Popular films often inspire musicians to write their best songs. Here area few examples.
INSPIRATION: The
Searchers. John Wayne's favorite-and maybe his best--cowboy film, The Searchers,
was released in 1956.
Wayne's character in the movie was a defiant, macho loner, an anti-hero who
fit right in with the James Dean/Marlon Brando image of the mid-'50s. Whenever
anyone said something he disagreed with, he'd sneer, "That'll be the day." The
phrase caught on among teenagers, and two high school musicians from Lubbock,
Texas, Buddy Holly and Jerry Allison, used it in a song.
They recorded it with their band, the Crickets, in 1957, and it became the first
hit in a series of records that made Holly a rock legend.
INSPIRATION: The
Savage Innocents. Who-or what-inspired Bob Dylan to write "The Mighty Quinn
(Quinn the Eskimo)"? He's not saying, but chances are it was a little-known
1960 film called The Savage Innocents.
What does the movie have to do with Quinn the Eskimo? Well, it starred Anthony
Quinn. And he played an Eskimo.
INSPIRATION: American
Graffiti. "The song was inspired by American Graffiti," Seger says. " I came
out of the theater in 1972 thinking, `Hey, I've got a story to tell, too! Nobody
has ever told about how it was to grow up in my neck of the woods."'
So Seger wrote "Night Moves" about the early '60s, when he and his teenage friends
around Ann Arbor, Michigan would drive into farmers' fields to party. "Everybody
had their headlights on, so there was light to dance," Seger recalls. "They'd
play 45s, and we'd be blasting them out: Ronettes, Crystals ...." Seger's personal
"American Graffiti" sold over a million copies and became the favorite tune
of his career. "I don't know if I'll ever write one as good as that again,"
he says.
INSPIRATION: A "B"
movie on TV. This was one of the biggest hits of 1962. According to Bob Crewe,
the man who co-wrote it:
"I was up late one night in my apartment, watching a dreadful movie-I think
it was with John Payne and some blonde bombshell. I had been drinking ...and
I was drifting in and out of sleep. I woke up at one point and Payne was smacking
the blonde across the face and knocked her on her bottom. He said something
like, `Well, whadda ya think of that, baby?' She gets up, straightens her dress,
pushes her hair back, stares at him and says, `Big girls don't cry,' and storms
out the door. I ran and jotted down the line. The next day we turned it into
a song."
INSPIRATION: West Side Story. There's a distinct similarity between the "Beat It" video and the filmed musical West Side Story -which tends to indicate that Michael Jackson was inspired by the award-winning 1961 film. Indeed, he's known to have studied it. "The theme of my song," he said, "is about two gangs coming together to rumble, to fight." Just like the Sharks and the Jets. But the best evidence is this: The first two words in West Side Story - spoken when a member of the Sharks accidentally wanders into jet territory - are "Beat it!"
INSPIRATION: A Bowery Boys movie. From 1937 to 1958, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, and the rest of the Bowery Boys gang appeared in dozens of low-budget films. Alice Cooper was inspired by one of them. "I heard the phrase 'School's out' in a Bowery Boys' movie." he says. "It was used the same way that someone would say 'Get smart, Satch.' " Cooper then used it in the song that became his first Top 10 hit.