April 28th, 2001

I remember this stuff vividly. Evan's a freakin' musical genius, but working with him could be a trial. I know a lot of super-creative types who are like this.

I'm sure I seem the same way in some respects, so I don't blame him. In the end I don't think anyone could have given me a better score, so it worked out.

But at the time it was frustrating.

April 28th

Oh boy. Jesus, the shit just keeps going wrong.

Not totally true, I guess. There’s good and bad.

Evan emailed me. Said he read my note regarding the music playing over the credits, and he thinks it’s a mistake. Says he hasn’t listened to it yet, but he thinks it won’t work with what he’s going to do, that you have to establish certain things in the credits, blah blah.

Sounded like he was being a bit of a primadonna. He was going to watch the movie “with an open mind” and see what he thought.

The email right after that put him over the top. Said that he thought the song over the credits was “amateurish” and “sucked the big jafooey, which is putting it nicely”. He said that if I insisted on leaving it in, he wouldn’t be able to score my movie. He claimed he can do much better.

I called Rick to tell him about this. He laughed in a wry kind of way. I had already decided on the tact to take with Evan and it goes like this:

There’s no contract between Evan and I. I nagged him to get me one, quite a few times, but he kept putting it off. Hey, whatever. It’s more to protect him than me, as he doesn’t even want all the money up front.

So I’m not going to come out and tell him that the song is definitely out, but I’ll let him know that if he can come up with something I like better, I’m open to it. If he’s willing to work on the credits 100 times if that’s what it takes, then okay. I’m confident he can come up with better, because he’s that good.

But if he doesn’t, I’m not contractually bound to use his version. It would be kind of a dick-move to do, and I’m sure it would sever any future working relationship between us, but I have to do what I think is best for the movie.

So I email him with that and wait. I still haven’t talked to this guy on the phone, and now I’m getting afraid to.