Thank you, Dave! One of my favorite films and scores of all time, also! So incredibly proud of this one. Joel McNeely gave every ounce of conductorly devotion to these recordings!
Then there's John Candy's famous "I'm ready for my crane shot..." I saw Sunset Blvd. on late night TV in the 60s or 70s. It made quite an impression. And I enjoy good sound tracks. I have a small collection but would love to have more. Didn't Mr. Hurwitz mention something about a box set of soundtracks? Perhaps I'm misremembering.
Through many viewings of this great movie, I hadn't noticed that Waxman cleverly incorporates the theme for the old Paramount newsreels--until a dear friend of mine pointed it out. And, under the trivia heading, "young fella" was actually the nickname DeMille gave Swanson back in her glory years. When he talks about how great she was, and how much he loved working with her, he's repeating what he'd always said about Swanson. I highly recommend Scott Eyman's biography of DeMille.
Yes! Excellent film!! Incidentally also a favourite of David Lynch’s and as such a big inspiration to another great film, Mulholland Drive, the soundtrack of which, by Angelo Badalamenti, is great as well, but for unknown reasons completely unavailable except for on RU-vid
I was told, I think by Bryan Gilliam the Strauss scholar, that the high strings at the end with Norma at the top of the stairs (or maybe coming down them) are at the same pitch level as the corresponding passage in the opera.
For 50 years I've been hoping we'd get a Waxman biography, but it's never happened. We have bios of Herrmann, Steiner, Korngold. Tiomkin wrote his own books. Certainly Waxman is no less a composer and given the large number of recordings his music has received I'd like to think there's interest in him.
