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Andy Hill (born 1951) is an American music supervisor, record producer, and music educator. [1] Under the name A.W. Hill, Hill has written three novels, Nowhere-Land, The Last Days of Madame Rey, and Enoch's Portal, and a screenplay based on the life of Nikola Tesla.
Andy Hill was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States, and educated at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. From 1987 to 1996, during the period now referred to as the Disney Renaissance, he served as vice-president of music production for The Walt Disney Studios (division), overseeing music production on a roster of films which included The Lion King , Beauty and the Beast , and Sister Act , and working closely with composers and songwriters such as Alan Menken and Hans Zimmer. Films for which Hill supervised music under the aegis of the Disney music department and its music chief, Chris Montan, earned nine Academy Awards in the categories of Best Original Score and Best Original Song for a Motion Picture. [2] Subsequent to his term at Disney, Hill opened Andy Hill Film + Music under the auspices of Modern Music and supervised projects which included Message In A Bottle, Ed Wood, James and the Giant Peach and Happy Feet, winning a Grammy Award in 2000 as producer of the Best Musical Album for Children for Elmo In Grouchland. [3]
From 2006 to 2011, Hill directed the graduate program in Music Composition for the Screen at Columbia College Chicago. His students have earned music credits on films such as Life of Pi, How To Train Your Dragon, and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and found work with such notable composers as John Powell , Mychael Danna , Jeff Danna , Johnny Klimek , and Javier Navarrete . In the fall of 2011, Hill was engaged to prepare and oversee the launch of graduate composition programs at Berklee Valencia, the international extension of the Berklee College of Music, including film scoring and electronic music production, with classes commencing in September 2012. The campus is located in the Palau de les Arts, part of the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciencies designed by visionary architect Santiago Calatrava in Valencia, Spain. Following matriculation of the first class of Berklee degree candidates and a pilot semester, he spent an additional six months in Spain and Morocco working on a portfolio of songs with an enigmatic producer known only as The Old Guitarist. In September 2013, Hill relocated to Belgium to take a post as executive soundtrack producer and director of international business development for Galaxy Studios and the Scoring Flanders initiative, with the goal of bringing more high-level film scoring to the Flanders region and the musical stewardship of the Brussels Philharmonic. Concurrently, he launched Cinemuse VOF as a company under Belgian law, for music supervision and scoring services within the EU. In late 2015, Cinemuse, and Hill, relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, where his principal activities were teaching, lecturing, and mentoring aspiring film composers through his Cinemuse Composer Coaching service. In 2019, he relocated to Sofia, Bulgaria, where he currently serves as dean of the Film Scoring Academy of Europe, [4] a constituent college of the Irish American University in Dublin, and as director of its M.F.A. program in Music for Motion Pictures & Contemporary Media.
Hill was from 2015 to 2018 a visiting lecturer and industry advisor to the Masters Program in Scoring for Film and Visual Media at Pulse College Dublin, a division of Windmill Lane Studios, and a member of the advisory board for Pingtrax (Musimap), a Belgian music search engine utilized by scholars, archivists, media producers and music supervisors. His comprehensive study of landmark film scores, Scoring the Screen: The Secret Language of Film Music, was published in August 2017 by the Hal Leonard Corporation. About the book, Conrad Pope, celebrated orchestrator for John Williams, Alexandre Desplat, and Howard Shore, among others said, "If you have any interest in what music means in film, you must read this book." The book has been selected as a core text by Leeds College and other institutions. In 2020, Hill received his PhD in Film Musicology from the University of South Wales. His dissertation was entitled BARDS OF THE SILVER SCREEN: Music and Meaning In Cinema.
Hill is also an American writer of speculative fiction and mystery. He grew up in the Midwest but began writing under the influence of Southern California and has been linked by novelist/ essayist Alan Rifkin to the tradition of "California fabulist literature." Hill has published three literary thrillers featuring Los Angeles cult investigator Stephan Raszer (Stee-vun Ray-zer), a tracker of missing persons and an expert in emerging religions in the present age of neo-millennialism and conspiracy theory. Raszer's preoccupation, as well as his author's, is in "what draws otherwise rational people to believe in unbelievable things...and act upon them." With his son, Nathanael, he authored a YA novel of speculative science-fiction entitled The Switch, published in 2017 by Curiosity Quills Press. His latest novel is Ministry, described by its author as a "post-apocalyptic romance," and will be published in 2022 by TouchPoint Press.
In 2003, Hill met Dorris Halsey, then 77, who had been literary agent for, among others, Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, Upton Sinclair, and Ben Hecht. In Halsey and her younger partner and protégé, Kimberley Cameron, Hill found champions for both his fiction and his screenwriting work. Halsey introduced the writer to those in her circle, including Dr. Mani Lal Bhaumik, with whom Hill developed the memoir Code Name God [5] and for whom he edited a primer on cosmology, The Cosmic Detective, [6] and Laura Huxley, with whom he briefly collaborated on a film adaptation of her late husband's novel, The Island. Halsey died in 2006, and Cameron now helms the Reece Halsey Agency. He has also written feature articles for the L.A. Weekly and short fiction for Susie Bright's Best American Erotica 2004 [7] and the Absinthe Literary Review, [8] which awarded him its Eros & Thanatos prize for The Grotto. Hill is represented for motion picture projects by Steve Fisher at APA.
