Alien

Alien is the Jerry Goldsmith score for the 1979 science fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott about a deep-space tugboat crew who face a hostile alien life form that boards their ship and destroys them. The film marked the first collaboration between Scott and Goldsmith—a turbulent partnership that resulted in most of the music being revised, rescored, relocated, or dropped altogether in favor of temp tracks. Though the score did not survive as a whole in the finished film, it gained widespread familiarity and popularity through the release of its soundtrack album following the success of the movie, and has since become one of the most admired of Goldsmith's science fiction scores.

Commission
The early concept and screenplay for Alien came to 20th Century Fox by way of Walter Hill, David Giler, and Gordon Carroll, who had formed a production company called Brandywine with ties to the studio (and who helped rewrite the original Dan O'Bannon script). After vetting and rejecting several candidates for director, the producers and writers settled on Ridley Scott, whose debut feature film The Duelists had impressed them. Scott's first choice as composer for the film was electronic music pioneer Isao Tomita, but his preference was overruled by the studio, who wanted a more widely-known composer. Alan Ladd, Jr., President of 20th Century Fox at the time, and Lionel Newman, head of the Fox music department, recommended that Scott meet with Jerry Goldsmith to discuss scoring Alien. Goldsmith had established a solid relationship with the studio and Newman in particular (through films such as Stagecoach, The Blue Max, The Sand Pebbles, Planet of the Apes, Patton, and his Academy Award-winning score for The Omen).

"He was immediately enthusiastic about the whole notion," Scott recalled in a 1999 interview, "the whole genre and the whole description of the atmosphere." Goldsmith first saw a rough cut of the film in late 1978. "I was sitting in a projection room all by myself, and of course everything was much over-length, and I remember to this day the one scene where he was looking for his cat, and it was in this dark chamber in this ship, and he hadn't cut it, and it went on and on, and I was absolutely terrified. I kept saying 'it's just a movie, it's just a movie,' but it really scared the shit out of me. I mean, I was terribly frightened with it—which is good, because that helps when I have to sit down and write the music for it."

Temp tracking
Terry Rawlings, who had been a sound editor for 17 years before working with Ridley Scott on The Duelists, was brought in to serve as the film's editor. Rawlings had developed his own method for working temp music into the rough working cuts of the films he was editing, an approach Scott found fascinating. "He taught me all I know about film music," Scott said, "or made me very conscious of the value of the score." Associate Ivor Powell approved of the technique as well. "He's an absolute master of doing a rough, temporary soundtrack. He's just got this great eye and ear, and he says, 'I know what piece of music would be great in there.'" Rawlings recalls, "When it came to Alien, I temped the film myself with as much Jerry Goldsmith music as I could, because I knew he was going to do the film. And whenever I do these temps, I obviously know by that time who's going to be the composer, and I bend over backwards to find stuff they've done in various other films to see if I can make it work." In the case of Alien, he temped a number of scenes with the music from Goldsmith's score to the 1962 John Huston film Freud. He felt it would guide the composer in the direction they wanted him to go. "You know the mood you want to create," Rawlings stated. "You know what you want to try and say musically. And if you get a mood correct, that's the mood I feel they should go with. They can change the theme, change the orchestration, but keep in mind the mood we created."

Goldsmith, however, was not as enthusiastic about the approach. "They thought they were giving me a compliment by using my stuff. I didn't like it. I'd rather they had used somebody else's music." Nor was he impressed with the choices Rawlings had made for the temp tracks. For instance, in the opening scene aboard the Nostromo when the crew is revived from stasis, Rawlings had inserted the piece "Thirsty Girl" from Freud. "It was sort of a little lullaby I had written," Goldsmith later recalled, "and everybody thought, 'Oh, look how wonderful that music works!,' and I said, 'It stinks! It's all wrong!' So I wrote a piece for it that was pretty—pretty but mysterious. And I thought it worked brilliantly."

Similarly, when Goldsmith put together the rest of the score, he did so according to his usual methods, disregarding the music Rawlings had temped for the rough cut of the movie.

Composition
To create a musical palate that would reflect the otherworldly and ghastly elements of the film that had made such a deep impression on him, Goldsmith returned to the techniques he had been developing and innovating over the previous decade of scoring similar science fiction and horror films. Instead of the "cleaner" electronic sound for futuristic scores like Logan's Run, he combined the primordial percussive elements of Planet of the Apes with the organic instrumental dissonances of The Omen and The Swarm. To lend an appropriately alien atmosphere to the texture of the music, Goldsmith augmented the orchestra with a serpent, a shofar (an instrument he previously used in Planet of the Apes), an Australian didjeridu, steel drums, and a shankha (an Indian conch). The latter two instruments would achieve their greatest effect through the use of another familiar tool: an Echoplex, the device Goldsmith had utilized to create the infamous repeating, fading brass triplets so central to the theme for Patton, as well as for sequences in his scores for Planet of the Apes and Coma. Goldsmith blended these exotic elements to produce an entirely new range of tones for the film; for instance, looping the Indian conch through the echoplex machine created a forlorn, hollow, deep-winded sound he called the "alien effect" (a texture the director loved).

