 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Nice story Howard. Let me join you on the porch with my pipe.
So, when I was a boy, we didn't have colour TV either - that didn't become common in my part of the world until about '73 or '74. So all the colour films I saw on TV were in b/w, often with the "snowstorm effect" caused by the aerial pointing the wrong way. And the films I watched since ever I can remember were almost always horror or SF, and usually what we'd call B flicks.
The result of this, speaking about the music, is that I had already been accustomed to hearing the scores of lesser-known composers before I knew that real people wrote that stuff. When I was about 12 I started noticing names and recognising styles, but it was never Jerry Goldsmith or Miklós Rózsa at that time. It was people such as Von Dexter, Hans Salter, Leith Stevens, Les Baxter, Buxton Orr, Kenneth V. Jones, Elisabeth Lutyens, Marlin Skiles etc etc etc. And around the same time, the spooky made-for-TV Movies were being shown, so I was pretty quickly immersed in the sounds of Gil Mellé, Robert Prince and Robert Drasnin.
It might seem odd to some people - I mean, I am odd - that it wasn't until a bit later that I began to pay attention to scores from other genres, and from films with bigger budgets. So my first "taped-from-the-telly" cassettes (Zzzzzz . wake up, you at the back) were all Salter and Baxter and Lutyens, then around 1975 or '76 a change began, and the cassettes (and my head) were increasingly filled with more varied stuff. I still remember that cassette which jumped from horror to... well, everything else really. On it were PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (Rózsa), MADIGAN (Don Costa), TORN CURTAIN (Addison), SHAFT (Hayes), AIRPORT (Newman), THE DEADLY AFFAIR (Q. Jones) and THE SATAN BUG (Goldsmith). That must have been around the time I was pretending to be groovy.
Thanks Howard. Any old excuse for me to spout the same old stories, sitting there on the porch, pipe in hand, dog snoozin' at my feet. They don't make 'em like that anymore.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
"A little man, with a little baby face. A little man who thought he could be a big man, in a big man's world, just because he carried a toy machine gun around with him. A little man whose final elegy was, quite appropriately, from a certain Maestro Van Alexander, another man short in stature, but in this case big in talent, a talent he shared with his brother, a certain mister Joshua Feldman, also known as Jerry Fielding. Except in this particular case, and despite what is claimed in that omnipotent universe of unending knowledge which is "the Internet", Maestro Alexander was NOT Maestro Fielding's brother. These things happened, or perhaps they did not happen, right here, in - the Twilight Zone."
And now a word from our alternate sponsor.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
And now Mr Serling -
"Next week we welcome back the immensely talented Richard Matheson, who takes us into that dark yet magical realm of black and white television, and how it casts its very particular spell on the aged and infirm, some time in the far future. Join us next week with Mr James Cagney and Miss Bette Davis at the same time."
"Smoke cigarettes - they're good for you."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Posted: |
May 22, 2016 - 12:57 PM
|
|
|
|
By: |
Howard L
(Member)
|
Yesterday I treated myself to something I hadn't seen in fifty years, The Attack Of The Crab Monsters. You know you grew up on a steady diet of sci fi and horror when you can still remember lines and faces from infancy. LOL this one was no exception. Call out the men in the clean white coats. Roger Corman has been featured on interviews the past few weeks on TCM and I have to hand it to him. He knew exactly who he was and what the shot was and damned if he and much of his stock crew didn't end up making viable careers out of it. The composer for this one was Ronald Stein. Like I ever heard of the guy, but Corman had nice things to say about him in this DVD's added feature. So I went to IMDB and holy cow I am ashamed to look at the incredible list of potboilers and recognize way too many titles. At least I can blame it on youth LOL. Oh but the best are these quotes from the composer, who died at 58 from cancer:
At mid-century Stein, as a young hopeful film composer, wrote to the various music department heads at the film studios in search of advice or suggestions. He received only one reply, and that from Lionel Newman at 20th Century-Fox, who said simply: "Don't come.".
I treated every project that I've ever worked on--and some of them have been fairly miserable--with the greatest of respect. My question to myself, always, in any work I've done, was that my contribution had to be equal to or greater than anyone else's individual contribution. That's always been the way I've approached it. This is also the way I treated it, budget-wise: never wasting money, even if I wasn't paying for it. I treated it with a great deal of respect, first of all because the medium, to me, deserved it; and secondly, because the cooperation of all the people involved in order to get a film mounted is important.
Keeping that in mind, I'm going to watch Not Of This Earth a little later. Had no idea what was going on fifty years ago but it still scared the crap out of me. 
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
