HOLLYWOOD, CA — The inferiority of porn soundtracks has been a standard joke for both professional comics and porn fans for years. While there’s a lot of truth to the joke, there have also been great strides made in creating original music for erotic entertainment. No longer is it just affordable audio filler between sex scenes, especially with the increased production of plot-based videos.
Producer Jeff Mullen knew he had to orchestrate an epic porn music score if his adult movie Rocky XXX a Parody Thriller from Adam & Eve Pictures and X-Play was to live up to the legend of the great Sylvester Stallone and composer Bill Conti’s Rocky movies. Pre-recorded library tracks would not suffice.
“Strangely this was the biggest hurdle I have ever faced in the adult business,” Mullen said.“This Rocky parody deserved a symphonic score, but how could I justify hiring a 45 piece orchestra to make this happen? And the second question was, did we have the talent to arrange, orchestrate and play something of this caliber without hiring 45 musicians?”
What Mullen did was spend weeks studying the Rocky score before going into the recording studio for 13 days, where he arranged, composed, bent, twisted, altered, rewrote and arranged what has long considered a masterpiece in American music. Brass instrument parts including trumpet, trombone, coronet, flugal horn and tuba had to be written, played and recorded. String arrangements had to be created, played and accurately voiced on synthesizers. Rhythm tracks had to be assembled including period appropriate guitars, bass guitars and percussion, plus vocals, involving topHollywood session singers, needed to be just right.
“We had to come close in order to give the feel and vibe of the Rocky movies, but alter it so that we would be free of copyright infringement claims. I believe there is a real art in doing that,” Mullen explained.
“I wasn’t going to make this movie if I didn’t at least allow myself to believe that we could create this epic music score in the studio,” he added. “But you really never know if you can pull it off and always carry constant doubts until you press the red record button if you are going to sink or swim musically speaking. There was no chance we were going to use canned library music on this puppy, so I had no choice but to devote a chunk of my life to this.”
Watch the YouTube trailer about how the Rocky XXX recording sessions went down, so to speak.
