Jon Burlingame

As part of an 80th-birthday tribute, Variety asked me to assemble a list of 10 key moments from Quincy Jones’ career writing music for films and TV. It was a fascinating challenge, and while I had to omit a few personal favorites just because they’re now so obscure (John and Mary, $, The Hot Rock), I came up with 10 that I thought fit the bill. Started out with The Pawnbroker (of course) and ended with The Color Purple, sneaking in such TV classics as Ironside and The Bill Cosby Show along the way. Variety built it into a slideshow for the web. Incidentally, here is my two-and-a-half-hour interview with Quincy, done in 2002 for the Archive of American Television; and here is my 2001 review of his autobiography.