Intrada Kickstarter Re-recording: The Chairman (Jerry Goldsmith) (1 Viewer)

[richardburton84]

Intrada returns with its fifth Kickstarter campaign and its 12th album recording project. As with our previous crowdfunded projects, we are engaging the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under the baton of William T. Stromberg to create an all-new digital recording. This time around, we’re answering the call from many collectors who have been asking for a revisit of Jerry Goldsmith’s 1969 political thriller score for The Chairman. Goldsmith is renowned for such scores as Patton, his Oscar-winning score to The Omen, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (one of the finest film scores ever written), and seemingly countless others from Poltergeist, the Rambo series, Total Recall to Basic Instinct. Yet even early in his career he was composing sophisticated, artistic and compelling scores. One of our earlier Kickstarter campaigns funded a recording of his first film score, the 1958 western Black Patch. The '60s and '70s also heard Goldsmith infuse many scores with an Asian sensibility. Morituri, The Sand Pebbles and Tora! Tora! Tora! were a few standouts. And The Chairman, largely set in China, sits firmly in this group.

While a soundtrack album was released at the time of the film on the Tetragrammaton label, the album masters and film recording sessions both vanished over the years. Several CD reissues appeared, but they were vinyl rips taken straight from the Tetragrammaton album, featuring the limited range and distortion inherit in the format. While a short mono selection of cues in superior sound surfaced several years ago and was released on the prestigious Goldsmith at Fox box set released by Varese Sarabande, that was it. As such, collectors have often imagined what a completely new, state-of-the-art recording would sound like, a hint of which was provided when Tadlow recorded a suite for their The Blue Max album.

As for the film itself, it’s a striking Gregory Peck political thriller. Also known as The Most Dangerous Man in the World, the film directed by J. Lee Thompson is based on a novel by Jay Richard Kennedy. It sounds mundane enough, with Peck as a Western agent tasked with going to mainland China to retrieve an agricultural enzyme. Little does this agent know that there’s a tracking device embedded in his head that doubles as an explosive, and if he fails it will be detonated. And nothing goes according to plan. It never does.

As a stretch goal, if we can raise an additional $10,000, we will record the end title to Rambo II, the original of which only exists in poor-sounding cassette dub. We'll also record "Alex's Death" from Under Fire, the set piece action cue from the film, left off the original soundtrack and now lost to time as the sessions are missing. But that's not all, we'll also record "The Flag" from Not Without My Daughter. The film version includes a militaristic trumpet solo, a favorite Goldsmith sound of our late founder Douglass Fake that is missing from the original soundtrack. And last but not least, we'll record "Homer Writes" from Lilies of the Field—another track long since lost and not included on the original soundtrack.


The album will be produced by Leigh Phillips, who has run his own Kickstarter campaigns to record many Goldsmith works, primarily from the GE Theater and coming imminently—a compilation of three TV scores from the '70s, also to be released on CD by Intrada: Pursuit, Crawlspace, and The People Next Door. Phillips has done extensive Goldsmith restoration work, including reperforming the electronic portions of Damnation Alley and complete recreation of The Salamander.

Please join us in supporting this Kickstarter campaign to get Jerry Goldsmith’s beautifully exotic and exciting score recorded in 21st-century sound. You’ll find an array of rewards for supporting us and if you support this campaign, you can get the CD for only $20. That’s $3 off the regular retail price of $22.99 when the CD goes on sale. And for customers in the US, we'll throw in shipping, too! That's another $4.50 value!

If we achieve our funding, we hope to record in Fall 2025.

As with all Intrada Kickstarter campaigns, your support also helps with future projects.

 

[richardburton84]

I am pleased to report that the campaign reached both main and stretch goals this morning with recording temporarily slated for August 11th and 12th.