24 Hours of Movies: Danny Elfman

by Patrick Bromley

A marathon of movies all scored by one of the greats.

I don't consider it a hot take to say that John Williams is the greatest film composer who ever lived. No one's music lives in our collective consciousness the way his does. But Danny Elfman is the composer I grew up on, the one who was scoring the movies that meant everything to me as a kid. His were the first scores I remember going to music stores and buying on cassette, listening to them every night as I fell asleep. Because I've been on a huge Elfman kick lately -- both his film scores and his work as frontman of Oingo Boingo -- I wanted to program a marathon celebrating his cinematic legacy. Hope you enjoy the lineup.

10 am - Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985, dir. Tim Burton)

Let's begin with Danny Elfman's first film composition, an all-time banger of a score for one of the best comedies of all time. I love that director Tim Burton and star Paul Reubens hand-picked Elfman to do the music because they were fans of Oingo Boingo -- the exact kind of outside the box thinking that makes this movie such a masterpiece at every level. While I could make a case that this score established some habits for Elfman early on, the music is too lively, too exuberant, too much a vital part of the fabric of this film's universe for me to care even a little. It's the best.

11:30 am - Midnight Run (1988, dir. Martin Brest)

If Pee Wee's Big Adventure helped establish an early Danny Elfman sound, Midnight Run just a few years later demonstrated he was capable of something completely different. More guitar driven than orchestral, Elfman found the perfect sound to capture the story of a bounty hunter (Robert De Niro) attempting to bring a white collar criminal (Charles Grodin) across the country. This is a classic buddy action comedy, one of the best of the 1980s, with De Niro crushing his first comedy role (at least his first since hitting it big) and Charles Grodin proving he could steal a movie from the best of the best. I'll always be sad that we didn't get more Martin Brest movies.

1:30 pm - Dick Tracy (1990, dir. Warren Beatty)

Another very tradition Elfman score seems like a no-brainer for this, the movie designed to be the next Batman. This was the event film of 1990 when I was a kid (who remembers the ticket T-shirt?), but neither Disney nor I took into account that director/star Warren Beatty was making a highly-stylized period musical from a 1930s comic strip and that's not the same as making a Batman movie. That's not a knock against the film, just the box office expectations (it was still a hit). Beatty's three-strip technicolor palette, the grotesque makeup, a truly insane cast of actors, and Al Pacion's Oscar-nominated turn as the villainous Big Boy Caprice make this something special despite its issues (Madonna) and a solid if somewhat unremarkable Elfman score.

3:30 pm - Wisdom (1986, dir. Emilio Estevez)

Truth be told, I don't think I've seen this movie since the late 1980s and the only way to watch it now is on a Warner Archive DVD that I don't own. I remember that this was Emilio Estevez's debut as director and that he and then-partner Demi Moore play bank robbers. I also remember the bad ending. What I don't remember is a Danny Elfman score, which I'm excited to revisit in this time slot. Sometimes we gotta program One for Us.

5:30 pm - Psycho (1998, dir. Gus Van Sant)

Speaking of One for Us. No one should be surprised that I'm slotting this in right before dinner because I love it and will take any opportunity I get to change people's minds about it. For the purposes of our marathon's theme, though, I love the idea of Danny Elfman and Steve Bartek (Elfman's old Oingo Boingo bandmate) adapting and rearranging Bernard Hermann's classic score for Psycho. It's one of the only instances I can think of where an entire film score is "covered" by another composer, which makes sense because this movie is a cover of Psycho. Elfman collaborated quite a few times with director Gus Van Sant, so I think it's important that their working relationship be represented in our marathon. It won't be the last time. 

7:15 pm - Batman (1989, dir. Tim Burton)

I mean, we have to include this in our Primetime Pizza slot because it's really the movie that made Danny Elfman a star as a film composer. I can still remember being a young kid and being more excited to see Batman than anything in my life and hearing that opening theme and realizing it was one of the best pieces of movie music I had ever heard. It still is. The rest of the score is terrific, too, but it's the high of that theme I'm always chasing.

