Behind the Ultimate Edition

by Xizor (www.jedinet.com)

  Here's a riddle: Harrison Ford has had it six times in his career. Denise Richards has never had it all, and Steven Spielberg's films have almost never been without it. So what is it? No, it's not acting skill. It's a John Williams score.

  And as all Star Wars fans know, no film in the Star Wars saga is complete without a score composed and conducted by John Williams. It was a tradition that John Williams continued and he composed and conducted the score for Episode I.

  John Williams, George Lucas, and Rick McCallum returned to England the first week of February 1999 for the scoring of Phantom Menace.

  "I saw the first cut of Episode I at the beginning of October 1998. It was a bit raw and all the special effects weren't in yet, but all the timings were there," Williams recalls of his duties to Phantom Menace. "I was anxious to get started as soon as I could. We had to record the music in February, so at the time, I had only four months to prepare.

  "We watched the film without the temp track and decided where we would stop and start the music. George explained what the dramatic function of the music would be, scene by scene. A spotting session (is what the called it), is a starting point for a director, a composer, and a sound designer to begin to realize where we're going to be soft or loud, where we're going to accelerate or slow down. It is a general discussion o about how the music will ride along with the sound effects and dialogue."

  Williams, composer of over fifty-five different films, including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, said that composing for Episode I was "Like coming back to an old friend. To me, it seemed very much like the experience I had twenty years ago, even though the characters were different. It had been a familiar connection, a thread of family unity through all of it."

  Williams' final score for the film was more than two hours long, and included various themes for the characters. For example, Jar-Jar Binks was given a motif, along with Anakin and Shmi Skywalker, Darth Maul, Qui-Gon Jinn, the Trade Federation, and many other elements of the film. However, Williams personally selected seventy-four minutes of the score to be used on the film's official soundtrack, packaged and released by Sony Classical in May of 1999.

  As to the use of his score in the film, "The music for Queen Amidala was originally much more developed, but George Lucas didn't want it so. There were matters which I could not control. I wrote my first partition on a first edit of the movie. Then, George Lucas showed the film to many people including Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard... and a second edit was made. I made adequate and necessary changes, but most of the time, I had to suppress complete cues."

  Once The Phantom Menace's soundtrack was released, and film released worldwide, the fans began wanting more of the music in the film that wasn't on the soundtrack, otherwise known was unreleased music. Several fans stepped in at that point to save the day, and some of the leading fans responsible for obtaining unreleased music from Episode I and prompting Sony Classical to release a new Ultimate Edition of the Episode I score.

  This series of interviews and articles will lead up to the release of the Star Wars: Episode I - The Ultimate Edition album, in stores on November 14th.

Behind the Ultimate Edition: Part I - Elvis Jones

Xizor:  Before you heard the score, what were your expectations for the score? How excited were you? And how did you feel after you heard the soundtrack?

  Elvis Jones:  I remember being very relieved when Rick McCallum confirmed in an issue of the Star Wars Insider that Williams would be returning to do the score for Episode I. I had visions of Joel McNeely being recruited in lieu of JW, and having heard the Shadows of the Empire CD, I was not in favor of that at all.

  In the months that preceded the release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, I was pretty excited about every aspect of the new movie, (except the toys, which didn't really do much for me). The music was no exception, I was looking forward very much to hearing the score. I was quite curious how John Williams would sound revisiting this musical landscape he had carved out fifteen years earlier.

  I had heard he was not impressed with the CD of Shadows of the Empire and that he regretted never being asked to participate in the project. I imagined that maybe this added some degree of "I'll show them!" to his approach for Episode I.

  I was pretty giddy when they ran that 60 Minutes spot with him conducting in London. Hearing that fragment of the score was exciting stuff for me. I was a little questioning of the "Carmina Burana" aspect of it all, but still intrigued by what was there.

  When the MP3 of Duel of the Fates hit the net in late April 99, I was buzzed about hearing it, but my reaction was pretty clinical, actually, not very emotional.  I sort of over-analyzed it, I think. "Does it sound like Star Wars music?! Is it any good?!" I was much more academic - "Oh, it's a repeating ostinato, it's not a recognizable formic structure, it's got this nine-note theme. It's a lot like Carmina Burana, reminds me of Nixon a little bit. It sounds good when you play it really loud.

  When the score came out on CD, my first reaction was how much it reminded me of Indy III (Last Crusade) - the end of track 1, the march in track 14. By this point, I had also read the novel, and the screenplay, and I knew how the movie began, so I was really perplexed by the loud, trumpet-y fanfare music that supposedly accompanied this arrival at the blockaded planet Naboo. It seemed wrong. I began immediately to suspect that the score had been edited for cd.

  I was also pretty surprised that the album ended the way it did, with the dark presentation of Anakin/Vader's theme. I was sort of impressed by that deviation from the brassy fanfares of the first 3 movies, actually.

