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I've got to add my 2cents to what m4b is saying.
You're absolutely right about most of it, but the ghost thing is not actually correct - MANY composers (and I'm not going to get specific for obvious self protection reasons) use sub composers to write cues, even whole sections of cues, and while they may get an IMDB credit, they are not the person on the poster or listed as the composer - it will be additional music production services or score assistant etc, and that's not the same as "score by" or "composer". Those minor credit won't get you a gig unless you've got a ton of them, and even then it will probably only yield a zero budget indie film /which is at least a start but again that itself is not really going to get you paid scoring/composing work).
In fact there is one well known "composer" I have worked on a couple of occasions with who barely writes a thing, has studio musicians often just play with a minimal bit of direction and call it his score. He's won major awards and he is the most tenious description of what I would call a producer.
As for composers giving other (often sub) composers feature film breaks, yes, they will have done so much ghost writing by that point it's virtually the last thing to keep them on board from going somewhere else and getting gigs. I actually think some of it is just to keep the available work out there in the family, essentially for nothing more than stopping the competition.
Quite a few of the composers that you're thinking of in reality broke away, rather than being gifted the chance to score - many of them patched it up later (mutual) but it's accurate to infer they were brought up through the ranks as part of a philanthropic gesture. Yes, some are because talent is spotted but it's really to make sure that talent is in house rather than competition, bidding for the same films.
I really can't say much more about the specifics of this subjects (and I'm not trying to be mysterious and he knows why) but M4B is absolutely right about the talent aspect. You have to be unbelievably talented, very well educated, both academically and in terms of musical awareness, as well as doing a ridiculous amount of dog work to even have the opportunity to get the chance to sub a bed track for a cue that *may* get in to the film. A lot of the guys I work / have worked with did so much work that it so unbeleivably below their talent and ability levels for years just to get a small chance at fixing or conforming a cue for a reedited segment.
And to touch on the other skills part - you have to realize that nearly every composer relies on a team, in some cases an army, of help to "produce" a score, and so much of the battle of being a top flight composer can also rest on things such as how good you are in a meeting, whether you can pitch your idea effectively, whether you think on your feet in terms of musical ideas, whether you can rely on the right team of people around you - it's not just about music, so much is management, and the top guys have it down to a fucking artform.
By the way Zimmer got in to by being a composers assistant in London for many years but he got the chance to do that because he was the keyboard player for The Buggles - Video Killed the Radio Star. He's actually self taught (no formal music training) which does go a long way to explaining his model of collaborating with musicians to bring something to the score.
It's funny though, through my work as a score engineer at various studios, one thing that strikes me is how major music stars or "artists" are so far out of their depth when they are on a film project. It's actually staggering how at a loss they can be and the nurturing and producing that needs to go on to get something useful.
Some can play their genre or instrument so well, even be amazing at song writing, but the sheer intellectualisation of score music is way beyond them and by the time the science (conforming, tempos, editing) portion gets involved, they are just floundering.
You have to bear in mind that for a given score or even a mid budget film, there would be obvious orchestral elements but there may well also be electronic, asian, middle eastern, folk, african, (etc), all in the same score, and you have to be able to write for them and make sure they fit and compliment the film in a cohesive manner, which is one of the single most difficult aspects of scoring.
And this is why most EDM producers suck at scoring - it's the combination of all these skills, while trying to do all these different elements or discliplines and being flexible under extreme pressure to produce something creative and working with and "handling" a large number of people (and that can inlcude everything from Assistant engineers to the Executive producer or director of the film itself).
It's so much more complex than writing some soaring chords to a slo- mo battle scene.
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