The Dark Fantastic Interview with Director Michael Pressman (Exclusive)

Director/Writer/Producer Michael Pressman has been working in Hollywood for over forty years. He's done it all: from TV movies, to weekly dramas, to mini-series, to features. His work is always visually stylish and energetic, no matter the genre he is working in (and he's worked in almost every conceivable genre).

I had a chance to ask Michael a number of questions about his work, especially the TV movie Final Jeopardy (1985) starring Richard Thomas and Mary Crosby, one of the most suspenseful and underrated American TV movies ever made, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II (1991), and what he's working on at the moment.

Final Jeopardy is, in my humble opinion, one of the best American TV movies ever made. It looks and plays like a feature. How did you manage to achieve that with what I assume was a small budget and mostly location shooting in Chicago and Los Angeles?

Thank you for the compliments. I so enjoyed making that film because it was like shooting a movie. I was completely left alone to make it visual and exciting. We were also quite short in the first cut, and I personally wrote two additional scenes that were my favorite - one was finding the dead body in the empty theater and the other was the drugged out girls in the abandoned church who thought it was a hospital.  

We only shot for one week in Chicago, and we used the sewers and the subways and the ending with Denis Farina, and that was pretty much it. The rest was shot in Los Angeles at night, of course.

I am a huge fan of the vastly underrated Richard Thomas. What was it like working with him?

Richard Thomas was totally dedicated and fully invested and a lot of fun. He had a tremendous sense of humor, and I remember many times if we were shooting past midnight he would go into a foreign accent and rehearse with a French or an Italian accent and crack everyone up. I also adored Mary Crosby who was a dream to work with. The most exciting actor was the famous late Jeff Corey whom I became very close to in his last years, and he was brilliant in a very underwritten role of the man who lived in the underground. He had a whole backstory and point of view and if you watch closely, he played the role like a rat who lived under ground and would scrounge. He added all his lines about “you got any food ?", lines like that. 

How did you get involved with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II (1991), and what was it like working on such an effects heavy film?

That was a complete left field surprise that I just said "Yes". They were looking for a director for the sequel and someone who knew how to work under pressure and handle TV-like schedules, and because of Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977), I had also directed a successful children’s movie that was also a sequel, so I was the perfect person for the job. I learned so much on that film about puppetry and effects, and little did the producers know my theater background came in very handy with the movement and staging of mimes playing the Turtles, and puppeteers off screen doing the facial expressions. I loved that experience, but it was stressful and demanding. I was offered to do the third one and turned it down, because I felt there wasn’t a learning curve.  

You’re an extremely versatile director. Doing everything, from thrillers, to one-hour TV dramas, to big-budgeted features like Ninja Turtles II. How do you choose your projects, and what do you enjoy more, working on features or TV? 

Michael Pressman

It's hard to answer that. Movies are my first love, and take a very long time, and sometimes you spend most of your time raising money or interesting a star that helps you get the money. And if it doesn’t make money, the director is always blamed. Television is a good friend. I am in demand if the work is good, and its fast and is always a challenge and keeps me going. And it pays well. 

What are you working on at the moment?

I am producing/directing Chicago Med [the Dick Wolf medical drama which airs on NBC] and enjoying it very much, though at the moment we are in a holding pattern due to the coronavirus, as is the rest of the industry and the country in fact.

* Special thanks to Craig Safan, for making this interview possible.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.

Ahmed Khalifa is a filmmaker and novelist. He is the writer/director of the feature film Wingrave, released on Netflix, and the author of a number of novels and short stories, including the YA horror novel, Beware The Stranger, available on Amazon.

Book Review: ENEMIES AND ALLIES By Kevin J. Anderson *** and a 1\2 out of *****

Enemies and Allies, Kevin J. Anderson's second novel for DC, after the superbly entertaining The Last Days of Krypton, is a clever, serious story about Batman and Superman's first encounter in 1956.

