From
Rain Man
Duration
1:22 min
Written by
Hans Zimmer, Hans Zimmer
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Larson*\n\nLike the characters’ prolonged road trip in the movie, 1988’s **RAIN MAN** took a long and complicated journey to the screen, filled with obstacles that threatened to stall the picture irrevocably. **RAIN MAN** told the story of self-absorbed salesman Charlie Babbitt who, after a disappointing award in his estranged father’s will, learns he has an autistic brother named Raymond, to which the $3 million family estate has been bequeathed. Determined to extract his half of the inheritance, Charlie convinces Raymond to drive across country to Los Angeles, where he hopes to win a custody battle and net his half of his birthright.\n\nThe film had its origins, according to screenwriter **Barry Morrow** in his commentary track on **RAIN MAN**’s 2006 MGM DVD release, in **Morrow**’s friendship with **Kim Peek**, a developmentally disabled man with an encyclopedic memory. **Morrow**, who had written the story for the Emmy-Award winning 1981 TV-movie **BILL** in which **Mickey Rooney** played an institutionalized retarded man who finds friendship, had developed **RAIN MAN** to focus on the savant concept. „I took all the things that happened with Bill and flipped them upside down“, **Morrow** said. „Instead of friendship, this was going to be about greed.“ **Morrow** came up with the film’s title when he sought a name for the savant that had a different meaning when mispronounced. After looking at „No-Man“ for Norman and „Rain Man“ for Raymond, he selected the latter.", "notes_body": "At the time, **Martin Brest** had been slated to direct the film. He wanted some changes and brought in screenwriter **Ronald Bass** to rewrite **Morrow**’s script. In **Morrow**’s screenplay, Raymond had not been autistic but retarded. Both lead actors, **Dustin Hoffman** and **Tom Cruise**, were involved in the film’s development process, and **Hoffman** suggested that his character be autistic instead of retarded. **Brest** demurred at this idea. **Bass** obeyed orders and finished his draft and turned it in; months later he learned that **Brest** was off the picture due to „artistic differences“. A few months after that, **RAIN MAN** was back on with a new director: **Steven Spielberg**.\n\n**Bass** met with **Spielberg**, who felt **Hoffman**’s autistic aspect would give the brotherly love story the kind of dramatic obstacle to overcome that any engrossing love story needs. **Bass** rewrote the script with the aid of **Spielberg**, **Hoffman**, and **Cruise** over the summer of 1987, essentially rebuilding the whole story. Various experts in autism and psychiatry were brought in adding to the research that **Brest** had previously amassed in order to make it as real and credible as possible. Knowing the film would be seen by autistic people and their families and friends, the team wanted to ensure „they didn’t feel that their experiences had been trivialized or devalued in any ways“, **Bass** in his DVD commentary.\n\n**Spielberg** wound up having to withdraw because the long redevelopment process on **RAIN MAN** had bumped up against the next INDIANA JONES movie, which he was already committed to do with **George Lucas**. So the search for yet a new director was on. **Sidney Pollack** was brought in, but soon decided he wasn’t keen on making a road movie and withdrew; but he called **Barry Levinson** and suggested he take on the movie. **Levinson** (who had actually been offered the movie prior to **Brest**’s being signed but had turned it down to make **GOOD MORNING VIETNAM**) agreed. It would be **Levinson** who added the gentle layer of ironic comedy to the dramatic story that made the picture click.\n\nCentral to the film is the Oscar-winning performance of **Dustin Hoffman** as Raymond Babbitt. **Hoffman**, who along with **Tom Cruise** met with and studied a number of autistic people in order to develop his performance accurately, gave Raymond a sense of verisimilitude that made his personality and actions entirely authentic. **Hoffman** also, reportedly, fought for the ending, where Raymond goes back to Wallbrook, even though the screenwriters had wanted him to end up staying with Charlie; **Hoffman** rightly felt it would not have been true to Raymond’s character if he was made to stay with his brother. Despite **Hoffman**’s accolades, however, it’s **Cruise**’s character that is most essential to making the film work, as **Bass** said: „This is our access character. This is the character [who] changes… **Tom**’s character was the real engine for making this movie happen.“ At one point **Hoffman** had reportedly wanted **Bill Murray** to play Charlie, but **Cruise**, following up on his roles in **TOP GUN**, **THE COLOR OF MONEY**, and **COCKTAIL** proved to be the ideal, greedy hustler who comes to love his disabled brother. **Cruise**, interviewed for the making-of featurette on the MGM DVD, described Charlie as an „emotional autistic“, who learns about life through his autistic brother; it’s his journey that is most important to the story.\n\nAt the same time, the role that anchors the film for audiences was that of Susanna, Charlie’s long-suffering girlfriend. Both **Morrow** and **Bass** had written the character as Susan, a tough American woman of means. But **Levinson** decided to cast Italian actress **Valeria Golino** because he felt that having a character for whom English was a second language would allow her to legitimately question what Charlie says or does, and thus allow **Cruise**’s character to provide some necessary exposition. „Culturally [and] emotionally she doesn’t understand Charlie“, **Morrow** added, „and she is able to ask those really hard, direct questions, like ‚why are you doing this? Why are you so mean to your brother?’ [while] an American person in that role would not have deepened the movie or put the screws to Charlie as she [did] in her own quiet way.“ As **Bass** noted, she was able to express the audience’s viewpoint toward Charlie’s being such a hard-hearted jerk, and by installing **Golino** as a sweet girl, who loved Charlie despite this but who wasn’t afraid to stand up to him, gave credence to the audience’s concerns over Charlie’s abusive behavior, and allow them to support the character through his changes.\n\nAnother important „character“ in the movie is the 1949 Buick Roadmaster, the rare automobile that, along with his father’s prize rose bushes, was all Charlie had inherited from his father. The vehicle serves as the story’s wheels, getting the cast from one place to another, while serving as the device through which Charlie first meets Raymond and discovers he has a brother.\n\n#### RAIN MAN as Road Movie: The Music\n\nJust as important as the Buick Roadmaster as supporting element in the film’s storytelling is its musical soundtrack. Typically for **Levinson** and for late 1980s comedy-dramas in general, **RAIN MAN**’s soundtrack is a mixture of dramatic score and stand-alone pop songs, heard either briefly as source music or fully. For the score, **Levinson** hired a young German composer by the name of **Hans Zimmer**, whose music for the British anti-Apartheid drama, **A WORLD APART**, had impressed him. **RAIN MAN** was **Zimmer**’s first Hollywood film score.\n\n„I did **RAIN MAN** the way I did all my European films“, **Zimmer** said in an interview for the audiohead website [www.audiohead.net/interviews/hanszimmer]. „I didn’t really do it in the studio – I just set up my Fairlight in **Barry**’s office with a couple more toys and gadgets. It was a relaxed way for **Barry** to work, too, because he didn’t have to go to a studio where there would have been pressure of ‚My God, here comes the orchestra. We’d better get it right!’“\n\n**Zimmer** produced an eclectic score mixing synthesizers (primarly a Fairlight CMI) with heavy sonic underbelly of steel drums and drum kit. The score is driven by rhythm, building its cadence and tone from the rolling hum of the Roadmaster’s wheel on pavement and bridge steel (a sound that Raymond mimics early in the journey as they leave Cincinnati). **Levinson** wanted the music to have a propulsive rhythmic motion, which is introduced at the very start in his choice of „Iko Iko“ over the main titles. The Mardi Gras song (originally called „Jock-a-mo“) had been a hit for the girl group **The Dixie Cups** in 1965; **Levinson** selected the version by **The Belle Stars**, with its heavier tribal percussion.\n\n„The aspect of the drum, which plays throughout the movie, has a certain kind of rhythm to it“, **Levinson** said on his DVD commentary for **RAIN MAN**. „**Hans Zimmer**’s score, which is very percussion-oriented, has no strings at all. One of the things we talked about very early on is I didn’t want any kind of strings at all in it, because I thought it would make the movie too melodramatic. I think it’s inherent in the piece and I didn’t want to emphasize that aspect, so it’s very rhythmic throughout.