Jerry Goldsmith

Jerrald King Goldsmith (February 10, 1929 – July 21, 2004) was an American composer known for his work in film and television scoring.

He composed scores for five films in the Star Trek franchise and three in the Rambo franchise, as well as for films including Logan's Run, Planet of the Apes, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Patton, Papillon, Chinatown, The Omen, Alien, Poltergeist, The Secret of NIMH, Medicine Man, Gremlins, Hoosiers, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Air Force One, L.A. Confidential, Mulan, and The Mummy.

He also composed the fanfares accompanying the production logos used by multiple major film studios, and music for the Disney attraction Soarin'.

He collaborated with directors including Robert Wise, Howard Hawks, Otto Preminger, Joe Dante, Richard Donner, Richard Fleischer, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Michael Crichton, Roman Polanski, Gordon Douglas, Fred Schepisi, Paul Verhoeven, and Franklin J. Schaffner.

His work for Donner and Scott also involved a rejected score for Timeline and a controversially edited score for Alien, where music by Howard Hanson replaced Goldsmith's end titles and Goldsmith's own work on Freud: The Secret Passion was used without his approval in several scenes.

Goldsmith was born February 10, 1929, in Los Angeles, California.

His family was Romanian Jewish.

His parents were Tessa (née Rappaport), a school teacher, and Morris Goldsmith, a structural engineer.

He started playing piano at age six, but only "got serious" by the time he was eleven.

At age thirteen, he studied piano privately with concert pianist and educator Jakob Gimpel (whom Goldsmith would later employ to perform piano solos in his score to The Mephisto Waltz) and by the age of sixteen he was studying both theory and counterpoint under Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who also tutored such noteworthy composers and musicians as Henry Mancini, Nelson Riddle, Herman Stein, André Previn, Marty Paich, and John Williams.

At age sixteen, Goldsmith saw the 1945 film Spellbound and was inspired by Miklós Rózsa's unconventional score to pursue a career in music.

Goldsmith later enrolled and attended the University of Southern California where he was able to attend courses by Rózsa, but dropped out in favor of a more "practical music program" at the Los Angeles City College.

There he was able to coach singers, work as an assistant choral director, play piano accompaniment, and work as an assistant conductor.

In 1950, Goldsmith found work at CBS as a clerk typist in the network's music department under director Lud Gluskin.

There he began writing scores for such radio shows as CBS Radio Workshop, Frontier Gentleman, and Romance.

In an interview with Andy Velez from BarnesandNoble.com, Goldsmith stated: "It was about 1950. CBS had a workshop, and once a week the employees, whatever their talents, whether they were ushers or typists, would produce a radio show. But you had to be an employee. They needed someone to do music, and I knew someone there who said I'd be great for this. I'd just gotten married and needed a job, so they faked a typing test for me. Then I could do these shows. About six months later, the music department heard what I did, liked it, and gave me a job."

He later progressed into scoring such live CBS television shows as Climax! and Playhouse 90.

He also scored multiple episodes of the television series The Twilight Zone.

His feature film debut occurred when he composed the music for the western Black Patch (1957).

He continued with scores to such films as the western Face of a Fugitive (also 1957), and the science fiction film City of Fear (1959).

He remained at CBS until 1960, after which he moved on to Revue Studios and then to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for producer Norman Felton, whom he had worked for during live TV and would later compose music for shows produced by MGM Television such as Dr. Kildare and The Man from U.N.C.L.E..

Goldsmith began the decade composing for such television shows as Dr. Kildare, Gunsmoke, and Thriller as well as the drama film The Spiral Road (1962).

However, he only began receiving widespread name recognition after his intimate score to the western Lonely Are the Brave (1962).

His involvement in the picture was the result of a recommendation by composer Alfred Newman who had been impressed with Goldsmith's score on the television show Thriller and took it upon himself to recommend Goldsmith to the head of Universal's music department, despite having never met him.

That same year, Goldsmith composed the mostly atonal and dissonant score to the biopic Freud (1962) that focused on a five-year period of the life of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.

Goldsmith's score led to him gaining his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score, though he lost to fellow first-time nominee Maurice Jarre for his music to Lawrence of Arabia (also 1962).

Goldsmith composed a score to The Stripper (1963), his first collaboration with director Franklin J. Schaffner for whom Goldsmith would later score the films Planet of the Apes (1968), Patton (1970), Papillon (1973), Islands in the Stream (1977), The Boys from Brazil (1978) and Lionheart (1987).

Following his success with Lonely Are the Brave and Freud, Goldsmith composed the theme music for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964), and scores to such films as the western Rio Conchos, the political thriller Seven Days in May (both also 1964), the romantic drama A Patch of Blue (1965), the war film In Harm's Way (also 1965), the World War I air combat film The Blue Max (1966), the period naval war drama The Sand Pebbles (also 1966), the thriller Warning Shot (1967), the western Hour of the Gun (also 1967), and the mystery The Detective (1968).

He almost did not accept the assignment for The Blue Max when he watched the final cut with the producers who had temp-tracked it with Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra.

He said: "I admit it worked fairly well but my first reaction was to get up and walk away from the job, but I couldn't. Once you've heard music like that with the picture, it makes your own scoring more difficult to arrive at, it clouds your thinking."

Goldsmith's scores to A Patch of Blue and The Sand Pebbles garnered him his second and third Academy Award nominations, respectively, and were both one of the 250 nominees for the American Film Institute's top twenty-five American film scores.

His scores for Seven Days in May and The Sand Pebbles also garnered Goldsmith his first two respective Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Original Score in 1965 and 1967.

During this time, he also composed for many lighter, comedic films such as the family comedy The Trouble with Angels (1966), the James Bond parodies Our Man Flint (1966) and its sequel In Like Flint (1967), and the comedy The Flim-Flam Man (1967).

Goldsmith gained attention for the score of the post-apocalyptic science fiction film Planet of the Apes (1968), which was one of the first to be written entirely in an Avant garde style.

When scoring Planet of the Apes, Goldsmith used such innovative techniques as looping drums into an echoplex, using the orchestra to imitate the grunting sounds of apes, having horns blown without mouthpieces, and instructing the woodwind players to finger their keys without using any air.

He also used stainless steel mixing bowls, among other objects, to create unique percussive sounds.

The score resulted in another Goldsmith nomination for the Best Original Score Oscar and ranks in No. 18 on the American Film Institute's top twenty-five American film scores.

Goldsmith concluded the decade with scores to such films as the western Bandolero! (1968), the spy thriller The Chairman, the science fiction film The Illustrated Man, and the western 100 Rifles (all 1969).

Though he did not return to compose for its sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Goldsmith scored the third installment in the Planet of the Apes franchise, Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971).

Goldsmith was nominated for six Grammy Awards, five Primetime Emmy Awards, nine Golden Globe Awards, four British Academy Film Awards, and eighteen Academy Awards (winning in 1976 for The Omen).