A YouTube user named leibniz154 has been posting piano reductions of film cues, including a great many from the Star Wars films. I love these so much! Since I was a little kid I’ve wanted to know the harmonies behind my favorite passages, and I’m not nearly a good enough musician to pick them out by ear. So ignore the fact that these are computer performances that don’t sound very good—it’s all about having the cues reduced to their bare essentials, so you can understand the

Here’s a 1990 interview with John Barry about Dances With Wolves for, I presume, a press junket, by a longtime entertainment journalist, Bobbie Wygant. The video runs 12:36 but it’s only six minutes long—it’s the A camera and B camera angles, back to back. This came to my attention from Stephen Woolston at the John Barry Appreciation Society Facebook group. I enjoyed seeing Barry being so in command and articulate about his process. This was not long after he nearly died from

I want to give a shout-out today to one of my favorite people, John(ny) Bender, and one of my favorite Facebook groups, The Retro Euro Cult Film Score Society. The pic above is from a visit John and his wife Karen made to Martha’s Vineyard circa 1995. What am I wearing??? This was, apparently, shortly before I murdered Versace: Something you all should know about John: he is ENORMOUS. He said he is 6'9'', I think. I am 5'8" if you include what’s left of my hair. He sat like a

I watched Being the Ricardos on Amazon and liked it. I always watch and enjoy Aaron Sorkin’s work. He operates at such a high level, it’s always educational. I try to listen hard to “crack the code” and it always escapes me—but it has to do something with the characters all being smart enough to express their experiences as if they were happening to someone else. (I must be getting old because for this one, I had to turn on the close captioning to make sure I heard the quips

I just woke up to the awful news that Jean-Marc Vallée has died. See Deadline. I thought Big Little Lies (the first season) and Sharp Objects on HBO were among the best-directed shows I’d ever seen. He directed every episode of those. There are good directors for performance, good directors for camera, and good directors for storytelling. He was all three—and so stylish, to boot. He was only 58. So sad.

Here’s a good topic for your post-Christmas hangover: “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?”—the John Barry–Hal David Xmas song from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Safe to say this has not grown into a standard. Has this grown on me since I first heard it? Maybe. Like a rash. It was worse in the old days of the original, short O.H.M.S.S. album, which was so frustrating to soundtrack collectors for including so little of the terrific score. The song closed side one of

Hope everybody has a great Christmas! For Jewish people, this is the ultimate day off. Nobody’s working, nobody’s calling, nobody expects anything from you—just relax! For your reading, here’s a piece at The Atlantic (a subscription site, but this should appears as a free sample) about how all this Internet bullshit got started as to whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. I have no opinion!

We were going to visit my wife’s parents in Chicago over the holidays. Omicron put an end to that plan. It would have been our first trip in two years. But looking at the caseloads skyrocket ever upwards...it’s not worth it. So we’re home for the duration and I realized—hey, the kids (twin girls, almost seven and a half) are getting to be the age where I can show them stuff I like! I figured, The Exorcist is about a little girl—let’s start with that. (That’s a joke, folks.) B

You know who is a smart man? Harrison Ford is a smart man. One of the many pleasures of the original Blade Runner is the ambiguity as to whether Deckard is a replicant. The movie is much more interesting and layered if Deckard is unwittingly hunting down his own kind (as implied by the unicorn dream cutaway). In recent years, Ridley Scott has explicitly confirmed this: “He is definitely a replicant.” But coming down on the other side of the “debate” is…Harrison Ford! He said,

Just a short note today to refer people to this terrific new article on Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs in Quillette. I think I found it through a Facebook link; whose, I have no idea. I was into Peckinpah in a major way in the early 1990s. I was a student at Amherst College, publishing Film Score Monthly on the side, and speaking often by phone to Nick Redman, then at Bay Cities Records and releasing the first few Jerry Fielding CDs (which were, it turns out, unlicensed, yet hidi

