Hollywood Bowl Museum exhibit on film music
July 18, 1993 at 10:00 amIn the summer of 1993, I put together what is believed to be the first major American museum exhibit on the history and art of film music. It was at the Hollywood Bowl Museum, and thousands of visitors passed through it. Libby Slate’s Los Angeles Times article gives a lot of credit to the curator — who, in fact, hired me to organize it — but I actually contacted all the composers, visited all the archives, chose most of the material and wrote all of the texts. We have lots of photos and will be adding those soon.
When it came to asking Jerry Goldsmith for a score, I really wanted one of the classics like Planet of the Apes or Chinatown. He, on the other hand, wanted to put the more recent Basic Instinct into the exhibit (hence Libby’s surprised opening paragraph of the story). We wound up using the cue “Crossed Legs” along with that now-familiar, provocative still photo of Sharon Stone as our example of a Goldsmith score. And, of course, today it is considered a classic.