Hollywood Catches the Rock Beat

By Richard Zoglin

Sound tracks have become the key to orchestrating a box-office hit

Like the war whoops and thundering hoofbeats that always preceded the Indians in old westerns, Paramount's new hit musical Footloose was heard well before it was seen. The title song, performed by Kenny Loggins, was sent to radio stations six weeks before the movie opened. A second single from the movie, Shalamar's Dancing in the Sheets, was released three weeks later, and a third, Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for Hero, a week after that. The sound-track album and a promotional video also came out weeks before the movie. When the film itself finally opened around the country in mid-February, the groundwork had been laid: Footloose the movie was the nation's top-grossing film for the first three weeks of its release and has earned $38 million at the box office so far; Footloose the album, with sales of more than a million, is currently No. 5 on the Billboard charts; and Footloose the single is No. 4. Of such stuff are multimedia successes made.

Footloose is probably the most sophisticated example yet of the prominent role that musical sound tracks are playing in the marketing of Hollywood movies. Music used to be merely an afterthought or, at best, a happy byproduct of the movie. But the success of Saturday Night Fever in 1977, with its hit Bee Gees score, taught Hollywood a valuable lesson: rock sound tracks can be not only big sellers but big promotional tools for the films they embellish. The lesson was resoundingly driven home with last year's Flashdance, whose album (4.9 million copies sold in the U.S.), hit singles like What a Feeling, and omnipresent videos helped turn a mediocre film into a sleeper success, grossing $97 million in the U.S. and Canada.

Flashdance was just one of five sound tracks that ranked among the 50 top-selling albums of 1983 (along with Staying Alive, Yentl, The Big Chill and Return of the Jedi), and Hollywood will try to launch several more in the coming months. The most elaborate after Footloose may be Streets of Fire, a futuristic rock fable directed by Walter Hill (The Warriors, 48 Hrs.) and featuring Marine Jahan, the unbilled dancer who doubled for Jennifer Seals in Flashdance. Scheduled to open in June, the film includes songs by Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty and others.

In addition, Rick Springfield will star in and perform the music for another rock-oriented movie, Hard to Hold; one single, Love Somebody, has already been released, though the film is not due until April. The beat will go on with such upcoming movies as Purple Rain (music by Prince) and Beat Street (Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force, among others).

"Producers now are more aware of how contemporary music can help sell a film," says Gordon Weaver, president of marketing for Paramount's motion-picture division, who just returned from a month-long tour of Europe, Australia and the Far East to negotiate record deals for Footloose. (His airplane seatmate was a print of the film, traveling under the name F. Luce to ward off potential pirates.) Most of the major studios have hired music consultants to help develop sound tracks, and record producers are being brought in to work with directors early on. Says Phil Ramone, who co-produced the sound-track albums for Flashdance and Yentl: "Music producers are now an integral part of the creative process, rather than being called in after the fact."

Although the studio typically gets a percentage of sales from an album, the record's greatest value lies in the attention it draws to the film. "Every time a record plays, it's a commercial for the movie," says Jeanne Theis, former promotion director for the Stigwood Organization. Composer Jim Steinman, who wrote one number for Footloose and two for Streets of Fire, puts it more delicately: "A sound track represents an efficient and imaginative way of communicating the essence of a film to a potential audience. It is like hints of perfume in the air."

Industry observers trace the current boom in rock sound tracks to several factors: the burgeoning teen audience, which is also the heaviest buyer of rock albums; the advent of music videos; and a new generation of film executives who grew up in the rock era. Jay Lasker, president of Motown Records, offers a more down-to-earth theory. The proliferation of multi-cinema complexes in shopping malls, he contends, has been a boon for impulse buyers. Says he: "After the movie, when you're all pumped up, you can walk two doors down to the record store to buy the album."

Ideally, a movie and its musical score should match and work together. The question is whether the musical tail is starting to wag the celluloid dog--both in the choice of what films are produced and in the changes made to accommodate music. A concert scene in the upcoming Oh God III, for example, was expanded to allow for a music video. "Studios are evaluating the viability of music in every project," says Joel Sill, vice president of music at Warner Bros. "The film must be served first, but if you can expand a scene to include music and a video clip, it always makes sense." Adds Danny Goldberg, contemporary-music consultant for 20th Century-Fox: "It isn't my function to tell a director what to do, but I think a film that has music these days becomes a little more attractive as an investment."

Producers insist that the sound-track boom has not marred their judgment of what makes a good film. Moreover, even the youngest of the new Hollywood moguls can recall the heady months following Saturday Night Fever. The studios scrambled to duplicate that film's success and came up with such box-office flops as FM, I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Says Footloose Executive Producer Daniel Melnick: "If you don't have a picture the audience really enjoys, you could have 100 hours a week on MTV and it wouldn't help." On the other hand, Hollywood seems to be reasoning, it can't hurt. --By Richard Zoglin. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/New York, Denise Worrell/Los Angeles