Frustration
This chapter focuses on Mancini's work on the large-scale space alien film Lifeforce (1985). Mancini's handwritten sketches for his score to the film reveals how important the job was to him, coming at this stage of his career. At last someone was offering him the kind of blockbuster science fiction epic that John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and even the young guys like James Horner (Brainstorm [1984]) and Alan Silvestri (The Abyss [1989]) were getting. With Lifeforce he might join the new ruling class of film composers on its own terms. However, the film was being supervised by Cannon Pictures, part of the infamous movie brokerage firm the Cannon Group. They had made their money by funding quick and cheap genre films on a one-time basis, turning a profit by almost immediately handing them over to their video-release branch. It was decided that Lifeforce would be chopped down to a more manageable length and into a form where most of the long reflective or descriptive visual sequences would be truncated. Along with them, their music had to go.