Fred Claus Gets A Stocking Full Of Meddling Executives

Executives meddling with the creative process on a movie is nothing new, and sadly enough it's more common than you might expect. Give a guy a suit and an overpaid salary and suddenly he's Steven freakin' Spielberg. However, it's not too often that the boys "upstairs" get involved at the soundtrack level. Not the case with Fred Claus where a "studio exec" decided to levy the longarm of the underwriter.

Kent, whose past projects include Mean Girls, Sideways and Wedding Crashers, announced on his web site back in August that he'd had the plug pulled on his work for the movie about Santa Claus' disgruntled sibling.

“I have been working intensely on Fred Claus, a film which kept being recut and reconceived, and I was whipping up new music all the time to keep pace with the new versions of the film. Really an incredible process, and I was very excited by the depth and detail of the music I created. Unfortunately the completed score fell victim to some studio exec, and is to be replaced by someone else."

Well, that someone else has been announced. According to Film Music Magazine Christophe Beck, the man behind the scores of both Garfield movies and Without A Paddle was brought in to finish the job. That's all well and good, and no doubt Beck's score will be pleasant enough in the movie, but what's worrisome about this is Kent's description of the film's creative process. Continued recuts and reconceptions are rarely a good sign and meddlesome executives are bad news all around. Not a hopeful outlook for Fred Claus which stars Paul Giamatti and Vince Vaughn and hits theaters November 9.

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TAGS: fred claus, soundtrack