1.
John Williams
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John Towner Williams is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. T. The Extra-Terrestrial, the Indiana Jones series, Jurassic Park, Schindlers List, Williams has been associated with director Steven Spielberg since 1974, composing music for all but two of his feature films. Williams has won five Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, with 50 Academy Award nominations, Williams is the second most-nominated individual, after Walt Disney. In 2005, the American Film Institute selected Williams score to 1977s Star Wars as the greatest American film score of all time. The soundtrack to Star Wars was additionally preserved by the Library of Congress into the National Recording Registry, for being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. Williams was inducted into the Hollywood Bowls Hall of Fame in 2000, and was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004, Williams composed the score for eight movies in the Top 20 highest-grossing films at the U. S. box office. John Towner Williams was born on February 8,1932 in Floral Park, New York, the son of Esther and Johnny Williams, Williams has said of his lineage, My father was a Maine man—we were very close. My fathers parents ran a department store in Bangor, Maine, people with those roots are not inclined to be lazy. In 1948, the Williams family moved to Los Angeles where John attended North Hollywood High School graduating in 1950 and he later attended the University of California, Los Angeles, and studied privately with the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Williams had originally briefly attended Los Angeles City College for one semester as the school had a Studio Jazz Band. In 1952, Williams was drafted into the U. S. Air Force, in 1955, following his Air Force service, Williams moved to New York City and entered The Juilliard School where he studied piano with Rosina Lhévinne. During this time Williams worked as a jazz pianist in the many jazz clubs. After moving to Los Angeles he began working as a session musician, Williams has two brothers, Donald and Jerry, both of whom work as percussionists in Los Angeles. After his studies at Juilliard, and the Eastman School of Music, Williams returned to Los Angeles, among other composers, Williams worked with Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann, and Alfred Newman, and also with his fellow orchestrators Conrad Salinger and Bob Franklyn. Williams was also a studio pianist, performing on film scores by composers such as Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, Williams recorded with Henry Mancini the film scores of 1959s Peter Gunn, 1962s Days of Wine and Roses, and 1963s Charade. Williamss first film composition was for the 1958 B movie Daddy-O and he soon gained notice in Hollywood for his versatility in composing jazz, piano, and symphonic music. Williams received his first Academy Award nomination for his score for 1967s Valley of the Dolls. Williams broke through to win his first Academy Award for his score in the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof
2.
Sony Pictures Studios
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The facility is owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment and houses the divisions film studios, Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures, and Screen Gems. The complex was the studios of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1924 to 1986. In addition to films shot at the facility, several shows have been broadcast live or taped there. The lot, which is open to the public for daily studio tours, while director Thomas H. Ince was filming at Ballona Creek in 1915, Harry Culver, the founding father of Culver City, persuaded Ince to move his studio Inceville from Pacific Palisades to Culver City. During that time, Ince co-founded Triangle Film Corporation and the Triangle Studios was opened in the form of a Greek colonnade – the entrance to the studios, the colonnade still stands fronting Washington Boulevard and is a Culver City historical landmark. Ince added a few stages and an Administration Building before selling out to his partners D. W. Griffith, Ince relocated down the street and built the Culver Studios at that location. In 1918, Triangle Studios was sold to film producer Samuel Goldwyn, Goldwyn also added a few sound stages before selling his shares in Goldwyn Studios. But it was the Technicolor musicals, including The Wizard of Oz, Singin in the Rain, in addition to the main production building, MGM added two large backlot facilities – Lot 2 located opposite the main studio across Overland Avenue. Lot 3 entered the corner of Jefferson Boulevard and Overland Avenue and was MGM’s largest backlot, the administration building was inaugurated in 1938 and was named for Thalberg. However, the United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. anti-trust case of 1948 severed MGMs connection with Loews Theaters, in 1969, millionaire Kirk Kerkorian bought MGM and proceeded to dismantle the studio. MGM’s film memorabilia was sold through an 18-day auction, and 38 acres of the backlots were sold. Lot 3 was razed while Lot 2 was sold to housing developments, Kerkorian used the money to construct his hotel chain, the MGM Grand Hotels. In 1981, Kerkorians Tracinda Corporation acquired United Artists and merged it with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to become MGM/UA Entertainment Co and he then sold MUEC to Ted Turner in 1986, who after 74 days, sold MGM/UA back to Kerkorian while retaining the pre-1986 MGM film library. In 1986, the studio was sold to Lorimar-Telepictures, during that time, the MGM logo was removed from the studios and moved across the street to the Filmland Building before their 1992 move to Santa Monica and finally settling in Century City. In 1989, Warner Communications acquired Lorimar-Telepictures and that year, Sony hired producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber to run the companys newly acquired Columbia Pictures Entertainment unit, even though they had a contract with Warner Bros. To resolve this issue, Warner sold their Lorimar lot to Columbia, Columbia had been sharing with Warner Bros. their studio lot in Burbank in a partnership called the Burbank Studios beginning in 1972. Sony sold its interest in the Burbank Studios as a result of the Guber-Peters issue, Sony acquired the property, first renamed Columbia Studios, in poor condition and thereafter invested $100 million to renovate the studio complex. The property underwent a comprehensive plan as it transitioned to the 45 acres Sony Pictures Studios complex
3.