Taking his cue from the works of Frank Miller and Jeph Loeb, both of whom are thanked in the preface, Anderson creates a tale infused with a paranoid, Cold War feel, with the threat of nuclear annihilation looming over the characters. Anderson's depictions of characters, from Superman, to Batman, to Lois Lane, to Jimmy Olsen, are well-crafted and endearing, and the dialogue always rings true. But the main villain, Lex Luthor, comes off as one-dimensional and somewhat cartoonish, which might have to do with his over-the-top plan for world domination. Which brings me to the main fault of the book. Although Anderson brings a depth and a weight to the historical and technical aspects of the story, they don't gel with the Sci-Fi elements, which feel cliched and underdeveloped. This makes the book uneven in tone, as the broad, "Golden Age" comic book aspects seem in constant battle with the solemn tone that Anderson chooses to tell his tale, making Enemies and Allies less fun than it should be.

But fans of Batman and Superman will find a lot to enjoy here, as both heroes are treated with love and care, and Anderson's short chapters make this a fast page-turner, and a good if not very memorable addition to the DC cannon.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.

Ahmed Khalifa is a filmmaker and novelist. He is the writer/director of the feature film Wingrave, released on Netflix, and the author of a number of novels and short stories, including the YA horror novel, Beware The Stranger, available on Amazon.

Book Review: DECEIT By James Siegel. **** out *****

Author James Siegel's fourth novel, Deceit, is a whopper of a mystery. Toying with the unreliable narrator trope and mixing it with a healthy dose of paranoia, Siegel creates a book that is original and unputdownable.

The story revolves around Tom Valle, a disgraced journalist, who is more or less banished to a small town in California to work for the local paper. Then a car accident takes place nearby and one of the drivers involved burns to death. What follows is a chain of events that will challenge Tom's sanity and endanger his life.

To say the novel is filled with twists is an understatement, as the plot is serpentine and complex. But Siegel knows what he's doing, never losing control of the plot or pace, or losing sight of the moral dilemma at the center of the story, which is the price of redemption for a pathological liar. Even if Siegel's prose gets a little cluttered every now and then, he's a master storyteller and dialogue writer

Overall, Deceit is an atmospheric, addictive, and haunting read, and is highly recommended for fans of psychological mysteries and paranoid thrillers.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.

Ahmed Khalifa is a filmmaker and novelist. He is the writer/director of the feature film Wingrave, released on Netflix, and the author of a number of novels and short stories, including the YA horror novel, Beware The Stranger, available on Amazon.

Book Review: THE DINNER By Herman Koch. *** out of *****

A highly praised novel of psychological suspense, The Dinner is an intriguing and readable book about a troubling subject matter.

Told in the first-person by Paul Lohman, a seemingly loving husband and father, as he sits down with his older brother and his brother's wife for a quiet dinner at an expensive restaurant, as he slowly reveals, through flashbacks that grow more disturbing as they go along, that there is more than meets the eye to this family gathering.

Revealing any more would be unfair. Suffice it to say that this is a dark novel, and one which gets darker and more disturbing chapter by chapter.

Koch's prose is on the chilly side, and all his characters are more or less unlikable. But there's a pitch-black mystery at the core of this novel that keeps one reading, no matter how unsavory things get, and Koch has some interesting things to say about mental illness, evil, and nature vs. nurture. But this is a challenging read; an unpleasant story about unpleasant people. And the ending, though shocking, is heavy-handed and implausible.

As far as psychological suspense novels go, this is a good if pedantic one, and only recommended to readers who like their mysteries dark and nihilistic.

* Adapted into a feature film starring Richard Gere, in 2017.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.

Book Review: Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix *** out of *****

The second novel by Grady Hendrix is a fun if slight horror-comedy novel about a haunted furniture store.

The book features likable characters, and Hendrix has a talent for dialogue and smooth prose. But the confined setting - the whole book takes place during one night inside the store - and lack of twists, make things feel repetitive, and the villain is pretty forgettable. Also, the anti-big business message comes off as heavy-handed and sophomoric.

An entertaining if forgettable book, which feels like a below average book by a talented writer. But it might please fans of eighties horror, as it is obviously intended as a pastiche of the "haunted store/mall" subgenre that was so popular in that decade.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.

Ahmed Khalifa is a filmmaker and novelist. He is the writer/director of the feature film Wingrave, released on Netflix, and the author of a number of novels and short stories, including the YA horror novel, Beware The Stranger, available on Amazon.

