The Lalo on My List
- Lukas Kendall
- Jun 29
- 2 min read
I’ve been thinking about Lalo Schifrin who we lost last week, and all the enjoyment I’ve gotten from his scores over, well, my entire lifetime.
When I was doing the FSM label, I had a “wish list” of titles I wanted to release—and we got to do quite a number of them. But there are, nonetheless, the “ones that got away,” and on my “Lalo list,” the one at the top was the 1976 Charles Bronson movie, St. Ives.
Sorry to tease—I am not making news, It’s still unreleased and I want it!
I know Warner Bros. has the multitrack masters and it would sound amazing. I did ask about the title at some point and was told there was a rights problem, which I am sure had to do with the underlying literary rights.
St. Ives was based on a 1972 novel by Oliver Bleeck (a pen name for Ross Thomas), The Procane Chronicle. This is a problem that has increasingly come to bite the specialty CD labels: literary rights expirations. Warner Bros. bought the rights to the book back in the 1970s to make a movie—and they did. They own St. Ives and can continue to release (on home video) and exhibit the movie based on their original deal.
However, once that original deal expires (there are complicated copyright issues having to do with the contract language and/or the death of the author), they can no longer continue to make new material based on the book. And technically, a soundtrack album to the film derived from the book could be considered a new product.
So there you go. What a bummer because I love that main title theme!
Our Kickstarter is still live, thank you for contributing! Ends July 10th.
I hope one day, this particular aspect of copyright law gets litigated with a decision that sets a precedent. We can all understand that an intellectual property's author/creator deserves to be able to control authorization of use that exploits that property until it enters public domain. We all (should) get it. Yet it reaches a point of absurdity when it comes to instances like this because music, in and of itself, can in no way be considered to exploit a literary property. It's not like a musical work with a textual component, such as an opera, cantata, or musical narrative--but even there, texts have been altered without being considered a violation of the composer's or publisher's prerogative. For example, "P…
It will eventually come out one day...stay possitive. I have it on my wish list for the last 30 years...JOE KIDD, COOGAN'S BLUFF, THE VENETIAN AFFAIR, DIRTY HARRY, MAGNUM FORCE, even BRUBAKER, almost everything from my early list of unreleased Lalo's scores are available since a long time. It's time to focus on this holy grail.
I'm still optimistic.