The Internet is full of lies and toxic sludge...but sometimes you stumble upon art of tremendous beauty, too. This is “Piano Folio...to a Disappeared Pleiad” (1997) by Takashi Yoshimatsu. I’ll take a wild guess that he is a Japanese composer. Wow!

I am certainly not going to be able to add anything meaningful to say about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine...but it seems important to acknowledge. I’ve spent the past few evenings watching the news, and the kids would ask what’s going on, and I’d explain it...it’s just so horrible to contemplate the lives lost and the terror for the people of Ukraine. Most of my ancestry is Jewish, from Ukraine, and Kyiv specifically. It’s all so crazy. It’s as if the U.S. decided to just send

Entertainment Weekly has published a terrific oral history of The Shield. I watched this phenomenal show as it aired and it was one of my all-time favorites. Because there’s never been a sequel or reboot, it’s sort of faded from memory, but this article reminded me how first-rate it is. The storylines are all a blur now, but I remember being taken by the run-and-gun cinematography, the naturalistic casting (wherein characters looked like real people, not TV mannequins) and th

Yesterday I posted a short autobiographical video, and I appreciate that a few folks watched it and had nice words about it. Message board user Jurassic T. Park asked: Pretty funny, inspiring, and I guess my ultimate question is are you really reworking and rekindling SKY FIGHTER or is that part of the entertainment? We’re ready for our call to action to amplify! Well thank you to Mr. Park, and all my Korean and Korean-American fans. Yes, I would love to make Sky Fighter. I n

Here’s a short biographical video I made in a desperate bid to promote myself. I made fun of a few things, but mostly of myself. My mom will text me any second—Mom, it’s fine, I loved my childhood!

The Motion Picture Academy announced that the Oscar telecast would be awarding some categories right before the broadcast, so as to squeeze the off-camera winners into the live show via tape-delay and save time. This is the kind of thing that makes me worry I’ll never be a very popular blogger (or podcaster, or “influencer,” whatever). I just don’t care! I’m sure it’s very disappointing to the people in the affected categories—which includes Best Original Score—but this isn’t

Writing these off-the-cuff blog posts are taking me down memory lane. For some reason—maybe the advertising of the next Batman movie?—I remembered being on Main Street, Vineyard Haven, on the opening weekend of Batman (late June, 1989). Vineyard Haven had the smallest theater on the island (the Capawock), and we weren’t able to get in that night. There was a crazy amount of foot traffic outside the theater, from the spillover. I ran into a friend in front of the Bunch of Grap

Vanity Fair has published a fantastic piece by Mark Rozzo about the prevalence of ghostwriters for Hollywood film and television composers, and how it’s become an even larger problem for the ghostwriters to earn a living with reduced or eliminated royalties in the streaming age. The article doesn’t “out” anybody—no stunning revelations—but it’s well-researched, nuanced and insightful. I don’t love contemporary film music the way I did even in the 1990s—in fact, I don’t even l

I want to write my least-viewed post ever—and with your help, I will! During the 2018 Winter Olympics I started watching curling and oh my God, it’s so relaxing. I’ve always enjoyed anticipating how things will...bounce, I guess? It’s the appeal of Breakout, Candy Crush, Bubbleshooter, hitting a tennis ball against the house...billiards? Sure. Is it a boy thing, hitting things into one another? Maybe? I just find it so soothing. Our kids were like, “Why are you watching this?