“\n\nThe **RAIN MAN** score is built around a primary Traveling Theme, which sets the tone for the characters’ journey cross country, during which Charlie gets to know, understand, and eventually love his brother. In a 2008 interview with **John Young** for ew.com [www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20216261,00.html], **Zimmer** described his approach to **RAIN MAN**: „It was a road movie, and road movies usually have jangly guitars or a bunch of strings. I kept thinking: ‚Don’t be bigger than the characters. Try to keep it contained.’ [Raymond] doesn’t actually know where he is. The world is so different to him. He might as well be on Mars. So, why don’t we just invent our own music for a world that doesn’t really exist?“\n\n**Zimmer**’s music is first heard at the funeral of Charlie’s father, an ambient tonality that sets a gentle cadence as Charlie and Susanna make their way to the Babbitt estate. When Charlie meets Raymond and the road trip begins, successive variations of this theme will underscore their progress across highway and byway, moving from a fairly formal vibe to a looser style as Charlie’s behavior becomes less impatient and self-serving. Heavier drums add an element of excitement once they are on the road, while a touch of didgeridoo and a woody synth melody (abetted in the mix by pan pipes) gives it an airy, pleasing vivid sensibility. The theme turns darker and „synthier“ as, after Susanna leaves, Charlie and Raymond approach a nasty vehicle crash on the freeway which frightens Raymond.\n\nOne of the score’s high points is the Las Vegas montage, the music derived from the drum-beaten vibe of the Traveling Music but taking on an entirely new configuration here.\n\nWhile warming to his brother, Charlie realizes how Raymond’s amazing memory can help him win at blackjack. **Zimmer** opens into a drum-heavy rock beat, punctuated by glitzy flashes of synth and electric guitar, adding a bluesy chorus and a vibrant saxophone measure as Charlie takes Raymond shopping, dressing him in style and getting him polished for gambling. Choir is added, almost heroically, as they arrive at the card tables and the games begin. The score’s only real discordant note sounds like the shrill siren of the smoke detector Raymond accidentally sets off when trying to cook waffles; **Zimmer**’s nightmarish atonality here mirrors Raymond’s panic and fear, warming only when Charlie come to the rescue.\n\nThe score’s second major motif is a brotherly love theme that will become prominent near the end of the film. **Zimmer** provides a soft, barely discernable atmosphere from very soft layers of Fairlight beneath dialog when Charlie tells Susanna about the last time he saw his father and why he left home. „When I was a kid and got scared, the Rain Man would come and sing to me“, he muses, recalling the imaginary friend from his childhood. „What happened to him?“ Susanna asks. „Nothing, I just grew up.“ Charlie says tersely. By the end of the film, Charlie realizes that this imaginary friend was actually Raymond, whose institutionalization when Charlie was 3 resulted in the lost memory of his brother. **Zimmer** reflects Charlie’s more sympathetic regard of Raymond with a warm, melodic clutch of synth and piano, very poignant and tender, the hollow reedy sound of the synth flutes lending a sympathetic sonority.\n\nThis love theme becomes particularly expressive at the end of the film as Charlie, realizing Wallbrook is the best place for Raymond but intending to visit him frequently (and, by the way, reunited with Susanna), has his former selfishness redeemed by his new found affection for his brother; the music resonates for piano and woody synths, very tender, hollow, earthy, and human. Charlie, having lost his business, his inheritance and, for a time, his girl, has gained a long-lost brother and a unique insight into his own humanity. The score celebrates this in **Zimmer**’s End Title music, which assumes a bright ethnic buoyancy while combining elements of the travel and love themes into a joyful refrain from the Fairlight over steel drums and a piping electronic riffing.\n\n„We fumbled our way through that score and I thought that was the end of my Hollywood career“, **Zimmer** had told **Audiohead**. Far from it. **RAIN MAN**’s score was nominated for an **Academy Award** in 1989 (the film itself won four **Academy Awards, including Best Picture) and it launched the composer on one of the most successful and influential careers ever seen in Hollywood film music.\n\n***Randall Larson** writes a film music column for buysoundtrax.com, writes for cinefantastiqueonline and musicfromthemovies.com, and is the author of several books on film music and more than six dozen soundtrack album commentaries.*", "comment": "The booklet of this recording says: \r\n*This album was transferred from really crappy analog files. Although every effort was made to reduce anomalies inherent in these files, such as tape hiss or warble, some still persist.*\r\n\r\nYou shouldn't buy this record unless you are a heavy collector. Instead look out for the *Notefornote* release, which has a much better quality.\r\n\r\nThe provided audio cues were taken from the *Notefornote* remastered recording, except tracks number 2, 8, 9, 15, 16, 19, 20. These cues reflect the sound quality of the *Perseverance* recording.", "file_artwork": "19", "covers": [ "/assets/img/recordings/rain_man_original_mgm_motion_picture_score_perseverance/cover/1.jpg" ], "cover": "/assets/img/recordings/rain_man_original_mgm_motion_picture_score_perseverance/cover/1.jpg", "works_id": [ "27" ], "works": [ { "id": "27", "title": "Rain Man", "title_order": "Rain Man", "uri": "rain_man", "release_date": "598230000", "premiere_location": "", "type_id": "1", "direction_id": "1", "poster": "/assets/img/works/rain_man/poster/1.jpg", "empty_poster": false, "banner": "/assets/img/works/rain_man/banner.jpg", "empty_banner": false, "type": { "id": "1", "title": "Movie", "uri": "movie" }, "dir_label_adjective": "directed", "dir_label_adjective_suffix": "by", "dir_label_singular": "director", "dir_label_plural": "directors" } ], "main_work": { "id": "27", "title": "Rain Man", "title_order": "Rain Man", "uri": "rain_man", "release_date": "598230000", "premiere_location": "", "type_id": "1", "direction_id": "1", "poster": "/assets/img/works/rain_man/poster/1.jpg", "empty_poster": false, "banner": "/assets/img/works/rain_man/banner.jpg", "empty_banner": false, "type": { "id": "1", "title": "Movie", "uri": "movie" }, "dir_label_adjective": "directed", "dir_label_adjective_suffix": "by", "dir_label_singular": "director", "dir_label_plural": "directors" } }, { "id": "153", "title": "Rain Man", "subtitle": "Original MGM Motion Picture Score (Notefornote)", "uri": "rain_man_original_mgm_motion_picture_score_notefornote", "label_id": "45", "release_date": "2018", "update": "1569855773", "notes_teaser": "German-born composer Hans Zimmer's emergence from scoring European and the occasional independent American film out of a London studio in the 1980s happened via Barry Levinson's 1988 film, RAIN MAN. The story goes that Levinson and his wife, Diana were in London promoting his film GOOD MORNING VIETNAM. While there, Diana had gone to see the 1988 film A WORLD APART, an anti-apartheid drama directed by Chris Menges, which Zimmer had scored. She was especially taken by the music, so she bought a copy of the CD and gave it to Barry, who was likewise impressed – so much so that he began to use parts of that score as temporary music during post production on his new film, RAIN MAN.", "notes_body": "\"The Barry came over to England to meet me\", Zimmer told Fred Karlin for his book, *Listening to Movies* (Schirmer Books, 1994). \"I was working on something and he came down to the studio and saw the Fairlight [sampler/synthesizer] and he couldn't believe what that thing could do. This wasn't what he was used to. He was used to somebody playing something on the piano, and then he could wait four weeks and they would have the orchestra. So he thought it was all very exciting.\"\n\nZimmer did too, although not without a little trepidation to find himself displaced to America for the first time. He felt a bit like Raymond Babbitt for a moment, he remarked, by himself in a land where he knew no one and wasn't sure where he would be going. He set up his studio in Levinson's headquarters, just down the hall from editor Stu Linder's office, who was cutting the film at the same time. Having such close contact with the director and his editor while he composed the music became a favored style for Zimmer, one that enhanced both creativity and collaborative interaction. In this case, his first Hollywood film score resulted in an acclaimed work that earned an Oscar nomination for music, in a film that won an Oscar for Best Picture of the Year (among other awards).