Publicity
Singer's Backup Musician
By Robert Koehler (as printed in Daily Variety on October 21, 1998)
John Ottman is either the most fortunate film composer in Hollywood, or the most snakebit. It all depends on which Ottman project you're looking at.
With director, collaborator and fellow USC alum Bryan Singer, Ottman has enjoyed a unique working relationship, serving as both editor and composer on Singer's three features, beginning with "Public Access," the breakthrough hit "The Usual Suspects" and the new psychodrama "Apt Pupil."
According to the best records available, no current film composer other than Ottman also edits the films he scores, and few composers or editors can claim such a close association as Ottman has with Singer.
Sounds wonderfully cushy and collegial, until one ponders Ottman's recent non-Singer work. His lush score, recorded with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, for the 1997 Morgan Creek-produced "Incognito," starring Jason Patric, was never heard in a cinema since the film failed to secure a theatrical release, finally airing on cable's Showtime channel. His even more adventurous score for Polygram's not-for-children feature starring Sigourney Weaver, "Snow White: A Tale of Terror," ended up a direct-to-video release.
"That was a huge score for me," Ottman says, acknowledging that had these previous films been theatrically released, "Apt Pupil" would have been his third major work in a year's time.
Still, the latest score makes a startling impact, since it's so deliberately syneopated to Ottman's editing. "Yes, people do wonder what comes first, the music or the editing," Ottman says, "and it begins with the fact that I'm really 90% an editor. The best editors are closet composers anyway, since they have an internal sense of peaks and valleys, of foreplay and climaxes, like composers do.
"So I edit the film and try to solve its problems, all the while knowing later that I have to solve more problems as the composer, it can sometimes be a strange split between the two tasks."
An admitted "film geek" who insists that Hollywood film music has suffered a decline since the era of the '60s and '70s, Ottman argues that film scorers need to get back to recognizing that "the whole orchestra can be used in all sorts of interesting ways to play strange music. There can be this tendency now for holding down a key on a synthesizer and getting the score from that. That's worrying."