Universal Pictures’ Straight Outta Compton has toppled 2005’s Walk the Line as the top-grossing music film of all time. The hip-hop drama today crossed the $120 million mark, and is expected to earn another $10-15 million this weekend, catapulting it past the Twentieth Century Fox’s Johnny Cash confessional, which had been the record-holder for a decade with a $119.5 million […]
Will the 2016 Warner Bros. release Suicide Squad become the first film to incorporate a song custom cut for a trailer into the actual feature film? If the studio has been paying any attention to the fans’ Internet response to the music created for the Comic-Con trailer, it just might! The cover version of the […]
What started out as a warm fuzzy tribute to Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Rent has turned into a bit of a musical tussle. The Harbor Lights Theater Company in Staten Island, which just began touting its September 18 through October 4 production was blindsided today by news of another production by the 5th Floor Theatre Company, whose […]
Steve Hampton has been scoring original music for television and film in Los Angeles for the past 25 years. A recent project, the “Ideas Are Scary” for GE, is a mini-masterpiece; the score amplifies and adds nuance to the story — that of an idea struggling to find its place in the world. (Let’s just say […]
GE’s “Ideas Are Scary” just happens to be this writer’s favorite bit of commercial storytelling — packing all the hope and inspiration of a Steven Spielberg film in two minutes or less. The spot, which debuted last year, has been in and out of rotation, and there’s no way I’d launch a website even remotely associated with commercials and not […]
Orson Welles’ original, full-length version of Othello finally makes it to the Lido. Celebrating the director’s centenary the 72nd Venice Film Festival will screen a restored Italian version of the classic on September 1, along with Welles’ 1969 Shakespeare adaptation The Merchant of Venice. Othello took three years to make. Welles was to have premiered it at the Venice Film Festival […]
Jeremy Leidhecker, of Williamsport, PA, has earned CINE’s prestigious Marvin Hamlisch Award for emerging composers. Leidhecker bested a field of more than 500 entrants. In all, 50 countries and 40 U.S. states were represented in the contest to set a winning score to Jill Hackett’s short film, Flip, a CINE Golden Eagle-winning short film. Hamlish winners and runners-up were identified by […]
Following James Horner’s tragic and untimely death in a plane crash on June 22, it was believed his last contributions onscreen would be Antoine Fuqua’s boxing drama Southpaw, released in July, and Patricia Riggen’s Chilean miner drama The 33, due in November. But recently, it came to light that Horner had also been working on Fuqua’s […]
It’s a diverse group of composers and songwriters to vie for Emmy gold from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences at the 67th Annual Emmy Awards. From veterans like Sean Callery, with 13 prior noms and three wins, to Primetime Emmy debutants like Kevin Kliesch, who is nominated for a show that earned him a […]
Kevin Kliesch hails from New Jersey and attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he had dual major in film scoring and music synthesis. Upon graduating, he was invited to joined the school’s staff. He moved to Los Angeles in 1996, and has since then worked as a composer and orchestrator on more than 100 […]
