The other day, the wretched 70’s snoozer Joyride was on. The only reason I watched it (actually taped so I could fast foward past the bad parts, which just happened to be ALL of it) was that I have the soundtrack. Why do I have the soundtrack to a movie sucks this badly, you might ask yourself? Well, as a collector of Electric Light Orchestra memorabilia, I got a copy because about half the songs in the movie are performed by ELO.
Or so I thought.
Seems that the rights had apparently expired or possibly had been revoked. The movie’s music had been replaced by generic drivel (no offense, studio musicians, a job’s a job, I know).
I was under the impression that any music used in a movie could be used ad infinitum. A further check of the Internet Movie Data Base shows that background music of Grease, (the stuff played at the rehearsal of the big dance, had been replaced as well, even though those songs appear on the original soundtrack.
So, someone set me straight on this matter, please.
The rights might have expired, but more likely when the movie was made, no provision was made for the videocassette rights. When the time came to make a videocassette or DVD, ELO probably demanded extra payment and the producers didn’t want to pay it.
umm… if you fastforwarded it then maybe you missed the music. It’s possible that the song was on radio in a car or something for only a split second. The reason it’s on the soundtrack is because it would help sell the soundtrack.
I’ve a couple of sound tracks like this, one is Freejack, it has a Scorpions song on it that I’ll be damned if I can find it in the movie at all. I think the same type of thing happens on the Top Gun soundtrack too. Right now though I can’t remember any more off the top of my head.
I know nothing about extra money for going to Video though so that is another possiblilty though it sounds strange to me that you wouldn’t sing a contract for X number of years and not per format.
I would stop every few moments where music was likely to be played and found nothing. When the credits rolled, there was NO music listed at all, not even the incidental stuff.
Heavy Metal is another movie whose video release was delayed because the original music usage contracts did not include anything but the original feature-film distribution. It took years for the video distributor to iron out the legalese on all of the various songs before the movie could be released on home video. And whereas Joyride used its songs for texture, Heavy Metal couldn’t really be released with new filler.