Easton composer’s work highlighted in ‘Shaft’ update
Easton-reared music man Christopher Lennertz is one of the busiest composers in Hollywood.
At the moment, his scores are enlivening three series: Amazon’s streaming hit “The Boys;” “Supernatural,” which is about to begin its 15th season on the CW; and Netflix’s “Lost In Space” reboot.
And that’s just his TV work! Lennertz’s main gig is composing for the movies. This year alone, he’s written the scores for the underrated animated gem “UglyDolls” as well as “Shaft,” which arrives this week on DVD, Blu-ray and VOD.
The original “Shaft” (1971) featured one of the most famous scores in Hollywood history thanks to Isaac Hayes’ relentlessly catchy compositions.
The latest chapter in the saga looks at the escapades of three generations of very different men, all named John Shaft (Richard Roundtree, Samuel L. Jackson, James Usher.) It’s part-action comedy and part-bonding flick between fathers and sons.
For Lennertz, the key to the score was maintaining the funk. As the composer told Variety, director Tim Story insisted on “keeping that classic ’70s vibe and using Isaac’s theme … I listened to that soundtrack over and over to understand how the orchestrations and arrangements worked, how he harmonized the guitar parts and all those things that were so iconic to his style.”
Already a critical hit, “The Boys” centers on a man named Hughie (Jack Quaid) who is a victim of superhero collateral damage. Unable to pursue a legal recourse, he hooks up with a mystery man (Karl Urban) and a gang called the Boys in hopes of exacting justice against a cadre of all-powerful, corporate-owned Superheroes called the Seven (Chace Crawford, Antony Starr, Erin Moriarty).
“The music for The Seven, our corrupt hero team, is traditional orchestra and electronics done in as corporate a way as possible, trying to feel like it was created after one too many focus groups,” the Easton High School grad (Class of 1990) said in an interview with We Are Movie Geeks.
“But then we used processing to warp, mangle, and sometimes crush that sound to feel like it was ‘going wrong’ as the perfect stereotypes of comic book heroes begin to shatter. It starts out great but by the end you realize the superheroes are betraying everyone’s trust.
“For ‘The Boys,’ [series creator] Eric [Kripke] said he wanted the music to have all the dirt and grime of a messy garage band with the energy of British punk, and that he wanted to poke fun at traditional superhero clichés … It’s supposed to sound sloppy on purpose.”
Finally, if you don’t want to wait for the Oct. 10 bow of “Supernatural’s” latest season, you can check out season 14 (2018, Warner, unrated, $30), newly available on DVD, Blu-ray and VOD.
During the latest batch of episodes, Sam (Jared
Padelecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) continue to deal with the fallout from their battle with Lucifer and the archangel Michael as well as their discovery of an alternate universe in which they were never born.
Amy Longsdorf is a contributing writer.