Movie Review: THE ZERO BOYS (1986) *** and a 1\2 out of *****

One of the smarter and more original slasher films to come out of the eighties, The Zero Boys (1986) is a somewhat obscure horror\thriller that is worth a revisit.

The plot: a group of rich California college kids obsessed with survival games, go out on a camping weekend and start to be picked off one by one by a bunch of psychopathic rednecks.

On the surface, this looks like a typical slasher movie of the era. There are pretty young people, the proverbial "cabin in the woods", and a bunch of killers wielding big knives. But co-writer/director Nico Mastorakis seems to have more on his mind than mere slasher tropes. From the mock-macho opening titles, which mimic and parody the opening of an eighties action blockbuster, Mastorakis seems intent on jumping from one genre to another, commenting on each in turn. And the above-average script has some witty dialogue, and characters that are a bit more than fodder for the psychopathic killers, and seems to have a point to make about the reactionary, macho male posturing of the eighties, painting the male characters as egotistical young adults who think they are invincible behind their machine guns and semi-automatic pistols. But as the movie progresses, the male characters, especially, become more and more helpless, realizing that their worldview maybe askew. Also, the female characters, although not very memorable, are painted as somewhat complex and not just damsels in distress.

The film also boasts stylish cinematography by Steven Shaw, and there's a terrific suspense sequence near the end of the film, featuring a slowly approaching killer and several characters trapped with a rattle snake. But, despite flashes of wit and an effectively ominous tone (helped by a moody score by Stanley Myers and Hans Zimmer), what brings the film down several notches are a number of dumb decisions by the main characters that just defy logic. Also, the ending, though admirably dark and unexpected, is abrupt and mildly unsatisfying.

Flaws aside, The Zero Boys is an entertaining, occasionally smart, and eerie horror film that deserves to be rediscovered by fans of the genre.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.

Ahmed Khalifa is a filmmaker and novelist. He is the writer/director of the feature film Wingrave, released on Netflix, and the author of a number of novels and short stories, including the YA horror novel, Beware The Stranger, available on Amazon.

Book Review: THE SHADOW: THE GRAY GHOST By Walter B. Gibson *** and a 1\2 out of *****

Fast-moving and entertaining The Shadow adventure, centering on a seemingly invincible cat burglar called "The Gray Ghost". Gibson keeps things moving at a brisk pace, with plenty of action and a few twists. The ending, though a bit hurried and light on surprises, is action-packed and atmospheric.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.

Book Review: RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD By John A. Russo *** and a 1\2 out of *****

Published in 1979 to little fanfare, screenwriter/novelist John A. Russo's sequel to George A. Romero's Night of The Living Dead (1968) is a must-read for fans of the seminal film and the zombie subgenre. Russo, the screenwriter of the original Romero classic, opens the book, which is set years after the event of the original film, with a shocking scene of mass brutality, as a preacher and his flock systematically mutilate the victims of a bus crush so that they won't turn into zombies. From there, the story gets darker and darker, as Russo introduces us to a number of believable, if not very memorable, characters, and takes them through one nerve-wracking and harrowing situation to the next.

Reading the novel, it quickly becomes clear that Russo is not as interested in overt sociopolitical commentary as Romero, focusing instead on the brutality of living in a world turned on its head, and the struggle of decent people trying to survive without turning into monsters themselves. There's plenty of violence, which makes the novel not for the faint of heart. What isn't there is humor, as, like Russo's screenplay for the original film, this is a dead-serious take on the zombie genre that Russo and Romero more or less invented back in 1968.

Even if the prose is a little workman-like, this is a good, fast-paced, and immensely readable story, and a worthy if somewhat dated sequel to the original classic. Fans will surely find it fascinating.

* Russo originally wrote the story as a screenplay, then turned it into a novel. His screenplay served as the basis for Dan O'Bannon's film, Return of The Living Dead (1985). Russo then adapted O'Bannon's revised screenplay into a separate book/novelization with the same title. That book was released  as a tie-in to the film in 1985.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.

