Intrada Soundtrack Forum

1/20/2019

News of Nick Redman’s passing this last Thursday had an impact on myself and Intrada that would be difficult to fully express. We had collaborated on the productions of numerous soundtracks for Intrada, drawn from the 20th Century Fox vaults. One in particular is worthy of note because it was the result of a fun meeting in Los Angeles with Nick and myself plus, my memory is murky, but I believe Julie Kirgo and Roger Feigelson. I think it was around 2011. The topic de jour was our preparations to release the soundtrack for The Kremlin Letter through Fox and Nick’s new video company, Twilight Time, for which The Kremlin Letter was to be one of the early DVD offerings. What a joy it was to see that new company of his expand rapidly into a world class leader of DVD and Blu-ray releases from the Fox library and soon other studio vaults such as United Artists and Columbia. If you collected movies you couldn’t wait to find out what his next “batch” was, as he referred to his groups of new releases.

My reflections on Nick go much further back. Our soundtrack collaborations began a decade earlier, back in 2001 when we premiered the James Horner score for Jack The Bear on CD. Nick helped us secure the rights from Fox and came to Intrada to guide the album’s assembly. On a more personal level, he spent time at my home and we admired posters to Zulu, The Searchers and The Wild Bunch, three of his favorite films. In fact, his wealth of knowledge and film making talents led to a 1996 Academy Award nomination for his production of a compelling documentary on Sam Peckinpah’s celebrated The Wild Bunch. He furthered his film career with a 1998 documentary he produced and directed on John Ford and John Wayne and their 1956 western masterpiece, The Searchers. Yet another film achievement was his feature documentary Becoming John Ford, which chronicled the complex relationship between director Ford and Fox’s studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck.

At about that same time in 2001, Nick and I also worked together on the soundtrack album from Hugo Friedhofer’s The Barbarian And The Geisha. Again joining me here at Intrada, Nick and I walked my younger daughter Veronika to school and talked at length about his goals and aspirations. Incredibly, those aspirations of his came true: His desire to build a comprehensive restoration program with 20th Century Fox on the thousands of music masters buried in their vaults, his championing of countless soundtracks by Jerry Goldsmith during his Fox years and of Lalo Schifrin including Bullitt and Jerry Fielding, especially from The Wild Bunch and his seemingly wild dream of one day getting many of his favorite films available on home video himself.

So this last Thursday night, I watched a movie “in memorium” of Nick. It was a Blu-ray on his Twilight Time label and featured commentary with his own insights to the film at hand. Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia with a score by Fielding. And I listened to Nick’s words. And as I did so I couldn’t help but think about and admire all of those achievements he once talked about and then actually realized with regards to his own film heroes: Sam Peckinpah. John Ford. John Wayne. Jerry Goldsmith. Jerry Fielding. All of them up there somewhere.

And now Nick Redman joins them. One can only imagine what incredible project they must all be talking about doing together.