Though intent on satisfying the need to musically represent the horrific elements of the movie, Goldsmith also brought his own passion for the vast mysteries of deep space exploration to the project. "I always think of space as the great unknown," he mused, "not as terrifying, but questioning, and sort of an air of romance about it. And I guess I approached Alien that way. I thought, 'Well, let me play the whole opening very romantically and very lyrically and then let the shock come as the story evolves.' In other words, don't give it away in the main title. So I wrote this very nice main title. There was mystery, but sort of lyrical mystery." (The music editing log also suggests Goldsmith was writing for a very different opening visual than the slow, diametrical pan of the alien world used in the final cut, instead describing the first shot as a "ship floating in space"; the grand crescendo at 2:24 of the original "Main Title" was written to accompany the initial flyover shot of the Nostromo.)

While sweeping and romantic, even epic, in scope, the main title as originally composed came to personify the growing separation of vision between director and composer. Scott did not share Goldsmith's poetic view of the cosmos—particularly as the prelude to a fundamentally xenophobic story about the inherent dangers of curiosity and exploration. "It didn't go over too well," Goldsmith explained about his initial version of the main title sequence, "and Ridley and I had major disagreements over that." Ultimately Scott insisted that Goldsmith rewrite the piece (based on the sound of another cue the director loved—"The Passage"). The composer acquiesced, though he didn't favor the decision. "So then I subsequently wrote a new main title, which was the obvious thing—weird and strange—which everybody loved, and I didn't love. Consequently, I kept getting kudos for years after for the main title I wrote for Alien, which was not exactly my choice. The original took me a day to write, and the alternate one took me about five minutes."

The composer would later attribute their creative estrangement to a combination of the director's inexperience and basic breakdown in the exchange of ideas. "Ridley is a brilliant filmmaker, he's a brilliant visualist, and I think that was just his second film and he wasn't as articulate then about what the music should do; the message I was getting from him was he wanted me to be visual with the music. Well, I can't be visual with the music; that's not what I'm supposed to do. Let the director and the cinematographer put the visuals on the screen, let me do the emotional element. And I think that's where it became a big problem with me, and I think the biggest problem was just in communication between me and the director."

Goldsmith had his usual collaborator, Arthur Morton, perform the orchestrations for the score.

Recording
Eric Tomlinson, who recorded Star Wars and Superman: The Movie for John Williams, served as recording engineer for Alien. Tomlinson had opened Anvil Studios in Denham, England in 1968 with his assistant Alan Snelling (who would also assist with recording Alien). The Anvil recording stage was 65 feet wide, 80 feet deep, and had a 50-foot ceiling, and boasted a Rupert Neve mixing console that had been installed in 1970. Bob Hathaway, who had worked with Tomlinson on Superman, was the music editor.

Because of the complexity of processing the variety of unusual instruments, some of which would be echoplexed, Goldsmith had to remain in the booth with the engineers to handle the operation personally. Lionel Newman, head of the Fox music department and the man who had suggested that Ridley Scott recruit Goldsmith for the score, served as conductor in his stead. The National Philharmonic Orchestra—originally the RCA Symphony in London, under Charles Gerhardt—would perform the music.

Recording sessions began on February 20, 1979, opening with the various takes of the romantic Main Theme (which was also meant to play during the film's end credit sequence). The afternoon of the first day was spent recording cues involving the didjeridu and serpent. Over the next three days, time was fairly evenly split between recording cues with the symphony and mixing down the results in the booth, allowing adjustments to be made and rerecorded at need. The final two cues recorded on the afternoon of February 23 involved the "alien effect" of echoplexing the Indian conch—an effect Scott loved.

On February 24, Maurice Jarre and the London Symphony Orchestra arrived at the Anvil stage to record The Magician of Lubin; in the meantime, Scott and film editor Terry Rawlings sat with Goldsmith and watched a rough cut of the film with the music added in. The director immediately asked that five cues be rewritten, including the Main Title and the piece Goldsmith had written to replace the lullaby at the start of the movie ("Hypersleep"). The composer agreed, but the stage had already been turned over, and they had to reschedule time to record the new cues. They managed to work in a half-day session on February 27 and a full day on the 1st of March, which brought an end to the recording process. Goldsmith remained in England to write the score for The Great Train Robbery—also recorded at the Anvil stage in April of that year.