  So after hearing the cd, I felt like Williams was approaching the Star Wars galaxy from a much more mature point of view than he had earlier on. Obviously, I hadn't seen the movie yet, but it seemed like he was not just playing the action all the time, instead playing a psychological level up from the action. Even when I sensed he was playing the action, as in track  5, I was impressed with what seemed to be a more developed sense of orchestration and action writing - not better, necessarily, just more experienced. And of course, sonically, it was state of the art, especially when compared to the analog recordings of the first 3 movies. Shawn Murphy did a great job there.

  On it's own, I thought the CD displayed competent writing, but nothing necessarily grabbed me like ANH or TESB.

What inspired you to create the Expanded Edition?

  Well, when the movie came out, I was there Tuesday at midnight with all the fans. As I was watching the movie I was really beginning to like the music a lot, much more than I had on CD. It had an intensity to it that seemed to be missing from the disc. Well, immediately after seeing the movie, I began to try and reconcile the cd to the movie's (in my opinion) superior presentation of the music. My first Special Edition CD was just the Sony Classical cd reedited in film order, or as close I could remember it at that time.

  During all this, from Feb. 99 or so on, I was visiting Ricard Befan's excellent website (located at http://www.jwfan.net) and conversing with him and others about the music. When I made my first cd, I sent him my notes about what went where, etc.

  The day TPM came out, I also got the video game for PC and began noticing that music that was missing from the cd was heard in the game as you played along. I was especially excited that the Force theme that plays as Qui-Gon cuts into the blast door with his lightsaber was in the game. I would play the game just to hear the music!

  Somewhere in June 99 or so, Ricard ran a piece on his website explaining how you could extract all this music from TPM CD-ROM game, which I immediately set about doing. When I heard the incredible amount of great music that was in these files that was left off the Sony CD, I just felt compelled to make a definitive cd of it for myself. So I set out to compile an "ultimate cd", if you will.

Can you explain the steps you took to create it?

  I used a program called SCUMMREV to extract the audio files from the TPM CD-ROM and convert them to WAV files. Then I edited them in with the files from the Sony CD using a program called CoolEdit. I've since upgraded to Sonic Foundry's Vegas, which I really love. There were some pieces exclusive to the Insider's Guide to Episode I, which I "extracted" by plugging my DAT player into my soundcard and simply running the program and recording the audio to my DAT, then digitizing back into my P.C. through my soundcard. Not as elegant as SCUMMREV, but I've yet to find another method of getting things out of the Insider's Guide programs.

  One thing about compiling all the music was that there were bits of music that were left out of the movie, and trying to find out where they fit in is an ongoing puzzle. I've been talking with another John Williams fan, Jim Ware, about the end battle stuff in reel 6 of TPM for weeks now, trying to piece it all together. It's tough because, not only was the music changed during the final dub of the movie, but Williams wrote to an entirely different version of the film!

  Well, once I had made my decisions, I burned the CDs and just kicked back and listened to them. I've only listened to the official CD about 5 times the whole time I've owned it.  I made the first 2-CD set sometime in June 99. Later, in July or so, a version of the movie hit the internet and I was able to download it. Obviously, this was much more definitive than trying to remember everything from the theater so I set about locking down once and for all the music in the film. That's where most of the timing info and accurate cue info on my website came from - the Thai-subtitled bootleg floating around the internet.

  Recently, more bits of music came to light in Racer and Jedi Power Battles, things that help fill in the gaps from the official CD and TPM CD-ROM game. And sometimes the "behind the scenes" videos at Starwars.com will have a helpful clue to how things fit together. Anyhow, I'm up to version 2.4 now, I think. When the new wave of video games comes out this fall, I hope to dig out a bunch more music and make a version 3.

Are you proud of the work you've accomplished?

  It's weird, I am really proud of it. Which is sort of funny, because I just cut together stuff so that it was back the way it was supposed to be. It's sort of a restoration job more than anything else. But I am proud that I managed to figure out so much of it, and that I was able to execute edits that made it a fairly seamless listening experience. In the case of TPM, I really think a CD along the lines of the RCA Victor Special Edition CD's was more in line than the heavily edited and repetitious CD Sony released. But I don't blame Sony for that, I attribute that to John Williams, actually - the Sony CD is the CD he wanted to release! I think Sony would have been thrilled to release a 2-cd set, I think Lucas would've been into it. I really think it was Williams who wanted to make it more of an album and less a document of the music stem of the film soundtrack.

How do you think LucasFilm will officially solve the "Unreleased Music" problem?

  Officially, I think they should release definitive complete editions with the release of the films. But I'll take whatever I can get. If they do a Volume II release with more music, I'd buy that. If I have to rip it out of more video games, I'll do that too.

What are your expectations for Episode II's score?

