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Score: A Film Music Documentary scores only partial marks

SCORE: A FILM MUSIC DOCUMENTARY (Matt Schrader). 93 minutes. Opens Friday (June 2). See listing. Rating: NNN


Score: A Film Music Documentary is fine as a primer on the history of film scores, but as a doc it’s merely adequate.

Starting with the live Wurlitzer accompaniment to silent movies and touching on game-changers like Max Steiner’s music for King Kong, Alex North’s Streetcar Named Desire score and Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock film work, director Matt Schrader and his talking heads analyze all the greats: John Barry, Ennio Morricone, Jerry Goldsmith, Hans Zimmer. Since those talking heads are also film composers who get their own moment in the spotlight, there’s a lot of back-patting around, but also some solid insights into process and artistry.

A good chunk is devoted to 70s king John Williams, with solid appreciations of Thomas Newman, Danny Elfman and a glimpse into where movie scoring is going with newcomers like Nine Inch Nails’s Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who won an Oscar for The Social Network.

If there’s a star to the doc, it’s the playful, enigmatic and very quotable Zimmer. The best sequences make you want to revisit the films themselves. And the final moments, dedicated to the late James Horner, are quite touching. There are absences, though where’s the great Nino Rota, for instance? It’s also a shame that more women and non-European composers like Tan Dun and Ryuichi Sakamoto weren’t interviewed.

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