SEEKING THE GROOVE IN MOVIE SOUND TRACKS

On paper, the sound track to Disney’s “Ruthless People” looked like a sure thing: A “monster” in record-industry parlance. With new songs from Mick Jagger, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen, the record offered the cream of the CBS Records roster (it was issued on Epic, a subsidiary of CBS). While the film was one of the largest-grossing comedies of the summer, the sound track--which managed to get on Billboard’s Top Pop Album chart--was still considered a star-studded disappointment.

Don’t feel too bad for the folks at Epic, though. Their sister label Columbia Records produced the sound track to “Top Gun.” Featuring Kenny Loggins and lesser-knowns like Berlin and Miami Sound Machine, the LP has sold almost 3 million copies to date, making it the largest-selling record this year for Columbia.

Nearly a decade after the phenomenal success of “Saturday Night Fever,” as both a movie and record, the search for profitable sound tracks has led to a feeding frenzy between studios and record companies. This year alone, 13 of Billboard’s Top Pop Albums came from films. But for every “Top Gun” or “Stand By Me” (now rapidly climbing the charts) there have been dozens of failures like “Out of Bounds” and “Howard the Duck.” Yet the hunt for the right musical chemistry and the battle for the potentially impressive revenues continues at full tilt. In 1985 alone, 10 sound-track singles made Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 singles chart and in 1986 a whopping 13 sound-track LPs have already landed on the Top Pop Albums list. “A lot of sound tracks have done very well lately,” says David Geffen, who heads his own film company and record label. “There is a real scramble on.”

That scramble has produced some strange bedfellows, joining together once disparate forces from the movie and music businesses. The enormously successful sound tracks from “Flashdance” and “Footloose” helped change the sound and look of the movies: Suddenly pop sound tracks became a de rigueur component of the modern feature and a stopgap for soaring marketing costs.

But a stubborn push and pull between the record labels and the movie studios evolved. Ideally, studios want bankable music and the music videos that spring from them. Record companies want to havetheir music showcased in hit movies. Occasionally the chemistry works, as in the megahits “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Karate Kid II.” But more often than not, as Geffen points out, “It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.”

A hit single from a sound track not only sells records but provides free movie advertising. A classic example is Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” a Top 10 single that will appear on the band’s new album and is also known as “Love Theme From ‘Top Gun.’ ” Says Geffen: “One of the reasons ‘Top Gun’ has hung in there for so long is because the music was so effective. And it doesn’t hurt to have a radio station saying ‘Top Gun’ eight times a day.”

For every “Top Gun” and “Big Chill” (3 million copies sold to date from a catalogue of old Motown chestnuts) there is the disappointment of an “Out of Bounds” or “Howard the Duck,” an expensive sound track that featured original music from Thomas Dolby.

For the movie studios, the sound track remains chiefly a marketing tool. “They (the studios) want the opportunity to exploit the name of the picture,” says one studio executive who insisted on anonymity. “Typically, they won’t see more than a dollar a record in royalties, so even on a giant hit they are lucky to see a million dollars. That doesn’t mean all that much to a studio that just produced a movie for $20 million.”

Nonetheless, sound-track deals are among the most complicated in the movie business. While the music component is usually less than 5% of the total budget, there is often a mountain of paper work to divide the album revenues. According to entertainment attorney Lionel S. Sobel, 47 separate contracts were made to cover the nine original songs on the enormously successful “Flashdance” sound track. (There would have been more if the producers had opted for existing music rather than original material.)

Typically, the studio provides a hefty advance (anywhere from $75,000 to as much as $1 million) for the production costs of the album in exchange for a royalty (typically 16% to 22%) on the record sales and a share in the publishing revenues. But as these albums have become more and more successful, the relationships between the record companies and the movie studios are growing increasingly strained as they each try to maximize their pieces of the profit pie.

“It will become more of a natural fit, but everyone is still trying to figure out what everyone else does,” says David Anderle, the director of film music for A & M Records. Anderle, who put together the successful sound track for “Pretty in Pink” and recently completed supervising the sound track for “Soul Man,” says the rush to jump into the sound-track bonanza has produced some predictable side effects. “Both sides (the record companies and the movie studios) became gluttons,” says Anderle. “A lot of sound tracks have been produced that should never have been done and a lot of film companies came to the record companies looking for music that should never have been there.”

Call it the gratuitous score. In any number of films today you can find the extraneous montage in which the director cuts away from live action to a dreamy slow-motion sequence in which we see lovers sharing ice cream to a syrupy Top 40 ballad. When it fits, music can be a genuine catalyst that can reinforce an emotional moment. (Remember the Simon and Garfunkel songs in “The Graduate”?) When the music is simply lopped on, it hangs like some toxic cinema cloud. “ ‘American Anthem’ looked like a giant video that was put together to sell music,” says Anderle. “You can’t mess with the kids, the kids are too hip.”

While the music in the slick and visual “Top Gun” seemed appropriate and memorable, audiences who liked “Ruthless People” came out remembering the laughs, not the rock and roll. What’s more, the audience for “Ruthless People” was undoubtedly an older group than that of the record-buying kids who flocked to “Top Gun.” “You need the right marriage,” says Steve Bedell, vice president of music at Paramount Pictures. “If the synergy works, it’s a natural.”

Knowing the profit potential has led to some epic sound-track battles too. Twentieth Century Fox’s upcoming “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” features Aretha Franklin and Keith Richards performing an updated version of the classic Rolling Stones song. But because Franklin is signed to the Arista label and PolyGram Records is releasing the sound track, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” does not appear on the PolyGram album. A spokesman for 20th Century Fox said the studio could not comment.