This is geeky, even for me. The TV trailer for "Lord Of The Rings: Two Towers" has been doing my head in for a few weeks now, due to the soundtrack’s surging orchestral riff being insanely familiar. I began to assume that this was due to my memory of the music to LOTR1 being unlocked a year later … seemed unlikely – the soundtrack to the first film had the standard unremarkable ‘Hollywood’ schlock-but-professional-schlock sheen – even if it was by Howard "I Score Everything" Shore.
NTK to the rescue. They spotted that IMDB’s trivia section indicates that the music to some of the trailers for LOTR2 is actually the soundtrack to Darren Aronofsky’s relatively recent film "Requiem For A Dream", by ex-Poppie Clint Mansell. I knew it!
Don’t recall that happening before … almost as if LOTR2 is trying to trying to subtly inherit some dark brand values from the flawed-but-often-brilliant "Requiem", further suggesting it might shape up to be the "Empire Strikes Back" of the franchise. Are they being that clever? Or just lazy?
This appeared on Clint’s own website a couple o months ago: http://www.clintatthecontrols.com. Incidentally, the Requiem remix project is now available and has some nice interpretations of the original movie score.
this is not as rare as one might imagine. There was a time when any period war film set before 1900 would have Orf’s “Carmina Burana” as the trailer score while the actual film might be accompanied by something (inevitably) inferior penned by someone like James Horner.
I also recall a time in the mid eighties when the video trailers of several unrelated films used the Glass score to Schrader’s “Mishima” despite the films themselves having relatively banal underscores, Badalementi is another whose trademark sound for Twin Peaks was used to great effect trailering films of starkly empoverished aural presence.
One of the reasons for this is that trailers are often cut and trialed before the final mix (and perhaps the delivery of the finished underscore). As the ubiquitous practice of temping (laying up already existing music as a temporary score usualy for the benefit of cinematicaly illiterate studio executives) often results in producers falling in love with “The Right Of Spring” or “Ride of The Valkyrie” at the same time insisting the hapless composer match the brilliance of the aformentioned in a matter of weeks while also acommodating the “structure” of a CGI Ork attack.
Prising producers away from these “temps” can be hugely difficult and often including them in the trailer can be a mollifying concession to a deluded studio head.
The actually do that fairly often (at least here in the US). They seem to use the less recognizable parts of the soundtracks from Batman and Beetlejuice the most.
Its generally the very early trailers that do that, later replaced by trailers with original music. I’ve heard it’s done because the movie’s own soundtrack just hasn’t been completed.
I don’t know if that’s the case for Lord of the Rings though.