ChatGPT Rescues FSM

I have been dreading something, maybe for decades. Not the FSM Kickstarter, that is fun, and working really well—thank you, and please keep the donations coming! (We need more like $50K, not the $25K goal we’ve already surpassed.)

I’ve been dreading converting all our vintage articles into text form. I have all the computer files, but the software has been upgraded so many times that the articles open up loaded with garbage characters.

I’ve used optical scanning readers to convert pdfs into text, but they also come with a lot of errors that have to be manually cleaned up.

Anyway, just now as a test I asked ChatGPT to convert to text form a jpg of page one of our infamous Hans Zimmer interview at the time of The Peacemaker.

It did this almost instantaneously:

Int. Hans Zimmer’s Windowless Studio

Lukas Kendall turns on his tape recorder, assuming that this interview was to be about Hans Zimmer’s latest project. Zimmer starts the first of many cigarettes. Media Ventures music editor Adam Smalley enters as well.

Lukas Kendall: Can you tell us something about Peacemaker?

Hans Zimmer: I wouldn’t mind talking about why the magazine keeps slagging my stuff off.

Lukas: Yeah, well, we were dreading this moment but we knew it would come. You go first.

Hans: Okay, well, why am I given hell for things I am not even guilty of? Like The Rock, which your magazine called another mindless Zimmer score. Why doesn’t Nick Glennie-Smith get the heat? It was sort of his score.

Lukas: I think on that one specifically, word had gone out that it was a Hans Zimmer score for whatever reason, and it was producers you had worked with before. Just from the experience of running this magazine and this website, I know how people repeat information that gets spread around, and it’s interpreted as accurate.

Hans: Yeah, but you print it.

Lukas: Yeah, and I get shit for it.

Hans: All right, good. But that’s the whole thing I was referring to, that it came out of here [Media Ventures]. What does that mean?

Lukas: Well, that you’ve done has never really existed in film music for any length of time, as far as writers collaborating—

Hans: Ghostwriters have existed.

Lukas: Ghostwriters have definitely existed and you’re unusual in that you say, “He did write that.” Whereas people over the years have gone, “Well, so-and-so never added a note…”

Hans: We have different generations of film score nerds. The oldest generation thinks Alfred Newman is the greatest composer ever, then you have people who think Jerry Goldsmith is the greatest, John Williams is the greatest. To these fans, film scoring is a tradition of the one man sitting at a piano in their homes, alone.

Hans: But Jerry is starting to credit people who have written for him.

Lukas: But I don’t know of any instance where he has uncredited ghostwriters.

Hans: Didn’t he do that on Star Trek?

Jeff Bond: Yes, Fred Steiner [on Star Trek: The Motion Picture].

Lukas: And on Outland Morton Stevens wrote the ending fight.

Hans: Yeah, but the new Star Trek, didn’t Joel McNeely...?

Lukas: Well, Joel Goldsmith, his son contributed to First Contact. He [Jerry G.] has always done scores in ten days or three weeks; this is the first time he’s actually said, well, this guy will write 20 minutes and receive credit.

Hans: Because I ran into Jerry in London while we were doing Peacemaker, and he’s finishing one thing or another, and then by the next week he’s finished with Star Trek.

Lukas: Ghost and the Darkness. The story was that he was going to do Star Trek, something happened on Ghost and the Darkness so he had to go kill another week on it, and didn’t have enough time for Star Trek.

Hans: If you look at the credits on Alien, it’s like composed by Jerry Goldsmith, conducted by Lionel Newman.

Lukas: But Lionel didn’t write anything.

Hans: Still, there’s that mark there, “Jerry wasn’t allowed to conduct his own score.”

Jeff: Lionel conducted a lot of the Fox scores.

Lukas: There are several stories with that: one that he [Goldsmith] was exhausted, another that it was union issues dealing with London. The other is that he wanted to sit in the booth and hear the balance of electronics. On Star Trek: The Motion Picture [which Newman also conducted part of, in Los Angeles] it was the first time he was piping in the blaster beam.

Hans: The thing that keeps creeping into the magazine about this place [Media Ventures] is that it’s a “factory.” That’s the word used.

Jeff: I think I’m guilty of that. Part of it for me is a style thing, in that I’m more of an old-school person, and you represent more of what contemporary scoring is becoming. Part of me is reacting against that. I don’t know how much of The Rock was yours—

Hans: I just want to say, categorically, the CD of The Rock stinks.

And that’s page one—fun interview!

This will definitely be the centerpiece of our Best of FSM book.

Anyway, our robot overlords may soon enslave humanity, but for now, this beats retyping something I already formatted 27 years ago.

More to come!