Sidney Poitier and Sidney Lumet were instrumental in helping me get started as the first black composer to get name credit for movie scores.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
John Barry was the first film composer I was aware of. As a teenager I owned several of his Bond soundtracks.
Bernard Herrmann used to write all his scores by himself. So did Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky. I don't understand why this happens in the movie industry.
I had come from an orchestral background, but I didn't really have any orchestral pieces for film.
When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life. Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor.
Sidney Poitier became a star in part by helping black and white Americans negotiate their new relationship in the post-Civil Rights era.
Film music has a great history of composers and performers.
I got my first break in 'Bhootnath,' solely on my credit, and went on to sing for around 20 films for all the leading music composers.
The first thing I wrote was a one-act play that got accepted at a one-act play festival, and I was in it along with Nathan Lane and a couple of other very good actors.
It would have been more obvious to go into film, based on the generation before me, but the generation before them were all composers or classical musicians.
I starred in a Broadway play that was Sidney Poitier's first directing job and the cast was Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, Diana Ladd and I played a Jewish kid who offered himself as a slave to two Columbia University students as reparations.