Post-production changes
The revisions to, and re-recordings of, the five pieces the filmmakers had changed were only the beginning of the alterations that would be made to Goldsmith's score. Several factors seem to have played a role in what followed:


 * The director and editor apparently approached the recorded score not as a finalized filmography, but as a general pool of music from which they could draw what elements they needed and simply disregard the rest.
 * Scott and Rawlings continued to edit the film following the delivery of the score. According to some documentation, they trimmed the movie by another 11 minutes in the final weeks of post-production. Rather than excising whole scenes, many of these changes were to single shots and integral transitions—which had the effect of changing the rhythm and pacing of scenes after they'd already been scored. In places where they couldn't make the existing score fit the new flow, they simply replaced it with more temp music.
 * The effectiveness of the original temp music Rawlings had selected for the rough cut had by this time become ingrained in the director's impression of the film. Now, with the project nearing its completion, neither of them wanted to let it go. Rawlings was comfortable justifying the decision, explaining about his temp music, "I must say at times there's areas you can get to work better than they do later."

The result was a drastically condensed and altered version of what Goldsmith had composed and recorded. Only a single cue made it into the film as intended and recorded ("To Sleep"), while several cues from Freud still remained in the final cut. "We bought a couple of the Goldsmith pieces we had in the temp," co-producer David Giler later admitted. (More than a couple, in fact. The opening minute and a half of the "Main Title" played over the scene when the facehugger bleeds acid through the floor of the medical bay; "Carcot's Show" and "Desperate Case" covered the entire sequence when Captain Dallas ventures into the ship's air conduits in an attempt to flush out the alien; while "The First Step" underscored Ripley's search for the cat on the bridge late in the film.) Giler added, "And then in the dub, in the mix, we really played down a lot of his stuff and played up some kinds of weird sounds we had. Mr. Goldsmith was quite unhappy when he saw the movie."

Rawlings believed the studio shared some of the responsibility for the use of the temp tracks. "Keeping the music that he wrote for Freud . . . was Fox's decision. They could've said, 'We're using the music that was written.'" But he made no excuses, nor offered any apologies, for his decisions. "I do think that what we did in those areas was better than what he did, and I'm taking nothing away from the rest of the film because what he did was perfect for it."

Goldsmith wasn't satisfied with Rawlings's explanation, nor pleased with the results. Some of his unhappiness was a response to the errant reaction from film music aficionados, who couldn't have been aware of what had taken place without his consent: "Consequently, I got more letters saying, 'Starting to repeat yourself, eh?'"

The final alteration involved music that Goldsmith hadn't composed at all—for Alien or any other movie. Scott and Rawlings had the opportunity to salvage the majestic theme music they had rejected for the opening title sequence and use it over the end credits. But when a run of descending trumpet notes in Goldsmith's underscore for the movie's final scene reminded Rawlings of Howard Hanson's Romantic Symphony (Symph. #2, Op. 30), he opted to temp track both the final scene of the film and the end credits with a section of it from the 1st Movement. "Hanson's Symphony #2 was so perfect for it," Rawlings explained. "It just did something that Jerry's end titles didn't achieve, even though it was good. It just didn't give us that emotional content." As a result, the full presentation of the film's Main Theme never actually made an appearance in the film itself—though it has since become arguably the most widely-known rejected title theme for any movie in history.

Years later, Ridley Scott praised Goldsmith's work on his film. "Jerry Goldsmith's score is one of my favorite scores," he said. "Seriously threatening, but beautiful. It has beauty, darkness, and seems to play the DNA of some distant society." On the other hand, when Scott approached Goldsmith to score his film Legend in 1985, the composer's response was straightforward. "I told Ridley working on Alien was one of the most miserable experiences I've ever had in this profession." (Goldsmith was able to put aside their past differences and provided the score for Legend . . . which Scott subsequently cut altogether from the American release of the film.)

Critical response
Though it was far from the highest-earning film of 1979, Alien was nonetheless a commercial box office success, making $78,900,000 in the United States and £7,886,000 in the United Kingdom during its first run. It ultimately grossed $80,931,801 in the United States, though international box office figures have varied from $24 million to $122,700,000. Its total worldwide gross has been listed within the range of $104,931,801 to $203,630,630. The film also garnered wide critical acclaim, and the movie, crew, and members of its cast received numerous other award nominations, winning several. It has remained highly praised in subsequent decades, being inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2002 for historical preservation as a film which is "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2008, it was ranked as the seventh-best film in the science fiction genre by the American Film Institute, and as the 33rd-greatest movie of all time by Empire magazine.

Goldsmith's score was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media, and a BAFTA Award for Best Film Music.

