Netflix Playlist Goes Live For First Time: ‘Glass Onion’ Johnson Cousins On Childhood Film Roots, Alexandre Desplat Conducts ‘Pinocchio’ & More
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Some people may be slow to go to cinemas as the pandemic eases, but here in Los Angeles, they’re certainly not sluggish to head to awards season events, and Netflix took over the old Amoeba Records space on Sunset Blvd Monday (aka The Lighthouse Artspace) for their very swanky, in-person concert Playlist event which touted a lineup of platinum composers and music supervisors working on their projects.
Not only did the event serve as a music sampling of Q4 Netflix series and movies, but it also doubled as an awards season preview for voters as well. Miramax broke ground on these types of awards events back in the late 1990s, read their English Patient In Word And Music which featured director/scribe Anthony Minghella reading parts of the script, author Michael Ondaatje reading from the book, and composer Gabriel Yared conducting the score before a chamber orchestra in a filled Broadway theater (the movie went on to win Best Picture among its nine Oscar wins). However, the pop-up nightclub which Netflix had going on with Playlist was a whole other experience in another stratosphere. One exquisite, jaw-dropping facet of the joint: wrap-around 360-degree screens which flashed up series and pic clips and lush title logos.
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“I feel the good vibes of Amoeba lingering in this space,” beamed Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery filmmaker Rian Johnson before the packed plush seat lounge crowd.
While filmmakers such as Guillermo del Toro beamed in to introduce and tell the crowd about their experiences with their composers, for him 2x Oscar winner Alexandre Desplat, who showed up in-person and actually conducted his work from Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. Others such as Johnson took the stage and regaled the house with stories of his long-running creative partnership with composer Nathan Johnson, which has spanned the director’s canon including Brick, Looper, The Brothers Bloom, Knives Out and the upcoming sequel Glass Onion. That pic hits theaters on Nov. 23 for an exclusive one week theatrical run, including for the first time, the top three circuits (AMC, Regal and Cinemark). It drops on Netflix on Dec. 23.
“You would never guess from our relative heights but Nathan and I are related. We’re cousins,” Johnson shared. “We’ve been making movies since we were ten years old.”
“Our first mixing stage was two VHS VCRs and a Discman with the Hook soundtrack,” continued Johnson, “and an elaborate [way] of hitting play and record to do our edits.”
“We’ve done all our movies together with the exception of one, which I was compelled to use John Williams,” said Johnson referring to his $1.3 billion grossing epic Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
While Nathan Johnson wasn’t hired on the director’s biggest grossing movie he made it up to him: “John (Williams) very graciously agreed to sign a copy of the Hook soundtrack which I gave to Nathan,” joked Johnson.
Before Nathan Johnson’s Nino Rota-inspired suite for the Daniel Craig Benoit Blanc sequel was played by the live orchestra, Rian Johnson expounded, “Nathan is a storyteller. He doesn’t come in at the end of the process to write some music. He’s the first person that I talk about the idea of the film with. He’s there from the start. He engages with story on a deep level, and he engages it with such joy.”
The suite incorporated a few different cues from the score, including the main Glass Onion theme, “Blanc’s Theme” and a special piece written for the night by the composer.
Desplat delivered a number of movements from Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio including “Carlo’s Theme”, “Spazzatura”, “My Dear Son”, as well as two versions of the animated pic’s nostalgic song “Ciao Papa” which is among several tunes del Toro co-wrote lyrics for with Roeben Katz. While Gregory Mann voices the wooden puppet in the film (the song is used in a sequence where he begins his journey and leaves Geppeto), performing the ditty live was singer Raewyn Davidson. Netflix’s feature music supervisor, Grammy winning and Emmy nominated Steven Gizicki, was a force behind marrying the script to the songs. Note that not all composers conduct their own scores before a live-orchestra, and Desplat stands in a small company that of course includes John Williams. The French composer has a graceful, moving style that demands to be seen.
Other scores played by the house orchestra included Florence + the Machine Isabella Summers’ classical-infused cues from Laure de Clermont -Tonnerre’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “Old Pictures” and “The Rain.”
Attendees got a look at an opening scene from the upcoming Nov. 23 Tim Burton series Wednesday in which the title character rescues her brother Pugsley from a locker, and exacts revenge on his bullies by throwing piranhas in the high school swimming pool, the hysterical sequence set to Edith Piaf’s “No Regrets.” It’s just one of the many ditties curated by 3x Emmy nominee series music supervisor Jen Malone.
Composer Danny Elfman, who wrote the opening theme, also had pieces performed from the upcoming Noah Baumbach movie White Noise –“Duel Lecture”, “Terribly Sad Moment”, “Trash”, and “Sunrise” — a rollicking throwback sound to 1980s summer sci-fi movies. You can listen to his opening title music below from Wednesday:
The music supervisors working on Netflix movies and series –Malone, Gizicki, Alexandra Patsavas (who is Netflix’s Director, Music Creative/Production for Original Series), and George Drakoulias — sat down with Deadline at the event to discuss their involvement in working with series creators, filmmakers and composers on their respective projects. Patsavas created a fabric on the first season of Bridgerton, one which looks to be emulated on its prequel series, Queen Charlotte by which classical instrumental covers of such pop hits like Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next” and Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” were performed by the Vitamin String Quartet.
Drakoulias, a longtime music collaborator of Baumbach’s, spoke about his latest highlight, the Talking Heads-like end credits sequence in the apocalyptic satire White Noise which features dancing customers, and Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig making their way through a 1980s A&P grocery store. On how the music supervisor settled on hiring electronic pop punk band LCD Soundsystem for the end song “Body Rumba”: Baumbach wanted an end song “about death.”
“Noah gobbles music more than just listens to it…He’s music obsessed,” said Drakoulias, who was also involved in the big musical finale of Baumbach’s Oscar winning film Marriage Story which featured Driver crooning “Being Alive” from the Stephen Sondheim musical Company.
Other highlights of the night included the debut of the music video “Paper Airplanes” from Ruth B. which is a key song in Tyler Perry’s A Jazzman’s Blues, an end sequence clip from Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, which has an original song from Tim Minchin; selections from Bryce Dessner’s score from Alejandro Inarritu’s Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths as well as a piano and string laced sneak peak from The Crown, Season 5, ep. 6 showing the Queen at her horse stables.
Netflix fired up a live-awards season music event in 2019 at the Avalon Hollywood when it was called Netflix Soundcheck. During the pandemic in 2020, they rebranded the event as Netflix Playlist and went virtual. Monday night’s event repped the first time Playlist went live.
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