Film and Music: Scoring "Cage"

When Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad first signed on to score Netflix’s Luke Cage, they didn’t consider how the show would consume their day-to-day lives. The two are legendary — Muhammad was a founding member of A Tribe Called Quest, and the prolific Younge has an output that defies categorization.
They quickly realized all future plans needed to be shelved. It wasn’t solely that the score was overly consuming — though Younge concedes, “We had to give up our lives as artists to dedicate ourselves wholly to this score” — but more that Younge and Muhammad realized they had a chance to create a score that could define the TV series.
“We raised the bar and created something that is timeless,” professes Muhammad. Over coffee at the Cut restaurant in the recently opened Four Seasons Downtown in New York City, Vulture spoke with the two musicians about creating the score, the lack of opportunities for black composers, and setting a tone that bridges a many musical genres.
You both had worked together before Luke Cage, right?Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Since about 2013, when he was working on the Souls of Mischief record, and he asked me to be a part of it. That formed our friendship and production partnership, but we had never spoken about scoring together, so when [showrunner] Cheo [Hodari Coker] reached out to us individually, it was easy to fall into.
For something like this, are you both in the same room working together? Are you emailing? And then how do you get the orchestra involved?Adrian Younge: There are 13 episodes, and on each of the episodes, we have a spotting session, where we meet with the directors and the music supervisors, and we all watch the episode. Then we write notes and we leave. Ali takes these amount of cues, I take these amount of cues, we do a certain amount of cues together, and when we are done, we submit it for approval to everybody, and assuming there are no changes — there are never much changes at all — we give it Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, who is our conductor-orchestrator, and he orchestrates it for a 30-piece orchestra that we record in Raphael Saadiq’s studio. Then we record that and mix it.
There is a sense that you both realized this score would be studied by future musicians, and the idea that you had to go above and beyond expectations. Am I right in that? And did that sense come while scoring or after the fact?AY: It was in the present. As freelance artists, you do what the hell you want to. When you are a composer for a multi-billion-dollar company like Marvel, you are an employee and you have responsibilities. When we accepted these jobs, I just thought it’d be a couple of months. We realized this is a big deal for many reasons, at that point.
One reason, we enjoyed it, and we wanted to do a good job for Cheo, who has our back. Secondly, it is something that is great for our careers. As composers, it brings us to another side where cats have done hip-hop, R&B, and now we’re getting into a big television series with a film perspective on composition, not just a regular television.
And lastly, we needed to execute because it was something that was bigger than us. We are two black composers, and black composers don’t really get the opportunities to support things of this magnitude. It is a cyclical process. If you look back to Duke Ellington, to Quincy Jones, to Isaac Hayes, these opportunities are seldom, and when black composers have been awarded these opportunities, it is something where you must make a statement. The statement we sought to make is that people of our culture should aspire to do more than just sampling or producing for someone else. Don’t just stop there. You can score film, you can have an orchestra, you can go as far as you want to.
When I say our culture, I am talking about urban culture. And that includes people that are in hip-hop. You don’t see hip-hop producers composing. We can count on one hand how many we know. It is unfortunate. But it is something that ties into the fact that you don’t see many black composers having these opportunities. We knew we wanted to set a bar, and we wanted to make something pivotal, unique, and novel for people to watch and feel.
The second episode is where the viewer really feels the impact of the score. It starts and ends the episode. Was that a pivotal episode for the both of you?ASM: The funny thing about that is that the second episode was the first episode we scored. That was the one where we knew — everything has to go into this moment.
AY: And when we did that episode, it helped convince Marvel and Netflix that these guys should have an extra budget now to have an orchestra. They love what we were doing so much. Dawn Soler at ABC pushed hard for us to get an orchestra. That song that starts and ends episode two is the song where they were like, “This is it. This is the sound of the show.” They always believed in us, but what we said to them is you don’t have to have any needle drops here, you don’t have to license as much music, let us create more score. Let us create more source material for you guys so that the music all comes together to create a world of Luke Cage. Instead of songs just being pulled from everywhere. That helped us have this orchestra for 13 episodes, which is very expensive.

