Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood's Most Influential Composer with Steven C. Smith

During a seven-decade career that spanned from 19th century Vienna to 1920s Broadway to the golden age of Hollywood, three-time Academy Award winner Max Steiner did more than any other composer to introduce and establish the language of film music. Indeed, revered contemporary film composers like John Williams and Danny Elfman use the same techniques that Steiner himself perfected in his iconic work for such classics as Casablanca, King Kong, Gone with the Wind, The Searchers, Now, Voyager, the Astaire-Rogers musicals, and over 200 other titles. And Steiner's private life was a drama all its own. Born into a legendary Austrian theatrical dynasty, he became one of Hollywood's top-paid composers. But he was also constantly in debt--the inevitable result of gambling, financial mismanagement, four marriages, and the actions of his emotionally troubled son. Throughout his chaotic life, Steiner was buoyed by an innate optimism, a quick wit, and an instinctive gift for melody, all of which would come to the fore as he met and worked with luminaries like Richard Strauss, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, the Warner Bros., David O. Selznick, Bette Davis, Frank Sinatra, and Frank Capra. In Music by Max Steiner, the first full biography of Steiner, author Steven C. Smith interweaves the dramatic incidents of Steiner's personal life with an accessible exploration of his composing methods and experiences, bringing to life the previously untold story of a musical pioneer and master dramatist who helped create a vital new art with some of the greatest film scores in cinema history. Steven C. Smith is a four-time Emmy-nominated producer and author whose latest book is Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood's Most Influential Composer (Oxford University Press; April 2020). His biography A Heart at Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, and served as the primary research source for the Oscar-nominated documentary Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann. He has written about film and music for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly and the Hollywood Reporter. A former supervising producer of the TV series A&E Biography and AMC Backstory, his 200-plus documentaries have received sixteen Telly Awards. They include The Sound of a City: Julie Andrews Returns to Salzburg; The Lure of the Desert: Martin Scorsese on Lawrence of Arabia; and Thou Shalt Not! Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood. Smith lives in Los Angeles. #richardskipper #hollywood #composer