Ahmed Khalifa is a filmmaker and novelist. He is the writer/director of the feature film Wingrave, released on Netflix, and the author of a number of novels and short stories, including the YA horror novel, Beware The Stranger, available on Amazon.

The Dark Fantastic Interview With Composer Craig Safan (exclusive)

I first came across Craig Safan’s music about twenty five years ago, when I was just a kid obsessed with horror movies. I was watching a rented VHS copy of A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) when something strange happened. I started noticing the score, a rarity for me at that age. To me, it sounded strange, eerie, rousing, and catchy. Going over the credits, I realized that the score was composed by someone named Craig Safan, and ever since then, whenever I find the words “composed by Craig Safan” up on the screen, I know I’m in for something special.

Safan has composed dozens of scores since the seventies, including the scores to Remo Williams (1985), The Last Starfighter (1984), Warning Sign (1985), Tag: The Assassination Game (1980), and several episodes of the 1985 versions of The Twilight Zone and Amazing Stories. His latest release is Sirens: Music inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, an album of original music.

I had a chance to talk to Craig and ask him a number of questions about his music, his background, how he broke into the industry, and about working with Spielberg, John Milius, and Danny DeVito, among others.

So, the first thing I wanted to ask you about is how you got started as a film composer.

Craig Safan

   I started playing piano when I was about six or seven, and my mother had played classical piano a bit, and wasn’t very happy with it, because she said nobody wanted to listen to classical music. So when she started to find a teacher for me, she found someone who taught what was called “popular music”, which was basically more improvisation. From the very first listen I was improvising, and then I started writing songs. I was about ten or eleven, probably, and I wrote songs all through high school. And then in college I was actually a fine arts major, because I never thought I would be a professional musician, plus my family looked down on that. When I graduated university, I was given a fellowship and went to London.

   When I was in college, they had an electronic music studio in the music department, and even though I wasn’t a music major, I’d spend night after night working on the synthesizer. I was always fascinated by contemporary music and electronic [music], since the late sixties, when I was in college. When I came back after living in London, I started getting into songwriting and performing with my brother, and trying to earn a living arranging record albums, and working part-time in my father’s store. Of course, my father was furious that I wanted to be a professional musician, because his idea was you’re a doctor or you’re a lawyer, and you play music at night, when you come home to relax. He couldn’t conceive of it as a profession that didn’t lead to destruction on every level.

   I did that for a while, songwriting and some arranging for record albums, and then one day I just got a call from a college friend who’d gotten married, and her husband was starting AFI here in L.A, and had made a low-budget horror film, and she said you’re the only person I know who does music in Los Angeles, and we need music for this film. He’d made it on Super 16mm. She said, “You know who can do it?”, and I said, “I’ll do it.” And just, I figured, why not. And I did that film, and it was never released. The director was John McTiernan, who ended up being a famous director [the director of Predator (1987) and Die Hard (1988)], but it took him years before he made Nomads (1986) after that, he really just languished. But I did this little film for him that never got released, and I loved doing it so much, it just was perfect for me. I loved that the palate could be so large, and I didn’t just have to write a “pop” hit, which I wasn’t very good at.

   And so I started really pursuing film music at that point, and what was just serendipitous was that I was working with a group of musicians in the the studio in L.A, around Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, and people like that, and three of the musicians had all gone to school together, and their parents were all famous film composers. Elmer Bernstein’s son, Ernest Gold’s son, and Fred Steiner, who did a lot of Star Treks and Twilight Zones, and Perry Mason, he wrote the theme. And I started talking to these friends' parents, and they became my mentors. That’s really how I started. It was just total luck that this friend called me and asked me to do this low-budget picture, and I did it. And I knew immediately that this totally fits my talent…my talent is really writing dramatic music, it really is fun, I really enjoy it.

When I looked at your filmography, I saw that you worked with Michael Pressman, and Matthew Robbins, and Nick Castle several times.

Well, I think a lot of composers’ success, besides being good composers, is that they find one director who sort of [uses] them over and over. You can see that, especially in my generation, quite a bit. If you look at Alan Silvestri...Robert Zemeckis always used him from his first movie. It’s a big part of whether you can have success as a composer, your relationship with the director. So, yeah, I did a lot of movies with Nick Castle, I think I did my best movies with Nick Castle, or a lot of them anyway. And with Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood, I did Corvette Summer (1978) with Mark Hamill. We did Warning Sign (1985).

