Yes, of course, but can you really think of another movie were they just lifted the theme from another movie, in this case made just a few years earlier? And I'm not talking about just ripping off, like with "Lord of the Rings" but actually reusing ;-)

"Rock Around The Clock" leaps to mind, actually. It was orignally the theme to a 1955 flick called BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, and has been used to open at least two other films. So does "To Sir With Love", although I can't remember the second film it was used to open. And the Trenet "La mer" was originally a theme to a 30s Trenet movie but was used to beautiful effect as the opening of LA STORY.

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Lets blame it on Hal Wilner. He seems able to destroy anything he gets his

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hands on. What a shame.

Willner's pretty brilliant, in my opinion, and in the opinions of just about any musicians he's ever worked with.

I always figured he must be a realyl nice guy, or something :-) I never heard his solo album, even though I heard it should be great, but his all star projects like the Harry Parch one, and even worse the Disney one always fell like a big waste of time to me.

Cheers.

I love the Disney. Steve Swallow backing James Taylor was gorgeous, and the Replacements, NRBQ, Los Lobos, and Ken Nordine are never a waste of time. The Yma Sumac cut was great as well. Hal is a pretty brilliant producer -- the way he puts combinations of players together is a gift and a half (as in the case of the Sanborn album he produced), and his ability to find the right tune for the right artist (I'm thinking Carla Bley's "8 1/2") is really special. There's a Partch one? Other than some of the instrumentation on the Mingus one? skip h

I'm reasonably certain that Philip Glass recycled music from his own 'Powaqqatsi' for 'The Truman Show'... at least, that's what I remember thinking when I first saw the latter film. And 'Powaqqatsi' is a sufficiently distinctive score among Glass's works that it would be hard to confuse with another. I'm with Skip and the other Willner boosters: the Monk, Weill and Disney discs made indelible impressions upon me during a particularly impressionable period, and were it not for "Shuffle Boil" and "The Little Lieutenant of the Loving God," we almost certainly would not have 'The Big Gundown,' 'Spillane' and 'Godard.' The Rota and Mingus albums made slightly less of an impression, but only slightly. More than anything, I think it's his wide-open ears and willingness to embrace and juxtapose disparate traditions that really cemented my interest in Willner. I came to the Weill album for Sting and Richard Butler (Psychedelic Furs) and had a really hard time with Zorn and Elliott Sharp. Nowadays, it's really the latter two (plus that grand, sweeping chart by Henry Threadgill) that keep me coming back to that disc. Similarly, it could be said that the ear candy by Peter Frampton (!), Joe Jackson, Donald Fagen and Steve Khan made my ears more ready to receive artists like Steve Lacy and Elvin Jones at one extreme, and Zorn and Shockabilly at another, during a formative period where I was groping to discover new things. It's remarkable to see just how prescient Willner was and remains in his hiring policies, picking up on folks like Zorn, Frisell and Sharp well before anyone in the mainstream had heard of them. And that version of "Speak Low" by Charlie Haden captures the essence of that song in ways that very few vocalists have ever done for me. I used to use it to sign off my college radio station off the air every single night. In some ways, the Disney album is the most challenging of all: Once you've adapted your Zorn-honed ears and can readily assimilate the harshest Waits and the zaniest Sumac, it can be hard to open your mind enough to appreciate what James Taylor, Suzanne Vega and Ringo Starr have to offer (warm, spooky and affable, respectively). Here, some things work and some things don't: Depending on your point of view, Sinead O'Connor's "Someday My Prince Will Come" can be vulnerable, ironic or just pathetic (I tend to fall into the latter mindset) and the combination of Michael Stipe and Natalie Merchant turns out to be as painfully fey as you'd imagine. NRBQ's track doesn't find them at their strongest, in my opinion (go back to the Monk disc for that), but Los Lobos are terrific and even Buster Poindexter is somehow palatable. And few things I've heard are as touching as the simple pleasure of hearing Bonnie Raitt, on the cusp of her "comeback," singing a simple ballad from 'Dumbo' backed by Don Was. I don't remember the Mingus disc as well simply because I loaned my copy to a record producer who was working on another Mingus tribute and naturally I never got it back. And the Rota disc is beautiful, but I must admit that I'm not enough of a cinephile for the composer's music to have made as great an impression on me as did the others. His spoken-word Edgar Allan Poe set is a spooky treat; I haven't heard his "solo" album. And we've spoken at great length here about his programming work on 'Saturday Night Live' and the magnificent failed experiment that was 'Night Music' (my homemade tapes are wearing out and I'd kill for a set of DVDs...). Here in New York, Willner has continued to program eclectic and challenging fare, including an extremely well-regarded tribute to Harry Smith and his folk anthology (some of the new Robin Holcomb disc started here); pity that little of it has been documented. I once had an opportunity to meet him and gushed that he had been one of my formative musical reference sources. "I'm really sorry to hear that," he said, unironically redirecting my awe to his own sources. Steve Smith ssmith36@sprynet.com