We Have A Fun Little White Lotus Music Feud On Our Hands

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

… riiiiiiiiiiiight here.

Off we go.

FIVE: Discordant sounds

There is drama afoot at The White Lotus. Not on the show itself. I mean, there is some drama afoot on the show, too. There is mysterious gunplay and benzo-gulping Duke graduates and multiple incest-adjacent plots weaving together as we careen into the season three finale. But that’s not the drama I want to talk about here. I want to talk about the drama behind the scenes. I want to talk about interpersonal conflict. I want to talk about the thing where the guy who composed the theme music for the show announced he was quitting right at the beginning of an interview with The New York Times and then proceeded to say a bunch of vague and petty things about the show’s creator, Mike White. That's the good stuff.

The interview is here and I do recommend you read it all at some point, if only to get an idea of the type of people we are dealing with. These are proud, stubborn, creative people who are eccentric and demanding. Especially the composer, whose name is Cristóbal Tapia de Veer. This is how he is introduced in the opening.

Mr. Tapia de Veer, a 51-year-old composer who was born in Chile, joined a video call on Monday from his home in the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec, a gong the size of a beach ball visible over his right shoulder.

Perfect. I love him already.

The interview was supposed to be about the opening theme of the show, which he had also composed in the first two seasons to great fanfare, and which has been the subject of fiery debate in the third season. Many people do not like the new theme as much as the old ones. Here’s the season three version, just so you have a baseline.

What we learn very quickly, though, is that the theme’s composer doesn’t exactly love it either. There was apparently a lot of back and forth and “hysterical” conversations about it, both related to how experimental he could get and how it was supposed to fit into the show’s allotted timeframe for credits, just under two minutes. And that’s when he informed the interviewer that he had quit.

He didn’t just quit, though. He did this…

It’s kind of weird right now because I announced to the team a few months ago that I was not coming back, that I was leaving. I didn’t tell Mike for various reasons; I wanted to tell him just at the end for the shock and whatever. Except I told the whole editorial team and music editor and producer and all that, but I didn’t think that they were going to tell him. At some point he heard about that.

I can’t decide what I enjoy more in this paragraph, the thing where he told every single person who works on the show and then was surprised when word trickled up to the man who employs them all, or the phrase “for shock and whatever.” Really no loser here. Working with artists is fun.

Wanna see what he said when the interviewer asked him how Mike White reacted?

He says a lot of things, but I can’t really talk about that.

I should be clear here that I’m not taking sides in this mess. I don’t know either of them and I don’t know what happened and I kind of don’t care. I do, however, love the phrasing of this answer. It’s like that thing where someone says “I have no comment about that duplicitous weasel” and you think… well, you did kind of comment there, didn’t you? If you would like more examples of this kind of phrasing, please watch all 45 hours of the music documentary about The Eagles.

Anyway, guess if there’s a longer version of the theme that he likes more but was prevented from releasing…

I texted the producer and I told him that it would be great to, at some point, give them the longer version with the ooh-loo-loo-loos, because people will explode if they realize that it was going there anyway. He thought it was a good idea. But then Mike cut that — he wasn’t happy about that.

And then guess if he uploaded it to YouTube and gave it to the New York Times in the interview where he announced he was quitting over disagreements with the showrunner…

Here’s what we’ve learned in all of this:

• Creative people are delightful but not always easy to work with
• More people should announce they are quitting their jobs in interviews with major publications
• This uncut version of the theme does whip ass at the end

This was fun. Let’s do something like it again soon.

FOUR: You can’t disrespect Carrie Coon, Marvel Studios