Music Supervision: Cutting Bowie From The Rugrats Movie...

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Interesting piece on Music Supervisors, and their struggles to get music cleared in time, or at all...

The Hardest Song I Ever Chased

Some fun pull quotes:


“With Reservoir Dogs, I really had to fight to get ‘Stuck in the Middle With You,’” says Karyn Rachtman, who also worked on Pulp Fiction, Clueless, and Reality Bites. “Getting that in a low-budget film in a scene where somebody gets their ear cut off was really hard. I had to get on the phone with Joe Egan [from Stealers Wheel] and convince him. I said, ‘This is the best script I’ve ever read,’ and brought up ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ and how it was used in A Clockwork Orange. I guess, to my credit, I had the ability to really get people rallied around the project.”

There was this scene written in the script where Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s character sings karaoke. I think my budget overall for the whole movie was something like $12,000 and I said, “I don’t know how we’re going to do this. We have no money for like a recognizable song.” Then we landed on “Cruel to Be Kind” by Nick Lowe. That song’s actually co-written with Ian Gomm, who was part of that pub-rock scene in England at the time. We both love the song and it worked for the character and what she was going through at the time. It was upbeat and happy and this wasn’t a happy character.

I went to the label and the publisher. The publisher just said, “This is just too low of a fee. We can’t do this.” So I made James write a letter asking for it, and then I included a story in the letter. So, my mother lived in England when she was pregnant with me. She worked at this pub in London, the Hope and Anchor, and I wrote in the letter, “This song is also important for me because when I was a fetus, my mother worked at the pub where you used to play all the time, so I heard your music when I was in utero. Please, please let us have the song.” And they let us have it. I think we got it for like something really, really low, like $2,500, but with a backend deal so that if the movie did well, he would get a certain amount.

The harder part of the job is when you get a great song and then the director decides he doesn’t want it after you did all this work. I had that happen with David Bowie, with The Rugrats Movie. The director [Igor Kovalyov] wanted Bowie, so I went and I made that happen. I flew to Bermuda and he gave us this song, “Sky Life,” that was unreleased. It’s so gorgeous and haunting.

You know how they say, “Never meet your heroes”? It’s not true. He was the most wonderful person I’ve ever met. When I was at his house, he had just painted a picture of Iggy Pop and he had a test print of it to approve, so it’s numbered 00. And he gave it to me. He wrote, “To Karyn, with all my love, David Bowie.” I cherish that with all my heart.

Now, mind you, the song was very sad, but it’s so beautiful. The director just said, “No.” Maybe they were scared to go back and say, “Can you make it a little bit more like this?” When you hear it, you’ll be like, “Oh, how could that have worked in Rugrats?” To an extent, we were all kind of like, “How are we going to make this work?” I feel like there was a way we could have.

When I started in this business in the ’90s, we had something called a Phonolog, the biggest book you’ve ever seen. It had every song with every songwriter and what recording it was on, and then we’d get pages sent to us to add in when things changed or new songs came in. We also went to Tower Records to look things up, and we would call ASCAP or BMI, but they would only give you the information on three songs per call. You’d have to hang up and call back — I had to hire an assistant to do it because you’d be on hold all day and couldn’t do any other work.
For season two, there was a scene in the French club, Madame Arthur’s, and I actually found one of the first trans [women] ever who performed in the club, Bambi. She emailed me this big long letter in French — thank God for Google Translate — and got information on what songs they played there, and Amy chose this song “C’est Paris” for a scene. French music is very different to clear — you have to go through every single writer or heir, or heir of an heir. Universal’s office in Paris couldn’t find one heir for two weeks, so I was calling them 24/7, and literally, at 1 o’clock in the morning before the shoot, I got the approval. There was no reason we didn’t think it would clear, but I lost so much sleep over it.

Fair few decent insights in there though, worth a read . From making the playlist for 'Better Call' Saul's mind, to scratching their heads over the rights to 80s hip hop.
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