The 2026 Academy Award nominations were recently announced and there are a number of music-related honorees even beyond the song and score categories. But instead of talking about Song Sung Blue, let's learn some previously unknown trivia about an Oscar-nominated music movie released thirty years ago.
That Thing You Do! was the first film credit for Adam Schlesinger, the late songwriting genius behind Fountains Of Wayne and Ivy. He wrote and recorded "That Thing You Do!" to serve as the hit by fictional '60s pop band the Oneders aka the Wonders in Tom Hanks' 1996 film of the same name. (The Candy Butchers' Mike Viola sang the lead vocal mimed by Johnathon Schaech in the movie.)
The song "That Thing You Do!" was nominated for an Oscar and charted just shy of the real-life Top 40. Schlesinger went on to an illustrious TV/movie scoring career, with three Emmy wins and too many credits to count. Most of the That Thing You Do! soundtrack was written by behind-the-scenes types like Scott Rogness and Rick Elias, though alongside Schlesinger many notable '90s power-pop artists are known to have submitted tracks for consideration.
Now, three decades after the movie's release, Danny Benair has randomly revealed some previously unreported details about the soundtrack and songs that didn't make the cut for it. On his social media accounts, the musician and former publishing exec has been sharing excerpts from TTYD! demo tapes that he'd held onto. (After drumming for punk band the Weirdos, power-poppers the Quick, and Paisley Underground icons the Three O'Clock, Benair served as Vice President of the Film & Television Department of Polygram Music Publishing all through the '90s.) Benair's posts include snippets of previously unreleased songs like a Schlesinger tune for the film called "Bom Ditty Bom" and title track pitches from acts not previously known to have participated.
In 1995, Gigolo Aunts were coming off the success of their biggest hit, "Where I Find My Heaven," which was featured in 1994's Dumb And Dumber. The Potsdam, NY rockers did ultimately get a Wonders song on the That Thing You Do! soundtrack, "Little Wild One." But Benair revealed they submitted a bunch more, including three attempts at the Wonders' big hit. (“They described to us what Tom Hanks wanted which was songs that sounded like faux-Beatles tunes," bassist Steve Hurley said in 2007.) Gigolo Aunts also submitted a track called “Draw The Line" that has never been released.
Another cassette, labelled "Film Ideas," came from World Party. That contained the late British songwriter Karl Wallinger's ideas for the Wonders. This would've been shortly after World Party's "Young Americans"-inspired track "When You Come Back To Me" was selected for 1994's beloved Reality Bites soundtrack. Ultimately none of Wallinger's tunes were used for TTYD!, but the song previewed in Benair's video became "It Is Time" from World Party's 1997 album Egyptology.
While theirs is not part of Benair's time capsule, They Might Be Giants took a stab at the That Thing You Do! theme too. "The thing we did was pretty squared off, riff driven rock and roll," John Flansburgh later recalled. "It was done very fast and probably was way too punk." The submission was part of a bootlegged 1999 TMBG demos tape that finally made its way to YouTube a few years ago. Coincidentally They Might Be Giants linked up with Schlesinger for the 1999 album Mink Car, then had plenty of Hollywood success of their own — the duo landed the Grammy-winning theme song to Malcolm In The Middle in 2000.
Robyn Hitchcock, Dwight Twilley, Velvet Crush, and the Verve Pipe (who hadn't yet had their breakthrough) are known to have submitted versions of "That Thing You Do!" too.
XTC offered "My Train Is Coming," a song that had already been rejected for the 1988 Phil Collins movie Buster, Andy Partridge revealed upon releasing the demo on the 2003 demos comp Fuzzy Warbles Volume 3.
Marshall Crenshaw, who co-wrote Gin Blossoms' Empire Records hit "Til I Hear It From You" in '95, revised and rerecorded "All I Ever Wanted," a song he wrote with Kirsty MacColl that was even released as a single from her 1991 album Electric Landlady (the one with the hit "Walking Down Madison"). Crenshaw so regretted not taking the assignment more seriously, it spurred him to land the title track to 2007's Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a soundtrack otherwise mostly written by the aforementioned Viola (it's all connected!). From a The Morning Call profile published the year after that biopic parody:
Crenshaw’s diligence was motivated partly by the regret he still feels at not trying harder when asked to contribute a song to the winsome 1996 Tom Hanks-directed cult fave That Thing You Do!
“I pulled something I had written with Kirsty MacColl off the shelf and sent it in. .. The song, 'All I Ever Wanted,’ was a single in England [in 1991]. I wrote the music, she wrote the lyrics. Later, when the film [about an Erie band that scores a hit in 1964] came out and I saw how good it was, I thought, 'I could have gotten a song in this movie.'"
Writing for Musoscribe last fall, Bill Kopp noted that the Posies were rejected for That Thing You Do! too. When their "Ask Anybody" wasn't used, the band's Ken Stringfellow reworked it with Denny Scott as the title track to Swirl 360's debut album a couple of years later. Scott also co-wrote a song with Schlesinger on that LP.
Back to Benair... he also shared excerpts from a couple of demos by the Cardigans for another 1996 movie with a memorable soundtrack. One is labeled "Untitled Song for ‘Romeo + Juliet.’" That cut, which was selected for the soundtrack to Romeo + Juliet, was "Lovefool," their biggest hit. The snippet sounds like the iconic version we know, but I love this glimpse at it before it had a name (and that the Cardigans ultimately went with one that wasn't in the lyrics). Turns out the Swedish pop-rock band also submitted "Juliet's Theme"; it was not selected, but ultimately became "Great Divide" from their '96 album First Band On The Moon (the same LP with "Lovefool").
Check out clips from all these demos below and lemme know if I'm the only one who finds this lore interesting.
Gigolo Aunts’ "That Thing You Do!" demo v1:
Gigolo Aunts’ "That Thing You Do!" demo v2:
Another unused Gigolo Aunts' demo for the Wonders, “Draw The Line”:
Adam Schlesinger’s "That Thing You Do!" demo:
A Schlesinger demo not used, "Bom Ditty Bom":
World Party's submission for That Thing You Do!:
The Cardigans' “Untitled Song For ‘Romeo + Juliet’" aka "Lovefool":
The Cardigans' "Juliet's Theme":