Written in a neo-noir style that pays homage equally to Raymond Chandler and William Gibson, the Raszer Investigations are described by their author as "boundary explorations" that track the sometimes precarious path between faith and fraud, and between genuine mystical experience and madness. Using the detective genre as a foil for his metafiction, Hill employs his protagonist, Stephan Raszer, to probe a demimonde that oscillates between journalistic truth and high fantasy. Chandler scholar Judith Freeman, author of The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Women He Loved, described Raszer in the L.A. Weekly as "the thinking person's private eye" and Nowhere-Land, the third in the series, as "maybe the first truly 21st-century mystery I've read." [9] Scottish crime author and Edgar Award winner Ian Rankin (Inspector Rebus) described Hill's first novel this way: "Dollops of humor and horror and erotica, a good solid conspiracy, and a hero who is a James Bond for the spiritually uncertain 21st century. Written like a thriller-ish Thomas Pynchon or a literary Robert Ludlum."
Hill's first novel, Enoch's Portal, was loosely based on the exploits of the infamous Order of the Solar Temple, a Franco-Swiss "suicide cult" and spiritual Ponzi scheme that claimed the legacy of the Knights Templar and fifty-three lives. Initially published in hardcover in 2001, Portal anticipated the phenomenon of The Da Vinci Code by finding grist for modern myth in the legend of The Priory of Sion. But where Dan Brown makes his revelations explicit, Hill's hero Raszer walks the mean streets of Los Angeles and Old Prague in a dense fog of deliberate, riddling, and for some critics, maddening obscurity. The book was read in manuscript by Caldecott Chubb at Alphaville, then optioned by Paramount Pictures and assigned to cult director Alex Proyas, who developed two scripts before abandoning it to make "I,Robot." Following a dispute with "Portal's" publisher over problems that had arisen from the Paramount deal, Hill was successful in reclaiming his ownership of the copyright.[ citation needed ]
Five years later, Hill followed with the second installment of the Stephan Raszer series, The Last Days Of Madame Rey, a tarot reading in the form of a mystery novel, or a mystery novel in the form of a tarot reading, with acknowledged literary debts to writers from Jules Verne to H. Rider Haggard to Jorge Borges to Wilhelm Reich. The third installment in the series arrived in June 2009 with Nowhere-Land, a Sufi legend mapped out as a role-playing game on the borderlands of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey in the imagined reality of a metastasizing Mideast war involving an ISIS-like Islamist sect that traces its origins to Hassan-i Sabbah's Cult of the Assassins. Nowhere-Land's panoramic and eerily prophetic cast of characters also involves members of the Yezidi sect and Kurdish peshmerga fighters, as well as the chimerical CIA agent Philby Greenstreet, who provides critical assistance to Raszer's mission.[ citation needed ]
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime. All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.
Angelo Badalamenti is an American composer, best known for his work scoring films for director David Lynch, notably Blue Velvet, the Twin Peaks saga, The Straight Story, and Mulholland Drive. Badalamenti received the 1990 Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance for his "Twin Peaks Theme", and has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Soundtrack Awards and the Henry Mancini Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.
Alan Anthony Silvestri is an American composer and conductor of film and television scores. His credits include the Back to the Future film series, Predator, Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Polar Express, The Abyss, and several Marvel Cinematic Universe films, including many of the Avengers films. He is a two-time Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominee, and a three-time Saturn Award and two-time Primetime Emmy Award recipient.
Henry Selick is an American stop motion director, producer, and writer who is best known for directing the stop-motion animation films The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), James and the Giant Peach (1996), Coraline (2009), and his upcoming stop-motion film Wendell and Wild (2022) with Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key. He studied at the Program in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts, under the guidance of Jules Engel. Selick is also known for his collaborations with voice actor and artist Joe Ranft.
A mystery film is a genre of film that revolves around the solution of a problem or a crime. It focuses on the efforts of the detective, private investigator or amateur sleuth to solve the mysterious circumstances of an issue by means of clues, investigation, and clever deduction.
Treasure Planet is a 2002 American animated science fiction action-adventure film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures on November 27, 2002. The 43rd Disney animated feature film, it is a science fiction adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 adventure novel Treasure Island and was the first film to be released simultaneously in regular and IMAX theaters. It is at least the second retelling of the story in an outer space setting, following the 1987 Italian miniseries Treasure Island in Outer Space. It employs a novel technique of hand-drawn 2D traditional animation set atop 3D computer animation. With a budget of $140 million, it is the most expensive traditionally animated film to date.
