Favorite Links
My writings
A collection spot for some of my reviews. in-a-critical-condition.blogspot.com/
This link to my review of the movie "Fright Night" will lead you to a lovely Roddy McDowall tribute site. xmoppet.org/orig-rev/night.html
My so-called blog. somekindofhairpin.blogspot.com/
Some of my recent sexual experiences. Not for the feint of heart, as reading these requires imaging me naked. www.livejournal.com/users/joegillis96/
Movie Composers and Scores
The Film Score Monthly website. Aside from being a fine source for the appreciation of movie music, FSM also produces two reconstructed soundtrack albums a month, most of which are superb. Although the magazine has ceased print publication, they've set up a splendid subscription-only site, linkable from here. www.filmscoremonthly.com/
A comprehensive site devoted to dozens of movie composers. http://www.celluloidtunes.com
The official site of the late, lamented Elmer Bernstein. His scores, too numerous to mention, touched me more profoundly than those of any other movie composer. My favorite: the elegiac To Kill a Mockingbird. www.elmerbernstein.com/
The Jerry Goldsmith site. With Elmer Bernstein and Bernard Herrmann, one of the greatest of all American movie composers. Hall-of-fame effort: Poltergeist. www.jerrygoldsmithonline.com/
The Bernard Herrmann Society. An excellent source for aficianados of the sublime artistry of this giant on whose shoulders so many have stood. From Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver—has anyone else straddled that kind of range? http://www.bernardherrmann.org/
The official Henry Mancini site. God, but I miss that man. http://www.henrymancini.com/
Vic Mizzy's site. You know his music even if you've never heard his name. His best work is probably his score for The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. His most well-remembered tune: "They're crazy and they're kooky ..." www.vicmizzy.com/
Jerome Moross. You may never have heard of him, but his scores influenced every composer who ever wrote for a western-themed movie. www.moross.com/
Tribute to Alfred Newman The man who composed the inimitable 29th Century-Fox fanfare and served for 30 years as the studio's musical director, Newman (the father of Thomas and uncle of Randy) preferred conducting to composing, but his own scores (How Green Was My Valley, Wuthering Heights, Airport, King of Kings, Captain from Castile) are among the finest ever written. http://hometown.aol.com/ranger7774/myhomepage/index.html
The official Alex North site. North not only brought jazz to American movies (A Streetcar Named Desire) but a complex harmonic dissonance that is always dramatically right. Among his great scores: Cleopatra, Viva Zapata!, The Bad Seed, Dragonslayer and, especially, the hauntingly bleak yet somehow redemptive chamber poem he wrote for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? http://alexnorthmusic.com/
The Miklos Rozsa Society. An organization devoted to the grand wizard whose masterpieces include everything from The Theif of Bagdad and Ben-Hur to Double Indemnity and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. http://members.iinet.net.au/~agfam/miklos/index.html The home-page of Lalo Schifrin, one of filmmusic's more underrated composers You can also order copies of his scores here, which include Bullitt, Dirty Harry and Rollercoaster. http://www.schifrin.com/ The Franz Waxman site. He'd be a great movie composer if he'd only ever composed the score to Sunset Blvd. Fortunately for us, he did so very much more. www.franzwaxman.com/main.html John Williams. The man who single-handedly brought big orchestral music back to the movies. At his best—Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Fury, Revenge of the Sith—there's no one better. www.johnwilliams.org/ Theatre Composers and Lyricists Harold Arlen. A site devoted to the man who was, arguably, the greatest composer of popular music in the 20th century. http://www.haroldarlen.com/ The Dorothy Fields Webpage. Nice tribute to one of our greatest lyricists. http://www.dorothyfields.co.uk/index.htm Pleasing tribute to E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, the imp who wrote the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz. Plus the opportunity to order a new, comprehensive edition of his great verse collection Rhymes for the Irreverent. www.choreographics.com/harburg/ A fine site devoted to the greatest of all American theatre composers. http://www.sondheim.com/ Talkin' Broadway. A great way to find out what's in the pipeline for cast recordings, soundtracks, DVDs and books. www.talkinbroadway.com Performer and Theatre-Related Sites A tribute to Louis Armstrong, the greatest and most innovative jazz musician who ever lived. www.satchmo.net/ The Kuklapolitan Page. A charming site devoted to those idols of my childhood, and perhaps yours. users.ultinet.net/~kfo/ My petition to get Jack Lemmon on a stamp. Plese sign. www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/192077642?ts=1095786971&sign[partner_userID]=674376310&sign[memberID]=674376310&sign[partnerID]=1&sign[password]=&sign[firstname]=Scott&sign[lastname]=Ross&sign[email]=joe_gillis_2000%40yahoo.com&sign[orgname]=&sign[age]=43&sign[gender1m]=1&sign[address]=401+Guilford+Circle&sign[city]=Raleigh&sign[state]=NC&sign[zip]=27608&sign[country]=us&sign[mask_flags]=1 The premiere professional theatre company in the Triangle area. www.playmakersrep.org/index.pl Theatre Sites on the Net. Go thou and peruse. http://www.win.net/~kudzu/theatre.html Lily Tomlin's official website. Ernestine, Edith Anne, Madame Lupe and the entire cast. www.lilytomlin.com/ The official website of Rufus Wainwright, the most gifted and ingratiating young singer-songwriter of our time. www.rufuswainwright.com/ Humor The Landover Baptist Church page. This may be the single funniest and most subversive satirical site on the web. Betty Bowers lives! www.landoverbaptist.org Tom Cruise is Nuts. The name says it all. www.tomcruiseisnuts.com/home.php Literary Ellison Wonderland. The web pages of one of the most important American writers of the last 50 years. harlanellison.com/home.htm The John Simon Archive. Yes, he's often infuriating and sometimes just plain ugly in his prejudices. He's also among the great theatre critics of the past hundred years. www.newyorkmetro.com/nymag/author_379/index.html The Gore Vidal Index. A good spot for keeping up with America's gtreatest living man of letters. www.pitt.edu/~kloman/vidalframe.html Gay Billy Masters, doyen of gay gossip. Look for a new column every Monday. www.billymasters.com/ GLBT Encyclopaedia. An excellent source of information on gay and lesbian biography. www.glbtq.com/ Orson Welles A page devoted to what might have been Orson Welles' greatest movie, if RKO hadn't butchered it and thrown out the negative. www.ambersons.com/main.htm More Orsoniana. www.wellesnet.com/ A place to read Pauline Kael's great, inflammatory and slightly misguided essay on Citizen Kane. paulrossen.com/paulinekael/raisingkane.html Miscellaneous Mike's Blog. My best friend's pesonal site. highunimportance.blogspot.com/ A good place to find out where all those DVD Easter Eggs are located. www.eeggs.com/tree/1899.html