They Clear the Songs

Lawrence Bender recalls getting into a potentially sticky bind while producing “Jackie Brown.” As he often does, Bender had procured a stack of CDs for Quentin Tarantino to use for inspiration on the set. A bluesy Elvin Bishop tune, “She Puts Me in the Mood,” seriously piqued the director’s interest while he prepared to shoot a brief scene depicting Samuel L. Jackson’s character making a tense pay-phone call from a topless bar.

“I want to use this song [in the movie],” Bender remembers Tarantino telling him.

Bender inspected the disc and sensed trouble. “Quentin,” he replied, “I haven’t gotten the rights to it yet.”

Tarantino called for a break and told Bender to get the rights. He would hold off shooting this scene until the tune was his to use. Feeling pressured to satisfy the director’s desire, Bender tracked down his music consultants, Mary Ramos and Michele Kuznetsky.

The dynamos behind the 3-year-old company Tri-Tone Music, they are known as high-energy, never-say-die troupers who’ll spend three months grappling to secure a desired song (that’s how they got the Who’s ordinarily untouchable “Baba O’Riley” for last year’s “Prefontaine”). The problem here, of course, was that Bender could give them only about five minutes in which to close the deal.

Ramos, 34, remembers Bender’s reaching her on her cell phone. She and her partner Kuznetsky, 27, were in a meeting with producer Etchie Stroh, discussing the final music budget for his upcoming Timothy Hutton project “Digging to China.”

“I gotta take this,” Ramos told Stroh apologetically, sensing impending disaster and breaking free from the meeting.

With Bender in one ear--”Get me this song, now!” he demanded--she picked up a desk phone and tracked the song’s owner, Alligator Records, to Chicago. “Good news,” she told the man, sounding excited in a happy way rather than a gun-to-your-head way. “Quentin Tarantino wants to use one of your songs in his next movie.”

After naming the song and requesting a price, she pressed, “I need it cleared right away or else this isn’t going to happen.”

The man in Chicago tossed out a reasonable four-figure amount. Ramos thanked him and hung up before telling Bender that Tarantino can have his song. Shooting can resume.

*

If only everything were this easy. Thanks in large part to Tarantino’s high-profile success with the albums that accompanied “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction,” movie music is hot and more of a complicated priority than ever. With young directors all over Hollywood wanting cool, chart-topping soundtracks, Ramos and Kuznetsky have evolved into prized niche players. They have shelves upon shelves of CDs and a sense for the most compelling musical cues in Hollywood. They are valued for finding and securing songs that muscle-up a movie’s legs, accent dramatic plot twists and occasionally spawn MTV videos.

“They’re very good at what they do,” Bender says about Ramos and Kuznetsky. “They know the give-and-take [of negotiating], where they can push and where they can’t. They fight really hard for what we need.”

It’s why their recent projects could fill a day of hot-ticket screenings at Sundance: “Jackie Brown,” “Clay Pigeons” (a highly anticipated independent project, it stars Vince Vaughn of “Swingers” and Janeane Garofalo), “An Alan Smithee Film” (when its producer refused to provide a soundtrack budget, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas placed ads in the trades, soliciting gratis songs and inadvertently besieging Tri-Tone with 9,000 demo tapes mail-bagged to its office door) and “Cop Land” (with a little help from Miramax, they spent months convincing Bruce Springsteen to relinquish rights to his songs for a relative pittance).

“Smithee” notwithstanding, Ramos and Kuznetsky usually negotiate song rights via telephone. They sit at facing arts-and-crafts style desks in a homey office on a stylish stretch of Sunset between the Chateau Marmont and Mondrian hotels. They share phone lines, slam mute buttons and communicate with hand signals.

Double-teaming music owners, they operate with an attached-at-the-hip smoothness that belies their contrasting lives: Kuznetsky is single, resides in Beverly Hills and hits the Tinseltown party circuit; Ramos is married, lives in the Valley and strives to get home early enough to tuck in her year-old son. Kuznetsky kick-boxes in her spare time, favors tight jeans and cropped tops and drives a black Saab convertible; Ramos likes to hang at home with her family, wears hippie-ish dresses that flow to her calves and tools around in a white Ford Explorer. Kuznetsky exudes jumpy, hard-edged energy, talks about “going off on people” and is the good cop when they negotiate in tandem; Ramos remains calm under pressure and does a Sipowitz act straight out of “NYPD Blue” for music publishers who refuse to loosen a desired song at a decent price.

Though they obviously run in different circles, they share a friend named Jennifer Pyken who brought them together. By 1995, Kuznetsky had gone from interning with music supervisor Happy Walters (she met Pyken on that job) to employment with another music supervisor named Danny Bramson. At the same time Ramos was working on soundtracks with Karen Rachtman (responsible for the “Pulp Fiction,” “Reservoir Dogs” and “Get Shorty” CDs, she is now head of soundtracks at Interscope Records) and picking up her own music supervising gigs on Rachtman hand-me-downs “johns” and “From Dusk Till Dawn.”

Preferring to collaborate rather than solo, Ramos asked Pyken to team up on those jobs plus a third one, “Heavy,” that came her way. Pyken agreed and suggested that Kuznetsky make the duo a trio--hence the name Tri-Tone--and they sealed the deal over lunch at Hollywood Coffee Shop. Each partner kicked in $300 to finance a ratty office space on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Then, a month later, Pyken was offered a job as a vice president of music publishing at Sony. She split, the name stuck, and the company grew.

