How do you pick a song for a movie?
Music supervisor Dan Wilcox explains why you can't do his job
First, a couple of things I enjoyed this week.
• I watched the Mike Nichols/Nora Ephron collaboration Heartburn for the first time, and unsurprisingly loved it. Aside from the performances and the writing and the fullness of the characters, I really noticed the seeming lack of music in the first half of the film and then the pervasive weaving of Carly Simon’s “Coming Around Again” into the second half. It’s such an interesting choice to let the characters’ comic chatter take up the soundscape earlier and then to introduce this song and its accompanying score when there are no more words left to say, only feelings and askew glances and a sense that something isn’t quite right.
I have to imagine that Nichols received the song and realized very quickly it could become not just a single musical moment but a guiding refrain. That made me think about Tony Scott’s collaboration with Giorgio Moroder on Top Gun.
• The song “Danger Zone” was ordered and completed first, and then Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer requested a “romantic” song, at which point Moroder and lyricist Tom Whitlock got to work on a bare, poetic synth track that was so good it made Scott realize his movie wasn’t done, and he went on to shoot one of the most iconic love-making sequences in cinematic history, guided by this incredible song.
This archived interview with Whitlock explains it all. The relevant part is below, but highly suggest reading the whole interview for an insider’s look at Moroder’s music machine.
Secondly, I’m obviously theming this newsletter around music in film, and that’s all to highlight my interview with prolific music supervisor and DJ Dan Wilcox, whose impressive body of work includes everything from The Edge of Seventeen and Ramy to Waffles + Mochi. I come from a music background, having worked in record stores and college radio stations, so when it comes to film, I am hyperaware of sound and music and how it can make or break a scene. But selecting the perfect needle drop is only one aspect of a music supervisor’s job, as Dan explains below.
What is your creative process for music supervision?
It starts with asking a lot of questions. Usually in the process of asking those questions what I aim to do is to gain the trust of the showrunner, director, or producer I’m working with. You need to understand what they’re doing, because that’s the most critical part of the process. The biggest mistakes and regrets are the ones where even though I may have worked really hard at it, I wasn’t able to pull out of the creative decision makers what it was that they were trying to do. And most people have a really hard time talking about music. They get nervous talking about music. They can talk about how they’re gonna frame a shot and more technical aspects that require more technical language, but they don’t have the language to talk about music. The first step is to make sure that I understand what the vision is, what they’re trying to accomplish, what kind of tone they’re trying to set with the music. I’ve learned over the years what questions to ask, talking to them in terms that make sense to them and then inferring what they mean. I came from a weird background that most music supervisors don’t, and I’ve found it’s really helpful, and if I look back on my career, I think I owe it to the fact that I started off in advertising. The first eight years of my career, I was in advertising. I wasn’t a copywriter or graphic designer or anything. I was an account executive. I learned how to take care of clients. There are a lot of weirdos who are encyclopedic about music. They have great instincts about all of it, but if you can’t sell what you’re trying to sell, what you’re trying to pitch, if you can’t talk to a creative person, if you can’t figure out how to communicate with them and make them feel at ease in sharing and talking about these details, you’re not going to be effective at this job.
If you worked in advertising, you know how to sell things. Not just selling your ideas to a filmmaker but selling a certain emotion or feeling to an audience.
In the context of a film or television show, it sounds probably very sleazy, but to a certain degree that is true and also weirdly I started my music supervision career doing TV commercials. I worked on those for three or four years before breaking into film. The stakes are really high in advertising. You have the most skeptical, critical client, who doesn’t understand music at all, so you really have to learn to walk the line being able to find a piece of music that adheres to the frame work, hits those cylinders, gets across what it needs to get across in 30 seconds. After working in commercials, film and television feels so much easier, because the people you’re working with are just so much more relatable, but you still have to use those same kind of skills.
When people think of music supervision, many think your job is mostly just picking needle drops. But what are you actually doing?
