credit where credit is due
As any of you who bother to watch movies through the end credits will know, in the last thirty years there has been a huge increase in the amount of contributors to a film who get credit.
In the Golden Age, you had a couple of screens worth of primary contributors before the story got going, most of these being the above-the-line people (actors, director, writers, etc).
Nowadays, virtually everyone is contractually entitled to be credited in the film’s end credits, from the production runners through the personal assistants, drivers, caterers, accountants … enough personnel that bigger movies need ten minutes or more to scroll all the names past. Even the managerial staff of the visual effects companies get credit. They’re all covered, right? Right?
Wrong.
There’s one major group of professionals who virtually never receive credit at the end of a motion picture. They are, so far as I can tell, the last group of professionals to regularly contribute to films who are not contractually entitled to appear in the credits. I’m talking, of course, of the motion picture score musicians.
Play a few of your favorite flicks, and skim through the end credits. Found one that listed all the violinists, oboists, cellists, percussionists, French hornists, and so on whose performance appears in the score? Didn’t think so. You may, perhaps, see a featured soloist or two, but probably only if that soloist is a famous name in his or her own right (like, say, Yo Yo Ma).
Now, go back to one of those favorite flicks, and find the section in the end credits which lists sound and score personnel. If it’s a movie with a big score (like the Lord of the Rings trilogy), you’ll see credits for people like score producers, orchestrators, orchestra contractors, score preparation people, music programmers, and of course music editors. They all get credit, and I believe they’re all contractually entitled to it.
So why aren’t the musicians themselves?
If you forward ahead, to the songs credits, even the most incidental of songs, like a snippet from Handel’s Concerto Grosso Opus 6 No. 6 that lasts for five seconds, or Tom Cruise croaking out a lullaby to Dakota Fanning, will get complete mention, including composer, performer, and publisher (where applicable). Handel has been dead for two-hundred and fifty years, and his music is in the public domain. But they dutifully list his or any other composer’s contribution in the credits, no matter how incidentally it appears during the movie.
So why not the musicians?
It’s been a question that’s really puzzled me big-time, for a long time. Is it because somehow the individual musicians are not perceived of as being contributors, but the orchestra itself? If so, why are orchestras themselves not often mentioned, unless they’re a “name” orchestra, like the London Symphony? Is it because the musicians’ contribution is not considered material enough to warrant inclusion? I’ll argue with anyone who thinks the value of those musicians’ contributions is somehow less than the petty cash accountant, or the Teamster driver.
Or perhaps it’s because the guild(s) to which these musicians belong doesn’t have the clout and sway of the Teamsters Union, or the SAG union, or the WGA. Perhaps there is no unified voice standing up and saying, “put us in the credits, or we walk”.
Occasionally, if the composer is feeling nice, or someone thinks to do it, you’ll see the list of musicians in the compact disc release of the soundtrack. But not always. I’m a big soundtrack collector; many of my discs have no listing of musicians.
I think that sucks. I think it sucks that the musicians appear to be the last professionals in the industry excluded from the end credits, and I think it sucks that the composers, like Hans Zimmer and John Williams and Danny Elfman, don’t push the producers to put those musicians’ names in the credits, whether they’re contractually obligated to appear or not.
Just take a second to imagine Star Wars without the orchestra. John Williams conducting to a room full of empty seats.
People filled those seats, people with names. And their contributions really mattered. So put their fucking names in the credits.
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