I never set out with this blog to write daily updates, but I don’t want to break the streak. Sometimes I don’t know what to write and then something randomly comes to mind that always annoyed me. Today—the Ewoks TV movies! Do you remember those? They were belatedly added to Disney+ last year. I started to watch bits of them, then remembered why I always found them so frustrating. By 1984, Star Wars was fading from the public’s imagination. Return of the Jedi had been a satisf

I am liking this sick, twisted show way more than I thought I would. Especially the opening dance credits! I remember seeing James Gunn’s The Specials at its premiere. Oh, here’s a story about that! In the ensemble cast of The Specials is Judy Greer—terrific actor! I don’t remember when or where it was, but I was at a premiere party later on, and I saw Judy Greer, and I sort of point her out to my friends while sitting down in a booth—“Hey, look, it’s Judy Greer, from The Spe

Yesterday I went on our message board and asked people if they could like a tweet of mine. I was hoping to elevate it in the hashtag that people were using to promote their projects (long story, not worth explaining—I was pitching my SKY FIGHTER project, the feature film version of my short film. A whole bunch of people did as I asked and that was really cool—thank you so much! It didn’t seem to work to entirely beat Twitter’s algorithm, but it helped...and I was quite touche

Hello friends, I need to stress-test a one-hour sci-fi TV pilot, PANOPLAY. Seeking any possible reader—inside the biz, outside, related to me, not related, whatever! Logline: “When a virtual-reality game is hacked by a mysterious entity at Comic Con, locking all of its players inside, a bookish teen must follow her brother into the game to save him.” Here’s the first 10 pages. If you want to read the whole thing, email me: Lukas@filmscoremonthly.com. Thanks!

I have read a lot of amateur scripts. For that matter, I have written a bunch of them! I wrote bad scripts for years and years. This took me forever to learn. Would you like to save time? The key to a good script opening is this: First, use a relatable human situation to connect with your reader. This can be pretty much anything—so long as it works! It can be a kid at high school scared of a bully. A cop who has a traffic stop turn into a shootout. A woman who is so looking f

Oh my God, my wife and I have a new favorite show. The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window is a quintessential Netflix show: it came out of nowhere, I’ve never seen anything like it—and it turns out to be awesome. I love the original Zucker–Abrahams–Zucker productions: Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane! and Police Squad! (Top Secret! is a little flabby but still great). I mean, genius, right? But those films were so rapid-fire, anything-goes in their

Interesting question! I have not been watching the show, so I have no opinion. The full themes: Ronja Rövardotter: Boba Fett: I guess Ludwig would be the person to ask? It’s not a big deal to me if he was inspired by something from his childhood, consciously or unconsciously. It would just be interesting to learn how intentional it was, how much the team discussed and signed off on it, etc. Happy Sunday!

I had fun yesterday talking about my earliest soundtrack collecting experiences in the 1980s. As with a lot of geek kids of the era—I was born in 1974—Star Wars was my entry-way into sci-fi and fandom. But I soon discovered Star Trek, via the ubiquitous reruns. In our market, channel 10 from Providence ran them in the afternoon or evening. As a little kid, it always seemed to be “that show where everybody was always getting sick”—I think I chanced upon “The Naked Time” and “M

Writing about John Williams’ 90th birthday, and then the current (boxed) state of my soundtrack collection, reminded me of my earliest days discovering movie music. The first soundtrack album I ever bought was the Varèse Sarabande vinyl album of The Star Wars Trilogy, with Varujan Kojian (I eventually learned how to spell that name) conducting the Utah Symphony Orchestra. This was quite a good album—track list above, from the 1980s Varèse CD—which for years had the only avail

Feast your eyes on this messy stack of boxes under the stairs—that’s (most of) my CD collection. You can also snoop the spines of some of my old DVDs and books. (Joe Sikoryak, I have your Major Mars!) When our twins were born, in 2014 (fortunately, an easy date to remember), we were living in a townhouse in Los Feliz. I had my CD collection on towers and racks that I had hauled through the previous FSM offices and my apartments. But, you know—babies. So I spent several weeks

I was writing my 90th birthday tribute to John Williams yesterday when I saw that Douglas Trumbull passed away on Monday. Here’s the Variety obituary, and some samples of his genius. I don’t have anything to add about Trumbull except that I adore his work, the likes of which we’ll never see again. I mean, seriously and literally, because of the digital revolution, we will never see this again— spellbinding VFX work created without modern computers: I never met Trumbull, but h