Tag Archives: Stanley Wilson

Stanley Wilson, TV music pioneer, honored

When I learned that Universal was renaming one of its streets after Stanley Wilson, I jumped at the opportunity to write about it — and composers John Williams, Lalo Schifrin, Quincy Jones and Dave Grusin all immediately agreed to talk with me about him. That’s because he helped launch all of their careers at Revue/Universal TV in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Stanley Wilson confers with "M Squad" star Lee Marvin about music.

Stanley Wilson confers with “M Squad” star Lee Marvin.

Wilson is an unsung hero in the film/TV music business. Anyone who grew up in the 1960s will remember seeing “Music Supervision… Stanley Wilson” at the end of practically every show that came out of Universal City. And sharp-eyed jazz fans will recall seeing his name as conductor or producer on albums by Benny Carter and Quincy Jones. He was a great man who deserves to be remembered. In 2001 I wrote a 52-page biography of him for The Film Music Society’s Cue Sheet (available here) and it’s still among my proudest accomplishments.

Music From Hollywood

Not so much a book as a journal: The July/October 2013 issue of The Cue Sheet, the quarterly publication of The Film Music Society. Utilizing nearly four dozen never-before-seen photographs, this 64-page booklet goes behind the scenes to tell the previously untold story of the greatest film-music concert in history, Sept. 25, 1963 at the Hollywood Bowl.

That night Elmer Bernstein, John Green, Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini, Alfred Newman, Alex North, David Raksin, Miklos Rozsa, Dimitri Tiomkin and Franz Waxman conducted their own scores — with Percy Faith conducting Max Steiner and Nelson Riddle conducting a medley of TV themes, plus guest artists Jack Benny, Mahalia Jackson and Andy Williams. It was the largest-scale public project ever attempted by the Composers and Lyricists Guild of America. (Amateur photographers Raksin, composer of Laura, and Alexander Courage, later the composer of Star Trek, documented the rehearsals.) In addition to the photographs, images of the posters, tickets, even parking passes and newspaper clippings of the reviews, accompany my 9,000-word chronicle of this once-in-a-lifetime event (and its April 1964 sequel, with fewer participants, that was taped for later TV showings).QuincyJBWilsonTVArchive

Editor Marilee Bradford — who originally discovered Raksin’s previously unseen Polaroids — did a stunning job of preparing the photos and laying out the issue. Here’s an overview and a link showing how to order it.

This is one of many writing projects that I’ve done for The Film Music Society of which I’m very proud. (Another is my 52-page biography of Revue/Universal music director Stanley Wilson, published in 2001 and shown here in the hands of Quincy Jones, Wilson’s 1960s scoring protege.)