Today heralded the return of the SCL Film and Television Music Conference. Starting at 8am and scheduled to run until 8pm (yeah, RIGHT!!), the day was filled with panels from every corner of the industry
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Beginning with a panel about Ethics in the Business, composer Shirley Walker, agent Seth Kaplan, and Fox V.P. Julia Michels were walked through a few moral and ethical dilemmas. Following that, director Frank Darabont and composer Mark Isham talked about their collaboration on The Majestic. Then, songwriters Alan Menken, Richard M. Sherman, and Glenn Satler discussed working for Disney. Gotta say – seeing the clip of “Supercalifragalisticexpialidocious” while the guy who came up with and wrote it was 20-feet away, was pretty darn cool. Not to mention he was a really friendly guy.
After lunch, BT gave us a really cool live demonstration of how he works, and did a bit of stuff with the main title from The Fast and The Furious. Following him were 3 legends on stage: Ralph Winters, Donn Cambern, and Alan Heim. These guys are some of the top film editors in town, and Winters talked about his work on Ben-Hur, Cambern talked about Romancing The Stone, and Heim talked about All That Jazz. VERY cool stuff.
Finally the panel everyone had been waiting for: composer Jerry Goldsmith and director Phil Alden Robinson were there to talk about their collaboration on The Sum of All Fears. They discussed the genesis of the music for the main title, and how it ended up resulting in a pop song for the end credits (and the album).
At that point, it was now 5pm. I had been there since 8:15am, and was dead-tired. There was still another panel (about television music), and then Elmer Bernstein was gonna present the first SCL Hall of Fame awards. Then there was gonna be a light dinner, then a screening of The Great Escape followed by Q&A with Bernstein. As much as I would have loved to stay, I couldn’t spend another 5 hours there. That was just gonna be too much. So, I thanked Ray Costa for the day, and went home to rest.