\n\nThe film is about Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), an autistic savant who is reunited with his self-centered and high-rolling, car reseller brother, Charlie (Tom Cruise), upon learning of the death of their father. Charlie, estranged from his father for years, learns that dad's estate and fortune has been left to Raymond and only a pittance to himself. Hoping for a better cut of the inheritance, Charlie takes Raymond on a road trip in order to convince him to split the money evenly, but the time together changes Charlie, opening his heart to altruism and the desire to preserve a close relationship with his brother.\n\nTypically for Levinson and for late 1980s comedy-dramas in general, RAIN MAN's soundtrack is a mixture of dramatic score and standalone pop songs, the latter usually heard briefly as diegetic source music in the film, usually establishing environment, period, or sentiment. Sometimes the source music takes on attributes of emotional dramatic music, such as in Etta James' classic \"At Last\", which play over the touching scene where Charlie teaches Raymond to dance in Las Vegas, and the Gershwin's standard \"They Can't Take That Away From Me\", used as score where a reconciled Charlie lets Raymond drive the Roadmaster thorugh Las Vegas before they leave town. \"Nathan Jones\" by Bananarama is heard briefly near the end as Ray tries to dance by himself in Charlie's L.A. house. A variety of blues, jazz, and pop tunes are heard from casinos and attractions they pass through Las Vegas.\n\nApart from the songs, Zimmer's musical score creates its own space within the strucure of the story: setting the mood, giving the film drive, and underlining its emotional bearings. The score grasps the spirit of the story and the changing conflict within Charlie as he learns to love his brother, the musical journey with its confident tempo carrying the affecting story through to its emotive resolution.\n\nOne of the first decisions that Zimmer and Levinson made about the score was to agree to avoid jangly guitars and a big string section, because they both felt that had become a cliché in too many road movies by then. Zimmer was thinking more outside of the box. \"We thought, let's first of all take out everything that is the normal convention\", Zimmer said in a comprehensive 2014 interview with Stephen Galloway for *The Hollywood Reporter*. \"And the second thing was because, I was feeling, like… if you come to Los Angeles for the first time it's so foreign. It's [such] a different place from anything that you've ever experienced… And I said to Barry, 'look, the music we should have, it should be culturally non-specific. It should be music from Mars. It should just be foreign.'\".\n\nIn a 2008 interview with John Young for *Entertainment Weekly*, Zimmer added, \"I kept thinking 'don't be bigger than the characters. Try to keep it contained.' The Raymond doesn't actually know where he is. The world is so different to him. He might as well be on Mars. So, why don't we just invent our own world music for a world that doesn't really exist?\"\n\nReplacing an old-fashioned sentimental orchestral vibe, Levinson and Zimmer favored Zimmer's keyboard textures providing more contemporaneous harmonies to establish what Fred Karlin, in *Listening to Movies*, described as \"an objective, non-emotional musical approach throughout much of the film.\" An underlying rhythmic cadence is established by synths while a confident, recurring pattern of figures contrast against it from a variety of sounds, from keyboard to guitarlike-synth notes contrasting against softer, piping tones.\n\nZimmer's score was conceived and performed on synthesizers – primarly a Fairlight CMI (Computerized Musical Instrument – a digital synthesizer, sampler, and digital audio workstation introduced in 1979 that revolutionized electronic music creation). It creates the basic sounds and contrasts within the score, while Zimmer also employed steel drums as one of his primary percussion devices, along with additional synthetic patterns generated via the Fairlight.\n\nAccording to the film's musical cue sheet, the RAIN MAN score contains some fifteen songs or song excerpts and twenty score cues; the latter range from anywhere between four seconds and nearly four-and-a-half minutes, depending on usage in the film (two minutes being the avarage). The film begins with \"Iko Iko\", an oft-covered New Orleans folk tune performed here by British girl group The Belle Stars. The song runs beneath the film's main titles. Zimmer's music is first heard after the funeral of Charlie's estranged father. A gentle, ambient tonality transports Charlie and his girlfriend Susanna (Valeria Golino) to the Babbitt estate (\"Drive from the Country\"), where he learns the astonishing facts of his father's cynical inheritance. Ambient clusters of reflecting synths drift airily and mirror Charlie's thoughts once he's back home (\"Empty House / Charlie's Memories\"), while the main theme begins softly, with a slow increase in tempo, as Charlie and Susanna head towards the Wallbrook institute where they'll meet Raymond (\"Drive to Bank and Wallbrook\"). The theme then takes on a more prominent drum beat after Charlie takes Raymond out of Wallbrook and their road trip begins (\"Leaving Wallbrook\"), while the pleasing textures of didgeridoo and a woody synth melody (abetted in the mix by pan pipes) provides an airy sense of traveling.\n\nThe mixture of keyboard notes and synth tonalities provides a wash of apprehension, mirroring Raymond's discomfort at being away from his familiar home at Wallbrook and Charlie's growing impatience over his brother's time-consuming quirks. Susanna is along for the ride – the report of Charlie's dad's funeral came while she and Charlie were on their way to a Palm Springs vacation – but his treatment of Raymond eventually wears her out and she leaves him on his own. After that, Zimmer treats the theme a little darker and \"synthier\", noting her absence.\n\nOnce they're on the road in the 1949 Buick Roadmaster, the automobile that his father had cynically bequeathed to him, the music becomes closely associated with the vehicle. Because of Raymond's fear of flying (he recites airline crash statistics in grim detail), a furious Charlie has to drive them from Cincinnati to his home in Los Angeles. The vehicle becomes a character in the story, their means of accomplishing their journey, a frequent focal point of Levinson's camera, and the one thing the Babbitt brothers have in common. Without Susanna's presence to assist with Raymond's care, Charlie has a tougher time of it and the music reflects both his irritation and Raymond's increasing apprehension through bleaker tones. He also imparts worrisome calliope-like \"whooshes\" in place of drums to emphasize Raymond's anxiety when they have to slow down to pass a serious vehicle accident (\"Traffic Accident and Aftermath\").\n\nZimmer arranged the score as a ryhthm-based progression of tempos and textures; it also makes frequent changes in direction, instrumentation, tempo, and pattern, starting out in one vibe but being interrupted and moving into a new one until sidetracked again off into something else – much like Raymond's thought processes. While the music gives the film its momentum and character contrast, it also reflects the personalities of both characters. \"The RAIN MAN theme… [is] fragmented and in odd meters, which is like the character played by Dustin Hoffman\", Zimmer told interviewer Matthias Büdinger for *Soundtrack Magazine*, Dec. 1993. \"He keeps repeating something until something else is coming in. Then he starts repeating that. So you never get a full picture of it. If you strung all the musical pieces of RAIN MAN together you would get one tune because every scene has another little fragment of that.\"\n\nA particularly stimulating variation of the theme welcomes them to Las Vegas, where Zimmer embraces the city's glamor and glitz with heavy drum-kit, electric guitars, and a Vegas line-up of rock-&-roll choristers who really ramp-up the tempo with disco friendly excitement. Charlie may have warmed to his brother by this time, but his inherent self-centered greed has led him here to see how well Raymond's savant talents at counting cards can serve him at the Blackjack table. The score has its most discordant moment in the scene where Raymond accidentally activates the smoke alarm at Charlie's home (\"Smoke Alarm / Freaked / Baby Burn\"), causing a severe reaction from Raymond, emphasized by extremely raucous, twisting chords in the music followed by a slow, resting descent of suspended synth patterns as Charlie silences the alarm and calms his brother down. This is followed by comforting ambient peals of synth pipes and sparkling clusters of tonality as Charlie treats Raymond to his favorite pancakes the next morning (\"Pancakes / My Main Man\").