1) you can bet Williams has clearly set in the contract that he has let's say 6 weeks for a film and he simply won't accept anything else. the majority of composers is forced to work in 3 weeks or sometimes even less. 17 days for I, Robot, 2-3 weeks Lara Croft II, 12 days on Troy,.....
2) Williams works on 1 film every two years which is usually directed by an established directors who know the craft and works the old way - Williams especially has benefit of working conditions unlike anyone else - Shore on the other hand occassionally uses several orchestrators on some of his scores including his nephew Ryan a few years ago. Also just like Williams, Shore works these days on much less films he did years ago usually composing almost exclusively for Cronenberg/Scorsese and doing only about 1 other film a year.
3) Debney and others work often for young insecure directors who keep changing the film during the time they are set to record the score. The composer than has to decide if he will prefer orchestrating his music and let the music editor to make some adjustments (sometimes they can't be done) or if he will focus on making adjustments so the "new" music will fit the "new cut" of the film. Even Horner when he was scoring Troy, the film was still being re-edited. This combined with time the composers have to compose their music clearly doesn't help them to orchestrate everything themselves and they are FORCED to pass something on others in case they want to work on BIG STUDIO pictures.
4) This is not the "old Hollywood" where composers like Herrmann, Jarre etc were trusted by the directors and worked exclusively with them. Nowadays any studio executive has something to say about the music (including those two Weinstein assholes) and the amount of music being written for a film increases - eg Young wrote two different scores for An Unfinished Life - one for the director, the other for the producers - or his Lucky You he spend rewriting several months, composed like 4 hours (if I remember correnctly) and only less than 20 minutes was used in the film.
Several quotes:
http://lokutusost.ufouni.cz/filmmusic/b ... -ro/01.mp3
"It is a real shame to see the current working conditions for composers. It is certainly not a climate that fosters the creation of great film music. Post production schedules get shorter and shorter. And as soon as some ridiculous schedule is met, word gets around and then that become the new industry-wide expectation of how long a score takes. Alex North spent a year on "Spartacus" and it shows. Jerry Goldsmith used to accept new projects on a ten week contract. I think John Williams is about the only composer left who can demand proper time be allotted to the creation of the score. Further undermining the creative process is the frequency with which scores are tossed entirely. It has gotten so that composers know that if they stray too far from the temp track, there work is likely to be rejected. Great directors like Franklin J. Schaffner allowed a safe environment and, when scoring his films, Jerry could feel not only comfortable about experimenting but even encouraged to do so. When I was recording "Patton" with Jerry in Scotland, Joel McNeely was there with us. After Jerry recorded the German Advance cue Joel, who was completely knocked out by what he had just heard, asked Jerry if he thought it was even possible to write a cue like that for a film today. Jerry's response was that it was not. He said he felt that that cue would be thrown out immediately in this day and age. I thought that was a pretty sad comment on the state of the art. This is not to say that great work is not being done. It is. But the deck is seriously stacked against the composer. The days of composers answering solely to an all-powerful studio music head like Alfred Newman are long past."
- Robert Townson - the quote from this interview
http://www.filmzene.net/read.php?u=inte ... glish.html
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