GET HIM TO THE GREEK
COMPOSER: Lyle Workman
WRITERS: Nicholas Stoller, Jason Segel
DIRECTOR: Nicholas Stoller
CAST:  Jonah Hill, Russell Brand, Rose Byrne

This latest Judd Apatow production is sort of a rock-n-roll My Favorite Year, with Hill as Mark Linn-Baker and Brand as Peter O'Toole.

He shared the scoring credit on Judd Apatow's Funny People with co-star Jason Schwarzman, and next he scores a vehicle for Apatow veteran Jay Baruchel, She's Out of My League.

John Frankenheimer had originally planned to direct PLAYERS, a Robert Evans-produced romance pairing a young tennis player (Dean-Paul Martin) and a mysterious older woman (Ali McGraw), but he left the project to make Prophecy, and the directing reins went to Anthony Harvey (The Lion in Winter, They Might Be Giants). The natural choice for the score would have seemed to be John Barry, but instead the filmmakers hired Jerry Goldsmith, who had written the classic, romantic Chinatown score for producer Evans. None of Goldsmith's Players music has ever been released, and Intrada's CD, limited to 3000 units, features the complete score mastered from the original tapes, including two love themes (one in the Chinatown vein) and a thrilling theme for the tennis matches.

Their other release, limited to 1500 units, presents the first-ever CD release of Gil Melle's music for Robert Wise's classic 1971 film version of Michael Crichton's THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN. The CD features the same tracks as the original Kapp soundtrack LP, which was first released as a special hexagonal disc (which was later rereleased in a traditional shape because the oddly shaped disc damaged needles on automatic turntables), but though the CD is only 26 minutes long, it features nearly all of Melle's groundbreaking score.

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.

Then the expanded edition came out.