\n\nWhile the score maintains a continous keyboard-and-drums vibe throghout its journey, reflecting both the velocity and conflict of their excursion, Zimmer also employs numerous alternate treatments that color the score at certain moments, allowing it to filter across the emotional atmosphere of the drama. The music eventually emerges with a looser style, and the sharp synth notes settle into a silkier panpipe sound as Charlie begins to understand the brother behind autism, and the music softens sympathetically (\"Putting Ray to Bed\", \"Charlie Tries to Hug Raymond\") to ultimately fully embrace the brotherly love that Charlie has learned to feel for Raymond as the film concludes with a warm farewell and a promise to visit him again soon (\"Train Station Goodbye\"). The music resonates with feeling as Charlie watches the train depart.\n\nBy the end of its travels, Zimmer's music celebrates the newfound bond established between the two brothers as both story and score and full circle, with a heartfelt resolution of the bright, earthy synths with which the journey began, concluding with a satisfying refrain from the smooth voice of the Fairlight and gentle cadence of pan pipes and steel drums accompanying the final fade out (\"Rain Man End Credits\").\n\nThe album concludes with two bonus tracks, presenting alternate versions of \"Leaving Wallbrook\" combined with \"On the Road\", and \"Las Vegas\" combined with \"End Title\".\n\n*Randall D. Larson writes a regular film music column for buysoundtrax.com, runs the musiquefantastic.com web site, and is the author of several books on film music and numerous soundtrack album commentaries.*\n\n*Online Sources:* \n*Zimmer interview from The Hollywood Reporter via* \n**\n\n*Zimmer interview from Entertainment Weekly via* \n**", "comment": "", "file_artwork": "20", "covers": [ "/assets/img/recordings/rain_man_original_mgm_motion_picture_score_notefornote/cover/1.jpg" ], "cover": "/assets/img/recordings/rain_man_original_mgm_motion_picture_score_notefornote/cover/1.jpg", "works_id": [ "27" ], "works": [ { "id": "27", "title": "Rain Man", "title_order": "Rain Man", "uri": "rain_man", "release_date": "598230000", "premiere_location": "", "type_id": "1", "direction_id": "1", "poster": "/assets/img/works/rain_man/poster/1.jpg", "empty_poster": false, "banner": "/assets/img/works/rain_man/banner.jpg", "empty_banner": false, "type": { "id": "1", "title": "Movie", "uri": "movie" }, "dir_label_adjective": "directed", "dir_label_adjective_suffix": "by", "dir_label_singular": "director", "dir_label_plural": "directors" } ], "main_work": { "id": "27", "title": "Rain Man", "title_order": "Rain Man", "uri": "rain_man", "release_date": "598230000", "premiere_location": "", "type_id": "1", "direction_id": "1", "poster": "/assets/img/works/rain_man/poster/1.jpg", "empty_poster": false, "banner": "/assets/img/works/rain_man/banner.jpg", "empty_banner": false, "type": { "id": "1", "title": "Movie", "uri": "movie" }, "dir_label_adjective": "directed", "dir_label_adjective_suffix": "by", "dir_label_singular": "director", "dir_label_plural": "directors" } } ], "main_recording": { "id": "153", "title": "Rain Man", "subtitle": "Original MGM Motion Picture Score (Notefornote)", "uri": "rain_man_original_mgm_motion_picture_score_notefornote", "label_id": "45", "release_date": "2018", "update": "1569855773", "notes_teaser": "German-born composer Hans Zimmer's emergence from scoring European and the occasional independent American film out of a London studio in the 1980s happened via Barry Levinson's 1988 film, RAIN MAN. The story goes that Levinson and his wife, Diana were in London promoting his film GOOD MORNING VIETNAM. While there, Diana had gone to see the 1988 film A WORLD APART, an anti-apartheid drama directed by Chris Menges, which Zimmer had scored. She was especially taken by the music, so she bought a copy of the CD and gave it to Barry, who was likewise impressed – so much so that he began to use parts of that score as temporary music during post production on his new film, RAIN MAN.", "notes_body": "\"The Barry came over to England to meet me\", Zimmer told Fred Karlin for his book, *Listening to Movies* (Schirmer Books, 1994). \"I was working on something and he came down to the studio and saw the Fairlight [sampler/synthesizer] and he couldn't believe what that thing could do. This wasn't what he was used to. He was used to somebody playing something on the piano, and then he could wait four weeks and they would have the orchestra. So he thought it was all very exciting.\"\n\nZimmer did too, although not without a little trepidation to find himself displaced to America for the first time. He felt a bit like Raymond Babbitt for a moment, he remarked, by himself in a land where he knew no one and wasn't sure where he would be going. He set up his studio in Levinson's headquarters, just down the hall from editor Stu Linder's office, who was cutting the film at the same time. Having such close contact with the director and his editor while he composed the music became a favored style for Zimmer, one that enhanced both creativity and collaborative interaction. In this case, his first Hollywood film score resulted in an acclaimed work that earned an Oscar nomination for music, in a film that won an Oscar for Best Picture of the Year (among other awards).\n\nThe film is about Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), an autistic savant who is reunited with his self-centered and high-rolling, car reseller brother, Charlie (Tom Cruise), upon learning of the death of their father. Charlie, estranged from his father for years, learns that dad's estate and fortune has been left to Raymond and only a pittance to himself. Hoping for a better cut of the inheritance, Charlie takes Raymond on a road trip in order to convince him to split the money evenly, but the time together changes Charlie, opening his heart to altruism and the desire to preserve a close relationship with his brother.\n\nTypically for Levinson and for late 1980s comedy-dramas in general, RAIN MAN's soundtrack is a mixture of dramatic score and standalone pop songs, the latter usually heard briefly as diegetic source music in the film, usually establishing environment, period, or sentiment. Sometimes the source music takes on attributes of emotional dramatic music, such as in Etta James' classic \"At Last\", which play over the touching scene where Charlie teaches Raymond to dance in Las Vegas, and the Gershwin's standard \"They Can't Take That Away From Me\", used as score where a reconciled Charlie lets Raymond drive the Roadmaster thorugh Las Vegas before they leave town. \"Nathan Jones\" by Bananarama is heard briefly near the end as Ray tries to dance by himself in Charlie's L.A. house. A variety of blues, jazz, and pop tunes are heard from casinos and attractions they pass through Las Vegas.\n\nApart from the songs, Zimmer's musical score creates its own space within the strucure of the story: setting the mood, giving the film drive, and underlining its emotional bearings. The score grasps the spirit of the story and the changing conflict within Charlie as he learns to love his brother, the musical journey with its confident tempo carrying the affecting story through to its emotive resolution.\n\nOne of the first decisions that Zimmer and Levinson made about the score was to agree to avoid jangly guitars and a big string section, because they both felt that had become a cliché in too many road movies by then. Zimmer was thinking more outside of the box. \"We thought, let's first of all take out everything that is the normal convention\", Zimmer said in a comprehensive 2014 interview with Stephen Galloway for *The Hollywood Reporter*. \"And the second thing was because, I was feeling, like… if you come to Los Angeles for the first time it's so foreign. It's [such] a different place from anything that you've ever experienced… And I said to Barry, 'look, the music we should have, it should be culturally non-specific. It should be music from Mars. It should just be foreign.'\".\n\nIn a 2008 interview with John Young for *Entertainment Weekly*, Zimmer added, \"I kept thinking 'don't be bigger than the characters. Try to keep it contained.' The Raymond doesn't actually know where he is. The world is so different to him. He might as well be on Mars. So, why don't we just invent our own world music for a world that doesn't really exist?\"\n\nReplacing an old-fashioned sentimental orchestral vibe, Levinson and Zimmer favored Zimmer's keyboard textures providing more contemporaneous harmonies to establish what Fred Karlin, in *Listening to Movies*, described as \"an objective, non-emotional musical approach throughout much of the film.\" An underlying rhythmic cadence is established by synths while a confident, recurring pattern of figures contrast against it from a variety of sounds, from keyboard to guitarlike-synth notes contrasting against softer, piping tones.\n\nZimmer's score was conceived and performed on synthesizers – primarly a Fairlight CMI (Computerized Musical Instrument – a digital synthesizer, sampler, and digital audio workstation introduced in 1979 that revolutionized electronic music creation). It creates the basic sounds and contrasts within the score, while Zimmer also employed steel drums as one of his primary percussion devices, along with additional synthetic patterns generated via the Fairlight.