Elmer Bernstein

In the history of film music, Elmer Bernstein is among the iconic and the legendary. With a career that spanned an unparalleled 5 decades, he composed more than 150 original movie scores and nearly 80 for television, creating some of the most recognizable and memorable themes in Hollywood history, and in doing so, redefining how movies were scored. His score for The Man With the Golden Arm brought intense, aggressive jazz to the big screen, the rousing Western anthem of The Magnificent Seven set the standard for western scores for years to come, the lyrical and quietly moving music of To Kill a Mockingbird is simply timeless, while the the jaunty, thumb-nosing march of The Great Escape is still heard 50 years later. In the '70s and '80s, Bernstein's comedy scores for National Lampoon’s Animal House and Ghostbusters changed the way comedy films have been scored ever since. Working for everyone from Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments) to Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence), his career connects Old Hollywood with the new. Bernstein is also the only composer to have been nominated for an Academy Award in every decade from the 1950s to the 2000s.