Oh, No
The great movie & TV composer Jerry Goldsmith has passed away. As the IMDB obit notes, his “diverse, long, and prolific career included some of the most famous themes of the last fifty years,” including The Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke, Planet Of The Apes (the good one) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (themes reused from The Motion Picture).
Besides those, I’m partial to his scores for the Gremlins movies, especially the first one. Unfortunately, only one side of an album exists (and there’s an idea for an expanded CD release, come to think of it: The complete Gremlins). It was one of the first times, if not the first, as I recall, that Goldsmith used sythisizers on a score, and there are some really interesting results combining them with more traditional strings, etc.
Then there’s Basic Instinct, in which at times his score was yummier than Sharon Stone’s body. And Escape From The Planet Of The Apes, in which at times his score was hairer than Roddy McDowall’s body.
But all jokes aside…one of the great ones has left us.
ETA: Oh! And I almost forgot the original score to Legend, which was replaced in the US cut , in a wrongheaded attempt to lure cretinous teenagers into theaters, by Tangerine Dream. Goldsmith’s original score was finally released with the director’s cut DVD a few years ago. It’s gorgeous, and fits the film so much better it made me wish it was silent apart from that and perhaps narration by Tim Curry’s character…
ETA, again: Our man Corey Klemow sends the following correction:
“Goldsmith did not write the theme to “The Twilight Zone” – Bernard Herrmann
did. Goldsmith scored episodes of the series, though, as well as scoring
the 1980s film version. Same goes for “Gunsmoke” – imdB sez that was Rex
Koury. And did “Planet of the Apes” have a theme tune… ? (He did the
scores to the first film and to “Escape From the Planet of the Apes” – the
third one, I think – where Cornelius and Zira escape to the 1970s.)”
–To which I’ll only add that according to my information, Marius Constant wrote the theme to “The Twilight Zone,” not Herrmann. Unless the one is a pen name for the other, of course. And I think it’s clear imdB were using a broad–perhaps too broad–definition of “theme.”