\n\nAccording to the film's musical cue sheet, the RAIN MAN score contains some fifteen songs or song excerpts and twenty score cues; the latter range from anywhere between four seconds and nearly four-and-a-half minutes, depending on usage in the film (two minutes being the avarage). The film begins with \"Iko Iko\", an oft-covered New Orleans folk tune performed here by British girl group The Belle Stars. The song runs beneath the film's main titles. Zimmer's music is first heard after the funeral of Charlie's estranged father. A gentle, ambient tonality transports Charlie and his girlfriend Susanna (Valeria Golino) to the Babbitt estate (\"Drive from the Country\"), where he learns the astonishing facts of his father's cynical inheritance. Ambient clusters of reflecting synths drift airily and mirror Charlie's thoughts once he's back home (\"Empty House / Charlie's Memories\"), while the main theme begins softly, with a slow increase in tempo, as Charlie and Susanna head towards the Wallbrook institute where they'll meet Raymond (\"Drive to Bank and Wallbrook\"). The theme then takes on a more prominent drum beat after Charlie takes Raymond out of Wallbrook and their road trip begins (\"Leaving Wallbrook\"), while the pleasing textures of didgeridoo and a woody synth melody (abetted in the mix by pan pipes) provides an airy sense of traveling.\n\nThe mixture of keyboard notes and synth tonalities provides a wash of apprehension, mirroring Raymond's discomfort at being away from his familiar home at Wallbrook and Charlie's growing impatience over his brother's time-consuming quirks. Susanna is along for the ride – the report of Charlie's dad's funeral came while she and Charlie were on their way to a Palm Springs vacation – but his treatment of Raymond eventually wears her out and she leaves him on his own. After that, Zimmer treats the theme a little darker and \"synthier\", noting her absence.\n\nOnce they're on the road in the 1949 Buick Roadmaster, the automobile that his father had cynically bequeathed to him, the music becomes closely associated with the vehicle. Because of Raymond's fear of flying (he recites airline crash statistics in grim detail), a furious Charlie has to drive them from Cincinnati to his home in Los Angeles. The vehicle becomes a character in the story, their means of accomplishing their journey, a frequent focal point of Levinson's camera, and the one thing the Babbitt brothers have in common. Without Susanna's presence to assist with Raymond's care, Charlie has a tougher time of it and the music reflects both his irritation and Raymond's increasing apprehension through bleaker tones. He also imparts worrisome calliope-like \"whooshes\" in place of drums to emphasize Raymond's anxiety when they have to slow down to pass a serious vehicle accident (\"Traffic Accident and Aftermath\").\n\nZimmer arranged the score as a ryhthm-based progression of tempos and textures; it also makes frequent changes in direction, instrumentation, tempo, and pattern, starting out in one vibe but being interrupted and moving into a new one until sidetracked again off into something else – much like Raymond's thought processes. While the music gives the film its momentum and character contrast, it also reflects the personalities of both characters. \"The RAIN MAN theme… [is] fragmented and in odd meters, which is like the character played by Dustin Hoffman\", Zimmer told interviewer Matthias Büdinger for *Soundtrack Magazine*, Dec. 1993. \"He keeps repeating something until something else is coming in. Then he starts repeating that. So you never get a full picture of it. If you strung all the musical pieces of RAIN MAN together you would get one tune because every scene has another little fragment of that.\"\n\nA particularly stimulating variation of the theme welcomes them to Las Vegas, where Zimmer embraces the city's glamor and glitz with heavy drum-kit, electric guitars, and a Vegas line-up of rock-&-roll choristers who really ramp-up the tempo with disco friendly excitement. Charlie may have warmed to his brother by this time, but his inherent self-centered greed has led him here to see how well Raymond's savant talents at counting cards can serve him at the Blackjack table. The score has its most discordant moment in the scene where Raymond accidentally activates the smoke alarm at Charlie's home (\"Smoke Alarm / Freaked / Baby Burn\"), causing a severe reaction from Raymond, emphasized by extremely raucous, twisting chords in the music followed by a slow, resting descent of suspended synth patterns as Charlie silences the alarm and calms his brother down. This is followed by comforting ambient peals of synth pipes and sparkling clusters of tonality as Charlie treats Raymond to his favorite pancakes the next morning (\"Pancakes / My Main Man\").\n\nWhile the score maintains a continous keyboard-and-drums vibe throghout its journey, reflecting both the velocity and conflict of their excursion, Zimmer also employs numerous alternate treatments that color the score at certain moments, allowing it to filter across the emotional atmosphere of the drama. The music eventually emerges with a looser style, and the sharp synth notes settle into a silkier panpipe sound as Charlie begins to understand the brother behind autism, and the music softens sympathetically (\"Putting Ray to Bed\", \"Charlie Tries to Hug Raymond\") to ultimately fully embrace the brotherly love that Charlie has learned to feel for Raymond as the film concludes with a warm farewell and a promise to visit him again soon (\"Train Station Goodbye\"). The music resonates with feeling as Charlie watches the train depart.\n\nBy the end of its travels, Zimmer's music celebrates the newfound bond established between the two brothers as both story and score and full circle, with a heartfelt resolution of the bright, earthy synths with which the journey began, concluding with a satisfying refrain from the smooth voice of the Fairlight and gentle cadence of pan pipes and steel drums accompanying the final fade out (\"Rain Man End Credits\").\n\nThe album concludes with two bonus tracks, presenting alternate versions of \"Leaving Wallbrook\" combined with \"On the Road\", and \"Las Vegas\" combined with \"End Title\".\n\n*Randall D. Larson writes a regular film music column for buysoundtrax.com, runs the musiquefantastic.com web site, and is the author of several books on film music and numerous soundtrack album commentaries.*\n\n*Online Sources:* \n*Zimmer interview from The Hollywood Reporter via* \n**\n\n*Zimmer interview from Entertainment Weekly via* \n**", "comment": "", "file_artwork": "20", "covers": [ "/assets/img/recordings/rain_man_original_mgm_motion_picture_score_notefornote/cover/1.jpg" ], "cover": "/assets/img/recordings/rain_man_original_mgm_motion_picture_score_notefornote/cover/1.jpg", "works_id": [ "27" ], "works": [ { "id": "27", "title": "Rain Man", "title_order": "Rain Man", "uri": "rain_man", "release_date": "598230000", "premiere_location": "", "type_id": "1", "direction_id": "1", "poster": "/assets/img/works/rain_man/poster/1.jpg", "empty_poster": false, "banner": "/assets/img/works/rain_man/banner.jpg", "empty_banner": false, "type": { "id": "1", "title": "Movie", "uri": "movie" }, "dir_label_adjective": "directed", "dir_label_adjective_suffix": "by", "dir_label_singular": "director", "dir_label_plural": "directors" } ], "main_work": { "id": "27", "title": "Rain Man", "title_order": "Rain Man", "uri": "rain_man", "release_date": "598230000", "premiere_location": "", "type_id": "1", "direction_id": "1", "poster": "/assets/img/works/rain_man/poster/1.jpg", "empty_poster": false, "banner": "/assets/img/works/rain_man/banner.jpg", "empty_banner": false, "type": { "id": "1", "title": "Movie", "uri": "movie" }, "dir_label_adjective": "directed", "dir_label_adjective_suffix": "by", "dir_label_singular": "director", "dir_label_plural": "directors" } }, "writers_id": [ 1, "1" ], "writers_name": [ "Hans Zimmer", "Hans Zimmer" ], "writers": [ { "id": "1", "name": "Zimmer", "first_name": "Hans", "uri": "hans_zimmer", "banner": "https://hzdb.net/assets/img/persons/hans_zimmer/banner.png" }, { "id": "1", "name": "Zimmer", "first_name": "Hans", "uri": "hans_zimmer", "banner": "https://hzdb.net/assets/img/persons/hans_zimmer/banner.png" } ] }, "works": [ { "id": "27", "title": "Rain Man", "title_order": "Rain Man", "uri": "rain_man", "release_date": "598230000", "premiere_location": "", "type_id": "1", "direction_id": "1" } ], "recordings": [ { "id": "153", "title": "Rain Man", "subtitle": "Original MGM Motion Picture Score (Notefornote)", "uri": "rain_man_original_mgm_motion_picture_score_notefornote", "label_id": "45", "release_date": "2018", "update": "1569855773", "notes_teaser": "German-born composer Hans Zimmer's emergence from scoring European and the occasional independent American film out of a London studio in the 1980s happened via Barry Levinson's 1988 film, RAIN MAN. The story goes that Levinson and his wife, Diana were in London promoting his film GOOD MORNING VIETNAM. While there, Diana had gone to see the 1988 film A WORLD APART, an anti-apartheid drama directed by Chris Menges, which Zimmer had scored. She was especially taken by the music, so she bought a copy of the CD and gave it to Barry, who was likewise impressed – so much so that he began to use parts of that score as temporary music during post production on his new film, RAIN MAN.", "notes_body": "\"The Barry came over to England to meet me\", Zimmer told Fred Karlin for his book, *Listening to Movies* (Schirmer Books, 1994). \"I was working on something and he came down to the studio and saw the Fairlight [sampler/synthesizer] and he couldn't believe what that thing could do. This wasn't what he was used to. He was used to somebody playing something on the piano, and then he could wait four weeks and they would have the orchestra. So he thought it was all very exciting.