TEN (WELL, ELEVEN) COMPOSERS ON THE RISE:

JEFF BEAL

AGE: 46
BIRTHPLACE: Hayward, California
REPRESENTATION: First Artists Management
3 EMMYS, 9 NOMINATIONS
ONGOING FILMMAKER RELATIONSHIPS: Ed Harris, Jessica Yu
BACKGROUND: Teenage jazz trumpet player/composer, Eastman School of Music, recording artist, jazz/concert composer
FAN FAVORITE: Appaloosa
TOP GROSSING FILMS:
1. Appaloosa--20 (U.S. gross in millions)
2. Pollock--8

Jeff Beal had an impressive career as a jazz recording artist before he made his big screen breakthrough with Ed Harris's Oscar-winning biopic Pollock. Replacing an unused score by Knightriders composer Donald Rubinstein, Beal wrote a fresh and original work which did a striking job of musically depicting the film's subject, groundbreaking painter Jackson Pollock. Despite the film's relatively high profile, the film led to virtually no feature work for its composer, and his major big screen films have been the stylized documentaries of Oscar-winner Jessica Yu (whose acceptance speech featured the memorable line "You know you've entered into new territory when you realize your dress costs more than your film"), such as In the Realms of the Unreal and Protagonist. Throughout the last decade, Beal has become one of the most acclaimed composers in television, earning Emmys for his music for Monk, Nightmares and Dreamscapes and The Company as well as nominations for Carnivale, Rome and his TV movie scores. Ed Harris made a welcome return to directing with the underrated 2008 Western Appaloosa, and brought Beal along with him, his offbeat music fapproach the demands of the genre while expanding the classic history of Western scoring. Beal is continuing his feature work with Al Pacino's Wilde Salome, an exploration of the Oscar Wilde play that continues to fascinate the star.

AGE: 52 (Cave), 45 (Ellis)
BIRTHPLACE: Warracknabeal, Victoria, Australia (Cave), Ballarat, Victoria, Australia (Ellis)
REP: United Agents
RELATIONSHIPS: John Hillcoat
BACKGROUND: Cave: Art student at Caulfield Institute of Technology, Melbourne, rock singer-songwriter (The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds), screenwriter, novelist; Ellis: Classical violin studies, theater composer, musician (bouzouki, flute, guitar, mandolin, piano) for bands (Dirty Three, The Bad Seeds, Grinderman)
FAN FAVORITE: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
TYPECAST IN: Westerns
TOP GROSSING FILMS:
1. The Road--7 (as of 1/31/10)
2. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford-- 3
3. The Proposition--1

It's hard to think of a current film composer who has had a more impressively eclectic career in the arts than Nick Cave. Beyond his popularity as a singer-songwriter (particularly with The Bad Seeds), he has been an actor (Johnny Suede), a novelist (his latest is The Death of Bunny Munro) and a screenwriter. He was even offered the assignment of rewriting Ridley Scott's film version of Cormac McCarthy's brilliant novel Blood Meridian, but Cave told Scott "I don't want to be the guy who f****d it up. You can be the director who f***s up Blood Meridian, but I don't want to be the writer." Ellis began performing with Cave's Bad Seeds in 1995, and he's been scoring features with Cave since the critically acclaimed Cave-scripted Western The Proposition. Cave and Ellis received particularly strong reviews for the superb, too-little-seen Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Cave even had a cameo as a saloon singer), but their latest score for Proposition director John Hillcoat, The Road, earned undeservingly harsh notices from critics. Hillcoat is planning to direct Cave's adaptation of the novel The Wettest Country in the World, and one can only assume Cave and Ellis will write the score.

Englishby has been prolific in writing for the theater, particularly for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and worked as an orchestrator or conductor on a handful of Stephen Warbeck scores, including Two Brothers and Proof. His first feature released in the U.S. was the British comedy Confetti, but his real breakthrough came with 2008's charming Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, with the New York Times review calling his music "wonderful." He found a suitable follow-up project with last year's critically acclaimed romance My Education, though, despite the project's high profile, it has actually made less money in this country than Miss Pettigrew. He scored a new TV version of Hamlet and An Englishman in New York (with John Hurt reprising his classic Naked Civil Servant role as Quentin Crisp), and is currently working on the music crew for such upcoming films as the comedy Your Highness and the remake of The Wolfman.

Since Hamlisch was accepted to the Julliard School of Music at the age of seven, it should not be surprising that he has had an unusually impressive career as a composer, whether becoming the only person to win all three music Oscars in one year (for the score and song The Way We Were and The Sting's adaptation) or one of the few composers of film and theater to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama (for A Chorus Line). Hamlisch had a particular run of big screen successes in the 1970s and early '80s, particularly the gorgeous Sophie's Choice and The Spy Who Loved Me, the only James Bond film to earn an Original Score nomination, but it's easy to forget he stayed prolific throughout the 1980s, scoring blockbusters like Three Men and a Baby as well as genre items like D.A.R.Y.L. and The January Man. Since then, Hamlisch has stayed busy in other fields, including TV movies, theater (an underrated song score for the Broadway musical version of Sweet Smell of Success), and Emmy-winning songwriting and musical direction for TV specials, but his return to feature film scoring came from the intervention, of all people, Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh, usually no fan of Hollywood film music, hired Hamlisch for his offbeat comedy-drama The Informant! on the basis of Hamlisch's zany score for Woody Allen's Bananas, and the end result was one of the most critically acclaimed scores of the year and a welcome return to the big screen for the former child prodigy. Hamlisch score earned him a Golden Globe nomination, and he hopes to continue his feature renaissance.