I love the soundtrack to Warning Sign. I was listening to it recently, and I think that many aspects of that soundtrack are way ahead of their time. It hasn’t aged that much.

That movie was not a successful movie, and I’d just forgotten about the score. And then, five years ago or something I get a call from Invada records in the UK, and they are rock and rollers, and they said this is one of their favorites, you know, heavy metal, all electronic scores. And they got the rights, and I sent them my masters, and they released a double vinyl set, plus the CD, with all new artwork. So they were really into it, and they did a great job. It was a pretty obscure score.

Looking at your filmography, what’s really interesting about your work is that you do these big, orchestral scores, and you also do these synth-based, electronic scores.

I’m a very eclectic musician, and I’ve done rock and roll scores, like The Legend of Billie Jean (1986), I’ve done The Last Starfighter, which is just a big, giant romantic orchestra. Nightmare On Elm Street 4 or Warning Sign, which [are] all electronic. So I’ve always been comfortable going from genre to genre. What’s important to me is to find what the right sound of the movie is, and that will lead me to whether it’s…is it electronic or is it more ethnic, like Remo Williams, where I used a lot of Korean musicians. So I change from score to score. I guess that’s good and bad in terms of a career, I can’t quite tell (laughs).

I love your new album Sirens. I think it’s very accessible, and I think it’s a great introduction to your work for newcomers, as it has both orchestral and electronic arrangements.

I’m really happy with that album, it’s the last album I did, and the second of just music without a film. But I think of it as music with an imaginary film, as that’s sort of how I write.

Going back a bit, I wanted to ask you about a movie you worked on in 1983, called Nightmares. I think it was initially produced as a pilot before it was released to theaters.

I have to go back one movie before that, which was a movie called Wolfen (1981). I did what is called aleatoric music, which has no synthesizers at all, it’s all orchestra. But the orchestra is making sounds, that are just weird sounds. And then the director on that [Michael Wadleigh] got fired and then they threw out my score and hired James Horner. But I had all this music that I wanted to use in a movie and it was thrown out. Then I got hired to do Nightmares, which was a pilot at Universal, which was an anthology, I guess. It had like four different segments. And I thought, well, I won’t have as big an orchestra, but I can use the same techniques and do the whole thing with just sounds from conventional instruments. And that’s what I did, and then they eventually actually released it as a film, I guess. It’s sort of a cool score. It’s interesting, because people who like film music sometimes mention it to me.

You also worked on the eighties reboot of The Twilight Zone and on the original version of Amazing Stories.

I did two Amazing Stories. “The Wedding Ring” with Danny DeVito, “The Main Attraction” with Matthew Robbins. I did eight [episodes of The Twilight Zone].

I know that version of The Twilight Zone wasn’t a huge success, but the talent behind it was amazing. Wes Craven, William Friedkin, and George R.R. Martin all worked on it. Did you get a chance to work with any of them?

In television, especially episodic television, you almost never even meet the director. The only director I remember I spent some time with is John Milius. And I did one, it was called “Opening Day”, and it’s a really cool thing, it was [in] Vietnam…you know, during the Vietnamese War. And all I remember is sitting with John, and you sit and decide where the music goes, and he finally said, “I don’t know where it goes, write music for everything and then I’ll take out what I don’t like later.” I went, “OK”. I think he used all of it. What I did on Twilight Zone, each one I did had a totally different sound. So one would be electronic, one would be an orchestra, one would be more comedic with weird sound effects. I tried to keep each episode sounding different, so they’d be interesting and not the same. Other than John Milius, I don’t think that I met with other directors. Again, I think it was the producer that I worked with. You’re brought in, you have a week to write it, and you record it on one afternoon.

So was Amazing Stories the same process? I know you again worked with Matthew Robbins, and Danny DeVito. Did you get to meet him?