I spend most of my time managing a project, or in my case you typically end up having to work on multiple projects at once. That’s how things work. Managing a project, it’s not necessarily the individual looking for songs to license for a particular scene in a film or TV show. It’s mostly trying to make sure that the everything is communicated to the client I’m working with, the team I’m working with, making sure that I’m not going over budget, making sure that they know where we are in a process, tracking the music licenses if we’re in that part of a process on a project, which involves a lot of time reading over licenses and passing revisions back and forth that the production might have. It’s a lot of the details added up to what I might call “managing the project.” The actual music searching, which is what you’re referring to, is a relatively small part of that. I would say that’s maybe what you’re doing 20 to 25 percent of the time.
How do you license a song?
With any song you’re licensing, if it’s an actual recording, there’s two parts to it—the master recording (the thing you listen to) and then there’s the composition or the publishing of a song, you could refer to it as the sheet music. It’s the notes, the melody, it’s the lyrics, and so those are two separate kinds of things. Sometimes you’re only licensing just the composition, if you have a character singing the composition on camera and singing, like a cappella. If you’re licensing to record a new version specifically for a project, then you’re only licensing the composition side. You need to track down both halves.
The master usually a record label owns that. The more obscure and the further back you go, sometimes the harder it is to find who owns it. I like to delve into deeper cuts, sometimes because it’s inexpensive, but also maybe because they haven’t been licensed, so they’re not encumbered by people’s notions of the song having been used in other TV and movies that would alter the way you’re perceiving a piece of music. Sometimes the further back you go, it’s like, Fuck this label folded in 1973. So sometimes it takes a lot of detective work. Also on the composition side, there are reference websites. The PROs, public performance organizations that songwriters belong to—BMI or ASCAP you’ve probably heard of. There are other websites where you can go, which can be very helpful for getting you contact information or at least letting you know, Hey this is administered by Cobalt, this is published by Sony Music Publishing. Or it’s independent songwriter or publisher, and it’ll give you an email and phone number. If all those fail, you have to get really creative, maybe try to figure out another song by that songwriter and track them down that way. I just worked on this movie that Simon Barrett is doing they wanted some—not super obscure—but a band from the ’90s they wanted to use, and the songwriter’s not registered through any PROs, not really active, but we managed to track him down on social media and find him that way. Sometimes it takes creativity, but it can be time-consuming.
Have you ever hit any white-whale dead ends?
I had a really weird one that I almost wanted to do a podcast about, combining music and light true crime to tell the story. I worked on a film David Oyelowo directed a few years ago [The Water Man], and I pitched him a song by the artist Common, and it worked great in the scene. He really liked it, so I was tasked to go license it, and very strangely on this song, the master was through Universal, but the background singer owned a piece of the master, and that’s really rare, especially on a major label, but this is not your average background singer. This was Vinia Mojica, who is famous in hip hop circles. If you listen to any hip-hop in the ’90s, you’ve heard her multiple times. She sings the background vocals on “A Roller Skating Jam named ‘Saturday’” from De La Soul. She’s all over A Tribe Called Quest. She’s worked on countless hip hop classics—A Tribe Called Quest name checked Vinia Mojica—so it was a name I was familiar with, and I think Okay this will be easy. To make a long story short, she disappeared. I don’t mean she backed away from the industry. She straight-up disappeared. I went so deep into this, long past what a music supervisor should be doing, talking to friends of hers, people who she’s had any contact with. Everyone essentially said things got a little strange with her, she got bitter about the industry, and she went off to do something, but we haven’t seen her. I went and contacted her publisher, who probably gave me some information they shouldn’t have, but they said she isn’t cashing her royalty checks. She’s disappeared. For somebody who was not an obscure person in music, who was just gone, that was the freakiest. I’ve had lots of dead ends where we can’t find this songwriter share, none of the other songwriters know how to get a hold of them. That stuff happens not infrequently, but this was the weirdest. It’s been three or four years, so maybe there’s an addendum to it. Maybe she just took some time off. But the people I talked to had known her for decades. That’s why I was so alarmed.
