I’m sad to report that longtime collector Jeanne Jones has passed. I mentioned her GoFundMe last month . Please see this thread on the FSM board with info on a remembrance in the L.A. area on the 25th—I’ll be there. I received this remembrance from longtime friend, filmmaker Willard Carroll, who asked to share a few words with the community: ### In the ’90s I purchased quite a few soundtracks from one J.J. Jones. After a couple of years of contact, I extended an invitation t

Today would have been Jerry Goldsmith’s 97th birthday. Check out this great piece by Tim Greiving on Goldsmith , informed by his time interviewing John Williams.

Happy 94th birthday to the Greatest Of All Time, John Williams, still going strong—looking forward to Disclosure Day! His birthday was yesterday. Also congrats to Intrada who made their Kickstarter goal to The Night of the Hunter ! And really, congrats to US who will get to hear it.

It’s the final stretch for Intrada’s Kickstarter to make a new recording of Walter Schumann’s transcendent score for The Night of the Hunter . Please help support this effort! Thanks!

Artist Paul Shipper has made available the cover art from the Best of FSM 35th Anniversary book on his website . It’s beautiful work and I’m so honored to have it for our book!

Today’s update is going to be super annoying—it is for me! We used Amazon print-on-demand for the Best of Film Score Monthly book. It was cheaper and more convenient than a conventional printer. I do not have the funds to do a 1,000-copy print run (and then have to deal with ongoing warehousing, shipping, etc.). The book has come out really well...except for one problem. Out of the “author’s copies” I ordered to ship to the Kickstarter donors, 114 of them were dinged, perfor

I saw this YouTube video by Ryan Leach about five amateur composer mistakes: And what can I say? Yup—seems right to me.

This is what FSMCDs.com has done to my house! The Kickstarter fulfillment is really filling it up. We’ll be through it this coming week—finally!

I didn’t realize how lucky we were to be shipping CDs almost all of the time. These Best of FSM books are heavy and unwieldy. But we are getting the Kickstarter rewards out, I promise! Thanks and look for more updates next week.

Thumbs up for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms , the newest Game of Thrones spinoff/prequel from HBO. I didn’t even know this was coming, or what it was based on. I saw a listing and thought, hey that looks like a Game of Thrones ripoff. The creators have wisely “gone small” and very successfully so, with a character-based story about a wannabe knight and his unusual squire. It recaptures the feeling of the early Game of Thrones seasons, with the lived-in world and medieval

I wrote a Kickstarter update about this yesterday , but we are getting the digital rewards for the campaign set up now. These are the free months of FSM Online and the donor “badges” for your forum profiles. If you want your FSM Online subscription to use something other than the email address you used with Kickstarter, please email me: LukasKendallMV@gmail.com . Thanks!

As we work on getting our Kickstarter rewards out the door, a reminder that Intrada needs your help to fund their new recording of The Night of the Hunter —which I absolutely want to hear! Please contribute, this score is SO GOOD and a new recording is our only hope.

I’ve been asked for cover art for our Filmation Music of Ray Ellis CD, now being shipped to Kickstater donors. (Extra copies will go up for sale after the donors get theirs.) Of course— here you go ! And, a reminder, we have a free archive of all our FSM CD cover art on Dropbox .

We are thick in the middle of getting the Kickstarter rewards out. I know some people have received them, but most are eagerly waiting. It’s still going to take us at least a week to get everything out—maybe two. We are setting up the system to email tracking numbers upon dispatch, and hopefully that is working. Stay tuned!

The Kickstarter rewards are coming! Thank you for being patient as we have hundreds to get through. I am not going to start selling the extra copies of the perks until the donors get theirs. And I’m not going or promote them yet, because I want people to be able to buy them once they see the promotion. It’s all underway—thank you!

The Best of FSM books have arrived! So we’re now good to go to ship out all the Kickstarter perks. We have around 700 to send, and can do 50–70 a day, so this will probably take two to three weeks. Many thanks to Paul Shipper for that beautiful cover art!

I had such a good time last night at the Scott Dunn Orchestra’s 1970s film music concert in Beverly Hills! Great renditions of classics like Chinatown , Superman and Jaws , but also a lot of rarely played pieces: Time After Time by Miklós Rózsa (with filmmaker Nick Meyer in the audience), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and The Conversation by David Shire—and the encore was David’s “Manhattan Skyline” from Saturday Night Fever . I’m sure you can find a proper report/rev

Tonight is the next concert by the Scott Dunn Orchestra in Beverly Hills (Sat. 1/17/26). I really enjoyed the last concert and this one is all 1970s repertoire. Buy your ticket and hope to see you there !

FSM Online subscribers, check FSMO today where we’ve added to the main issue page a “Gallery View” to help you decide what to read. This will be on the issues going forward. The “magazine cover” interface is still there, on top, but now you have this as well.

Boy, this is taking forever. We will start to ship out the Kickstarter perks as soon as the platform finishes its mandatory 48-period to allow everybody to double-check (or update) their address. Stay tuned, it’s happening!