Yeah. I know him very well. I did a TV series for eleven years called Cheers (1982-1993), and that was a huge, huge hit. And so we became very good friends during that time. So Danny asked me to do the music, and the story of that is that these half-hour comedies like Taxi and Friends, they have very little music. They’re really run by writers who don’t want anything to get in the way of their words. There’s very little music. Danny comes out of that tradition, and so he did this really good piece, called “The Wedding Ring”, and we’re looking at the film, and he wanted very little music. I went, “OK. I would write a lot more, but you’re the director.” So I wrote, I don’t know, fifteen minutes of music, with an orchestra, and he loved it. And the next day I get a call from my agent, that Steven Spielberg (the executive producer of the show) took a look and said, “Tell Craig to write twenty more minutes of music.” So I had to go back and write, because Spielberg, you know, he just wants wall to wall music. And that’s the story of that. It was just two different points of view. So I had to go back in, and there was another whole recording session.

I know you previously said that every project is like a job, and you have to go in and do your job. But do you have a preference, whether you like working on TV shows more or on movie projects?

It’s nice to have more money and more time. With television, people have to get the film finished, because it has air dates. They can’t give you too much trouble. This thing is in a production line and it’s going out. With a movie where they don’t really have a release date, and they’re not so sure how much money they are making on it, they can be much more difficult in terms of making you rewrite...[you’re] not sure if they’re really happy... bringing in another composer. You know, it’s a more difficult process. But when people think of my music, it’s almost ninety percent about the features. I did a lot of television and a lot of good music, but…people are much more aware of the work you do on a feature.

You said that, working on TV projects, you don’t get to interact with the director that much. But in feature films you do get to collaborate with the director a lot more. So do you like that process more, with more input from the director?

I love working with the director. I think it’s much better, I think you come up with better ideas. You’re less of an assembly line. I think it’s great. Some directors are better to work with than others, but I think the interaction is great. This may have changed, but in a lot of television that I worked on, I barely met the director, not always, sometimes, like [with] Matthew Robbins on Amazing Stories, or Danny DeVitto or John Milius. But a lot of times on television the director is long gone by the time the composer gets to work.

I wanted to ask you about one of my favorite soundtracks of all time, which is your soundtrack for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4. I think it’s a very unique electronic score, and not a typical soundtrack for a horror movie from the eighties. It’s almost an experimental score, really. Can you talk a little bit about how you got that job and what went into recording that?

 I got the job because I’d done a movie [for] New Line, called Remo Williams, and the head of New Line [Robert Shaye] loved the music, and he said, “I want Craig to do the next A Nightmare on Elm Street.” And so that’s how I got the job. I decided it should be all electronic. It was not a very big-budgeted score, and I thought that would be really appropriate for the film.

   So I did it all with Synclavier…at that point we had MIDI, and you could connect a lot of different synthesizers together. So I did that, and I worked a lot with Renny Harlyn, who was the director, so we had a lot of interaction. He would come over and listen to cues, and we’d discuss them, and everything I could play back in my studio, because it was all electronic. And I guess my idea was just to come up with a lot of interesting sounds and voices, and I came up with all of the percussion myself. I recorded it, and did weird treatments of the percussion. Also, each segment of the movie, where Freddy ends up killing a different character, I tried to make it have a little different sound. So with the first one, where the kid dies in the junkyard, I had a lot of samples of metal, banging metal together that I turned into a score. The Kung Fu one, I obviously had a lot of Asian sounds. The one where she’s a cockroach, I used contrabass clarinet samples and made it sound like this weird insect. So I tried to distinguish each segment. I think I used the theme once, which I didn’t write, and I just went from there. It was just a lot of fun to put it together.

   I think it’s a pretty cool movie. If you just go with it, it’s a good movie. Renny did a really good job. The sound effects are really good. The sound effects are very loud, and sort of become part of the music, which is sort of nice. I like that for that kind of film. By that point The Nightmare on Elm Street series was…the first part was really scary, I thought. And then each one got less scary, because it became more like, campy, more like Freddy winking at us and telling one line jokes. But by part four, I didn’t think it was really scary, it was just sort of fun and macabre and weird, and I sort of went with that. In the end sequence, I did a lot of big, organ music, because it all takes place in a church. But I tried to just make it unique and have an interesting sound. It’s on vinyl, it’s on CD. It’s just constantly being re-released.

