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Yavar Moradi

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Yavar Moradi last won the day on February 12

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  1. I'm pretty sure my earliest Jerry Goldsmith-related memory is Dennis McCarthy's arrangement of his Star Trek: The Motion Picture theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation. I remember getting excited by that music every time I would watch an episode of the series with my grandfather, around age six or seven, even though I later learned it was a pale echo of the original work. That said, my Persian father was really into old westerns and had a bunch he recorded off AMC or TCM or whatever in the 1980s onto VHS... and one of these was Black Patch (1957)! I ended up watching most of those old westerns as a kid so it's entirely possible that my first time hearing Jerry Goldsmith music was Jerry's very first original score for a feature film. I just don't have a conscious memory of it. The very first CD I ever owned was Star Trek: First Contact... a birthday present from my great uncle who kinda introduced me to the concept of film music being available on album, by playing Last of the Mohicans in his car. Yavar
  2. So… it’s honestly not just a half hour of that material, but I will sadly admit that the Varese album does focus much more on that material and only has a little bit of the great darker stuff that permeates the film. A Deluxe Edition release would do wonders in terms of reappraisal of this great score. If you view the film again and then revisit the Varese, you’ll notice giant chunks of musical story and development are missing. Yavar
  3. I concur with Thor; this score is a masterpiece which I grew up with. Unfortunately, the Varese album is only about half the score and leaves off a great deal of the darker material that I like better. But try this cue on for size, for something really lovely: Yavar
  4. Bad Girls wouldn't make it on my top 5 Goldsmith westerns list, but it might make the top 10. I agree it's really underrated. Lots of people seem to judge it on the syrupy 90s opening track rather than all the badass gritty action in it ("Ambush"!!!) which stands up proudly with all the western action music he was writing in the 60s and 70s IMO. Yavar
  5. Here's a grand tally and ranking taking all four places polled (here, FSM, Jerry Goldsmith Online, and "The Cult of Jerry" on Facebook) into account: FIRST PLACE: Pursuit/Crawlspace, with a whopping 72 people voting for it as their top choice! SECOND PLACE: the All-Synth "Trilogy", Orchestrated, with 56 THIRD PLACE: Jerry Goldsmith at The CBS Radio Workshop, with 48 Thriller Vol. 3 brings up the rear with only 23 people preferring it as their #1 choice... but that's still a healthy number of people, and it is impressive enough that it made it through the first round! Thanks to all for participating, and I'll just point out what Leigh himself said in the FSM thread for anyone who missed it: Lots of food for thought here, and good options (all with a lot of support) for what to tackle next. So if your own pick didn't win, don't assume it's never happening. (After all, CBS Radio Workshop scores have much smaller ensembles than the two options which beat it and that's always a factor to consider as well.) Yavar
  6. Here’s the accompanying text from Facebook when The Film Music Society shared the image this past December: “🎥🎶 Today would have been beloved composer ALEX NORTH’s 113th birthday. North was a pioneer of incorporating jazz into film music with some of the finest scores ever written. Among his many distinquished credits are A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, SPARTACUS, VIVA ZAPATA! THE RAINMAKER, CLEOPATRA, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, and UNCHAINED – the theme (“Unchained Melody”) for which is recognized as one of the most romantic ballads of all time. He was nominated for 15 Oscars and was the first composer to receive an Honorary Academy Award in 1986. 🎥🎶 A moment in film music history... On June 10, 1986, Alex North was celebrated by The Film Music Society with its distinguished Career Achievement Award. Presenters included John Green and David Raksin. Pictured here from that evening are (standing, L to R) Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Williams; (seated, L to R) Leonard Rosenman and Alex North.” Yavar
  7. Ah, got it. Yes, it would be great to have an actual produced-and-mastered album for this excellent score (which I actually prefer to any in Giacchino's trilogy...Seiter uses his theme in more interesting ways). I also wouldn't be at all surprised if the game rip omitted some music that was recorded. Yavar
  8. I'm pretty sure what I acquired was a game rip (taken from the actual game files somehow), not a promo. I was under the impression that it had made the rounds a decade ago. Yavar
  9. I think the only bit of professional envy Goldsmith ever expressed regarding Williams was that he wished he could have been the one to score Schindler's List. In this video panel that @TownerFan and I co-produced, IIRC Bruce Botnick makes it clear that Goldsmith and Williams were still active friends in the 80s (maybe even the 90s)? Certainly that photo above of the two of them, which was selected for the image to promote our video, was taken in the 90s: I've never heard of their relationship souring, though people certainly do drift apart when they get super busy, and it's harder to prioritize staying in touch. Williams and Goldsmith were both in super high demand from the 80s forward (and they also both started conducting lots of live concerts of their music during that decade, besides). This picture with two (three) great film music titans is wonderful... but I'll do you one better, courtesy the Film Music Society (this is pre-ponytail so a bit older… back in June 1986): I assume so, but I don't really like to speculate on that too much as he seems to have been a pretty private person who didn't speak about his personal life much. We know that he wrote his somewhat spiky and angry-sounding Music for Orchestra concert piece around the time he got divorced from his first wife (I think that was either in the late 60s or early 70s; I forget exactly when it was written). And it seems pretty public knowledge now that Goldsmith was something of an alcoholic at least into the 80s. By the time the 90s rolled around it seems he had largely broken that vice... I've even seen some people make comments that it hurt his music and it lost its edge as a result of him getting off the bottle. Alcoholism is an actual disease and it usually has a significant negative impact on people's lives. I realize some people turn to alcohol *because* they are unhappy, but then becoming addicted to alcohol can *keep* them unhappy for a long time when they otherwise would have managed to be happy. Anyways, that's all I'm going to say on this because I honestly don't know more and I would just be making it up. Even if I did know more, I wouldn't really think I have a right to share stuff about Goldsmith's personal life that wasn't public knowledge already. Yavar
  10. Yeah but instead they felt free to speculate that all of those composers were unhappy BECAUSE they weren’t composing concert music, which is frankly ridiculous. In general (setting aside cases like The Mummy or Alien, lol) Jerry Goldsmith was very happy scoring films. In fact, I’ll offer my own speculation: part of the reason he scored so much stuff was because he enjoyed the process and it distracted him from other stuff he was more unhappy about. I 100% dispute that Jerry Goldsmith would have been happier if he’d primarily written for the concert hall rather than film. That’s absolutely absurd and unfounded. If you read Linda Danly’s book on Jerry’s talented predecessor Hugo Friedhofer (mostly a transcribed lengthy interview with him), he makes it clear that he tried his hand at writing some concert pieces and never really got into it because he far preferred writing music to picture. I’ll bet this isn’t uncommon amongst film composers. Yavar
  11. The original album was not the film recording, which is quite different and 100% unreleased. (See also: Miklos Rozsa’s Eye of the Needle, also strangely controlled in perpetuity by Varese just because of their album recording.) Yavar
  12. That's not Williams's quote. His quote went through "All unhappy". The rest of the stuff you added was the article's author putting his own spin on it which I think is REALLY a stretch (there is ZERO evidence to suggest Goldsmith was anything other than happy composing film music; his unhappiness came from elsewhere), a disappointing part of an otherwise good piece. Yavar
  13. That game also had an awesome Chad Seiter score, so it wasn't a total loss lol... Yavar
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