World premiere release of unused Jerry Goldsmith score for Joe Pesci gangster tale! Universal Pictures presents a Robert Zemeckis production. Howard Franklin scripts and directs, Joe Pesci, Barbara Hershey, Stanley Tucci, Jerry Adler star. Leon “Bernzy” Bernstein shoots photos… crime photos. It’s a living. As the one sheet tagline states: “No matter what he was shooting, The Great Bernzini never took sides, he only took pictures… Except once.” First a murder suspect, then cleared and released, next into romance, finally in the middle of a mob war. Jerry Goldsmith fashioned a score both appropriate to the period setting and tinged with drama. It’s a haunting mood edged in darkness, but just not what director Howard Franklin was looking for. Ultimately Mark Isham stepped in to score the final picture. Not one to let a gorgeous yet bittersweet tune go to waste, Goldsmith drew inspiration for much of his unused The Public Eye score from an idea he initially scored for an earlier boxing picture that, ironically, also went unused. From the onset, this smoky jazz-inflected theme in C minor (with rich cadences in F major) features strings above and prominent bass below mournfully melodic clarinet. Piano soon follows with a new idea that expands Goldsmith’s harmonic vocabulary further. Though the theme and corresponding mood recur often, Goldsmith has several other things to say: A rising two-note figure consisting of a minor second steadily plays underneath the theme during “Morning Call”, new orchestral and synthesizer colors embellish the rising two-note figure and initial theme during “The Body”, dark and complex lower string harmonies infuse “Someone To Trust”, high violin harmonics color “After Hours” plus several other ideas. As is customary with this composer in his later career, what initially seems open and sparse begins to reveal much within its transparent layers. The score is written for full strings plus solo bass, percussion, keyboards (both piano and synthesizer), harp, oboe, flute and that haunting ever-present clarinet. Courtesy of Universal Pictures, the original digital stereo session mixes appear in clean, crisp sound. This Intrada premiere presentation features the complete score as Goldsmith wrote and recorded it in the intended picture sequence, all engineered by veteran Mike Ross-Trevor at Whitfield Recording Studios in London during April 1992. A terrific long-lost gem is finally unearthed and heard for the very first time! Jerry Goldsmith composes, conducts. Intrada Special Collection CD available while quantities and interest remain!
