Leonard Rosenman CD Signing This Saturday

by Lukas Kendall

I am blowing this entire FSD today to publicize our upcoming Fantastic Voyage CD signing this Saturday at Creature Features in Burbank. Wait, keep reading! Even if you are far away from Los Angeles and are grumbling about why all the cool things have to happen in L.A...

This Saturday from 1 to 3 PM we will be carting out Leonard Rosenman to autograph copies of our new FSM Silver Age Classics Fantastic Voyage CD. (Go here for complete info on the CD, which we just got back from the pressing plant yesterday - we are frantically shipping them out to collectors now!) This score has NEVER been available in any form and our CD presents the complete score in stereo, newly remixed from the original 35mm elements at 20th Century Fox. It is a limited edition not available in ANY store... except for Creature Features during these two hours. (And of course it's available by mail through this site.)

Leonard Rosenman is a very misunderstood personality. This comes almost entirely from an article David Hirsch wrote about him in Starlog magazine around 7 or 8 years ago (or more). Basically, Lenny slammed right and left a lot of fan-favorite composers and scores, especially Basil Poledouris and RoboCop. He also declared his score for Star Trek IV the most modern of the film series -- which took me forever to understand, since I always thought Star Trek IV had the most traditional dramatic approach. What Lenny was referring to was some of his compositional techniques, which drew on idioms created later in musical history than Goldsmith and Horner's respective scores - especially the whale fugue.

In any case, I know that fans have an image of Leonard Rosenman as this totally snobby, humorless professor, like John Houseman or something. This is SO incorrect. This is why you should show up this Saturday. He's a really affable man, almost goofy, and what he says in person does not come across the way it does in print. He has lots of funny stories, and funny opinions, and lets them fly in a breezy, enjoyable way. Plus he's a pretty accomplished, amazing composer.

To give you some background, Rosenman was a concert composer in New York in the 1940s and '50s. He was James Dean's piano teacher (how cool is that?) and did East of Eden because of that relationship, and because his buddy Lenny Bernstein said that doing a film was fun and he should try it (Bernstein did his only film score, On the Waterfront, the year before). Rosenman of course went on to score East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, Cobweb and many other movies where he was a pioneer in bringing modern 20th century compositional techniques to Hollywood cinema. He has at many times taken years off to pursue concert composition - prior to Fantastic Voyage, he spent four years in Italy having nothing to do with film. He won an Oscar in 1975 for his adaptation of classical music for Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (and has some good Kubrick stories).

If you come Saturday, you should expect a pretty compact sci-fi collectibles store, Creature Features (which is loaded with cool stuff), with Leonard Rosenman at a table signing CDs, and a line weaving through the store of people waiting to talk with him. The store really is fantastic, and if you are in L.A., you should know about it. It is located at 1802 West Olive St, which is on the south side of the street a few blocks east of Buena Vista and Disney (Warner Bros. is also down the other way). It's easy to find and there is parking on the street. Call the store at 818-842-9382 for more info.

Also, this is your chance to meet the FSM crew (Lukas Kendall, Jeff Bond, and our art director, Joe Sikoryak), which I know is of paramount importance. We'll probably throw out a suggestion box and we will be as close as you can get to a captive audience if you just want to talk about soundtracks.

So, I hope you're not doing anything from 1 to 3PM this Saturday, and come by the store. See you then!

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