[Wesley]

Goldenthal is one of the few composers whose music I can listen to and really “get”. John Corigliano was developing his architectural method of composition at the same time as he was mentoring Goldenthal, and I can definitely hear that sense of structure in EG’s music in a way I don’t hear in most others’. He can do the big orchestra avant-garde thing and still keep a lot of clarity for the regular joe, which is not easy. His music introduced me to Penderecki, Ornette Coleman, Corigliano, all this stuff I’d never heard before floating around in movies he’s done. He has really original ideas on how to score scenes, for instance the opening credits to an action movie like Demolition Man sounds like something Bernard Herrmann might have done.

Everyone goes nuts for Heat but I’ve never been interested in that one; he did the electric guitar idea much better for In Dreams a few years later. I like just about everything else he did though. Sphere is definitely his most original, the orchestrational verve there is awesome. He and his orchestrator should publish a book on all the little tricks they developed over the years, like Henry Brant did.

The lawsuit thing, KMCG mentioned he was out of line to do that. Making WB publish an apology with all the DVD marketing was overkill. But keep in mind that Titus was a little film which ran in like a dozen theaters, whereas just the CD for 300 had sold 150,000 copies by the time Goldenthal filed suit, and he probably recouped a pretty penny from that. I kinda wonder if he made a grab for the royalties to help fund a recording of his Grendel opera, but obviously that never materialized. In any case Bates had been going around telling the press that those specific cues were all his own great ideas, which just isn’t cool. Goldenthal has acknowledged other rip-offs of his music with amusement because they were little foreign films, or projects which his conductor/orchestrator were directly involved in, but when a rock and roll guy rips you off three times in the very first reel of a WB blockbuster, it’s a little much.