This is pretty much how Adult Martin feels every day.
The ragtime life is pretty rad sometimes.
Not ashamed to shill for Shatner.
Feeling grateful for my brother today.
RIP Marvin :(
“While the film “The Way We Were” was in post-production, I got a message from director George Roy Hill. I had loved his Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and he said he needed to talk to me right away.
“Marvin, it’s not an original score I need. All I want you to do is adapt some music for me.” I thought: Please… I don’t do adaptations. I’m a composer. I write my own music. But once again I heeded the biblical injunction that “pride goeth before a fall.”
I quickly realized that this was one of the best pictures I had seen in years. David Ward had written a witty, stylish script, George Roy Hill had directed it faultlessly, and Newman and Redford were the best screen couple in years.
From the beginning, George Roy Hill’s idea had always been to use the ragtime music of Scott Joplin.
I was well aware that there were other musicians who knew the music of Scott Joplin far more intimately than I, men who had popularized Joplin’s famous piano “rags.” But I knew how to write for film, marrying music to the length of each scene, and I could also play the piano “rags”- those Juilliard piano lessons were about to pay off.
The real fun came for me when we started recording the soundtrack. We didn’t have a full-size orchestra, as with “The Way We Were,” but we had eight or nine great musicians, with yours truly at the keyboard. We spent hours making ragtime; the piano player in me had found a long-lost brother in Scott Joplin.
The music for The Sting was getting a lot of mention in the reviews. (Who would have guessed that a ragtime single would bounce to the top of the charts?) Of course, there were critics. Some carped that Scott Joplin’s music was out of place in a movie set in another era. The film was set in the thirties; the Joplin “rags” were written around the turn of the century. I had been aware of this. I knew this might cause a problem for some purists. But the music and movie had a great kinship-a good humor and high spirits. It received many nomination and won many Oscars” — Marvin Hamlisch
I want to know how to blow smoke rings.
