Is there anybody out there?

In the late seventies, out of accident or curiosity, some unknown stoner put on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon while simultaneously watching a muted The Wizard of Oz. Thus begat music/film synchronicity. For The Dark Side of the Rainbow, the quality of effect is directly proportional to the amount of drugs you have ingested. Sober, the whole is more annoying than the sum of its parts.

But even if the idea of a midnight Floyd/Wizard screening makes you want to go kick a flying monkey, don’t hate the concept. Movie modding has yielded some great results. There are the soundtracks-as-criticism (DJ Spooky’s remix of Birth of a Nation, Rebirth of a Nation), the satirical (RiffTrax or Cinematic Titanic‘s MST3K-style riffs on popular films), the officially-sanctioned (Phillip Glass’s new soundtracks for silent films), and pure brilliant (Wall-E with Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Another Brick in the Wall-E).

When we were teenagers, I swore to my brother that his most-beloved album Frank Zappa’s The Yellow Shark was a total mindf*ck when played with his favorite film Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet.  Hadn’t he heard about it? It was all the rage! Of course, I was lying through my teeth. We pressed play on the cd the moment the line in the Criterion Collection intro hit the last letter (go ahead try it).

And it worked! My brother was blown away, jaw dropped: “Wow! I thought you were full of it, but this is awesome!” I felt like the joke was on me. Finally, I gave in and told him I WAS full of it. But that only increased his enthusiasm. We had discovered something. We went on a quest to test as many movie/music combinations as we could find.

Some may argue that replacing the soundtrack is hijacking the filmmaker’s vision (or the musician’s. Or both). Yeah, so what? The original version will always be around, and the modification can yield new insights, turn a mediocre movie into a masterpiece, or revitalize an old favorite. Those of us who wouldn’t sit through Twilight if you paid us, may find comedy gold when paired with Rifftrax’s redub.  And what’s not to like about Nevermind The Memento (Memento with Nirvana’s Nevermind), The Fellowship of the IV (The Fellowship of the Ring with Led Zeppelin IV), Ziggy Starfighter (The Last Starfighter with Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust), or my personal favorite, The Ozzercist (The Exorcist with Black Sabbath’s first album)?

You can even make your own. For my experimental music podcast Theatre Intangible, we created a live improv soundtrack for the 1931 Dracula with instructions on how to sync it up [episode link].  The episode remains our most-downloaded to date. I always encourage our listeners to try any episode with the movie of their choice, sound down, subtitles on. Such a pairing makes some of the more challenging experiments more digestible. We plan on doing another movie-mod soon.  Perhaps Weekend at Bernie’s 2?

What do you think? Is movie modding a harmless bit of fun, a way to new insights, or the debasement of artists original visions? What are your favorite pairings?

Tony Youngblood is the current Foursquare Mayor of the Belcourt Theatre, a film and music snob, and producer of the experimental improv music blog and podcast Theatre Intangible. His favorite films include Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, Abbass Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician, Lee Chang Dong’s Oasis, and Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap.