MOVIE MUSIC: IS IT BECOMING HIT OR MISS?

Item: After disappointing previews, director Ridley Scott and Universal Studios drastically cut an hour out of his $30-million fantasy-epic “Legend” to suit American audience tastes. Universal also commissions a new score by synthesizer-pop band Tangerine Dream to replace “Legend’s” original symphonic score by Oscar-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith.

Item: In an apparent attempt to corral both “art” crowds and MTV-saturated youth audiences, Taylor Hackford’s “White Nights” mingles pop rock, American ballet and Russian folk dance. Critics aren’t impressed, but first-week audiences made a hasty jete to the box office. (As of last weekend, the film had sold more than $22-million worth of tickets.)

Item: Director Walter Hill tosses out James Horner’s percussive “Streets of Fire” score in favor of Ry Cooder’s more commercially exploitable music. Likewise, director Ivan Reitman sees visions of gold and discarded portions of Oscar-winner Elmer Bernstein’s tongue-in-cheek “Ghostbusters” score for potential hit records.

The writing--make that composing--seems to be on the wall: As long as teen audiences shape the ways and means of studio executives, film scores increasingly will be heard in three-minute increments, with a steady techno-pop beat and co-vocal by Phil Collins.

Ten years ago, the pulsating rhythm of cellos and orchestra helped send moviegoers screaming out of theaters in Spielberg’s “Jaws.” The commercial success of Williams’ music was a timely reminder that the symphonic idiom had not worn out its welcome on movie sound tracks, sparking a widespread renaissance in film-music appreciation.

But in the wake of “Flashdance,” “Footloose” and MTV--all facets of the same demographic face lift from older to younger moviegoers--the second “golden age” of movie music is again becoming the platinum age.

“The art of film scoring is in dire danger today, the greatest it’s faced,” said Elmer Bernstein, composer of scores for “The Ten Commandments,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and more than 70 other films. “The problem is one of pure ignorance. To the studios, film music is just a sort of wallpaper. If they don’t like what they bought, they just paint over it.

“In the days when studios had music heads like John Green at MGM and Alfred Newman at Fox, composers had people who would fight for them if necessary, who would educate the executives. Today, the composer has no one to protect him. It’s a very disturbing situation.”

Bernstein feels that film music’s ills are symptomatic of a larger problem in Hollywood: the mass-market movie maker.

“Socially, we’re going through a plastic, corporate kind of culture; everything’s very superficial. Mass media is great, but you can’t have real progress in the arts if everything you make has to be liked by everybody. You tie yourself to the lowest common denominator every time. An art form can’t survive that way.”

A seeming majority of film makers would respond that numbers, not art, remain the target. With a teen-age audience worth millions at the box-office, the argument goes, what’s so wrong about hit-oriented movie music?

“There’s a cross-pollination between movies and records and MTV,” lyricist screenwriter Dean Pitchford (“Footloose”) noted after his film’s success. “If all the elements click, you have the most powerful marketing push imaginable.”

Reaching the masses through movie music is hardly a new innovation. In the days of the silents, producers regularly incorporated well-known melodies into film scores; with the advent of talkies, movie musicals delivered the latest song hits amid highly secondary story lines.

But it was Dimitri Tiomkin’s Oscar-winning score for “High Noon” in 1952, with its recurring use of the theme “Do Not Foresake Me Oh My Darlin’,” that forcefully showed producers the commercial potential of songs in non-musical films.

By the 1960s, with the explosion of pop groups like the Beatles and a growing awareness of the American teen-ager’s buying power at the box office, the first wave of soundtrack-mania struck. Soon, veteran composers like Bernard Herrmann (“Citizen Kane”), Max Steiner (“Gone With the Wind”) and Miklos Rozsa (“Ben-Hur”) found film offers on the wane as producers put their stakes on pop-oriented scores.

After a brief return to the symphonic idiom in the mid-’70s with “Jaws” and Williams’ hugely successful “Star Wars” sound track, the hit mentality has returned--with a subtle and disturbing new wrinkle, according to Bernstein.

“In the ‘60s, it was strictly a matter of commerce,” he said. “I think executives still knew what a good film score was. But now, we have a new generation of businessmen who are so used to synthesizers and electronic sounds that they’ve forgotten what real music sounds like.”

Jerry Goldsmith is naturally frustrated by the rejection of his “Legend” score, but doesn’t consider himself a victim. “I think the real victim is the picture,” he said. “The entire concept of the film has been totally changed.” (In a phone interview from London, director Ridley Scott said that “Legend’s” leisurely plot about fairies has been “toughened up” to emphasize the film’s “action-adventure” aspects.)

Some good has actually come from the controversy, Goldsmith added; an album of his score will soon be released, in part because of the film’s much-publicized troubles.

MCA President Sidney Sheinberg declined comment on “Legend” but, according to a Universal spokesman, Sheinberg commissioned the new score from Tangerine Dream for both commercial and practical reasons: Universal is aiming for a more exploitable sound and Goldsmith’s score no longer fit the re-cut film.

But Scott insisted that “Legend’s” re-cutting and re-scoring was entirely his own decision and Universal supported it. “Jerry’s score is probably one of the best he’s done,” Scott said, “but I finally decided it was a bad marriage with the film. It just became too sweet.”

After determining that Goldsmith was committed to other projects (Scott and Goldsmith both said they had not spoken since re-scoring), Scott said he chose Tangerine Dream: “I wanted a score that would still be appropriate to certain period elements of the film, but I wanted to use musicians that had a more contemporary connection.” Audiences can make up their own minds about “Legend” next spring after the film’s domestic release.

Veteran screen composers are not entirely alone in feeling that studios are going too far. Taylor Hackford, whose “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “Against All Odds” each featured hit pop themes (“Up Where We Belong” and “Odds’ ” title song, respectively), is clearly not against “a synthesis of film making and record making.”

But “the film making has to come first. Some people don’t approach it that way,” he told Calendar.

“The most important thing about songs in films is that they complement the emotional content of a scene. But when that approach meets with some success, other film makers throw in songs just to get a hit. A lot of music groups today are over-recording, with the idea that they can sell leftover songs to producers.”

Film music’s current state may not entirely be the fault of hit-hungry executives. “Perhaps, to a certain extent, composers are responsible,” Bernstein noted, “because they haven’t been tough enough by either rejecting jobs or asserting themselves more. It’s difficult to get tough with people who have the power, but if you’re going to be useful, you’ve got to stand up for what you believe in.”

Movie music’s current infatuation with pop hits may be only temporary but, in the meantime, Bernstein and others remain pessimistic.

“Film composing in a classical sense, I think, is disappearing,” said the 63-year-old composer. “There’s such a growing and pernicious disregard for it that the studios may wind up not having film composers anymore.

“Not every film score works, even when it’s written by someone of experience. But if you’re going to employ an expert in the field, your best decision is to trust the expert. If you’re simply trying to hit the charts and make it with the 12-to-16-year-olds, there’s no point in making a picture over that level in the first place.”