\"\n\nZimmer did too, although not without a little trepidation to find himself displaced to America for the first time. He felt a bit like Raymond Babbitt for a moment, he remarked, by himself in a land where he knew no one and wasn't sure where he would be going. He set up his studio in Levinson's headquarters, just down the hall from editor Stu Linder's office, who was cutting the film at the same time. Having such close contact with the director and his editor while he composed the music became a favored style for Zimmer, one that enhanced both creativity and collaborative interaction. In this case, his first Hollywood film score resulted in an acclaimed work that earned an Oscar nomination for music, in a film that won an Oscar for Best Picture of the Year (among other awards).\n\nThe film is about Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), an autistic savant who is reunited with his self-centered and high-rolling, car reseller brother, Charlie (Tom Cruise), upon learning of the death of their father. Charlie, estranged from his father for years, learns that dad's estate and fortune has been left to Raymond and only a pittance to himself. Hoping for a better cut of the inheritance, Charlie takes Raymond on a road trip in order to convince him to split the money evenly, but the time together changes Charlie, opening his heart to altruism and the desire to preserve a close relationship with his brother.\n\nTypically for Levinson and for late 1980s comedy-dramas in general, RAIN MAN's soundtrack is a mixture of dramatic score and standalone pop songs, the latter usually heard briefly as diegetic source music in the film, usually establishing environment, period, or sentiment. Sometimes the source music takes on attributes of emotional dramatic music, such as in Etta James' classic \"At Last\", which play over the touching scene where Charlie teaches Raymond to dance in Las Vegas, and the Gershwin's standard \"They Can't Take That Away From Me\", used as score where a reconciled Charlie lets Raymond drive the Roadmaster thorugh Las Vegas before they leave town. \"Nathan Jones\" by Bananarama is heard briefly near the end as Ray tries to dance by himself in Charlie's L.A. house. A variety of blues, jazz, and pop tunes are heard from casinos and attractions they pass through Las Vegas.\n\nApart from the songs, Zimmer's musical score creates its own space within the strucure of the story: setting the mood, giving the film drive, and underlining its emotional bearings. The score grasps the spirit of the story and the changing conflict within Charlie as he learns to love his brother, the musical journey with its confident tempo carrying the affecting story through to its emotive resolution.\n\nOne of the first decisions that Zimmer and Levinson made about the score was to agree to avoid jangly guitars and a big string section, because they both felt that had become a cliché in too many road movies by then. Zimmer was thinking more outside of the box. \"We thought, let's first of all take out everything that is the normal convention\", Zimmer said in a comprehensive 2014 interview with Stephen Galloway for *The Hollywood Reporter*. \"And the second thing was because, I was feeling, like… if you come to Los Angeles for the first time it's so foreign. It's [such] a different place from anything that you've ever experienced… And I said to Barry, 'look, the music we should have, it should be culturally non-specific. It should be music from Mars. It should just be foreign.'\".\n\nIn a 2008 interview with John Young for *Entertainment Weekly*, Zimmer added, \"I kept thinking 'don't be bigger than the characters. Try to keep it contained.' The Raymond doesn't actually know where he is. The world is so different to him. He might as well be on Mars. So, why don't we just invent our own world music for a world that doesn't really exist?\"\n\nReplacing an old-fashioned sentimental orchestral vibe, Levinson and Zimmer favored Zimmer's keyboard textures providing more contemporaneous harmonies to establish what Fred Karlin, in *Listening to Movies*, described as \"an objective, non-emotional musical approach throughout much of the film.\" An underlying rhythmic cadence is established by synths while a confident, recurring pattern of figures contrast against it from a variety of sounds, from keyboard to guitarlike-synth notes contrasting against softer, piping tones.\n\nZimmer's score was conceived and performed on synthesizers – primarly a Fairlight CMI (Computerized Musical Instrument – a digital synthesizer, sampler, and digital audio workstation introduced in 1979 that revolutionized electronic music creation). It creates the basic sounds and contrasts within the score, while Zimmer also employed steel drums as one of his primary percussion devices, along with additional synthetic patterns generated via the Fairlight.\n\nAccording to the film's musical cue sheet, the RAIN MAN score contains some fifteen songs or song excerpts and twenty score cues; the latter range from anywhere between four seconds and nearly four-and-a-half minutes, depending on usage in the film (two minutes being the avarage). The film begins with \"Iko Iko\", an oft-covered New Orleans folk tune performed here by British girl group The Belle Stars. The song runs beneath the film's main titles. Zimmer's music is first heard after the funeral of Charlie's estranged father. A gentle, ambient tonality transports Charlie and his girlfriend Susanna (Valeria Golino) to the Babbitt estate (\"Drive from the Country\"), where he learns the astonishing facts of his father's cynical inheritance. Ambient clusters of reflecting synths drift airily and mirror Charlie's thoughts once he's back home (\"Empty House / Charlie's Memories\"), while the main theme begins softly, with a slow increase in tempo, as Charlie and Susanna head towards the Wallbrook institute where they'll meet Raymond (\"Drive to Bank and Wallbrook\"). The theme then takes on a more prominent drum beat after Charlie takes Raymond out of Wallbrook and their road trip begins (\"Leaving Wallbrook\"), while the pleasing textures of didgeridoo and a woody synth melody (abetted in the mix by pan pipes) provides an airy sense of traveling.\n\nThe mixture of keyboard notes and synth tonalities provides a wash of apprehension, mirroring Raymond's discomfort at being away from his familiar home at Wallbrook and Charlie's growing impatience over his brother's time-consuming quirks. Susanna is along for the ride – the report of Charlie's dad's funeral came while she and Charlie were on their way to a Palm Springs vacation – but his treatment of Raymond eventually wears her out and she leaves him on his own. After that, Zimmer treats the theme a little darker and \"synthier\", noting her absence.\n\nOnce they're on the road in the 1949 Buick Roadmaster, the automobile that his father had cynically bequeathed to him, the music becomes closely associated with the vehicle. Because of Raymond's fear of flying (he recites airline crash statistics in grim detail), a furious Charlie has to drive them from Cincinnati to his home in Los Angeles. The vehicle becomes a character in the story, their means of accomplishing their journey, a frequent focal point of Levinson's camera, and the one thing the Babbitt brothers have in common. Without Susanna's presence to assist with Raymond's care, Charlie has a tougher time of it and the music reflects both his irritation and Raymond's increasing apprehension through bleaker tones. He also imparts worrisome calliope-like \"whooshes\" in place of drums to emphasize Raymond's anxiety when they have to slow down to pass a serious vehicle accident (\"Traffic Accident and Aftermath\").