Symphony Hall, Boston
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Symphony Hall is a concert hall located at 301 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts. Designed by McKim, Mead and White, it was built in 1900 for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the hall was designated a U. S. National Historic Landmark in 1999 and is a pending Boston Landmark. It was then noted that Symphony Hall remains, acoustically, among the top three concert halls in the world, and is considered the finest in the United States. Symphony Hall was inaugurated on October 15,1900, after the Orchestras original home was threatened by road-building, admired for its lively acoustics from the time of its opening, the hall is often cited as one of the best sounding classical concert venues in the world. The hall is modeled on the second Gewandhaus concert hall in Leipzig, the Hall is relatively long, narrow, and high, in a rectangular shoebox shape like Amsterdams Concertgebouw and Viennas Musikverein. It is 18. 6m high,22. 9m wide, stage walls slope inward to help focus the sound. With the exception of its floors, the Hall is built of brick, steel. Side balconies are very shallow to avoid trapping or muffling sound, conductor Herbert von Karajan, in comparing it to the Musikverein, stated that for much music, it is even better. Because of its slightly lower reverberation time, in 2006, due to years of wear and tear, the original concert stage floor was replaced at a cost of $250,000. In order to any change to the sound of the hall. These included tongue-in-groove, three-quarter inch, hard maple boards, a compressed wool underlayment and hardened steel cut nails, the vertical grain fir subfloor from 1899 was in excellent shape and was left in place. The nails used in the new floor were hand cut using the size and construction as the originals. Beethovens name is inscribed over the stage, the musicians name that appears in the hall since the original directors could agree on no other name. The halls leather seats are the ones installed in 1900. The hall seats 2,625 people during Symphony season and 2,371 during the Pops season, sixteen replicas of Greek and Roman statues line the upper level of the halls walls. Ten are of subjects, and six of historical figures. All are of plaster cast by P. P. Caproni, the Symphony Hall organ, a 4, 800-pipe Aeolian-Skinner was designed by G. Donald Harrison, installed in 1949, and autographed by Albert Schweitzer. It replaced the halls first organ, built in 1900 by George S. Hutchings of Boston, the Hutchings organ had fallen out of fashion by the 1940s when lighter, clearer tones became preferred
4.
