A while ago I went to a performance by the Minnesota Orchestra where they showed an old Charlie Chaplin movie, and played the score to the movie as it went. (Side note- the Minnesota Orchestra is doing it again with another Chaplin movie in early January. I’d recommend it. It’s fun.)
It was really cool not only because it was a live performance coupled with a great movie (City Lights is awesome, highly recommended), but because it’s also the way silent movies were originally shown – with a live musician either performing the score along with it (often on just a piano), or completely improving a score for the movie as it played.
I also remember that at some point even longer ago, I saw something on TV about old movies, and I believe one of them was a Charlie Chaplin one as well, where they were saying that it’s a bit hard to restore a definitive version of the movie, because it was originally produced with 4 different scores, any one of which could be played with the film, and each one of which had a very different tone and style, each giving the whole movie a very different feel.
So, here’s my idea for the more cinematic crowd out there. I’d like to see a website called Four Score (intentional pun on Lincoln’s speech) where a film maker produces a modern silent movie, and then releases it to the website. Any user (or possibly a select group of preselected composers, up to you) can then submit a score / sound track for the movie in the form of an mp3 to be played along with the movie. The best four are voted on, and the 4 different versions of the movie are then released on the site. I would tend to imagine this would work best with shorts, maybe in the 5-10 minute range, just so people would be willing to watch the different versions, and so the idea of coming up with a score for them would be at least somewhat within reach of the average user.