Please tell me you’ve seen at least one variation of Legend, Ridley Scott’s rather odd, charmingly dreamy and thoroughly divisive 1985 fantasy film starring a disarmingly fresh-faced Tom Cruise, the befittingly enchanting Sloane Peterson Mia Sara and a truly marvelous Tim Curry as Darkness, the wonderfully-realized physical embodiment of pure evil – an iconically fearsome figure brought to vivid life by the genius practical effects guru Rob Bottin with countless layers of prosthetics, latex, spirit gum and make-up (and all while he was already primarily preoccupied with his likewise legendary work on John Carpenter’s The Thing, impressively enough).
If you haven’t, I certainly can’t promise you my forgiveness but you can certainly help your case and also do yourself a rock-solid in the process by doing so in the eminently foreseeable future – and redouble these efforts by doing so once more with the brand-spanking-new score that I will be quite justifiably shining a spotlight on shortly.
But first…a brief cinematographic history lesson, if you don’t mind:
Ridley Scott’s original cut of Legend was 125 minutes long; feeling that he could handily trim some fat and improve the flow and focus of his film, he trimmed it down by 12 minutes to a perfectly reasonable 113. At that point, the film ran through the test screening gauntlet somewhere in Orange County, Southern California where the resulting consensus was that the audience was somehow obligated to expend too much effort to simply enjoy the movie for what it was. Sir Ridley then cut the film down by nearly 20 more minutes to a fairly brisk 95. This particular incarnation of Legend was released in the U.K. on December 13, 1985 by international distributor 20th Century Fox.
Scott and domestic distributor Universal Pictures then opted to ax a little more than 5 minutes more from the run time and the North American release of this new 89 minute cut – in other words, it was now pretty much the actual length of all the Disney animated classics of which it was originally envisioned as a live-action reinterpretation. Anyway, Legend was then pushed back to April 18, 1986 after the questionable decision was made to completely discard the late, great Jerry Goldsmith’s 6 months-worth of classical compositions (kind of a big deal considering the fact that Goldsmith would usually work only 2 1/2 months on any given film, at most) and hire the popular West Berlin-bred electropop group Tangerine Dream to concoct a new soundtrack in an effort to make the film more hip, commercial and edgy enough to connect with young American audiences and help increase those all-important box office prospects.
And so the only version of the movie widely available Stateside was the heavily-truncated, Tangerine Dream-scored cut until the year 2000, when Universal Pictures discovered a fairly well-preserved print of that 113-minute-long OC preview screening cut (1 of only 2 such prints of that extended version in known existence) set to Jerry Goldsmith’s original traditional score. That print was fully restored and remastered, with some finished shots from the super-short American theatrical release digitally extrapolated and inserted into it to smooth over a few rough patches and rectify some unfinished elements.
This new edition of Legend became Ridley Scott’s preferred version and was officially christened his Director’s Cut and subsequently released for the very first time by Universal on a sweet 2-disc Ultimate Edition DVD set in 2002 that was eventually awesomely rereleased in high-definition on an even sweeter Ultimate Edition Blu-ray…needless to say, I can proudly boast of the presence of both of these editions in my own home video collection.
Anyway, so basically there are now 2 distinctly different cuts of this cult classic featuring 2 drastically different original scores which in turn offers viewers 2 wholly unique viewing experiences very easily accessible for ideal home exhibition but now there is yet another way to watch and enjoy this particular diamond-in-the-rough and it’s all thanks to the bizarrely brilliant and blazingly original comedic performance artist Reggie Watts….
Doing what he always does with his signature brand of unquantifiable aplomb and using only the sound of his own voice, selected sound effects, 3 synthesizers, a few digital looping devices and an especially effective and memorably funny Tim Curry impression, this prodigiously talented man somehow managed to improvise and record a full 1 hour and 31 minutes of score…LIVE, as the original American cut silently unspooled at the Roxie Theatre as part of the annual San Francisco Comedy Festival. This bold new soundtrack of his then went on to make its big debut in an unsurprisingly sold-out show at SXSW in Austin, Texas.
It’s fresh, freaky, funny, fantastic and, as of about one week ago, downloadable…FOR FREE! Oh, yea. No joke. Pretty pretty pretty damn good deal if you ask me.
All you have to do is pay a visit to Mr. Watts’ official website RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, submit a valid e-mail address in the little white box and the full feature-length soundtrack is instantly made available to you in MP3 file format so all in all, this is an absolute no-brainer decision and quite likely the best, strangest and most ambitious thing to greet your eardrums in quite a long while.
So get out there and acquire a copy of Legend for yourself on either DVD or (preferably) Blu-ray (it can be yours forever on the cheap in both formats), take a couple hours out of your overly-busy and oppressively humdrum real world schedule, properly sync this thing up to the quickie cut and get blissfully lost in a filmic fantasy land you won’t soon forget – with the singularly sensational Reggie Watts as your magical forest spirit guide.
And would some brave and intrepid filmmaking soul out there please make it her or his mission to hire this dude to score their new film and break some serious musical ground on film already?
(A brief but compelling look at Watts warming up and messing about during a tech rehearsal.)
12 comments
Fantastic – thanks for the heads up.