  I'm really trying to curb my expectations for Episode II. With Episode I, there was so much anticipation, years of disappointment as Lucas would talk about doing new Star Wars movies and they'd never materialize. I swear, the week before the film came out, I was paranoid I'd get hit by a car and die without seeing it. What kind of a loser am I?!

  I think Episode I was a pretty remarkable movie in so many ways, but it gets a real bum rap, and I think that's because we all had so many expectations about it.

  That being said, I'm guardedly hoping it will be darker, a la TESB, and a bit moodier. But I am also willing to go where Lucas wants to take me and I trust that he'll bring us through Episode II and into the end of Episode III in a way that satisfies my desires as a set up for the Episodes IV-VI.

How do you feel about bootlegs?

  Ah, here's the real question, eh? This is a tough one. I mean, I like having a copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special. I understand Lucas's reasons for suppressing it, and disowning it, but I'm still glad I've got it. Now when I downloaded TPM off the internet, in widescreen stereo MPG files, one month after it's theatrical release, I was thrilled to have it. But I still went to see it in the theater. I've got the ticket stubs to prove it. I bought the novel, I bought the screenplay, and I bought all the video games. I would've PAID Lucas for a download of the movie if it had been an option. I bought the video when it came out, I also bought the laser disc and the VCD. I'm not adverse to paying for things when they are legally available.  But when they're not, I'll take whatever I can get.

  That being said, I have a problem with opportunists who use the situation to make money off people who don't know any better or are so desperate they pay whatever someone asks for something they want. What I love about the internet is it's free. No one made any money off the copy of the movie I downloaded. Admittedly, Lucas might have lost a few bucks from people who didn't go see it in the theater after they downloaded it, and that's not cool.

  So it's a sticky point.

  When I made my Special Edition CDs of TPM, I was, as I said, pretty proud and I gave a copy to two people I knew. One of them passed it on to some industry professionals, like the guys who made the RCA Victor SE CDs, and they emailed me some really encouraging words about the work I'd done. The other guy I gave it to passed a copy along to friend overseas and next thing I new, people were selling copies of my 2-CD set as bootlegs! I was pretty annoyed by that. I never did it to make money and I was kind of dismayed that people were taking advantage of the situation like that. Obviously, I wasn't surprised that it happened, I had just hoped it wouldn't. So I opened a website and began posting MP3s of my edits for free as a sort of rebellion against bootleggers. I hoped people would get them from me rather than pay some loser 30 bucks for some lo-fi music files from a video game. The MP3s really sound just as good as the CDs I burned. I did them at 160/44.1 and they sounded great. Now, as far as my files infringing on Lucas' income, I justified it like this: I figured anyone who was going to download 140mb of MP3s had probably already bought the SONY CD and at least one of the video games and could make the cd themselves if they wanted. I didn't see it as something someone would download to circumvent buying the actual CD.

  Unlike some buzz I hear on the net, I think Lucas deserves every penny he makes off these movies, and I applaud him for it. More than anyone else in Hollywood, he takes risks with his own money to make his movies. He doesn't use studios in the conventional sense, he paid for Empire with profits from Star Wars figures, and Jedi with profits from Empire toys. AVID editing for movies came out of Star Wars merchandising profits. He really does turn the money back around into his art. I respect that and I have a problem with people who justify making money off of Lucas and his product out of some sort of anger or revenge at Lucas for being "so rich".

  So in the end, I'd rather have a legit copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special than a bootleg, but I'll take the bootleg over nothing any day. You know, I'd be the first in line to buy a legit release of the complete score to the TPM on CD. When it comes to certain things, I'll spend what I've got to spend to have it.

Do you have any parting thoughts?

  Not really, except that I want to say, if you've downloaded the files from my websites without buying the official CD release or the video games, shame on you. Seriously, though, if we don't buy these things, they won't make more of them. It's like with the Napster situation - no one is going to want to make an album if it's just going to be ripped and distributed for free on the Internet. The bottom line is Lucas and Williams need to be compensated for what they do. I know it's a real thin line I'm walking here, since I've contributed to content that in some way could challenge their ability to make money, but I really do support copyright-holder's rights to make a living from their material. Until we are truly a socialist society, we all have to make living, and there can be no free lunch. Sad but true.

  On an up note, I would like to thank everyone who enjoyed the files I made and wrote to tell me so. I'd also like to recognize the contributions of Ricard Befan, Jim Ware, and the others who helped me to compile my TPM CDs. The Internet is a great place to be a Star Wars, and John Williams, fan.

  There you have it. Those of you interested in learning more may contact Elvis Jones through elvisjones@hotmail.com. Before I close the article, I'd like to thank Elvis Jones for his time, and I, at least, would like to assure him I've purchased Sony Classical's soundtrack release.

  Have a nice week, guys. 

  Roger Roger,

  Xizor