James and the Giant Peach is a 1996 musical fantasy film directed by Henry Selick, based on the 1961 novel of the same name by Roald Dahl. It was produced by Tim Burton and Denise Di Novi, and starred Paul Terry as James. The film is a combination of live action and stop-motion animation. Co-stars Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes played James's aunts in the live-action segments, and Simon Callow, Richard Dreyfuss, Susan Sarandon, Jane Leeves, David Thewlis, and Margolyes voiced his insect friends in the animation sequences.
The Black Cauldron is a 1985 American animated dark fantasy adventure film produced by Walt Disney Productions in association with Silver Screen Partners II and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The 25th Disney animated feature film, it is loosely based on the first two books in The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, a series of five novels that are, in turn, based on Welsh mythology.
Re-Animator is a 1985 American comedy horror film loosely based on the 1922 H. P. Lovecraft serial novelette "Herbert West–Reanimator". Directed by Stuart Gordon and produced by Brian Yuzna, the film stars Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, a medical student who has invented a reagent which can re-animate deceased bodies. He and his classmate Dan Cain begin to test the serum on dead human bodies, and conflict with Dr. Carl Hill, who is infatuated with Cain's fiancée and wants to claim the invention as his own.
Justin Paul Theroux is an American actor, screenwriter, and filmmaker. He gained recognition for his work with director David Lynch in the mystery film Mulholland Drive (2001) and the thriller film Inland Empire (2006). He also appeared in films such as Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997), American Psycho (2000), Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), Strangers with Candy (2005), Wanderlust (2012), The Girl on the Train (2016), The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018), On the Basis of Sex (2018), and Lady and the Tramp (2019).
Ryan Shore is a Canadian composer, songwriter, conductor, music producer, and music director for film, television, virtual reality, records, games, concerts, and theater. He is often known from his scores for Star Wars Forces of Destiny, Scooby-Doo! and WWE: Curse of the Speed Demon, The Not-Too-Late Show with Elmo, and Go! Go! Cory Carson. He is a Yamaha Artist and a graduate of the Berklee College of Music.
Robert Kraft is an American songwriter, film composer, recording artist and record producer. As president of Fox Music from 1994 to 2012, he supervised the music for more than 300 Fox feature films, as well as dozens of TV shows. He co-produced the 2016 Score: A Film Music Documentary about film composers and the evolution of Hollywood film music.
Alex Lacamoire is an American composer, arranger, conductor, musical director, music copyist, and orchestrator who has worked on many shows both on and off-Broadway. He is the recipient of multiple Tony and Grammy Awards for his work on shows such as In the Heights (2008), Hamilton (2016), and Dear Evan Hansen (2017). Lacamoire was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 2018.
Michael Reagan is an American composer, songwriter and music producer for film, television, and video games. His TV work includes The Powerpuff Girls, Chico Bon Bon: Monkey with a Tool Belt, and Bob Boyle's Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!. His film work includes Any Given Sunday, Odnoklassniki.ru: naCLICKay udachu starring Snoop Dogg, the original song "Heart and Soul" for Ripple Effect featuring Asdru Sierra from Ozomatli, and the song "Take The First Step" for the Sony Pictures / Jim Henson Studios feature film Elmo in Grouchland, which won a Grammy Award for Best Children's Soundtrack. Reagan is the voice of the Tarzan yell in the 1999 Walt Disney Studios film Tarzan.
Roger Bellon is a French film, television, theatre and opera composer, conductor, orchestrator and producer.
Tomas Costanza is a certified-platinum American record producer/songwriter and owner of the Killingsworth Recording Company. Born in Massapequa, New York, he was first noted in the music industry as the lead singer and guitarist for the band Diffuser. In addition to being signed to Hollywood Records in 2000, several of the band's songs were featured on major motion picture soundtracks including Freaky Friday, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Mean Girls and Mission: Impossible 2. As a record producer, Costanza has worked with artists such as Macklemore, Boys Like Girls, Darren Criss, Rachel Platten, 2 Chainz and Icona Pop. Costanza's big break came in 2011 after producing X-Factor finalist Katie Waissel's debut album which reached #1 on the U.K. charts and remained there for five weeks.
1906 is a 2004 American historical novel written by James Dalessandro. With a 38-page outline and six finished chapters, he pitched it around Hollywood in 1998 for a film by the same name, based upon events surrounding the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.
Greg Herren is an American writer and editor, who publishes work in a variety of genres, including mystery novels, young adult literature and erotica. He publishes work both as Greg Herren and under the pseudonym Todd Gregory.
Steven Gaydos is an American screenwriter, songwriter, and journalist.
Richard Ludlow is an American video game audio director, sound designer, music producer, and voice director, best known for his work on Disney Infinity, King's Quest, Ring of Elysium and Arena of Valor. He is the founder and co-owner of Hexany Audio. Ludlow was named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of 2019 under the Games category.
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