Barely knowing one another, having very little in common, Ramos and Kuznetsky nonetheless always shared a high school sophomore’s wide-spanning enthusiasm for all kinds of popular music--giving equally upbeat props to Paul Anka and the Cramps. Songs resonate deeply enough that both Tri-Toners instantly recall what they listened to when they lost their virginity: “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’ ” by Journey for Ramos and Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” CD for Kuznetsky. (“The whole CD?” asks Ramos, a bit shocked. “I did it in just one song.”) Kuznetsky, who graduated from Southwestern University School of Law and passed the bar exam but never really wanted to be an attorney, sheepishly replies: “ ‘Fast Car’ reminded me of this guy, so I decided it would be great to have sex to that CD. I music-supervised my own deflowering.”

Ramos and Kuznetsky stand outside the makeup trailer of actor-director Mario Van Peebles. On the Bel-Air set of his new independent film, “Love Kills,” they have just played him two songs that might make it onto the soundtrack. First was a mambo version of “Chopsticks” (“That’s not doing it for me,” he said to Ramos), the other was Perry Como’s rollicking version of “Papa Loves Mambo” (“I dig that song,” he declared to her, snapping his fingers to the beat).

Seconds after pitching the songs, Ramos and Kuznetsky are huddled together and whispering back and forth. Anxiously, they conspire to divine who else on Earth might possess the Como mambo vibe that Van Peebles digs so much.

It’s a burden that they will share, for in an area of the industry dominated by solo practitioners, Ramos and Kuznetsky operate as equal partners. They herald a new, more mogul-inspired generation of music supervisors as they plow through half a dozen projects simultaneously. The two of them balance highbrow but low-budget independent jobs (“Citizen Ruth”) with unapologetically commercial ones (“Happy Gilmore”) that pay the bills quite handsomely.

Whatever the movie, their responsibilities range from simply selecting and clearing song rights to negotiating soundtrack deals, aligning directors with composers and finding key spots for musical cues in films. The process requires a deejay’s artistry, an encyclopedic knowledge of music, patience for endless negotiating and enough stamina to spend 14-hour days listening to thousands of CDs while watching movie scenes ad infinitum. How else does one stumble across Lene Lovich’s Japanese version of “I Think We’re Alone Now” for the “Beverly Hills Ninja” scene in which Nicolette Sheridan strips for Chris Farley? For this they receive $50,000 to $150,000 per movie.

“They have great taste in music,” says Raja Gosnell, director of “Home Alone 3.” “It’s not easy to find music relevant to your film that can also create the mood you’re looking for. They have an intuitive sense of what works. They’re bright and smart and a lot of fun.”

Though even a monster soundtrack’s probable payoff is usually considerably less than a hit movie’s, there are enough exceptions to keep things interesting. The “Reservoir Dogs” CD, for example, netted more money than the movie itself earned domestically. In the case of a hit picture with a hot soundtrack, the payoff is considerable: “Men in Black’s” “music-inspired-by” disc (a trend that disturbs soundtrack purists) generated sales of 1.8 million and led to a heavily played music video that featured the movie’s star Will Smith. This amounted to millions of dollars in free advertising and explains why the major production companies are hot for soundtracks.

“Soundtracks are total marketing tools,” says Brian Loucks, a Creative Artists Agency agent whose client list includes Tri-Tone. He cites “Dangerous Minds” and its synergistic Coolio video for the accompanying song “Gangsta’s Paradise,” which received heavy rotation on MTV: “If you have a hot music video with movie footage, you have a valuable thing. You have a kind of credibility that does not exist in commercial spots.”

Recently, speeding through a yellow light on Fairfax Avenue en route to a meeting with producer Bender, Ramos and Kuznetsky discuss what might be their unlikeliest cool project ever: “Home Alone 3.”

Ramos and Kuznetsky insist that 10- to 14-year-olds everywhere will love the hard-rocking soundtrack, which was not even part of the movie until they found previously unrealized musical cues and convinced Gosnell that the right songs could add a new sheen to what has been widely considered a shopworn concept. Ultimately, they landed a deal with Hollywood Records, which supplemented the project’s previously limited music budget.

“The movie’s cool, but it’s not ‘Pulp Fiction,’ ” Ramos acknowledges, referring to the Everest of cool soundtracks, on which she served as music coordinator. “We did goof on it a little bit, though, by putting in surf music just as somebody does this [“Pulp Fiction”-like] back flip.” She shrugs. “The director thought it was cute.”

But the movie wraps in three days and two more songs still need to be found. Tri-Tone has already submitted more than 100 tunes, most of which have been rejected by Gosnell. The latest batch of front-runners share narcissism in their titles: the Ramones-ish “My Town” by a band called Cartoon Boyfriends, “My Life” by the Tories and “All I Want” by Dance Hall Crashers.

“The director turned down Radish for being too hard-edged,” groans Kuznetsky, punching at her convertible’s multi-disc CD player. “The Dance Hall Crashers have a song about Santa being a dirty old man; that didn’t make it. And Suicide Machine has a song that would have been perfect. But they turned us down.”

“They’re par-tic-u-lar about using their songs in movies,” Ramos chirps from the back seat, drolly enunciating each syllable.

“Particular?” Kuznetsky fumes back. “They’re crazy. They ought to be excited to be in a movie like ‘Home Alone 3.’ They ought to call themselves Career-Suicide Machine.”

Both women scream with peals of teenage laughter, confident that nothing more than a 14-hour session with 1,000 CDs, a video monitor or two and a pair of telephones will impart tired old “Home Alone 3” with the sonic cachet of a “Pulp Fiction” for 12-year-olds.