Motive and thematic layout
Goldsmith's score for Alien—as it was conceived and composed, not how it was ultimately presented in the film—could be referred to as a "dichotomy of mystery" wherein each theme, melody, and motif arises from, and culminates in, one of two categories of ambiguity. The first is the romantic mystery of deep-space flight, of humans braving the unknown, of the wonders of the universe explored. Goldsmith, who was particularly passionate about this sense of galactic novelty, enjoyed writing music to accompany it (his other highly-regarded work of 1979, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, explored the vein in much more depth). The second category, that of dark mystery, would encompass the dangers of the unknown, the perils lurking in the shadows, the consequences of curiosity.

Goldsmith illustrated the fundamental distinction between these two types of mystery through the presence or absence of specific pitch and melody: the human elements of the film demonstrate tune and tone through standard instrumentation, while the alien elements are replete with atonal, non-melodic phrasing and aleatoric techniques.

Original Soundtrack
In spite of the changes made to his score in the film, Goldsmith was able to present it as conceived and written by producing an original soundtrack album in 1979. It had five releases on LP in eight different countries, as follows:


 * 20th Century Records (T-593) in Canada, the UK, and the U.S.
 * 20th Century Records (6370 295) in Italy and the Netherlands
 * 20th Century Records (L.P. 110.023) in Venezuela
 * 20th Century Records (T-593) in Spain (under the title "Alien, El 8º Pasajero")
 * Casablanca Records (25SA-261) in Japan

Silva Screen re-released the OST in 1987 on vinyl and LP (FILM 003), then again in 1988 for the first time on CD (FILMCD 003).

All of these releases featured the same 10 pieces (35 minutes, 2 seconds of music), none of which were presented in their full form in the final cut of the movie. ("The Landing" was the closest, but post-scoring contractions to the scene forced a few splices in the piece—though the music was inserted again when the Nostromo lifts off from the alien planet.)



Soundtrack Library Bootleg
In the late 90s, bootleg copies of Alien began to surface. The first was Soundtrack Library CD 005, which contained a more complete version of Goldsmith's original conception for the score. The arrangement was not chronological, and the titles of several pieces (likely arbitrary choices by the album's "producers") were different than official releases and the titles on the original manuscripts, but no prior release offered more material.



Studio Master Track Bootleg
Around 2000 another bootleg surfaced, simply titled Studio Master Track Tapes 500. As with the Soundtrack Library bootleg, it appears to be a re-edit of the original concept score into a cohesive whole (in some cases, by combining previously separate tracks). Once again the evidently arbitrary track titles differed from the OST and manuscript titles. This bootleg release, however, did feature the score in chronological order.



20th Anniversary 2-CD Set (Banda Sonora Original Del Film Y Temas Rechazados)
In 1999, Memory Records released a 2-CD, limited edition (500 units, handwritten serial numbers) of the complete score from Alien (CDS-2431) to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the film's release. The rare CD set claimed to offer for the first time complete original motion picture soundtrack in chronological order. The first disc accomplished this simply by including all the music Scott and Rawlings had temped from Freud, the Bach-composed source music, and the Goldsmith score as edited in the final cut of the film. The second disc contained the rejected elements of the score.

The credits listed the release's production label as "Weyland-Yutani Music" (Weyland-Yutani was the corporation that owned the Nostromo and employed its crew, referred to several times as "the company" during the movie), which revealed this to be yet another bootleg release, in spite of its unusually high quality—particularly the accompanying booklet, which included movie stills and an index of cues with commentary, all written in Spanish.



Intrada Complete 2-CD Set
On November 19, 2007, Intrada released a 2-CD version with the complete score from Alien (MAF 7102), produced by Michael Matessino and Nick Redman.

The first CD featured the complete score plus several rescored alternate cues; the second CD contained the original 1979 OST plus seven bonus tracks, which included the film version of the Main Title, alternate and demonstration tracks, unused inserts, and the only source music in the film. The set also includes a booklet with extensive liner notes, cue-by-cue analyses, and the story behind the making of the film and the score.

Compilation releases and recordings
In addition to the releases above, the main theme and various other pieces from the score have been featured in at least 19 other compilation albums featuring general film music, the works of Jerry Goldsmith, music from popular science fiction films, and the music from the entire Alien franchise. It was also prominently featured in Alien: A Biomechanical Symphony (Varese Sarabande, VCL 0512 1135, released in May of 2012 and conducted by Diego Navarro), a concert performance of music from the first Alien film as well as four other films in the series.

Cue Listing
The original reel, part, and slate numbers for the score, along with the title of each piece, the date it was recorded, and notes on its use (or lack thereof) in the final edit of the movie: