Leith Stevens

Film and tv composer Leith Stevens remains to be most widely known for his rating towards the Marlon Brando common The Wild One particular. Born in Support Moriah, Missouri on Sept 13, 1909, Stevens was a kid prodigy who by age 11 was playing skillfully behind Kansas City-area vocalists, producing his debut as conductor by 16. Honored a Julliard Base Fellowship in 1927, he relocated 3 years afterwards to serve as the pianist using the Chicago Opera Firm before time for NEW YORK to are an arranger with CBS Radio. Stevens migrated to Hollywood in 1939 to compose and carry out the rating for the Edward G. Robinson radio series Big City, and 3 years afterwards he finished his initial film rating for the RKO creation Syncopation. During Globe Battle II he aimed radio encoding for the U.S. Workplace of War Info; upon time for Hollywood he helped type the Composers and Lyricists Guild of America, offering as the organization’s chief executive for eight years. Although his film commissions included uncredited efforts to big-budget productions just like the 1946 perennial It’s an excellent Lifestyle and 1953’s The Battle from the Worlds, Stevens do his finest function in low-budget B-pictures, infusing little-seen film noirs like Crashout and Personal Hell 36 with percussive, bebop-influenced ratings that preceded the jazz enhancements of better-known Hollywood composers like Henry Mancini and Elmer Bernstein by some a few months — furthermore, his jazz rating for 1953’s The Crazy One (performed by Shorty Rogers) coupled with Brando’s landmark functionality, gained him the enmity of conventional watchdogs. In 1956 Stevens gained his initial Academy Prize nomination for composing the name theme towards the film Julie; he was also nominated in 1959 for his focus on The Five Pennies, and once again in 1963 for A FRESH Kind of Like. He also proved helpful in television, credit scoring Shed in Space and many seasons of Objective: Impossible, and also headlined a set of LPs: the Coral label discharge Jazz Themes for Cops and Robbers and Discovering the Unidentified. Stevens was functioning as the musical movie director at Universal during his loss of life on July 23, 1970 — his wife was wiped out in an car crash previous that same time, and after notifying relatives and buddies of her loss of life, he experienced his very own fatal coronary attack.