\n\nZimmer arranged the score as a ryhthm-based progression of tempos and textures; it also makes frequent changes in direction, instrumentation, tempo, and pattern, starting out in one vibe but being interrupted and moving into a new one until sidetracked again off into something else – much like Raymond's thought processes. While the music gives the film its momentum and character contrast, it also reflects the personalities of both characters. \"The RAIN MAN theme… [is] fragmented and in odd meters, which is like the character played by Dustin Hoffman\", Zimmer told interviewer Matthias Büdinger for *Soundtrack Magazine*, Dec. 1993. \"He keeps repeating something until something else is coming in. Then he starts repeating that. So you never get a full picture of it. If you strung all the musical pieces of RAIN MAN together you would get one tune because every scene has another little fragment of that.\"\n\nA particularly stimulating variation of the theme welcomes them to Las Vegas, where Zimmer embraces the city's glamor and glitz with heavy drum-kit, electric guitars, and a Vegas line-up of rock-&-roll choristers who really ramp-up the tempo with disco friendly excitement. Charlie may have warmed to his brother by this time, but his inherent self-centered greed has led him here to see how well Raymond's savant talents at counting cards can serve him at the Blackjack table. The score has its most discordant moment in the scene where Raymond accidentally activates the smoke alarm at Charlie's home (\"Smoke Alarm / Freaked / Baby Burn\"), causing a severe reaction from Raymond, emphasized by extremely raucous, twisting chords in the music followed by a slow, resting descent of suspended synth patterns as Charlie silences the alarm and calms his brother down. This is followed by comforting ambient peals of synth pipes and sparkling clusters of tonality as Charlie treats Raymond to his favorite pancakes the next morning (\"Pancakes / My Main Man\").\n\nWhile the score maintains a continous keyboard-and-drums vibe throghout its journey, reflecting both the velocity and conflict of their excursion, Zimmer also employs numerous alternate treatments that color the score at certain moments, allowing it to filter across the emotional atmosphere of the drama. The music eventually emerges with a looser style, and the sharp synth notes settle into a silkier panpipe sound as Charlie begins to understand the brother behind autism, and the music softens sympathetically (\"Putting Ray to Bed\", \"Charlie Tries to Hug Raymond\") to ultimately fully embrace the brotherly love that Charlie has learned to feel for Raymond as the film concludes with a warm farewell and a promise to visit him again soon (\"Train Station Goodbye\"). The music resonates with feeling as Charlie watches the train depart.\n\nBy the end of its travels, Zimmer's music celebrates the newfound bond established between the two brothers as both story and score and full circle, with a heartfelt resolution of the bright, earthy synths with which the journey began, concluding with a satisfying refrain from the smooth voice of the Fairlight and gentle cadence of pan pipes and steel drums accompanying the final fade out (\"Rain Man End Credits\").\n\nThe album concludes with two bonus tracks, presenting alternate versions of \"Leaving Wallbrook\" combined with \"On the Road\", and \"Las Vegas\" combined with \"End Title\".\n\n*Randall D. Larson writes a regular film music column for buysoundtrax.com, runs the musiquefantastic.com web site, and is the author of several books on film music and numerous soundtrack album commentaries.*\n\n*Online Sources:* \n*Zimmer interview from The Hollywood Reporter via* \n**\n\n*Zimmer interview from Entertainment Weekly via* \n**", "comment": "", "file_artwork": "20" }, { "id": "40", "title": "Rain Man", "subtitle": "Original MGM Motion Picture Score (Perseverance)", "uri": "rain_man_original_mgm_motion_picture_score_perseverance", "label_id": "44", "release_date": "2010", "update": "1570025946", "notes_teaser": "#### Roadmaster & Rose Bushes: The Journey of **RAIN MAN**\n\n*by Randall D. Larson*\n\nLike the characters’ prolonged road trip in the movie, 1988’s **RAIN MAN** took a long and complicated journey to the screen, filled with obstacles that threatened to stall the picture irrevocably. **RAIN MAN** told the story of self-absorbed salesman Charlie Babbitt who, after a disappointing award in his estranged father’s will, learns he has an autistic brother named Raymond, to which the $3 million family estate has been bequeathed. Determined to extract his half of the inheritance, Charlie convinces Raymond to drive across country to Los Angeles, where he hopes to win a custody battle and net his half of his birthright.\n\nThe film had its origins, according to screenwriter **Barry Morrow** in his commentary track on **RAIN MAN**’s 2006 MGM DVD release, in **Morrow**’s friendship with **Kim Peek**, a developmentally disabled man with an encyclopedic memory. **Morrow**, who had written the story for the Emmy-Award winning 1981 TV-movie **BILL** in which **Mickey Rooney** played an institutionalized retarded man who finds friendship, had developed **RAIN MAN** to focus on the savant concept. „I took all the things that happened with Bill and flipped them upside down“, **Morrow** said. „Instead of friendship, this was going to be about greed.“ **Morrow** came up with the film’s title when he sought a name for the savant that had a different meaning when mispronounced. After looking at „No-Man“ for Norman and „Rain Man“ for Raymond, he selected the latter.", "notes_body": "At the time, **Martin Brest** had been slated to direct the film. He wanted some changes and brought in screenwriter **Ronald Bass** to rewrite **Morrow**’s script. In **Morrow**’s screenplay, Raymond had not been autistic but retarded. Both lead actors, **Dustin Hoffman** and **Tom Cruise**, were involved in the film’s development process, and **Hoffman** suggested that his character be autistic instead of retarded. **Brest** demurred at this idea. **Bass** obeyed orders and finished his draft and turned it in; months later he learned that **Brest** was off the picture due to „artistic differences“. A few months after that, **RAIN MAN** was back on with a new director: **Steven Spielberg**.\n\n**Bass** met with **Spielberg**, who felt **Hoffman**’s autistic aspect would give the brotherly love story the kind of dramatic obstacle to overcome that any engrossing love story needs. **Bass** rewrote the script with the aid of **Spielberg**, **Hoffman**, and **Cruise** over the summer of 1987, essentially rebuilding the whole story. Various experts in autism and psychiatry were brought in adding to the research that **Brest** had previously amassed in order to make it as real and credible as possible. Knowing the film would be seen by autistic people and their families and friends, the team wanted to ensure „they didn’t feel that their experiences had been trivialized or devalued in any ways“, **Bass** in his DVD commentary.\n\n**Spielberg** wound up having to withdraw because the long redevelopment process on **RAIN MAN** had bumped up against the next INDIANA JONES movie, which he was already committed to do with **George Lucas**. So the search for yet a new director was on. **Sidney Pollack** was brought in, but soon decided he wasn’t keen on making a road movie and withdrew; but he called **Barry Levinson** and suggested he take on the movie. **Levinson** (who had actually been offered the movie prior to **Brest**’s being signed but had turned it down to make **GOOD MORNING VIETNAM**) agreed. It would be **Levinson** who added the gentle layer of ironic comedy to the dramatic story that made the picture click.\n\nCentral to the film is the Oscar-winning performance of **Dustin Hoffman** as Raymond Babbitt. **Hoffman**, who along with **Tom Cruise** met with and studied a number of autistic people in order to develop his performance accurately, gave Raymond a sense of verisimilitude that made his personality and actions entirely authentic. **Hoffman** also, reportedly, fought for the ending, where Raymond goes back to Wallbrook, even though the screenwriters had wanted him to end up staying with Charlie; **Hoffman** rightly felt it would not have been true to Raymond’s character if he was made to stay with his brother. Despite **Hoffman**’s accolades, however, it’s **Cruise**’s character that is most essential to making the film work, as **Bass** said: „This is our access character. This is the character [who] changes… **Tom**’s character was the real engine for making this movie happen.“ At one point **Hoffman** had reportedly wanted **Bill Murray** to play Charlie, but **Cruise**, following up on his roles in **TOP GUN**, **THE COLOR OF MONEY**, and **COCKTAIL** proved to be the ideal, greedy hustler who comes to love his disabled brother. **Cruise**, interviewed for the making-of featurette on the MGM DVD, described Charlie as an „emotional autistic“, who learns about life through his autistic brother; it’s his journey that is most important to the story.