TV: Winter is coming again.....next summer

HBO confirmed Monday that Game of Thrones’ seventh season won’t begin until summer 2017 and will include only seven episodes, as opposed to the usual 10. Rumors had been swirling about the shortened final two seasons 
(the eighth season will likely only include six episodes) and late start for weeks, but the network only now confirmed the changes. 

The next season will reportedly be shot in Northern Ireland, Spain, and Iceland. “Now that winter has arrived on Game of Thrones, Executive Producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss felt that the storylines of the next season would be better served by starting production a little later than usual, when the weather is changing,” said Casey Bloys, president of HBO programming. “Instead of the show’s traditional spring debut, we’re moving the debut to summer to accommodate the shooting schedule.”

Books: HBO "Contracts" James' 'Seven Killings" for series

HBO has optioned screen rights to Marlon James’ novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld), for a series adaptation.

James’ novel, which was published last year, takes inspiration from the real-life incident when gunmen attacked Bob Marley’s house in 1976. Spanning three decades and crossing continents, the story chronicles the lives of a host of characters, from slum kids to drug lords and the CIA. The book won both the Anisfield-Wolf Fiction Prize for books that contribute to our understanding of racism and cultural diversity and the OCM Bocas Fiction Prize for Caribbean Literature.

HBO plans to produce an ongoing series, with award-winning screenwriter Eric Roth penning the script. Roth’s credits include adapting books into screenplays for Oscar-nominated films such as “Munich”, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Forrest Gump”, as well as acting as the executive producer of Emmy-winning series “House of Cards”.

Oneworld is releasing the paperback edition of A Brief History of Seven Killings this June. It will publish James’ debut novel, John Crow’s Devil, in November, and it has also published his second novel, The Book of Night Women.

Amazon Studios gets a "Woody"

Amazon orders a full season of Untitled Woody Allen Project, which will premiere exclusively on Prime Instant Video

Episodes will be written and directed by Allen

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 13, 2015-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)--Amazon Studios today announced it has signed the critically-acclaimed Director Woody Allen to write and direct his first television series ever. Untitled Woody Allen Project, a half-hour series, has received a full season order and episodes will be written and directed by Allen. Customers will be able to see the series exclusively on Prime Instant Video in the US, UK and Germany. Additional details, including casting information, will be made available in the future.

Woody Allen is a visionary creator who has made some of the greatest films of all-time, and it's an honor to be working with him on his first television series," said Roy Price, Vice President of Amazon Studios. "From Annie Hall to Blue Jasmine, Woody has been at the creative forefront of American cinema and we couldn't be more excited to premiere his first TV series exclusively on Prime Instant Video next year."

Woody Allen added, "I don't know how I got into this. I have no ideas and I'm not sure where to begin. My guess is that Roy Pricewill regret this."

Allen is represented by ICM Partners.

About Amazon Studios

Amazon Studios most recently debuted its dramatic comedy Mozart in the Jungle from Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, Paul Weitz, John Strauss and Alex Timbers, as well as Jill Soloway's multi-Golden Globe Award-winning dark comedy Transparent; its first live-action series for kids 6-11, Gortimer Gibbon's Life on Normal Street; and a second season of the Garry Trudeau political comedy Alpha House. The studio has also launched three additional children's series, the Annecy International Animated Film Festival Award-winning and Annie Award-nominated Tumble Leaf from Bix Pix Entertainment; Creative Galaxy from Angela Santomero and Out of the Blue Enterprises, the creators of Blue's Clues; and Annedroids, from Emmy nominated Sinking Ship Entertainment.

Amazon Studios has also announced five additional, original series to debut in 2015 including Michael Connelly's Bosch; Hand of God from Marc Forster and Ben Watkins; Red Oaks from Steven Soderbergh, David Gordon Green, Greg Jacobs and Joe Gangemi; and kids series Wishenpoof! from Angela Santomero and Out of the Blue Enterprises; as well as a second season of Transparent.

Amazon Studios launched in 2010 as a new way to develop feature films and episodic series--one that's open to great ideas from creators and audiences around the world. Anyone can upload a script online and Amazon Studios will read and review all submissions. Those who choose to make their projects public can also receive feedback from the Amazon Studios community.

Comprehensive cast and crew information, including bios and filmographies, is available on Amazon's IMDb (www.imdb.com), the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content.