In 1979, the composer Harry Manfredini descended into a New Jersey basement to put together music for an indie slasher film. He was working with a quickly approaching deadline, a small group of players and a minuscule budget. “We weren’t even in a recording studio,” Manfredini remembered in an interview. “On the raw tracks, you could hear the chairs squeaking and the pages turning.”
The resulting score, with its sinister strings and eerie whispers, would be heard by millions of moviegoers when “Friday the 13th” opened the next year. But the film’s soundtrack never earned a stand-alone release. Nor did the numerous “Friday the 13th” sequels Manfredini worked on throughout the decade.
So he was surprised when, in 2011, MV Gerhard and Matt Verboys, the founders of the label La-La Land Records, approached him with an ambitious plan: They wanted to release every piece of music they could find from the first six “Friday the 13th” movies — even snippets barely a minute long.
“I thought they were crazy,” Manfredini said. “I told them, ‘Some of that music is pretty boring — it’s playing as people run through the woods. It’s never going to sell.’”
But La-La Land was able to track down and restore music that Manfredini, 82, hadn’t heard in decades. And the label’s six-disc “Friday the 13th” compilation sold out within days of being announced. It’s one of the hundreds of expansive, exhaustive soundtrack collections La-La Land has released since forming in 2002.
The company scours movie studio archives and composers’ personal collections to locate as much music as possible from older films or TV recordings, often turning up work that’s been misplaced or forgotten.
“These guys are always looking to make something the absolute best it can be,” Manfredini said.
La-La Land’s business strategy defies modern-day music-biz wisdom. Its deluxe editions don’t appear on streaming services, and are instead released as limited-run CD sets that are announced shortly before they go on sale. The company doesn’t jockey for space on playlists, nor does it launch aggressive social-media campaigns.
Yet last year, La-La Land’s website enjoyed its biggest sales to date, making the company one of a handful of long-running soundtrack labels — including Intrada and Varèse Sarabande — to survive decades’ worth of record-industry upheaval.
“It’s a niche of a niche of a niche,” Gerhard, 49, said on a recent spring afternoon in La-La Land’s music- and memorabilia-jammed headquarters in Burbank, Calif. On the wall were movie posters autographed by composers and filmmakers like John Williams, Mel Brooks and Eli Roth — all of whom have collaborated with the label.
Gerhard and Verboys met in 1994, bonding over their love of films. Both had collected soundtrack albums when they were younger, and were often disappointed by how incomplete they were. “Before VCRs, soundtracks were the only way to keep connected with a movie,” said Verboys, 56. “But even as a kid, I was like, ‘This is cool — but where’s the other 40 minutes of music?’”
In La-La Land’s early days, the label released soundtracks for a handful of contemporary films — like the 2004 Ashton Kutcher drama “The Butterfly Effect” — as well as genre films (“Creepshow”) and Hollywood classics (“Zulu Dawn”).
At first, Gerhard and Verboys didn’t have access to big franchise films or superstar composers. But they didn’t necessarily need them. To some soundtrack fans, it doesn’t matter if a movie is a blockbuster or a bomb, so long as they connect to its music. One of the label’s more recent hits is a two-disc collection of Jerry Goldsmith’s playfully dramatic score from the schlocky 1985 action-adventure “King Solomon’s Mines.”
“There are a lot of terrible movies that have great music,” said Nathan Pickup, 42, a corporate trainer in Riverview, Fla., who has more than 600 soundtrack CDs in his collection. “What I love is the narrative elements of film scoring. If there are themes I can pick out from a score, or certain moods it creates, that’s enough for me.”
Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, as Gerhard and Verboys earned the trust of studio executives and musicians, La-La Land began working with more blue-chip pop-culture properties: “Star Trek,” “Batman: The Animated Series,” the Harry Potter films.
“It took a little while to get some composers on board,” Gerhard said. “But we explained it to them: ‘We’re trying to be the Criterion of soundtrack labels, and give the fans everything they want.’”
Putting together such thorough releases requires patience, detective work and luck. Tracking down original recordings for a film can take months, if not years. “When a movie is done, the production people pack this stuff up as best as they can and ship it off,” said Neil S. Bulk, 49, a soundtrack producer who works with La-La Land. “The music isn’t always the highest priority.”
As a result, “there’s quite a lot of archaeology to this process,” said Mike Matessino, 61, who’s produced several releases for the label. A few years ago, while working on a collection of John Williams’s Oscar-winning “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” score, Matessino spent months looking for a tune that plays during the film’s tie-in ride at Universal Studios Florida. He ultimately found the original master tapes in the bottom of a box that had been sent to Universal’s theme park in Japan.
Other discoveries have been accidents. A few years ago, Matessino spotted a collection of recording materials sitting in the rain outside his next-door neighbor’s house — and realized the haul included music from 1935’s “Bride of Frankenstein,” which was later incorporated into a La-La Land release.
After older materials are secured, La-La Land has to obtain permission to license them — an arduous task in itself. Between record labels, film studios and music publishers, an individual soundtrack can have numerous rights holders. Bulk worked with three different labels to produce La-La Land’s recent soundtrack to 1964’s “Goldfinger.”
“Sometimes, it’s not clear who owns what,” Bulk said. “And sometimes you’re just waiting, waiting, waiting for approvals. But it’s very satisfying when you get that last piece of the puzzle.”
La-La Land doesn’t own any of the music it releases, putting out each compilation in limited-edition batches of anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 units. Though that’s allowed the label to avoid digital pitfalls that have felled other indies — from the arrival of downloads to the streaming era — the soundtrack market faces unique challenges.
For starters, as these original soundtrack recordings age, so do the people entrusted with their care. “When we started, there were guys who were walking computers who’d been with the studios for decades,” Gerhard said. “They could tell us, ‘That recording’s in a salt mine in Utah’ or ‘That’s here on the lot.’ Those people retire, pass away, or are let go.”
La-La Land also contends with the shifting fortunes of the entertainment industry itself. The label had a yearslong relationship with Warner Bros., resulting in expanded editions of soundtracks for “Blazing Saddles” and the “Wonder Woman” TV series. But after the studio merged with Discovery Inc. in 2022, Gerhard said, “the doors closed.”
The La-La Land founders are hopeful that Paramount’s recently announced takeover of Warner Bros. might allow for more access to both companies’ archives. “Paramount’s one of the few studios that are very cooperative with licensing older titles,” Gerhard said. “And there’s a mountain of treasure in those vaults.”
Yet the biggest obstacle for soundtrack labels is an ever-dwindling inventory of must-have scores. “The wells are running dry,” Gerhard said. “So many holy grail soundtracks have been released over the decades. What’s really left?”
The answer might lie in the small screen. Several beloved composers — including Quincy Jones and Dave Grusin — did television work that as of now is unavailable, but could be freed up in the future. And La-La Land has also released soundtracks for Netflix shows (including “Cobra Kai” and “Wednesday”) as well for video games like “Medal of Honor.”
For now, classic movie music remains the company’s focus. Last month, La-La Land released a soundtrack for the 1971 Bond film “Diamonds Are Forever” that includes alternate takes, as well Shirley Bassey’s theme song sung in both English and Italian. The set runs for two hours, eight minutes — just slightly longer than the film itself. It was an eagerly anticipated album for both La-La Land’s fans, and its founders.
“There’s a lot of wish-fulfillment involved with these soundtracks,” Verboys said. “The people working on them have been craving them themselves for a long time.”
The post Lost Movie Music? On CD? La-La Land Is an Anomaly. (And a Success.) appeared first on New York Times.
