In the mid-seventies William Friedkin, who had just made The French Connection and The Exorcist and could do whatever he liked, came across Tangerine Dream. How he came across them depends on who tells it. The band's own history says he saw the three of them play in a church in the Black Forest while he was in Germany, and quotes his account of it: three hours and more, and an audience that stayed silent. Christopher Franke says Friedkin heard the music in Los Angeles and rang up. Either way, he wanted them to score his next film, and he wanted the music before he shot it, so that he could cut the picture to the music. Nobody had done that. The film was Sorcerer. It cost twenty-two million dollars, opened a month after Star Wars, and died. The score did not.
- Film
- Sorcerer, dir. William Friedkin, 1977. From the same novel as Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1953), Georges Arnaud's of 1952, and dedicated to Clouzot
- Score
- Tangerine Dream: Froese, Franke, Baumann. Written in Berlin from the screenplay, before shooting
- Album
- Sorcerer, MCA, 1977. 44 min. Their first film score, and it reached No. 25 on the UK album chart
- What happened
- Opened 24 June 1977, a month after Star Wars (25 May). The budget is given as $21–22m; the takings range from $5.9m in US rentals to $12m worldwide. The restoration screened in Venice in 2013 and came out on Blu-ray in April 2014
- Legacy
- Led directly to Thief (1981), Risky Business (1983), Legend (1985) and a decade of Hollywood work
Music first
Friedkin's idea was simple and, in 1976, unheard of. He sent the band the script. They read it in Berlin and recorded about an hour of music, none of it to picture, all of it to the idea of four desperate men and two trucks. Then he flew to the Dominican Republic and shot the film with the tapes in his head. When you watch the bridge sequence, the one everyone remembers, the truck swaying over the river in a storm, you are watching Friedkin cut to a sequencer line that already existed. That is why the scene has the rhythm it has. The music was not added; the picture was.
What to listen for
Why it matters
Before Sorcerer, electronic film scores were either novelty (Forbidden Planet) or one man and one instrument (A Clockwork Orange). After it, a synthesizer band could score a studio picture, and for ten years Tangerine Dream did, and then Vangelis did, and then everybody did. Friedkin recommended them to Michael Mann, who had them score Thief (1981). Two years later their music went into Paul Brickman's Risky Business, which put "Love on a Real Train" in front of more people than every Virgin album combined. The line from a cathedral in Germany to a Tom Cruise movie runs through this film, and through a man who wanted the music before the pictures.
Where to get it
Where to find the records in this piece. New CDs and LPs are on Amazon; older pressings and used copies are on Discogs.
