OK, here’s the story on movie trailers. Most trailers are made way before the film is finished (which is why, more than occasionally, you’ll see scenes in a movie’s trailer that are later cut or never included in the actual movie). And when it comes to music in trailers, the problem is that there’s usually none available from the actual movie to use when the trailers need to be made. This is because music is one of the last things added to a movie (usually less than a month before a movie comes out) – and that’s way too late to use for trailers, which need to be made very early in the process, way before the film is finished. So let’s say you’re making a movie… what do you do for trailer music? Here are your choices:
(1) Hire an orchestra to record music specifically for your movie’s trailer, even though the movie is usually still being worked on, and none of the score has yet been written or recorded. This happens every once in a while if they have the budget for it. Sometimes the trailer music will be written by the composer attached to the film (we recorded a very early Star Trek trailer that Michael wrote to air during the Super Bowl almost a year before the score was recorded). But often when doing new music for trailers, the composer for the trailer is not the composer attached to the film, but usually either someone up-and-coming, or someone who specializes in writing music for movie trailers. A typical trailer session is a 1-hour call for the musicians (normal movie sessions will either be a 3-hour or 6-hour call per day with multiple days).
(2) Forget using new or unique music, and find some music already recorded to use on your trailer. This can be pop songs (like one of the initial Wall-E trailers), or more often than not, to use bits and pieces from previous movie scores. The trick here is to pick pieces of older movie scores that convey the emotions you want, and perhaps make it just a little familiar… but you don’t want people to recognize where it’s actually from. In other words, you don’t want to use “Star Wars” or “ET” because anyone listening would immediately think “Oh, that’s the Star Wars music…” and stop paying attention to the trailer. It should be a little familiar, but never recognizable. For instance, Randy Edelman’s “Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story” and especially Marc Shaiman’s “The American President” are two scores that I’ve heard lifted from for trailer music. Soundtrack fans out there will know many examples.
(3) Go to a company that specializes in providing music for trailers (but not written for any specific movie). This differs from #1 because #1 is creating new music specifically for your movie. But there are companies that write all kinds of stock (generic) trailer music that they will sell to anyone who wants to use it in their trailer. From what I understand, this is what Up did for the earlier trailers (someone put a link up somewhere to the company that provided the music). This music is never for sale to the general public (you won’t be able to buy it on a CD), it’s for sale only to film companies for them to use in trailers. They’ll have a vast library of music, and the filmmakers can pick and choose what music from a pre-existing library they think will work for their trailer.
So those are pretty much your choices. As far as Up goes, as far as I can remember, we never had any special trailer sessions. Initially for the early trailers (as someone else pointed out, I don’t have any firsthand knowledge) the music came from one of these trailer houses. For the later trailers, we had already recorded some of the music, so some of the trailer scenes used music from the movie’s earlier sessions (Pixar movies are unusual in that most of the time a few sessions are done early on, instead of everything at the last minute… so at least there was some music from the movie ready to go if they wanted to use it). So one of the late trailers that shows the house lifting up has some snippets of the original version of this cue (when it was “big”)… and if I remember right, was kind of a mix of stuff from the film and stuff not from the film. But the early trailers didn’t have anything from the film, and, as someone else pointed out, came from a trailer music house.
Yes, that’s Carmen, by Georges Bizet (actually, the Habanera from Carmen), and it’s used in the actual film (the scene where [spoil]Carl is slowly going down the stairs in his motorized chair-lift[/spoil]). Michael arranged it, but it’s basically Carmen’s Habanera. rachelcakes1985 is right that at times, composers will slightly alter a piece of music to “homage” it and avoid copyright problems while still making it recognizable to the audience… but in this case, there’s no copyright worry because Carmen was composed over 100 years ago.
about the Star Trek screening. Did Ben Burtt attend that screening at all? Or Michael Giacchino or J.J. Abrams?
Don’t know if Ben Burtt was there. Michael wasn’t, because he was probably busy working on Land of the Lost, but at one of the LotL sessions, mentioned he saw it at a midnight screening. JJ Abrams wasn’t there either, but videotaped a message that was projected before the movie began, saying he’s sorry he couldn’t make it, and thanking everyone involved in the making of the movie they’re about to see.
whether this “Original Trailer Music” track is on the film soundtrack
Generally, unless music used in a trailer is also used in a film, there’s no chance you’ll hear the trailer music on the film’s soundtrack CD. Sometimes a film’s DVD release might have one of the film’s trailers as an extra, so if you’re lucky, occasionally you might be able to hear it that way…
How’d ya find it?
Gawsh gee willikins, I discover something new every day! Thanks Rachel! 