I got my new CD player for the computer so I am happily catching up with Quartet Records’ latest releases. So great! Piero Piccioni (Colpo Rovente, Il Dio Sotto la Pelle), Ennio Morricone (Bandits in Rome, Maddalena, Vergogna Schifosi, Cat o’ Nine Tails), John Barry (Zulu), Henry Mancini (his final three Pink Panther scores)—and a Philippe Sarde score I really like, Le Train, on a CD of Le Chat/Le Train (along with some other Sarde releases). They also reissued The Taking of

I got a huge package of CDs from Quartet Records and I am so excited to listen to them! But I am waiting on a new CD player to hook up to my computer—the old one won’t mount with Monterey. Such problems. (Forgive me, I listen to music on my computer.) One of the new titles is Vergogna Schifosi by Ennio Morricone—just sitting here, waiting for me to listen to it, mocking me—which reminded me of this great cover version I found a while back on YouTube of “Malto, caldo, soldi, m

So much bad news in the air, not least of which is the omicron variant of Covid. So today I’d like to give a shout-out to one of my favorite ridiculous websites, Love Boat Insanity. This fellow, whoever he is, custom-creates Love Boat guest-star title cards for pretty much everybody. That’s it, that’s the whole site. My all-time favorite is above. Best episode ever!

UPDATE 3/8/22: Wow, was I grouchy when I wrote the below! So many negative ways to express things. Sorry!!! But for posterity’s sake, here it is: ### Writing a bit about Star Trek II yesterday reminded me of what it was like to be a James Horner fan in the 1980s and 1990s. For a lot of people, it was a pretty simple love–love relationship. But it was more love–hate for me—because I loved his early scores, but as time went on, became annoyed by all the borrowing and self-borro

I’d like to do a little music theory today. Maybe somebody smarter than I am will read this and offer some wisdom? I love James Horner’s early work. It was part of what got me into film music in the first place. Star Trek II and III, Krull, Brainstorm—his luscious orchestrations and beautiful melodies spoke to my heart when I was a kid...and still do today! There’s a lot to write about Horner’s influences—his “borrowing”—and I don’t have the time or inclination to do it today

My daughter (7) drew the above as part of a school assignment. It thought it was hilarious. I would like to produce movies and television. Really, I’m a producer. I write so I have something I want to make, and I direct so it comes out the way I want it. And wow—if this is not the most competitive field ever. It truly is. It has been far more difficult, arduous and full of failure than I could have imagined. I’m so naive! At the same time, I remain optimistic...because conten

If you’re like me, you love Jerry Goldsmith’s score to Capricorn One. But did you love it enough to choreograph and produce a ballet based on it? Somebody did! John McFall, to be exact, with choreography by Kirk Petersen. Or at least, that’s what I just looked up. This ballet, Belling the Slayer, was premiered by the Columbus BalletMet in 1989. And I have a tape of it! No, not the above link—that’s just an excerpt I found at YouTube. My tape is complete. I just digitized it..

I’m glad people enjoyed the Leonard Rosenman memories yesterday. Today’s post is way more stupid. I can’t believe it’s been 25 years since Mars Attacks! was released (on December 13, 1996). I had recently moved to Los Angeles and was living in (and operating FSM out of) a tiny studio apartment near the Mayfair on Franklin with very loud neighbors who drove me crazy. It wasn’t a happy time of my life. But I was in L.A. and still had excitement for being “where it all happened.

I’ve wanted to write this piece for some time, but have put it off because it’s a little complicated—and, also, personal and emotional. The first time I remember consciously encountering the music of Leonard Rosenman was when I saw Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, probably in its opening week (Thanksgiving 1986). We were visiting grandparents in Philadelphia and I was a big Trekkie—I was 12—so my dad took me. It was my first time seeing a movie in a big, modern movie theater—th

The Expanse is back on Amazon Prime (because space freak Jeff Bezos loved it, and rescued it from cancelation) for its sixth and final season. I’ve watched this show from the beginning and it’s the realistic, grounded space show of my dreams, ever since I was a kid. It’s beautifully mounted, thoughtfully written, and wonderfully precise in the scope and detail of its worldbuilding. And yet there’s something lacking that I think has also held it back from being a pop-culture h