the theater can infect the experience of everyone else. In short, the cinematic experience, Murch said, fulfills an innate human desire to open one’s mind to the uncontrollable.

A good film must also have its own unique “grammar.” It can’t feel like anything seen before. Although Murch may have opinions regarding a scene, he’s very careful not to pass judgment until he’s intimate with the work as a whole and has learned the language of that particular film.

Finally, in a serendipitous moment, Murch screened the scene in The Godfather when Woltz awakes to the severed horse head in his bed. This has always been my favorite blend of film and score, which I’ve attributed in the past to the composer, Nino Rota. However, the music in that scene was originally much too over the top and gave away the horror too early. So Murch took a solo trumpet piece Rota had written for elsewhere in the film, and blended it with the original music Rota intended for the scene. That’s the piece that’s in the film as we know it. Who knew?