Soundtrack
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In movie industry terminology usage, a sound track is an audio recording created or used in film production or post-production. Initially the dialogue, sound effects, and music in a film each has its own track, and these are mixed together to make what is called the composite track. A dubbing track is later created when films are dubbed into another language. This is also known as a M & E track containing all sound elements minus dialogue which is supplied by the foreign distributor in the native language of its territory. The contraction soundtrack came into public consciousness with the advent of so-called soundtrack albums in the late 1940s and these phrases were soon shortened to just original motion picture soundtrack. More accurately, such recordings are made from a music track, because they usually consist of the isolated music from a film, not the composite track with dialogue. The soundtrack to the 1937 Walt Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first commercially issued film soundtrack. It was released by RCA Victor Records on multiple 78 RPM discs in January 1938 as Songs from Walt Disneys Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and has since seen numerous expansions and reissues. The first live-action musical film to have a commercially issued soundtrack album was MGM’s 1946 film biography of Show Boat composer Jerome Kern, the album was originally issued as a set of four 10-inch 78-rpm records. Only eight selections from the film were included in this first edition of the album, in order to fit the songs onto the record sides the musical material needed editing and manipulation. Needless to say, it was several generations removed from the original, the playback recordings were purposely recorded very dry, otherwise it would come across as too hollow sounding in large movie theatres. This made these albums sound flat and boxy, the phrase is also sometimes incorrectly used for Broadway cast recordings. While it is correct in some instances to call a soundtrack a cast recording it is never correct to call a cast recording a soundtrack, contributing to the vagueness of the term are projects such as The Sound of Music Live. Which was filmed live on the set for an NBC holiday season special first broadcast in 2013, film score albums did not really become popular until the LP era, although a few were issued in 78-rpm albums. Like the 1967 re-release of the film, this version of the score was artificially enhanced for stereo, in recent years, Rhino Records has released a 2-CD set of the complete Gone With the Wind score, restored to its original mono sound. One of the film scores of all time was John Williams music from the movie Star Wars. Many film score albums go out-of-print after the films finish their theatrical runs, in a few rare instances an entire film dialogue track was issued on records. The 1968 Franco Zeffirelli film of Romeo and Juliet was issued as a 4-LP set, as a single LP with musical and dialogue excerpts, and as an album containing only the films musical score
5.
MCA Inc.
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MCA, Inc. was an American media company. Initially starting in the business, the company next became a dominant force in the film business. MCA, Inc. is the predecessor of NBCUniversal, which since March 2013 is a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast. MCA was formed in 1924 by Jules Stein and William R. Goodheart, Jr. as Music Corporation of America, MCA helped pioneer modern practices of touring bands and name acts. Early on, MCA booked such prominent artists as King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton for clubs and speakeasies run by legendary notorious Chicago mobsters such as Al Capone and others. Lew Wasserman joined MCA in 1936 at the age of 23 and rose through the ranks of MCA for more than four decades, Wasserman helped create MCAs radio show, Kay Kyser and His Kollege of Musical Knowledge, which debuted on NBC Radio that same year. Following that success, Stein installed Wasserman in New York City in 1937, the company was guided by a codification of Steins pet policies known as The Rules of The Road. The Rules were passed down from the Prohibition era, Chicago–area MCA to the 1940s Los Angeles–area firm, which focused on representing movie actors. The Rules were next passed to the 1950s generation of MCA talent agents, including Jerry Perenchio, Perenchio is well known for his version of the Rules, which vary from year to year and have some internal contradictions. Its aggressive acquisition of its clientele in all entertainment sectors earned MCA the nickname of The Octopus and this behavior led U. S. Department of Justice agents to investigate not only whether MCA was a monopoly breaking anti-trust laws, but also its suspected connections to underworld criminal activities. This investigation continued for the few decades. In 1948, Jules Stein moved up as MCAs first chairman and that year, Stein and Wasserman decided to get into a new medium that would, decades later, change the entertainment landscape forever, television. Although many motion picture studios would not touch this new medium, thinking it was just a fad and would fade away, MCA decided to embrace it. First, however, the company needed to get a waiver from the Screen Actors Guild, thanks to the newly elected SAG president, Ronald Reagan, MCA was granted a waiver to start producing TV shows. After the waiver was granted, the company formed MCA Television Limited for syndication, prior to 1958, all Revues shows were filmed at the old Republic Pictures studio lot in Studio City, California. In February 1958, MCA acquired Paramount Pictures pre-1950 sound feature film library through a newly created MCA subsidiary, EMKA, Ltd. Also in 1958, MCA bought the 423-acre Universal Studios lot from Universal Pictures for $11 million and renamed it, as well as the television unit. Stein, who by this time was the owner of MCA, decided to take the company public by giving 51% of his ownership of MCA to his employees
6.
