A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Animation courtesy of Intrada Records. Art by Roger Kastel  © 1975, 2015 Universal Pictures "Dick Zanuck and David Brown, thank you both for giving me the opportunity to work with this extraordinary man, Steven Spielberg. The great Universal orchestra, my friend Herb Spencer, thank you, and all the members of this Academy for giving me this honor. I'm a grateful man, thank you very much." - John Williams' Oscar acceptance speech, 48th Academy Awards, March 29, 1976 "In doing the score for Jaws , John Williams has really outdone himself. The soundtrack is a stunning symphonic achievement and a great leap ahead in the revitalization of film music as a foreground component for the total motion picture experience...." - Steven Spielberg, director of Jaws , in the original 1975 LP liner notes In 2015, Oakland (California)-based Intrada Records released a deluxe 2-CD edition of composer-conductor John Williams' Academy Award-winning score for...

On August 2, 1994, the Los Angeles-based label Milan Entertainment released Clear and Present Danger: Music From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack on compact disc and cassette. The album presents 10 selections from composer/conductor James Horner's score for Phillip Noyce's adaptation of Tom Clancy's best-selling novel. Reflecting the film's focus on a covert military operation in Colombia against a notorious drug trafficker loosely based on Pablo Escobar, Horner's music is more martial and eerie than his previous score for another Clancy-based film, Patriot Games.  The late Horner (who died in a single-plane crash on June 22, 1995) had written a score that in album form would have contained 31 tracks for a grand total of 88 minutes' worth of music, but like most record labels, Milan only released an album with a running time of only 50minutes and 35 seconds. (19 years later, Intrada Records, a label that specializes in film and TV music albums, release...

On June 27, 1995, three days before the theatrical release of director Ron Howard's Apollo 13, MCA Records dropped Apollo 13: Music from the Motion Picture , a 78-minute-long soundtrack album that presents eight songs from the Apollo era (including James Brown's "Night Train" and Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" ), one 1990s cover of a pop standard ( Blue Moon by the South Florida retro-country band The Mavericks) seven tracks of dialogue recorded for the record by members of the cast, and seven tracks of composer James Horner's original Academy Award-nominated orchestral score for the film. Prior to the release of Apollo 13: Music from the Motion Picture , Horner - who wrote the score to the Academy Award-nominated film based on Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger's Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 - had prepared a 59-minute-long "assembly" album for commercial release. This version of the soundtrack presented 12 t...