Sound and Vision Review and Autographed Copies

Following is Jeff Bond's review of Sound and Vision: 60 Years of Motion Picture Soundtracks, a new book by noted film music journalist Jon Burlingame.

Conveniently -- and sort of coincidentally -- we are now carrying this book and selling it through our magazine and site. And as a special bonus, we have gone to both Jon Burlingame and Leonard Maltin (who wrote the foreword) to autograph the first 30 copies going on sale today.

Jon has autographed the title page in silver ink (the background is black), "Best wishes, Jon Burlingame," while Leonard has signed the bottom of his foreword page, above his name.

We are offering these autographed copies at the same price as the regular ones -- $18.95 -- which is the book's retail price overall. So HURRY NOW and get your signed copy -- order here!

Also, we have updated all of our ordering forms here on the site to allow gift recipient addresses and a place you can put a message to go with the gift.

Thanks for your support!

--Lukas Kendall

JON BURLINGAME

Billboard Books, 244 pages, $18.95

Periodically I get a phone call from Jon Burlingame asking me if I know something about a certain composer, record label, movie score or soundtrack album that he doesn't. I'm presuming that one of these phone calls led to me being thanked in the foreword of Burlingame's new book, Sound and Vision. However, I am continually perplexed that Jon makes these phone calls to me. Doesn't he realize that I'm the same Jeff Bond whose sleep-deprived memory put Clint Eastwood in the cast of Wagon Train? Who said Saul Bass did the title sequence to The Satan Bug when it was actually Depatie-Freleng Associates doing a Saul Bass-like title sequence? Or who misspelled "The Master Musicians of Jajouka" in his summer movie piece when discussing Howard Shore's score to The Cell?

The fact is, I'm the one who should be calling Jon Burlingame every day. And when I finally do get around to doing that, asking him some arcane question about a TV score (one of many subjects on which Burlingame is unquestionably the final authority), Jon's response is inevitably "Don't you have my book?" Well of course I have TV's Biggest Hits, but I kept my jealously-guarded edition at home where I could savor it. Only when I brought the book into the office did I cut my volume of desperate calls to Jon Burlingame in half. Now he has produced Sound and Vision for Billboard Books, which should practically eliminate ALL my calls to Jon.

In Sound and Vision Burlingame is given the unenviable task of encapsulating the entire history of the movie soundtrack, with an eye toward the popular influence (as interpreted via sales figures) of the medium. Of course this is impossible to do. Burlingame does it anyway, in 244 pages. In a fascinating opening section, he charts the history of the soundtrack album from a 1926 Bell Laboratories 33 1/3 RPM recording of the John Barrymore film Don Juan to The Jazz Singer, early Walt Disney soundtracks for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, an album from The Wizard of Oz featuring new recordings of Judy Garland and the Ken Darby Singers doing songs from the film, to much later breakout hits like Maurice Jarre's Dr. Zhivago, Ernest Gold's Exodus, John Williams' Star Wars and Horner's Titanic.

I've got a feeling the folks who requested this book wanted Burlingame to do a book about albums like Flashdance, Saturday Night Fever and Footloose and Burlingame told them he wouldn't do it without discussing the movie score end of the business as well. He tracks the history of the movie-inspired popular song (also beginning in 1926 with a song by band leader Guy Lombardo's written for the film What Price Glory?) through David Raksin's seminal "Laura," Dimitri Tiomkin's "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling" from High Noon (the first song to actually promote a film before its release) to Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" from The Blackboard Jungle (which almost single-handedly introduced rock and roll to movie audiences), right on through the Beatles' hits for their films, Simon and Garfunkel's industry-changing songs for The Graduate and chart-topping albums like the aforementioned Flashdance and Saturday Night Fever.

You can almost see Burlingame holding his nose through some of this, and indeed the book consistently poses the question of whether there is merit to the song score approach (and whether there's in fact any relationship between many of these songs and the movies in which they appeared other than a purely contractual one). But ultimately the parallel relationship between musicals, song compilations and actual movie score albums makes for a fascinating journey through popular taste, showing how songs written by real film composers (like Barry's title tunes to Born Free or Goldfinger and Horner's "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic) have more than held their own against the works of more popular contemporary musical voices.

Burlingame does an invaluable round-up of the major film composers of the 20th Century, providing a brief but informative background on each and then listing several representative albums (some still sadly only available on LP) for each, with works ranging from Korngold and Steiner through North, Goldsmith, Williams, and today's practitioners such as Horner, James Newton Howard, Marc Shaiman and everyone in between. Burlingame's taste is impeccable and film score fans exploring the range of the hobby will find the book a perfect checklist for what they should seek out in order to experience the best of all the composers who've contributed to the form. Rounding out the book is an equally exhaustive compilation of the biggest-selling and most familiar song and compilation score albums, from Forrest Gump to Amadeus, Evita and Oklahoma! to Natural Born Killers and New Jack City. If you have any doubt about the completeness of this section of the book, I need only inform you that Rick Springfield's soundtrack album to the film Hard to Hold IS included.

For soundtrack fans, Sound and Vision puts their obsession in a cultural and commercial context they probably rarely consider, while the casual reader interested in how many albums the Saturday Night Fever album sold will be amazed at how many "real" film score albums are familiar to them. Now I just have to remember to keep my copy of Sound and Vision at the office instead of at home...I have a feeling I'm going to need it. -- Jeff Bond

MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com