It's difficult to imagine having the time to watch all 200-plus movies and TV shows featuring Elmer Bernstein scores. It's more difficult to fathom Elmer Bernstein having the time to the write music for all those productions. But he did.
The beyond-prolific composer, whose career spanned Robot Monster to the Oscar-nominated cadences of Far From Heaven, and dozens of other iconic productions both epic (The Ten Commandments) and comic (Ghostbusters), died Wednesday in his sleep at his Ojai, California, home, reports said. He was 82.
Bernstein is the second composing giant to pass away this summer, following Jerry Goldsmith (The Planet of the Apes, Star Trek: The Motion Picture), who died July 21 at age 75.
Bernstein was a 14-time Academy Award nominee, a two-time Emmy nominee, a two-time Tony nominee and a five-time Grammy nominee.
That he netted but one Oscar and one Emmy from that tally is beside the point; that he created memorable themes for The Magnificent Seven, To Kill a Mockingbird and a groundbreaking jazz motif for The Man with the Golden Arm (three of his Oscar-nominated scores) is the point.
Director Martin Scorsese, with whom Bernstein collaborated The Age of Innocence, Bringing Out the Dead, and on the 1991 remake of Cape Fear, among other projects, once summed up Bernstein as "the best there is--the very best."
Even Bernstein, though, was not immune from the sometimes-downbeat existence of the composer. No less than professed fan Scorsese scrapped the score Bernstein wrote for his 2002 film, Gangs of New York.
In 2003, Bernstein told London's Guardian that Scorsese changed course while editing the film.
"He rang me and said he was going to go for a Scorsese score, by which he meant that, as with GoodFellas and Casino, he was going to going to use recorded music on the soundtrack," Bernstein said in the newspaper.
Bernstein termed Scorsese's decision a judgment call with which he couldn't argue.
He also said he stood behind what he wrote.
Born April 4, 1922, in New York City, Bernstein began his music career as a piano prodigy. He segued to composing during World War II when he was enlisted to write music for Army radio shows.
It was during his radio days that Bernstein's talent caught the ear of a Hollywood executive who turned him onto his first motion-picture gig: the score for the 1951 college football melodrama Saturday's Hero.
No, not every movie Bernstein scored was a classic, but in the 1950s and 1960s, especially, a lot of classics featured Bernstein scores.
Among his credits from the era: The Man with the Golden Arm, said to be Hollywood's first all-jazz score, as well as Bernstein's first Oscar-nominated score; The Ten Commandments; Sweet Smell of Success; the soaring, Copland-esqe strains of The Magnificent Seven (his second Oscar nomination); the haunting melodies for To Kill a Mockingbird (another Oscar nominee); Birdman of Alcatraz; Hud; The Great Escape; and True Grit.
Other movies from those decades to bring Bernstein Oscar-nominated acclaim: Summer and Smoke, Return of the Seven, Hawaii and Thoroughly Modern Millie, for which he claimed his first and only Oscar.
In addition to movie scores, Bernstein wrote movie songs. "Walk on the Wild Side" (from Walk on the Wild Side), "My Wishing Doll" (from Hawaii), "True Grit" (from True Grit) and "Wherever Love Takes Me" (from Gold) earned him Oscar nominations.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the middle-aged, classically trained Bernstein became the unlikely composer of choice for Hollywood's young comedy directors, John Landis (Stripes), Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) and the Jim Abrahams-David Zucker-Jerry Zucker troika (Airplane!), included.
Having earned Oscar nominations in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Bernstein kept his streak alive in the 1980s with his work for the Eddie Murphy-Dan Aykroyd comedy Trading Places.
Starting in 1989, Bernstein returned to drama with My Left Foot. He went on to earn two more Oscar nominations, for 1993's The Age of Innocence and 2002's Far from Heaven.
The storied career nearly stalled back in the 1950s during the dark days of the McCarthy era. Whereas some Hollywood players were outright blacklisted, barred from studio work because of suspected ties to the Communist Party, Bernstein, who had been called to testify before Congress, was gray-listed, meaning he could find jobs, just not any choice ones.
"All of a sudden I found myself doing things like Robot Monster and Cat Women of the Moon, and I didn't know what the devil was going on," Bernstein told Newsweek in 2003. "But if you're going to do a really bad movie, at least you do one that is at the top of the all-time bad-movie list."
Bernstein credited Hollywood legend Cecil B. DeMille with bringing him back into the fold for DeMille's epic 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments.
Only in a career as long and varied as Bernstein's could a composer score the parting of the Red Sea, and provide the "scary music" for Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video.
In 2001, Bernstein told the Los Angeles Times he believed his themes, anthems and assorted scary music had "made a difference."
Said Bernstein to the paper: "It is an amazing human privilege to look back at your life and simply to be able to say that you had some part in making millions and millions of people feel better, two hours at a time."