\n\nAt the same time, the role that anchors the film for audiences was that of Susanna, Charlie’s long-suffering girlfriend. Both **Morrow** and **Bass** had written the character as Susan, a tough American woman of means. But **Levinson** decided to cast Italian actress **Valeria Golino** because he felt that having a character for whom English was a second language would allow her to legitimately question what Charlie says or does, and thus allow **Cruise**’s character to provide some necessary exposition. „Culturally [and] emotionally she doesn’t understand Charlie“, **Morrow** added, „and she is able to ask those really hard, direct questions, like ‚why are you doing this? Why are you so mean to your brother?’ [while] an American person in that role would not have deepened the movie or put the screws to Charlie as she [did] in her own quiet way.“ As **Bass** noted, she was able to express the audience’s viewpoint toward Charlie’s being such a hard-hearted jerk, and by installing **Golino** as a sweet girl, who loved Charlie despite this but who wasn’t afraid to stand up to him, gave credence to the audience’s concerns over Charlie’s abusive behavior, and allow them to support the character through his changes.\n\nAnother important „character“ in the movie is the 1949 Buick Roadmaster, the rare automobile that, along with his father’s prize rose bushes, was all Charlie had inherited from his father. The vehicle serves as the story’s wheels, getting the cast from one place to another, while serving as the device through which Charlie first meets Raymond and discovers he has a brother.\n\n#### RAIN MAN as Road Movie: The Music\n\nJust as important as the Buick Roadmaster as supporting element in the film’s storytelling is its musical soundtrack. Typically for **Levinson** and for late 1980s comedy-dramas in general, **RAIN MAN**’s soundtrack is a mixture of dramatic score and stand-alone pop songs, heard either briefly as source music or fully. For the score, **Levinson** hired a young German composer by the name of **Hans Zimmer**, whose music for the British anti-Apartheid drama, **A WORLD APART**, had impressed him. **RAIN MAN** was **Zimmer**’s first Hollywood film score.\n\n„I did **RAIN MAN** the way I did all my European films“, **Zimmer** said in an interview for the audiohead website [www.audiohead.net/interviews/hanszimmer]. „I didn’t really do it in the studio – I just set up my Fairlight in **Barry**’s office with a couple more toys and gadgets. It was a relaxed way for **Barry** to work, too, because he didn’t have to go to a studio where there would have been pressure of ‚My God, here comes the orchestra. We’d better get it right!’“\n\n**Zimmer** produced an eclectic score mixing synthesizers (primarly a Fairlight CMI) with heavy sonic underbelly of steel drums and drum kit. The score is driven by rhythm, building its cadence and tone from the rolling hum of the Roadmaster’s wheel on pavement and bridge steel (a sound that Raymond mimics early in the journey as they leave Cincinnati). **Levinson** wanted the music to have a propulsive rhythmic motion, which is introduced at the very start in his choice of „Iko Iko“ over the main titles. The Mardi Gras song (originally called „Jock-a-mo“) had been a hit for the girl group **The Dixie Cups** in 1965; **Levinson** selected the version by **The Belle Stars**, with its heavier tribal percussion.\n\n„The aspect of the drum, which plays throughout the movie, has a certain kind of rhythm to it“, **Levinson** said on his DVD commentary for **RAIN MAN**. „**Hans Zimmer**’s score, which is very percussion-oriented, has no strings at all. One of the things we talked about very early on is I didn’t want any kind of strings at all in it, because I thought it would make the movie too melodramatic. I think it’s inherent in the piece and I didn’t want to emphasize that aspect, so it’s very rhythmic throughout.“\n\nThe **RAIN MAN** score is built around a primary Traveling Theme, which sets the tone for the characters’ journey cross country, during which Charlie gets to know, understand, and eventually love his brother. In a 2008 interview with **John Young** for ew.com [www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20216261,00.html], **Zimmer** described his approach to **RAIN MAN**: „It was a road movie, and road movies usually have jangly guitars or a bunch of strings. I kept thinking: ‚Don’t be bigger than the characters. Try to keep it contained.’ [Raymond] doesn’t actually know where he is. The world is so different to him. He might as well be on Mars. So, why don’t we just invent our own music for a world that doesn’t really exist?“\n\n**Zimmer**’s music is first heard at the funeral of Charlie’s father, an ambient tonality that sets a gentle cadence as Charlie and Susanna make their way to the Babbitt estate. When Charlie meets Raymond and the road trip begins, successive variations of this theme will underscore their progress across highway and byway, moving from a fairly formal vibe to a looser style as Charlie’s behavior becomes less impatient and self-serving. Heavier drums add an element of excitement once they are on the road, while a touch of didgeridoo and a woody synth melody (abetted in the mix by pan pipes) gives it an airy, pleasing vivid sensibility. The theme turns darker and „synthier“ as, after Susanna leaves, Charlie and Raymond approach a nasty vehicle crash on the freeway which frightens Raymond.\n\nOne of the score’s high points is the Las Vegas montage, the music derived from the drum-beaten vibe of the Traveling Music but taking on an entirely new configuration here.\n\nWhile warming to his brother, Charlie realizes how Raymond’s amazing memory can help him win at blackjack. **Zimmer** opens into a drum-heavy rock beat, punctuated by glitzy flashes of synth and electric guitar, adding a bluesy chorus and a vibrant saxophone measure as Charlie takes Raymond shopping, dressing him in style and getting him polished for gambling. Choir is added, almost heroically, as they arrive at the card tables and the games begin. The score’s only real discordant note sounds like the shrill siren of the smoke detector Raymond accidentally sets off when trying to cook waffles; **Zimmer**’s nightmarish atonality here mirrors Raymond’s panic and fear, warming only when Charlie come to the rescue.\n\nThe score’s second major motif is a brotherly love theme that will become prominent near the end of the film. **Zimmer** provides a soft, barely discernable atmosphere from very soft layers of Fairlight beneath dialog when Charlie tells Susanna about the last time he saw his father and why he left home. „When I was a kid and got scared, the Rain Man would come and sing to me“, he muses, recalling the imaginary friend from his childhood. „What happened to him?“ Susanna asks. „Nothing, I just grew up.“ Charlie says tersely. By the end of the film, Charlie realizes that this imaginary friend was actually Raymond, whose institutionalization when Charlie was 3 resulted in the lost memory of his brother. **Zimmer** reflects Charlie’s more sympathetic regard of Raymond with a warm, melodic clutch of synth and piano, very poignant and tender, the hollow reedy sound of the synth flutes lending a sympathetic sonority.\n\nThis love theme becomes particularly expressive at the end of the film as Charlie, realizing Wallbrook is the best place for Raymond but intending to visit him frequently (and, by the way, reunited with Susanna), has his former selfishness redeemed by his new found affection for his brother; the music resonates for piano and woody synths, very tender, hollow, earthy, and human. Charlie, having lost his business, his inheritance and, for a time, his girl, has gained a long-lost brother and a unique insight into his own humanity. The score celebrates this in **Zimmer**’s End Title music, which assumes a bright ethnic buoyancy while combining elements of the travel and love themes into a joyful refrain from the Fairlight over steel drums and a piping electronic riffing.\n\n„We fumbled our way through that score and I thought that was the end of my Hollywood career“, **Zimmer** had told **Audiohead**. Far from it. **RAIN MAN**’s score was nominated for an **Academy Award** in 1989 (the film itself won four **Academy Awards, including Best Picture) and it launched the composer on one of the most successful and influential careers ever seen in Hollywood film music.\n\n***Randall Larson** writes a film music column for buysoundtrax.com, writes for cinefantastiqueonline and musicfromthemovies.com, and is the author of several books on film music and more than six dozen soundtrack album commentaries.*", "comment": "The booklet of this recording says: \r\n*This album was transferred from really crappy analog files. Although every effort was made to reduce anomalies inherent in these files, such as tape hiss or warble, some still persist.*\r\n\r\nYou shouldn't buy this record unless you are a heavy collector. Instead look out for the *Notefornote* release, which has a much better quality.\r\n\r\nThe provided audio cues were taken from the *Notefornote* remastered recording, except tracks number 2, 8, 9, 15, 16, 19, 20. 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