Replacing Film Scores for Copyright Reasons

[Teasing the Korean]

Last night, Ms. TTK and I watched Trouble Man on Plex. I don't think we had ever seen the film, although we've had the soundtrack album by Marvin Gaye forever. From the beginning, I suspected that something was amiss, and as the film went on, I knew I was right: All of the scenes in which Marvin Gaye's music was prominently featured used replacement music by what sounded like a bad garage band trying to play funk for the first time.

Interestingly, the movie retained Gaye's instrumental dramatic underscore, presumably because 1) it would have been difficult to remove under the dialog, and 2) this music had not been released on the original soundtrack LP.

All I can assume is that this film somehow slipped into the public domain, but they could not use music that had appeared on the original LP because it was still under copyright. If they had at least indicated this on a card at the beginning of the film, it would have saved us an hour-and-a-half of our lives.

Yet one more reason that many of us prefer the physical object over streaming. Now I can't help but wonder how common or rare this practice is.

[Daniel A]

Not the same, but similar. In 'Billion Dollar Brain', one of the somewhat forgotten sequels to the semi-classic "anti-Bond" spy thriller The Ipcress File, there is a whole scene cut where a Beatles record is being played at high volume. It was edited out already on DVD releases 20 years ago. Apparently, it was considered too expensive to obtain the rights to use the song. 

 

I might have an old VHS copy which includes the cut scene somewhere.

 

 

Edited January 20, 2024 by Daniel A

[Teasing the Korean]

7 minutes ago, Daniel A said:

Not the same, but similar. In 'Billion Dollar Brain', one of the somewhat forgotten sequels to the semi-classic "anti-Bond" spy thriller The Ipcress File, there is a whole scene cut where a Beatles record is being played at high volume. It was edited out already on DVD releases 20 years ago. Apparently, it was considered too expensive to obtain the rights to use the song. 

There are examples of pop tunes being cut from DVDs, because the original contracts specified videotape, and did not take into account future formats such as DVDs and streaming.  It is unusual, though, to have the score cut.  This also happened with Pete Rugolo's music for "The Fugitive" on the first DVD release of the series. 

[Rooster_Ties]

WKRP was a nightmare to negotiate the physical media rights for, iirc.

[medjuck]

2 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

There are examples of pop tunes being cut from DVDs, because the original contracts specified videotape, and did not take into account future formats such as DVDs and streaming.  It is unusual, though, to have the score cut.  This also happened with Pete Rugolo's music for "The Fugitive" on the first DVD release of the series. 

Wow they had a bad lawyer.  However there were many films that didn't clear music rights for home video because home video barely existed (if it existed at all) at the time the film was made.  Frank Zappa held up the home video release of MediumCool for many years because of a song that was barely heard in the film. 

Later contracts bought music rights for "any future medium  throughout  the universe". (I'm paraphrasing-- can't remember the exact wording. )