There is a recent book entitled Cult Fiction that offers short bios on a number of authors who are neither considered great literature (think Hemingway) or widely popular (think Stephen King). These are authors who attracted a small but loyal following of admirers (think David Goodis).

Borrowing the idea of cult authors, I see loving film composers in a similar light.

It's not that some aren't widely known (Star Wars sold 3 million+ copies), but the number of people who consistently listen to film music on its own apart from films is still a small percentage of the overall population. That suggests a cult following.

Just as the left breaks into various sub-sects (liberals, socialists, greens, labor unionists, communists, Maoists, Marxists, Trotskyites, etc.) and as Christianity does the same (Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Pentecosts, 7-Day Adventists, etc.), film music cultists/fans/aficiandos/morons/mavens/freaks rally around their own sub-sects (Golden age, MV, specific composers, etc.).

I think whatever the interface between us and loving film music is, I think we should celebrate it.

Instead of taking the moron theory to heart, I think we should all be proud of ourselves for finding this orphan artform and setting aside time and money to collect, discuss, and listen to its works.

Maurice Jarre
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Without Maurice Jarre, who died last week at 84, who would David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia be? Peter O’Toole’s deliquescent eyes, shimmering in the desert light, would have been little more than a silent mirage. Jarre’s 1962 film score, which won an Academy Award, is a reminder that in the movies there is no character and no landscape unless there is a musical soundscape too.

Maurice Jarre gave many of us a notion of the scale on which our personal life theme music might be written. People often notice the nostalgic quality of scent, the way a familiar smell can instantly carry you backward in time. The same is true of music.

A few bars of the theme from “The Longest Day” — astonishingly upright and Anglo-American for a French composer — and I am somewhere back in 1962, when I first saw the movie — and even further back in 1945. I understood, of course, that there was no harmony in the real sounds of D-Day. But Jarre’s score made the horrors and the heroism of that day palpably real for me.

To me, the indelible sign of Jarre’s power is the score for “Doctor Zhivago,” which was released in December 1965. Let me put my 1965 in perspective. The Beatles album “Help” came out in August, and “Rubber Soul” came out a couple of weeks before “Zhivago.” I was nearly deaf to anything that wasn’t composed by Lennon and McCartney, unless it was composed by Brian Wilson. And yet there was still room in my head for Jarre’s version of “Zhivago” — perhaps because it always carried with it an image of Julie Christie.