J. Neil Schulman
@ Agorist.com
@ Agorist.com
Anybody who knows me well knows that my dad, Julius Schulman, was one of the great violinists of the twentieth century.
You can’t grow up in a house where you’re hearing a master musician practicing for hours every day for years and years of your life without that having a primal impact on your very being. I’m told that when I was three years old I could sing the entire Mendelsson Violin Concerto. I remember at five listening over and over to 78 RPM glass transcriptions my father had brought home from his job as concertmaster and featured soloist of the WOR Mutual Network Symphony Orchestra — movements of the Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn violin concertoes, Camille Saint-Saëns’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Pablo de Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen — and no son of a major-league baseball player could have been more in awe of his dad.
A lot of my life was a trial-and-error search to find what talents nature had given me that I could hone through dedication, stamina, and focus into something as fine.
So it’s no accident that when I made my first feature film I put as much of my dad’s violin playing on the soundtrack as I could, and dedicated the movie to him. Nor is it accidental that two songs I wrote music and lyrics for are also on the movie’s soundtrack — as well as three more songs I wrote lyrics for — and that I probably spent as much time buying and commissioning new and original songs for the soundtrack as anything else I did in the production, and in the editing bay cutting the movie to the music as much as the other way around.
Let me tell you a secret. Once your name and email address is listed on IMDb as a producer and director, you regularly get emails from industry professionals who want you to think of them when you’re hiring for your next project. In my email box almost every day — even without having a project listed with a start date — are one or two emails offering me their services.
The ones I like best are from film composers, because they all come with links to their website where I get to listen to their music.
So I’ve decided to share some of these movie composer website links with you.
In reverse order I received them (most recent first):
If you’re as much in awe of composers as I am, check them out!
My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available for sale or rental on Amazon.com Video On Demand. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!