What are your favorite soundtracks by other composers?

   I like a lot of composers. I love John Barry’s music. I love Out of Africa (1985) and Somewhere in Time (1980), those two scores are gorgeous. I love Jerry Goldsmith, of course. I love Coma (1978). I was at the recording session, and it was just beautiful. The Bernard Hermann music, I love. I love North by Northwest (1959), it’s a fantastic score. Elmer [Bernstein’s] music. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is incredible. Those are my favorites. I like Thomas Newman a lot, in terms of composers who are working today. I like Randy Newman a lot, too. I like his score to The Natural (1984), it is beautiful. I like some of Christopher Young’s scores, I think they are really wonderful. He’s really a good composer. Those are the ones that when I listen to, I find really interesting. I think they are doing stuff that’s really unique.

   I think a lot of music now to me [is] boring. It all just sounds very similar to me. All the big, you know, action and cartoon movies, superhero movies, it’s just like almost the same score, and just from a composer’s standpoint it’s hard to even hear what the score is from the sound effects, they’re so intertwined now, which is what directors want, that’s what happens. But the scores don’t have any individuality that I can hear. I realize there’s a lot of talent and expertise in all these scores, but I just think it’s hard to think of movies today that I love the scores [for] as much as some of the older movies, but it maybe just my generation. I like melody, I also like sounds that are unique, so I like scores that are really unique, and those are harder and harder to do today, because there’s so much temping of the music before the composer gets involved, and the movie goes through more processes in terms of editing and re-editing, always with a temporary music track attached to it, that it makes it very hard for the composer to do anything that is inspired or really different.

So what are you working on at the moment?

Right now I’m working on a new album. It’s going to be released by Notefornote music, which does mostly film scores, but not only. It’s called L.A.-EX, and it’s about my memories of growing up in Los Angeles. So hopefully that will be out later this year.

For more about Craig Safan and his work, check out his official website here.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.

Ahmed Khalifa is a filmmaker and novelist. He is the writer/director of the feature film Wingrave, released on Netflix, and the author of a number of novels and short stories, including the YA horror novel, Beware The Stranger, available on Amazon.

Book Review: THE COLORADO KID By Stephen King. *** and a 1\2 out of *****

The Colorado Kid (2005) is a story about storytelling, and our continuous search for answers to questions that might never have answers. It is a short, entrancing novel, with Stephen King at his avuncular best, weaving a tale seductively told by two ageing journalists in a small town in Maine; a  tale that grows more intriguing with every chapter, while never actually giving us any definite answers to the central mystery. It's a bold choice for a populist writer like King, who usually specializes in masterfully written but wholly accessible novels, revolving around tired genre tropes raised anew by his unique and incomparable voice.

Here, King stretches his muscles a bit, writing a story about a story with no ending, and focusing on a few hours in the lives of two ageing characters who live to tell a good tale. It's a charming little book, and one which ends far too soon.

* The audiobook version, wonderfully narrated by veteran screen and TV actor Jeffrey DeMunn, is highly recommended.

** The book was adapted to TV as the Canadian-American TV series Haven (2010-2015), which bore almost no resemblance to the novel, but which was a charming supernatural mystery in its own right.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.

Video Version:

Book Review: THE GOOD CHILDREN By Kate Wilhelm. *** out of *****

The Good Children (1995) is author Kate Wilhelm's attempt at a contemporary homage to Victorian Gothic novels. There's an unreliable narrator, a mysterious death, familial tensions, madness, and a creepy house. But it isn't a wholly successful attempt.

For the first two thirds of the novel, the book is unputdownable, with interesting and believable child characters, an intriguing inciting incident with dire consequences for all involved, and a story that defies expectations. But things take a downturn in the last third of the novel, as the now grown-up characters become less interesting and less believable, and the dialogue grows more and more stilted as it goes along. Also, the climax is overwrought and implausible, failing to gel with the what transpired before.

All in all, this is a lesser entry in Kate Wilhelm's impressive cannon, but it is still a readable if flawed psychological novel, and one which benefits from being a relatively short and easy read.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.