The Influential Score behind Planet of the Apes
Monday is about movies. And sometimes TV. Today, a classic film’s (even more) classic soundtrack.
No less of a film score buff than the redoubtable Victoria Kelly, composer/arranger extraordinaire, once told me that Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Planet of the Apes was basically “it!” – a year zero, the birth of modern (and great) film composing. I had to go and listen to it again!
In a way, the film had been huge for me, kinda scary. It just got me at an age. I was super young. They were showing them all in a row on TV late – Sunday Night Horrors I guess – and I was allowed to watch a bit of the first one. Well, this set me off. I couldn’t sleep. I was super intrigued by it all. My mind raced. It was obviously just actors in make-up and costumes, but what if it was real – what if there was such a thing; this was just a depiction. I was one part frightened and one part excited. And that’s the best that any horror or sci fi or dystopian viewing or reading can offer. It’s the thrill I guess I still crave.
Anyway, the music had done its job in the help of building this world. I recognised that on subsequent viewings and then on isolated listens to the score.
Around the time that Vic Kelly dropped that pearl into a wide-ranging conversation that focussed a lot on film scores, I had been given a copy of Goldsmith’s score by a guy clearing out the last of his CDs. He gave me some great stuff. And so I really got to work on listening to the Apes soundtrack. It really is majestic – both unsettling and a comfort; much like the movie.
Jerry Goldsmith is one of the names in modern film scoring. Alien, Rambo, Poltergeist, Star Trek…and all of that comes after Patton, Chinatown, The Omen…Legendary stuff. There’s loads more. But when he made Apes he was new to the work, with just a couple of scores behind him. They were well regarded and he was a talent. But it is probably the Apes score that gave him any sort of first reputation.
He set about in the studio making essentially an electronic score but with live orchestra. He added strange non-orchestral elements (mixing bowls) but it was all organic. There’s a story that he conducted the orchestra in an ape mask – which sits nicely with what Brian Wilson might have been doing across town, wearing a fireman’s helmet as he saw strings lick and crawl up the walls of his arrangements like orange flames.
The Apes score is not an easy listen, it’s probably not a pleasant listen either – but I don’t know about that because I’ve always just listened to it alone. So my pleasure comes from getting buried deep inside it. Marvelling at the weird mix of percussive sounds that come from homemade instruments and the searing strings that are played by premiere instrumentalists. I love the way the world-building starts with the ‘alien’ sounds of this soundtrack, and how it also perfectly ratchets up the drama. You can hear it and feel it in the music without the pictures. And enormous influence on John Williams’ Star Wars work, I feel. An enormous influence on much of what was to come across the 1970s and 1980s in film scores.
And a reminder, for me, of a creepy, beguiling, flawed but brilliant film – and franchise – that, to this day, sits in my mind. Iconic. Ready for rewatch. And was it always the warning we somehow ignored too?
In fact I watched the first Apes again just recently. LOVED IT. Bought the novel it was based on, read up a bit about the making of the movies, bought a couple of the other films on DVD, ready for the big canon rewatch…and then I stalled. Maybe it really is that first film and its magical music. Maybe that’s really all that matters here…Certainly the music is such a huge part of the Planet of the Apes journey for me.
