Kevin Smith is in London plugging his new book ‘Shooting The Shit With Kevin Smith,’ a collection of his podcasts, and, in the course of a longer conversation with Empire, revealed that he wants venerable ’80s synth-happy composer Harold Faltermeyer to write the score for his upcoming buddy-cop movie “A Couple of Dicks.”
The comedy, in which Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan play a pair of policeman searching for a stolen antique baseball card, is a definite throwback to ’80s action movies, and Smith told the site that, during the edit, he’d been using Faltermeyer’s work as temp score. “So I’m putting some music on this scene, see if it works. I take this piece from “Fletch,” which I’ve always loved, and it works. Now I take this piece of music from “Beverly Hills Cop,” and it plays the comedy well. It plays the action well. And after doing those temp cues, I said to a few people, ‘Is it crazy to see if Harold Faltermeyer will want to score this movie?'”
Known for writing the iconic synth scores to “Top Gun,” and the aforementioned “Fletch and “Beverly Hills Cop” themes, Faltermeyer hasn’t scored a whole movie since German snowboarding movie “White Magic” in 1994 (remember that stone-cold classic??), but has recently expressed an interest in returning to Hollywood, and will be watching a cut of Smith’s movie in the next few weeks. But Smith says he’s after something specific from the composer. “What I’m looking for is that old Harold Faltermeyer sound that I grew up on. If he’s moved on from that sound, I’ll respect that. I’ll go get a Casio and fuck it up myself.”
We sort of hated the draft of the ‘Dicks’ script that we read, and we’re unconvinced by Kevin Smith’s skills as a director, to say the least, plus the film seems to have had a somewhat troubled production history. But we’d be lying if we said we weren’t excited about the pairing of Willis and Morgan, and Faltermeyer seems like a perfect match for the material, as you can hear from some of his classic themes below.
Before he became a composer in his own right, Faltermeyer assisted the great Giorgio Moroder as an arranger for film scores to “Midnight Express,” “American Gigolo” and “Foxes.” He also composed the scores for “Tango & Cash,” “The Running Man” and “Fletch Lives,” but obviously if you were forced to whistle a bar from any of these themes at gun point you would surely lose.
“Fletch” theme
“Beverley Hills Cop” theme
“Top Gun” theme featuring then-Billy Idol guitarist Steve Stevens.