Never knew Bottin was doing this while in prep for Thing. No wonder he had a nervous breakdown at the end of the latter’s shoot.
PS: did you mean Iconically rather than Ironically?
Thank you kindly, Nardo!
Yea, Rob Bottin was neck-deep in his nightmarishly sensational work on THE THING when Ridley Scott personally reached out to him for assistance with all of the intensive mythological creature make-up effects the LEGEND screenplay necessitated (Apparently, early drafts of the script apparently even contained epic glimpses of a fantasy world filled with thousands of magical beasts and beings, too.) after taking note of his previous exemplary effects for THE HOWLING.
And yes, I certainly did mean to say “an ICONICALLY fearsome figure”. What the heck? Damn SpellCheck and it’s automatic substitution. Thanks for pointing that out to me.
And to further clarify some unfortunate sloppiness, the 1st sentence of the 4th paragraph down is actually supposed to read something like this:
” Scott and domestic distributor Universal Pictures then opted to ax a little over 5 more minutes from the U.K. runtime for the eventual North American release, bringing the movie down to a wispy 89 minutes – in other words, it was now pretty much the actual length of all the Disney animated classics of which it was originally envisioned as a live-action reinterpretation. ”
Unfortunately, I neglected to amend the initial rough passage with the proper revised one before the article was published. I duly apologize.
So what’s the best time to sync these up? Anybody? I want to get it as accurate as possible, but the timing of the cuts and his switches in character are always way off.
Are you sure about the time on this? I don’t think the productions for these two movies would’ve overlapped so closely. The Thing came out in July of 1982, while Legend didn’t commence principal photography until spirng of 1984.
I’m so sorry! In all of my blathering excitement and enthusiasm I completely forgot to provide eminently useful information pertaining to the syncing of the movie with Reggie Watts’ soundtrack. UNFORGIVABLE.
For the best results, you’re obviously going to require the U.S. theatrical edition of LEGEND. This is available on Disc 2 of the Ultimate Edition DVD and on the Ultimate Edition Blu-ray, that cut is the secondary option (the disc defaults to the Director’s Cut).
Once you’re all situated and everything, you’re gonna wanna take Reggie’s score to the 0:53 second mark and pause. Now with the film, select “Play Theatrical” and, on either format, you’re then going to receive the usual round of F.B.I. warnings, MPAA rating information and such. Skip through those and you’ll quickly find yourself watching the contemporary CG Universal Pictures logo – skip forward to the actual movie proper and you’ll see the old-school and hopefully endearingly familiar Universal logo. Now just tap the skip back button and immediately pause the disc.
Now all you need to do is simultaneously hit Play on both the movie and the soundtrack and you’re good as gold.
Absolutely positive.
LEGEND was Ridley Scott’s wholly unexpected follow-up project to his enduring masterpiece, BLADE RUNNER (released in June 1982) and ultimately the labored product of about 4 full years of effort and development. Scott set to work in earnest on it as soon as he was finished with that film, having initially met with and brainstormed story treatments with screenwriter William Hjortsberg while still shooting BR.
Scott originally attempted to hire Rob Bottin for BLADE RUNNER but the man had already committed to THE THING; toward the end of the production schedule he was personally given an early draft of the screenplay by Scott (then titled LEGEND OF DARKNESS and but one of an eventual 15 separate script revisions written over the course of about 3 years). Bottin’s interest was majorly piqued and he began working in tandem with Scott, Hjortsberg & Co. to make the script’s effects demands practical and possible.
I love the piece of music from Psycho II that Goldsmith reuses in one scene of Jack looking up at a tunnel or a well. It fit in perfectly with the rest of the score in Legend.
Too bad The Fairy Dance no longer exists. At least the song is still there.
But just to further clarify, principal photography itself didn’t commence until March 1984 at Pinewood Studios in London, England.
I totally feel you. The rough reconstruction of the lost scene using old storyboards, production stills and salvaged audio recordings within the bonus material on both discs is a pretty cool feature, though. And that music cue is quite memorable and effective; I personally love listening for a great composer’s recycled and tweaked compositions across different movies myself.
Speaking of the special features, the isolated Tangerine Dream score track present on both editions of LEGEND is definitely worth a listen as it contains additional cues and alternate compositions that aren’t heard on the regular soundtrack. Plus, theirs’ is truly a great score and surely worth a spotlight (although, an isolated Goldsmith score track on the DC would have been a tremendous touch, as well) and I now worry that my piece above may have left a reader with perhaps a slight impression of dismissiveness or a reductive attitude toward it and that is most definitely not the case. The group has actually contributed quite a few killer scores to a wide variety of films over the course of their long career and they certainly deserve wildly positive recognition.
That guy did my LASIK procedure! He’s the best…
Cool, thanks. I had got it to a preeeetty good spot, but that might help it line up even better.
How long till some internet hacker actually puts out a copy of the movie with Reggie’s score laid over it? I want it.
By the way, this is genius, comedic, and just flat-out amazing at times…as you said, for Watts to score an entire film would be phenomenal….his synth shit is really, really good….on some Tangerine Dream or Vangelis shit.
“Wine Time in the Forest of Doom” had me screaming with laughter.
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