It is a truth universally acknowledged that, sometimes, the soundtrack is better than the movie. With the exception of musicals, this is a relatively new phenomenon, probably dating back to about the mid-’90s. One of the people who drove that is Karyn Rachtman. She’s a music supervisor, which is not a job that gets talked about much. In fact, Rachtman really got her start by acquiring the music rights to one of the most notorious scenes set to music in that era, and she got the film’s rights—which can’t have been cheap—paid for by selling the idea of a soundtrack album to MCA.
The mid-’90s were the rise of both the movie soundtrack and the independent film industry. Rachtman’s career is probably its most important overlap. A young guy named Quentin Tarantino, best known for playing an Elvis impersonator on The Golden Girls, was making his first movie. He knew he wanted to use the song “Stuck in the Middle With You” during a prominent moment in it, but his music supervisor couldn’t get the rights. When Rachtman could, she took over the job. In 1994 alone, she would have fourteen credits. And if not all of them are such stone-cold classic soundtracks as Pulp Fiction, having that and Reality Bites in the same year solidified her cred in the business.
Neither her Wikipedia nor her IMDb entries are complete; both include multiple entries that the other does not and therefore lead me to believe there are likely to be ones missing from both. Of the ones listed, her best in my opinion is being Executive Soundtrack Producer for Romeo + Juliet. And maybe that means she didn’t do much of the song selecting herself, but I’m not sure how the job works, and at the very least it indicates that someone working for her probably did. But she did the same job that same year for Grace of My Heart, and if the movie isn’t my favourite, the soundtrack’s been sitting on my Amazon list for years.
Her job, in short, is picking out songs that fit with a specific moment. And if, okay, that meant being one of the people who decided we needed the “All Star” needle drop, in her case at the end of Mystery Men, she’s also the one who made sure we’d get the fantastic “Supermodel,” by Jill Sobule, in Clueless. Would Office Space work without its soundtrack? Yes. Would it have been as funny? No. She also worked on Moulin Rouge!, one of the few full-on musicals she has worked on. Musicals don’t need her specific work.
During the era of Rachtman’s greatest successes, some of her soundtracks were in constant rotation at my house. Which, in fact, I shared with a woman named Karyn, who would have been thrilled if she’d ever noticed the commonality in their names. I’d also note that, in common with my thesis that Loveline has had a cultural footprint far outweighing what you’d expect, Karyn Rachtman’s brother Riki was a former host, from whom I’ve lifted “perfectly healthy, perfectly normal” in response to interests people mention. Maybe they’re not as notable as the Gyllenhaals or Martin Sheen’s boys, but they’re definitely a pair of siblings who have had a strong influence on my life.
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