For instance, take Stephen Smith's biography of Bernard Herrmann. A lot of it is just made up of anecdotes, stories that people recalled or that had been told them by another. And it isn't complete. I've heard a lot of additional stories about Herrmann that didn't make the book.

Here at this and other message boards information circulates in the same way. Somewhere someone sees or is told a story about a score or composer. Perhaps there is some direct research. Then bit by bit the stories are related, verified, added onto, doubted, speculated about, all in the hopes of getting some idea of what happened.

I picked up the Green Mansions soundtrack. The liner notes talk about how Kaper wasn't thrilled to adapt Villa-Lobos. It also went into depth about Villa-Lobos' trip to the US and other details about the production and scoring.

Film music history, which in a sense means the biographies of the composers, the stories behind the scores of specific productions, and an overall history of styles and approaches, doesn't seem to have been concretized yet into a single library. Rather, it seems to be scattered in liner notes, personal papers, interviews, many different books and documentaries, rarely-seen studio files, and the memories of lots of different film music fans. And it's also through discussion that the information seems to circulate. An issue of Film Score Monthly or an interview at some website devoted to film music may be the concrete source but then the information flows from there into an oral bank of stories that people discuss or blog about.

What I wonder about is how much distortion and loss is part of the process. Whether the oral dissemination of info is richer than that that people have tried to collect in writing or just a shadowy copycat of what is already solidly written about elsewhere. And just what are the key circulating myths. What stories about films and composers are the ones normally brought up to the people who start to become fans of this music.

This brings me back to an idea that was circulated here a while ago and which I wonder about. Maybe we're overdue for a big get-together. We need a big conference, we need the Film Music Society to sponsor a week long convention of composers, guys from record and on-line store companies (Varese, Intrada, FSM, etc.), Bill Stromberg & John Morgan, John Waxman, Peter K (god forbid), critics, researchers, fans, dealers, etc. etc. One big film music blow out where there is lots of talk and tales and someone is there to write it all down it all ends with the police getting called in to protect Ford Thaxton from rioters who want to kill him.

Speaking of Oscars wasn't it mentioned, don't know how true it was, that the Academy was all set to give Goldsmith the Oscar for Hoosiers but because he recorded it overseas in a country who was on our sh*tlist it was awarded to whoever won it that year. Like I said I don't how true this is but I know it's been mentioned on a few sites.

"Two cues from Heaven's Gate are included, along with themes form classic western scores by Maurice Jarre, Jerry Fielding, Dimitri Tiomkin, Elmer Bernstein and others. Unfortunately my two cues are not the versions from the soundtrack (which I performed). "Sweet Breeze" (the Main Title) holds up pretty well. The arranger (who obviously had to transcribe it by ear) did very well, missing only a handful of notes. Aside from the fact that they didn't have a mandocello (a dominant flavor in the score), and that the music occasionally drifts slightly out of time, and that the mandolin player sounds a little more Greek than Ukranian, it's a very good recording. I can't really say the same for the "Mamou Two-Step" (the famous roller-skating sequence), which sounds more like a Lawrence Welk polka than a cajun two-step...."

If a few of these composers were still alive they'd have strung up Thaxton and the Silva gang a long time ago. Mansfield seems to have gotten off easy as regards to his Main Title. At least he could recognize it as his!

But yes this is exactly the kind of story that gets passed between fans and is less likely to be colated into a written form that people can immediately consult or disseminate.