With Prince or Elfman, It’s a Case for ‘Batman’

This sounds like a mystery for Batman!

Why has Prince’s music for the smash film “Batman” been labeled by Warner Bros. Records as the official sound-track album even though the film itself includes just six minutes of Prince’s music and about 70 minutes of music by Danny Elfman?

And why has Warners scheduled the release of Elfman’s album--which will be marketed as the “score” to the film--for Aug. 8, nearly seven weeks after the film’s opening and the concurrent release of Prince’s album?

These facts have led some in the industry--including Elfman, who hasn’t been shy about speaking his mind in recent interviews--to surmise that Prince got favored treatment from the company because he is one of its most bankable stars. Elfman has little clout at the label because his band, Oingo Boingo, is signed to rival MCA Records.

Warners, the thinking goes, wanted to give Prince a clear path in the marketplace so he wouldn’t have to compete with another “Batman” album for consumer awareness or retail display space.

This is an especially critical album for the veteran hitmaker because his last album, “Love- sexy,” was his first collection in seven years to miss the Top 10. Sales so far have been sensational. The album, out just three weeks, has just shot to No. 1.

But Michael Ostin, a senior vice president at Warner Bros., denies preferential treatment is involved. The main reason that Prince’s album was released so far in advance of Elfman’s, he said, is that Prince delivered his record to Warner Bros. much earlier--on April 22, compared to June 6 for the Elfman score.

“It has nothing to do with trying to isolate the Prince record and give it an opportunity,” Ostin said. “It strictly has to do with when Danny delivered the record. He was scoring and dubbing literally until about two weeks before the film was released. It’s not Danny’s fault either. Danny couldn’t finish scoring until (film director) Tim Burton had a final cut on the film. And Tim was cutting the film until a month prior to release.”

Gary LeMel, president of the music division for Warner Bros. Pictures, noted that score albums often come out late, because the score is typically the last thing done on a movie. “That’s the bane of my existance,” he said. “The advantage with Prince is that he delivered early.”

As for the decision to call Prince’s record the sound-track album when so little of his music is featured in the movie, Ostin said, “At one point we thought we were going to have a lot more Prince music in the film. We made a lot of these decisions long before we knew how much music Prince and Danny were going to have in the film. It kept changing all the way up to the very end, and we had to start pressing records and album jackets long before those final decisions were made.”

Elfman acknowledged that his score was delivered later than Prince’s album, but still suggested that political factors played a part in the scheduling decision. He noted that Geffen Records had his sound track for “Beetlejuice” on the street in less than five weeks even though the company had no plans to release an album until the film’s potent box office opening.

Regarding Warners’ decision to call the Prince album the sound track, he added, “‘The whole concept of the film sound track has gotten radically perverted in recent years. No matter how few songs or how much score there is, they’ll call the songs the sound track. I’ve always thought it was pretty cold doing that: including on the sound track a piece of music that plays for four seconds on a radio and totally excluding the score. But this is a business.”