Movie & Television Music Playlist

This category is in 2 parts

MOVIES: When I was a kid, I began noticing music in movies like “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” “2001 A Space Odyssey”, etc., and the music would swirl in my head for days and even weeks following the first time viewing of such movies at the theater. This still happens all the time today so I can not help it when I go to a move, I simply do notice the music as much as the main actors. If the music appeals to me, I simply learn it. Great movie scores and their composers have had a huge influence on my composing style and my live performances. Whether it is music from the 1940’s movie “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers”, or a song from a more contemporary movie like the hit song from the 2018 version of “A Star is Born” called “The Shallow”, you will find a great variety of songs and score music spanning many years of great movies on my song lists.

The 1963 blockbuster, and greatest movie ever (in my humble but correct opinion!) is “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” produced in 1963 and in theaters through the early 1970’s. From the very first time I saw this movie at a drive in with my family in its’ big screen original 192-minute version, it has made a profound impact on my life and music! It is my all-time favorite music score as well as movie, because it is so brilliant and contains many themes in various arrangements throughout the movie. It is a blunt, brash, loud, physical comedy about greed, featuring a huge cast of comedians and dramatic actors, top stunt people, top production people, a famous director (Stanley Kramer) who had never done a comedy before this one, and one of the greatest, yet underrecognized film music composers of all time, Ernest Gold. I drove my family crazy with how often I played the main theme on the family piano as a kid. There even was a moderate earthquake one day when I was playing the theme song on the piano at home. Later in life, I realized I just had to record my rendition of the theme song, and did so in 2010 on my “Window on the World” CD. This CD and my version of the theme song, is mentioned on The Rosita Beach Podcast, Episode #22 currently found at blubrry.com as of this writing. The Rosita Beach Podcasts were put out from 2011 through 2013 by Paul Scrabo to prompt a release of the more complete version of the score from this great movie. It eventually accomplished this purpose as LaLa Land Records put out the music from the general release shorter version of this great movie.

****See my “Window on the World” CD on my Discography Page for my version of the theme song from “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and how to get a recording of it!

The reason why I use a “W” in the graphics on this website is because the movie “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” contains a scene in which the actors are all looking for money that is buried under a big “W” at a park. Since I am an intense fan of this movie, and this was the most important scene in the movie, AND I looked for this movie locale in person and found it years later before the days of the internet, and I consider the “W” to also stand for “World,” it was therefore quite meaningful and appropriate for me to use that imagery. The Palos Verdes Estates area overlooking the Pacific Ocean at Portuguese Bend, where the “W” scene was filmed in the movie, is beautiful. No wonder the director, Stanley Kramer, chose it. A “big W” will always mean a lot to me ever since that wonderful evening in July 1971 when I first saw this great movie as a child.

TELEVISION MUSIC:

Well, just like with other genres, I became fascinated with the variety of music on TV shows, music used for newscasts, and with music used for National Football League broadcasts. This music is particularly fun to play and learn. I drove my family crazy with various news themes I learned from local news broadcasts. Sitcom, westerns, and mystery shows were often repeating on TV; therefore, I was regularly hearing their themes in my head. Shows like “The NBC Mystery Movie,” “All in the Family,” “Green Acres”, “The Golden Girls”, “Phyllis” (fast closing theme – awesome!), “Bonanza”, “Cheers”, “ABC Movie of the Week”, “The Lucy Show”, “Lost in Space”, “The Name of the Game” and the awesome theme song from “Crazy Like a Fox”. It is so much fun to play music from professional football game broadcasts like Monday Night Football Theme, The awesome “NFL on CBS” Theme songs from 1986-1998, “Round Up” by Sam Spence and so much more. At some events I have led a “name that tune” game based on TV and Movie Music, and those are always fun!