Will We See a Jonah Hex Trailer in Front of Elm Street or Not?
Steve Barton
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Things have been deathly quiet out of the Jonah Hex camp so far this year — our last update was in early January to be exact. And if Brent Hinds, the guitarist and singer of Mastodon, which has been recording and rerecording the film’s soundtrack since last fall, is correct, things might be staying that way for a while.
New York Magazine chatted with Hinds recently, who told them “What I’ve seen so far doesn’t seem to be finished to me“, adding, “I’d heard a little rumor: ‘This shit ain’t gonna be ready.’ But then again, Warner Bros. is such a fucking bastard. They’re like, ‘The shit comes out on the day it’s supposed to.’ But what do I know? I’m just the dude to whom they’re like, ‘Hey, play some crazy fuckin’ music!’”
“The day it’s supposed to” refers to April 30th, when the trailer is scheduled to finally make its debut in front of New Line’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. If not, says one marketing chief at a rival studio … it means they’ll surely have to postpone, since there’s no other Warner Bros. film in the marketplace before June 18th [the film’s scheduled release date] that could be used to expose Hex to the same young demographic. And even if they do get the trailer out on time, says another marketing executive, “They’ll have to spend a fortune on TV to make up for the [advertising] delays.”
As for Mastadon’s involvement, it’s so convoluted we’re just gonna quote NY Mag and Hinds in their entirety:
The band had been brought in by [director Jimmy] Hayward to collaborate on the score with Horton’s composer John Powell back in September 2009. However, the reshoots and subsequent reediting meant Powell, who was already booked for Tom Cruise’s Knight and Day and Doug Liman’s Valerie Plame pic Fair Game, had to leave. “There was no animosity,” says Hinds. “He was just like, ‘If you haven’t figured out what you’re doing cinematically, I gotta go.'”
In his place, composer Marco Beltrami (Repo Men) was hired to work with Mastodon. (A spokesman for Warner Records said the label would not comment on the soundtrack nor Mastodon’s role in it.) “All of a sudden, there’s this new guy, who went in a different direction,” continues Hinds, who by that point was on a world tour with the band. “And there was no way he could connect with me: They brought all the new scenes to us, but I was on tour this entire time, so I had no time to preconceive what I wanted the movie to sound like. Being so busy … it’s hard to be creative when you’re going through the same motions every day [onstage].”
Hinds says that Beltrami wanted a more restrained, subtle approach than the vigorous shredding Mastodon recorded for Hex in L.A. last fall. “I totally had to go back and start over again,” says Hinds, reached in Atlanta as he prepped for the band’s 37-date spring tour of North America. “We’re still working on it. We wrapped a little of it today; we’re doing a little more tomorrow. Tomorrow is enough for me. I was finished months ago. We had such short notice to work on the thing.”
Though constant last-minute change isn’t a new phenomenon in Hollywood, Hinds, a first-time movie composer, has found the process frustrating. “I blew my wad over there,” he says of the time Mastodon spent recording and composing in L.A. last fall. “It was some of the best shit I’ve ever written in my life. Now I’m just trying to finish with as much patience as possible.”
Be sure to hit the link for the entire article for even more behind-the-scenes BS this flick has had to endure (i.e., Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend) being brought in to serve as Hayward’s directing “consultant” during reshoots). I know one thing: I’ll definitely be getting to NOES early enough for the trailers to see if Hex shows up or not.
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