FSM BOX #3 (MGM TREASURY COLLECTION) and SHAFT ANTHOLOGY 3CD SET

THE MGM TREASURY COLLECTION WOWS WITH 20 PREVIOUSLY UNAVAILABLE CD SCORES!

Film Score Monthly’s incredible 12-disc box set features rarities by Ennio Morricone, Andre Previn, Richard Rodney Bennett, Lalo Schifrin, John Addison, Neal Hefti and many others

Linden, VA – August 14, 2008 – From beyond your wildest possible soundtrack wish-list... around the corner of anything you would ever expect to be released... down the hall of your most ridiculous CD fantasy... it’s THE MGM TREASURY COLLECTION!

Film Score Monthly’s third box set features 20 scores from the United Artists film library and record catalog. Many of these titles are long-treasured LPs that looked like they would never make it to CD: Billion Dollar Brain by Richard Rodney Bennett...Duel at Diablo and How to Murder Your Wife by Neal Hefti...Charge of the Light Brigade and The Honey Pot by John Addison...The 7th Dawn by Riz Ortolani...The Apartment by Adolph Deutsch...The Fortune Cookie by Andre Previn...The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming by Johny Mandel... A Rage to Live by Nelson Riddle...and Hannibal Brooks by Francis Lai. It is likely that every collector will have his own set of favorites!

All of the titles have been remastered from the best-possible stereo source tapes in the MGM archives, with these exceptions: Goodbye Again by Georges Auric and Shake Hands With the Devil by William Alwyn are in “electronic” (simulated) stereo; and Hornets' Nest and The Hills Run Red by Ennio Morricone are in mono. For most of the scores (and the United Artists catalog in general), the album masters are the only surviving recordings, but complete masters were located for The Fugitive Kind (Kenyon Hopkins) and The Happy Ending (Michel Legrand) allowing complete-score presentations. Finally, Pussycat, Pussycat I Love You (Lalo Schifrin) and Hornets’ Nest make their debut presentations in complete form. Two additional notes: The Glory Guys (Riz Ortolani) is the LP re-recording, but bonus tracks have been added from the London session masters, and The Final Option by Roy Budd is a hybrid of the Varese Sarabande and Milan LP programs (containing all of the tracks).

Unlike the first two box sets – Elmer Bernstein’s Film Music Collection and Superman: The Music – the MGM Treasury Collection is not packaged with a deluxe book. Instead, the box set comes with two “clamshell” or butterfy cases containing six discs each, and a 48-page booklet with album covers, track lists, credits and a short introduction.

Fear not – FSM has not abdicated its responsibility in providing the world’s most obsessively complete and detailed liner notes! Comprehensive notes to all 20 scores are presented on the FSM website...for free! Simply go to www.filmscoremonthly.com/notes to begin reading and learning about these classic scores. (This allows FSM to be able to offer this box set for $129.95 rather than $199.95. That’s a $70 savings and the right way to present this rare and highly eclectic material.)

The liner notes will stay on the website indefinitely but the box set itself is sure to go fast – only 1,200 are being pressed. Buy one now so you can own The Final Option...and not face your own “final option” in high prices on ebay!

This incredible collection is available exclusively from Screen Archives Entertainment at www.screenarchives.com.

Check it out at http://www.screenarchives.com/title_detail.cfm?ID=10360

NEW SHAFT ANTHOLOGY FEATURES UNHEARD ORIGINAL ISAAC HAYES SCORE

The late composer’s seminal work highlights Film Score Monthly’s 3-CD release that includes Gordon Park’s Shaft’s Big Score! and Johnny Pate’s Shaft television scores

Linden, VA – August 14, 2008 – By strange coincidence, the culmination of a three-year project featuring Isaac Hayes’ original score to Shaft arrives just shortly after the great soul singer’s untimely passing. It is unfortunate that Hayes never saw his previously unavailable soundtrack finally released to new acclaim, but we hope there is solace in remembering the music that made him a household name.

With apologies, here's the copy for the original announcement that's much lighter in tone...

"They say that cat is a bad mother--" Yes, they're talking about Shaft!

On the famous record album, the lyric is "that cat Shaft is a bad mother--." However, the name "Shaft" is omitted above because this is the film version of the legendary score – not the familiar album – and it’s one of many differences, both subtle and large, in the two versions of Hayes’ seminal work. Film Score Monthly’s pioneering 3-CD set features the previously unreleased original soundtrack to the 1971 Shaft along with music from the sequel, Shaft's Big Score!, and the 1973-74 TV series. It is the Shaft Anthology: His Big Score and More!

Shaft is one of the landmark characters and films not just of 1970s "blaxploitation" cinema but all of pop culture. For the first time, a black leading man (provocatively named and dynamically played by Richard Roundtree) talked back to white authority and was like a cool James Bond who did whatever he wanted... and he was the hero. The character starred in seven novels, four feature films and a TV series.

FSM has compiled the best of Shaft's previously unreleased-on-CD soundtracks from the 1970s as follows: The original 1971 Shaft was a highly influential film of the "blaxploitation" movement, as the tough detective gets involved in the Harlem rescue of a gangster's kidnapped daughter. The score not only set trends in film music but in pop and R&B, with its spoken/sung lyrics, disco-era wah-wah guitar and high-hat cymbals, and lush, soulful orchestrations. The score was widely distributed on a 2-LP set (later a CD) by Enterprise (Hayes' personal label on Stax Records) but that was a re-recording done in Memphis. For the first time, this CD presents the original Hollywood-recorded soundtrack featuring primordial versions of the source cues as well as all of the dramatic underscoring, little of which was adapted for the LP. It is a fascinating glimpse into Hayes' creativity and an important archiving of this legendary work. As a bonus, disc one adds Hayes' two singles released in 1972 related to M-G-M productions: "Theme From The Men" (a TV theme) and "Type Thang" (used in Shaft's Big Score! ).

The second Shaft film, Shaft's Big Score! (1972), was scored by the director of the first two installments, Gordon Parks, when Hayes was unavailable. In addition to filmmaker, Parks was a multitalented musician, poet, author and photographer who had scored his directorial debut, 1969's The Learning Tree, and was technically assisted on his film scores (as was Hayes on Shaft ) by Tom McIntosh. The Shaft's Big Score! soundtrack adopted an earlier, Duke Ellington-style of sophisticated jazz compared to Hayes' Memphis-style R&B, with a bravura climactic chase ("Symphony for Shafted Souls") that has long made the soundtrack LP a treasured collectible. The complete soundtrack is presented here.

The third Shaft film, Shaft in Africa (1973), is not presented for licensing reasons (though most of it was included on a 1999 compilation, The Best of Shaft). That film's composer, Johnny Pate – the brilliant arranger for Curtis Mayfield on Superfly– returned for the short-lived Shaft TV series in 1973 (again starring Roundtree), which had seven 90-minute episodes produced for CBS. Pate provided an inventive adaptation of Hayes’ "Theme From Shaft" as well as his own groovy and suspenseful scoring – from an era in which most TV crime music sounded like Shaft, this is, delightfully, the real thing. Pate provided three full and two partial scores for the series (with the rest tracked with earlier cues), almost all of which are presented at the end of disc two and on all of disc three of this set.

This entire collection is in excellent stereo sound, meticulously remixed from the first-generation M-G-M session masters. There are lots of afros in Joe Sikoryak's art direction, and the comprehensive liner notes are by Lukas Kendall.

The set is available for pre-order exclusively from Screen Archives Entertainment at www.screenarchives.com.

Check it out at http://www.screenarchives.com/title_detail.cfm?ID=10361

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One word... WOW!

-Erik-