Congrats and many thanks to the Small family and Tim Greiving for a brand new and terrific website dedicated to the late Michael Small, composer of Klute, Marathon Man and so many other great scores.
I was so happy to be able to release Klute and Marathon Man/The Parallax View when we were doing the FSM label. These are among the greatest 1970s films and his scores are brilliant. For Klute, he went entirely against the grain of thriller–suspense scores by eschewing low registers in favor of wispy, disturbing, soft and mid-range/high colors.
We were lucky to have access to the 2'' 16-track masters for both Klute and Marathon Man. (The Parallax View was gone, we had to use a music stem.)
In recent years, I was excited to hear The Parallax View tracked into Mr. Robot by Sam Esmail, who loves this era of film music—and later tracked the first season of Homecoming entirely with vintage thriller–suspense scores, including several by Small.
I remember at one point thinking, damn, they should remake Klute—then I thought, that’s madness, how could you possibly do it as well as they did it in 1971?
Similarly, a friend of mine once mused, “Wouldn’t it be great to remake Marathon Man?” And I said, “Okay—Laurence Olivier, Dustin Hoffman, Roy Scheider, Marthe Keller, Bill Devane...can you improve upon that?” And he said, “Never mind!”