@PaulR said:
You have to work and get paid. You, as a writer of film music, regardless of how wonderful your score is going to be, cannot polish a turd. .
No, you can't, but that's part of why I say you have to try and leverage yourself. If you "have to work and get paid," and you end up on a crappy film, they still put your name 12 feet across the screen on a single card in bold type. Plus, you feel like you just wasted X weeks of your life. Plus, because it was a crappy film, it was 10 times harder to write the score for. I just went through this in January, when I did the score for a Sci-Fi Channel movie. If you've seen those, you know how bad they are. But this one was being produced by a friend of mine, who produced the series Farscape, and he's a great writer, plus a friend, plus my girlfriend ended up being in the movie, so I figured it would be the exception.
Wrong.
It was a nightmare; the director walked off the picture the second they wrapped, and the movie was just atrocious. I had 5 weeks to write 80 minutes of "try and save this crapcan movie" alien music, with nobody clear on the drama. The cue sheet read like, "01:05:00:09 - Marines arrive. Marine music here. 01:05:04:15 - girls get scared. Girls-are-scared-music here. 01:05:14:23 - Alien pops out. Alien popping out music here." It was from hell. Plus, I didn't sleep, hated my life, and at the end, hated every note of music. So even here, when I didn't take the gig for the money, and it seemed like everything would be cool about it, it was just horrific. And my name's on it, tweleve feet across on a single card at the top. I'm just glad amongst the godawful reviews, nobody's taken particular notice of the music at all. Fine by me. Just walk away and let's pretend it never happened, shall we?
So I'm saying that since it can always go south, for the "best" of reasons, it's usually better to give yourself the best odds you can first, by truly seeking out people who tell the kind of stories you like, and envision using the music the way you do, and like the music you do. Hard to find, but totally worth it. And if you can do other music gigs to ease the money pressure and allow you to be more selective, so much the better. And yes, the Coen brothers either totally hit it or totally veer left, but however sparse the Carter Burwell score, I always hear something cool I wish I'd thought of.
_Mike