So you’re basically the music detective.
A lot of it is detective work. I’ve learned how to be creative in order to find what I’m looking for and to not give up. There are some online resources that help. I have to be on Facebook, because there’s a group I belonged to, and it’s thousands of music supervisors, publishers, music reps. I’ve noticed people love to let everyone else know that they know the answer.
You have a radio show on KCRW, and you have to fill that time with a lot of songs, but I wonder if you ever get protective of certain songs, like you don’t want to give them away, because you’re saving them.
I worry about that all the time. I’m like, This is hidden gem. This is on my secret weapons list of things that haven’t really been licensed. And those are usually really cinematic or beautiful or intense. When you’re a music supervisor, you learn to think of things not so much as like, Hey I like this, this is good, this is bad. You learn to look at things like, Is this effective or not effective? Does this have potential, or does this not really have potential? Some things that I have tucked away, those hidden gems, I wonder if I really wanna play this on the radio show. Now I’m doing this thing with Vidiots [LA theater and video store run by Maggie Mackay, Dan’s wife], where I make these playlists, and they got requests from the people watching the movies asking like, Can you share that playlist before you were playing before Jaws? So now they’re putting all these playlists on their public Spotify, and I’m wondering if I’m giving away too much. I definitely think about that all the time. Sometimes I ask myself if a project is worth this song that I’ve been clutching onto for 12 years. Do I want to pitch this and run the risk of them using it, because I can count on one hand the times I’ve used the same song twice. Once I use something, I take it off the board. Usually I come to my senses, and I think most of the time there’s so many songs out there, and I have to put my best foot forward. I want to make a good impression and do a good job. Then if somebody does see that obscure movie or TV show, they might say, “Well this isn’t so great, but fuck, that cue was amazing. Who worked on that?”
Have you ever saved a song and then someone got to it first?
Happens all the time. I check this website that’s like the Wikipedia of keeping track of all the songs that have been licensed and what they’re in. You can type in Euphoria, and it tells you every song in Euphoria. But I just finished working on the Alex Braverman’s Andy Kaufman documentary [Thank You Very Much], and there was a song I pitched that worked perfectly for a scene, and I always like to look up the songs on that site before I pitch, so I can eliminate things that have been used too much, but I forgot to do it, and it turned out this super-obscure song was used in an episode of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, so I’m like whatever it’s one other show. It’s fine. We ended up keeping it in, and it the film just won best documentary at the Venice Film Festival, so it didn’t seem to hurt its chances.
Okay, what about songs you placed in something that you think are obscure but become big during the long wait for something to premiere?
There’s a song called “F.N.F” [by Hitkidd, GloRilla]. I worked on a show called Damascus for AMC, and it is probably the coolest, most interesting, most original thing I’ve ever worked on. Six-episode show. We finished it last year, and it was supposed to air this year on AMC, and we licensed a song for it, “F.N.F.” It’s a hip-hop thing that came from out of nowhere. After we licensed it, I noticed it started to get big. If you look at it now on Spotify, it has millions of plays. The show, I was like, When is it gonna come out?? I was concerned about that, and then it turned out AMC—this has never happened to me before, this was my first warning that something really fucked up was going on in the industry—AMC at the beginning of this year canceled the show after it had already been finished. This show that was completed with everything except for the music licenses, and the music licenses weren’t completed, because you always mix the show and then you handle the licensing. It’s common for licensing to be in the process even after the show has already aired. Meaning it’s been approved, and you have a formal approval, but the actual paperwork isn’t executed. It’s the last thing that happens. You mix the show, and sometimes music changes during that mix. Sometimes they’ll get shorter or longer or get taken out altogether. So that’s the last step that goes. But AMC was looking down the barrel of spending thousand dollars, and they canceled it.
Now the poor producers, it’s up to them to try to find a new home for it if it makes financial sense, or otherwise it’s a tax write-off. They aired a couple episodes at SXSW, but so far nobody has bought it. It’s a nightmare situation that you work your ass off, completing a show, and it’s fucking brilliant. It’s so good, which may be part of its problem. I don’t know if anybody is ever going to see this thing. By the time they do, that song will have already come and gone.
Are you worried about that sort of pre-airing cancelation happening again?
Everything was so bonkers these past few years, and so many things were being made, it’s a rare problem with my superior luck I just happened to be the one to music supervise that show. My worries now are that the amount of the work is going to be peeled back. I’m being told that there’s going to be a real frenzy once any agreements are reached and production goes back into swing. It’s going to be really crazy again for a while, but it’ll just be this bottleneck of everyone wanting to do shit. Things that were already in production that had to stop. That’s gonna go back, in addition to all the new things. I know that I’m gonna be able to find work.
What’s the difference between music budgets for film and television, and have you noticed music budgets decreasing or increasing anywhere?
It so varies from project to project and what kind of project. I started within the last five years doing more episodic series, and the budgets are always better on those. Right? They’re better funded, and there’s also a higher expectation, especially in the last 10-15 years, in the wake of The Sopranos, which I think is the gold standard of how music is used in episodic. There’s almost an expectation for music carry a certain impressiveness about the way it’s used. I worked on this Waco series, and it was an interesting, because it was a period piece set in two different time periods in the early ’80s when the Branch Davidians started and leading into the ’90s. Great project to work on for a music supervisor, and I had more budget to work with than I knew what to do with, because they believed in the project, and the music from the era helped determine which time period they were in. Same for Little America, a series I did for Apple. Every episode was different, not only a different time period but a different origin country we’d need to reference with the music. One episode is Japan, another Sri Lanka, and we had a really great budget to work with.
For films, it’s always been tough and always will be tough, unless you’re working on a big-budget kind of film that implements a lot of music. But usually I find the bigger the budget—unless it’s something like Guardians of the Galaxy—they just take whoever the biggest pop or hip-hop artist is for a song that isn’t that great and nobody gives a shit about. I worked on Chloe Dumont’s incredible movie Fair Play, and it was at Sundance. We had to really, really watch our budget. She had some big ideas we didn’t have the budget for, so I think we did a great job of finding things that were more obscure, even if it was a struggle. We ended up keeping one big Donna Summer song. Then the movie premieres at Sundance, and it’s the second-biggest sale out of Sundance ever, only behind Coda. I kept thinking afterwards, “Fuck. If we just had a fraction of that money to work with before.”
What’s the biggest misconception about your job?
I think how anybody can do it. Things have gotten easier with Spotify and these other resources making available a dizzying amount of the recorded music out there. But these playlists from Vidiots… I’m still shocked how much is not on Spotify. With all of these online resources that you have now, they’re making it harder for me to make this case that not anybody can do this, because it’s so much easier than when I started 20 years ago. I thought I had this huge upper hand, because I had access to the KCRW library, and now that’s kind of irrelevant. People within the industry sometimes don’t take what music supervisors do seriously. They think you’re just taking the music that the directors or editors put in, and you’re just licensing it, and it’s not really a creative job, or a job that takes a lot of experience or thought, which is bullshit. And it’s beyond just finding and licensing music. I know what do you do when you need an original song for a production, when you need music performed on camera. What you have to do ahead of time get that music legally cleared, how to handle contracting musicians. There’s a dizzying array of elements to the job that are beyond people’s preconceived notions of what the job is.
[Dan wishes more people would ask him about his work and is available for your podcasts.]
Really great, April. Not just the interview but your critical eye and contextualizing! Always interested to hear people talk about how two interrelated industries work together, the legal stuff, the union stuff, the synergy and the conflict. A+++