Danny Elfman's reputation as a film composer, to put it politely, is mixed. To put it not so politely, there are a lot of people who think he sucks. Though Elfman himself -- a multiple Oscar nominee, a millionaire many times over, and Mr. Bridget Fonda -- probably doesn't pay his detractors any mind, there is a growing consensus that the man who started out as the most unlikely person to achieve success as a composer of scores for blockbuster Hollywood films has turned into a contemptible hack whose name in the opening credits is a sure sign of sonic disappointment ahead. Of course, for everyone who feels that way, there's also those who fiercely defend his scores as memorable, inventive, and distinct; how many other film composers can you name who have gold records for collections of their motion picture scores? Elfman has two of them, and a legion of devoted fans. This kind of vehement disagreement is, in fact, familiar to Danny Elfman: during the 1980s heyday of his band Oingo Boingo, opinion was roughly split between those who found him an obnoxious noisemaker whose danceable, horn-laden compositions were an embarrasment to the punk circles in which he traveled, and those who found his music creative, infectious, and a welcome change of pace from the business-as-usual of L.A. hardcore.
But as Elfman's career as a film composer enters its third decade, those who defend him are growing fewer, and those who attack him are growing more. The time at which his name in the credits alone was enough to make fans line up at the box office for a ticket are long behind him, and it seems the more he embraced his fame as a Hollywood name worthy of dropping, the more he moved from his ludic, sonically inventive early work to a sense of darkness and bombast that never quite suited him to what can only be described as hackwork in films like A Civil Action, Proof of Life and Red Dragon. The sad thing is, it was not always thus: Elfman got his start composing music for the films of his friend, fan and frequent collaborator, the director Tim Burton -- and the early work they produced together really was special. Back then, Elfman geniunely sounded like someone who might seriously change the game when it came to film scores: his utterly postmodern approach of mixing the high and the low, and his keen sense of comic and dramatic timing, which he used to blow the doors off scenes with a judicious application of musical cues, seemed to be indicators of someone who was there to do more than just collect a paycheck.
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