Record producer
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A record producer or music producer oversees and manages the sound recording and production of a band or performers music, which may range from recording one song to recording a lengthy concept album. A producer has many roles during the recording process, the roles of a producer vary. The producer may perform these roles himself, or help select the engineer, the producer may also pay session musicians and engineers and ensure that the entire project is completed within the record companies budget. A record producer or music producer has a broad role in overseeing and managing the recording. Producers also often take on an entrepreneurial role, with responsibility for the budget, schedules, contracts. In the 2010s, the industry has two kinds of producers with different roles, executive producer and music producer. Executive producers oversee project finances while music producers oversee the process of recording songs or albums. In most cases the producer is also a competent arranger, composer. The producer will also liaise with the engineer who concentrates on the technical aspects of recording. Noted producer Phil Ek described his role as the person who creatively guides or directs the process of making a record, indeed, in Bollywood music, the designation actually is music director. The music producers job is to create, shape, and mold a piece of music, at the beginning of record industry, producer role was technically limited to record, in one shot, artists performing live. The role of producers changed progressively over the 1950s and 1960s due to technological developments, the development of multitrack recording caused a major change in the recording process. Before multitracking, all the elements of a song had to be performed simultaneously, all of these singers and musicians had to be assembled in a large studio and the performance had to be recorded. As well, for a song that used 20 instruments, it was no longer necessary to get all the players in the studio at the same time. Examples include the rock sound effects of the 1960s, e. g. playing back the sound of recorded instruments backwards or clanging the tape to produce unique sound effects. These new instruments were electric or electronic, and thus they used instrument amplifiers, new technologies like multitracking changed the goal of recording, A producer could blend together multiple takes and edit together different sections to create the desired sound. For example, in jazz fusion Bandleader-composer Miles Davis album Bitches Brew, producers like Phil Spector and George Martin were soon creating recordings that were, in practical terms, almost impossible to realise in live performance. Producers became creative figures in the studio, other examples of such engineers includes Joe Meek, Teo Macero, Brian Wilson, and Biddu
7.
Jurassic Park (film score)
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Jurassic Park, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is the film score to the 1993 Steven Spielberg film of the same name, composed and conducted by John Williams. John Neufeld orchestrated most of the cues, while Alexander Courage entirely orchestrated three and Conrad Pope partially orchestrated two others, MCA Records released a soundtrack album for the film on May 20,1993. Also produced by Williams, this includes most of the films major cues, sometimes edited together into longer tracks. Several passages are also repeated in different tracks, a 20th anniversary edition of the soundtrack was released by Geffen Records on April 9,2013, featuring additional unreleased music. A John Williams collection edition, joint with the soundtrack to The Lost World, was released by La-La Land Records on November 29,2016, remastered, John Neufeld and Alexander Courage orchestrated the score. The composition process was done in Skywalker Ranch concurrently with the editing process. Williams described it as, a rugged, noisy effort - a massive job of symphonic cartooning and he also said that, while trying to, match the rhythmic gyrations of the dinosaurs, he ended up creating, these kind of funny ballets. In turn, more scenes, such as the Tyrannosaurus rex attack. For the first time, Spielberg was unable to attend the sessions for one of his own movies. Instead, Williams gave Spielberg demo tapes with piano versions of the main themes prior to his travel, the score uses a large orchestra that often includes a variety of percussion, two harps, baritone horns, and choir. Some passages also call for unusual woodwinds, such as shakuhachi, furthermore, Williams included synthesizers in much of the score. Several prominent celeste solos are performed on synthesizers. Two major melodic ideas can be heard in this score, the first motif, which is heard most frequently, is known simply as Theme from Jurassic Park, and is introduced when the visitors first see the Brachiosaurus. It features, gentle religioso cantilena lines, which Williams declared was an attempt and this theme is widely regarded as one of John Williams greatest. There are a couple different variants of Theme from Jurassic Park, one is an extended version, heard in Welcome to Jurassic Park. The second is a shorter, more tender version heard in parts of the film. It revolves around a version of the themes climax. This softer version was modified and used for the track A Tree for My Bed
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