9:30 pm - Dead Presidents (1995, dir. Allen & Albert Hughes)

Another pivot from Elfman and a great blaxploitation crime film/coming of age drama/war movie courtesy of The Hughes Brothers. This is one of Elfman's most underrated scores and a deeply underrated film, which got a Criterion laserdisc back in the day but which has never been released on Blu-ray and only has a non-anamorphic DVD to its name. If this movie could get in front of more eyeballs, its reputation might finally match its quality. This is a movie and a score that deserve to be rediscovered.

11:30 pm - Sleepy Hollow (1999, dir. Tim Burton)

Ok, it's getting late now and it's time to transition to horror movies. After a brief split from working together during Ed Wood, Elfman reunited with Tim Burton for Mars Attacks! and continue their long collaboration here on what I think is Burton's Last Great Movie, the one that ended his 15-year run. Johnny Depp (boo) plays Ichabod Crane as Angela Lansbury, a choice I love, while a somewhat miscast Christina Ricci plays Katrina Von Tassel. The supporting cast consists of great British character actors (mostly) and Burton makes a great homage to Hammer horror, which Elfman's score complements perfectly.

1:30 am - Nightbreed (1990, dir. Clive Barker)

The second of only three movies made by by Clive Barker, who should have directed way more because he was good at it. I like the world created for Nightbreed, I love the monsters, I love that they're the heroes, and I love David Cronenberg as the villain. I know the studio fucked with this one to the point that Clive Barker wanted to disown it, but I like it in its theatrical form. To be fair, I still haven't watched The Cabal Cut despite it being available and on my shelf for years now. Maybe it's way better. Because this is on the early side of Elfman's days as a composer, it has a similar sound to a number of his first scores, though I like how heavy he goes on the percussion here.

3:15 am - The Frighteners (1996, dir. Peter Jackson)

Peter Jackson's big studio breakthrough -- the movie that basically gets him Lord of the Rings -- will play well in the middle of the night when its zany energy will help sustain us and we'll still be tired enough to overlook its flaws. I like this movie but I want to love it and haven't quite gotten there despite Jackson's direction, cool ghost effects, a leading man Michael J. Fox (Is he miscast? Discuss.), and a scene-stealing Jeffrey Combs absolutely crushing every scene. I love so many of the elements but haven't fallen in love with the whole thing even if I feel like watching it at least once a year.

5:15 am - Shrunken Heads (1994, dir. Richard Elfman)

I wanted to be sure to include this one even though Elfman doesn't do the whole score (that's instead done by Full Moon mainstay Richard Band) but he does do the main theme. More importantly, the cult movie is directed by Danny Elfman's brother Richard, making this a family affair. This is a very weird movie even by Full Moon Standards, but we should expect no less from the director of Forbidden Zone. It's going to play great at this time of morning when we are exhausted and delirious.

6:30 am - To Die For (1995, dir. Gus Van Sant)

Our second Gus Van Sant of the marathon reveals that he and Elfman had one of the best partnerships this side of his collaborations with Tim Burton. This isn't the sort of movie one would expect Elfman to score, but I love what he adds to this brilliant satire that features my favorite Nicole Kidman performance as a scheming wannabe celebrity who hires some high schoolers to kill her husband (Matt Dillon). Van Sant didn't make many comedies, so his deft touch with Buck Henry's script comes as a surprise but a welcome one.

8:30 am - Summer School (1987, dir. Carl Reiner)

We'll close things out with one of my favorite '80s comedies and the "school" score I like even better than Elfman's work on Back to School. Plus we get to hear "Happy," a solo banger he recorded as Oingo Boingo! I was recently reading up on this movie and discovered that Roger Ebert gave it half a star. Seriously? HALF? It's worth two stars just for the gory prank sequence with Rick Baker effects work! And another two for Mark Harmon's incredibly affable leading man turn. And then another two just for Chainsaw and Dave. What I'm saying is that this is a six-star movie.