Career-minded composers are always looking for the quickest route to scoring high-profile movies, and today there seems to be no surer route than Hans Zimmer's company Remote Control. The classically trained Henry Jackman enjoyed an eclectic career in the pop world through the late 90s and the early years of this century, working as a producer and programmer for the likes of Seal and Trevor Horn. His career underwent a drastic change in 2006 thanks to Hans Zimmer, as that year he worked as a programmer on Zimmer's score for the blockbuster The Da Vinci Code and provided additional music for The Holiday and the second Pirates film. Jackman continued to work on such Zimmer-and-friends scored hits as The Simpsons Movie, Kung Fu Panda and The Dark Knight, and in 2009 he received his big break as solo composer for DreamWorks 3D CGI feature Monsters vs. Aliens. It's hard to think of many composers who made their solo feature scoring debut with a $198 million hit, and the sci-fi/comedy/action nature of the project gave Jackson an impressive showcase for his talents. He is announced to score the modernized Gulliver's Travels (starring Jack Black), and is one of several composers mentioned in connection with the upcoming teen superhero comedy Kick Ass.

WHAT'S NEXT: Gulliver's Travels

Lockington gained valuable experience in film scoring while working with composer brothers Mychael and Jeff Danna on such scores as 8mm, Ride with the Devil, Girl, Interrupted and Hearts in Atlantis, in a variety of important tasks including conducting and performing. He shared the scoring credit with Mychael Danna for the 2001 made-for-cable prison movie Stranger Inside, and his first two solo-scored features to receive a U.S. release were the gay comedy Touch of Pink and the quirky coming-of-age story Saint Ralph. His true breakthrough came in 2008, as the 3D remake of Journey to the Center of the Earth proved to be a surprise smash, and had the kind of large-scale fantasy adventure score that fans and filmmakers tend to fall for. Lockington followed this hit with an even more satisfying score, for the beautifully crafted City of Ember, but the film was ultimately a box-office failure. His upcoming projects couldn't be more different from each other -- one is a drama with Halle Berry as a woman with multiple personalities, and the other is a feature film version of a beloved TV cartoon.

WHAT'S NEXT: Frankie and Alice, Yogi Bear

David Sardy worked in the rock music world throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s as a singer-songwriter-guitarist, including a handful of albums with his band Barkmarket. In the years since, he has worked steadily as a producer and mixer for other artists, his prolific output including collaborations with such bands as Cold War Kids, The Dandy Warhols, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, The Rolling Stones, and System of a Down. The fact-based youth caper 21 was something like a collegiate Ocean's Eleven, and just as David Holmes provided a hip, modern sound for Soderbergh's Ocean's trilogy, Sardy was hired for 21 to write his very first film score, giving it the youthful energy and up-to-the-minute sounds the filmmakers required. His followup feature Zombieland, was a deserved hit, mixing traditional zombie thrills with genuine wit and humanity, and Sardy gave it an effective pastiche incorporating an homage to everyone's favorite, Ennio Morricone.

Swihart had worked on student films and independent features, so it was fitting that his breakthrough feature should be a low-budget collaboration between several graduates of Brigham Young University film school. The offbeat teen comedy Napoleon Dynamite first gained notice at the Sundance Film Festival and became one of the year's sleeper hits as well as a pop culture phenomenon. The success of the film quickly typed Swihart as a composer for quirky, light-hearted fare, and while he has continued to be especially prolific in indie cinema, he has also scored major releases (the Renee Zellweger romcom New in Town was a rare venture into the mainstream chick flick for the composer) as well as episodic television (Accidentally on Purpose, Greek, How I Met Your Mother). His latest feature in released is the underrated Michael Cera vehicle Youth in Revolt.

WHAT'S NEXT: Lucky, The Perfect Host

A popular session guitarist, Workman had experience in scoring for documentaries and television when he scored his first feature, Jon Favreau's directorial debut Made. Favreau may have gone on to use John Debney for most of his later features, but Workman soon found an important collaborator in writer-producer-director Judd Apatow. After Workman provided additional music for the Apatow production Kicking & Screaming, the filmmaker hired him to score his directing debut The 40 Year Old Virgin, which proved to be a commercial and critical smash and began Apatow's reign as the major comedy film auteur of our time. The Apatow-produced hit Superbad proved to be an especially fertile ground for Workman's talents, and he collaborated with The Eels' Mark Everett for the Jim Carrey vehicle Yes Man. He has also worked as a session player for such composers as Edward Sheamur (on the Charlie's Angels scores) and Theodore Shapiro (Starsky & Hutch). Next up is a rock-themed Apatow production which reteams the composer with two Forgetting Sarah Marshall co-stars, Russell Brand and Jonah Hill.

WHAT'S NEXT: Get Him to the Greek

NEXT TIME: More working composers, from A to G.