Word: hamlisch
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...Marvin Hamlisch was the youngest student ever admitted to Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music. For his piano audition he transposed Goodnight, Irene into different keys on demand. He was seven at the time. This year, at 29, he became the first individual ever to win three Academy Awards in one night: the first for his adaptation of Ragtime Composer Scott Joplin's music for The Sting, the second and third for the score and title song of The Way We Were. After his final sprint to center stage, Hamlisch said to the audience: "I think...
...awards were the fulfillment of Hamlisch's plan to reach the peak of his profession before his 30th birthday. In the past five years, he has scored more than a dozen films (including Bananas, Take the Money and Run, Fat City, The World's Greatest Athlete), working up to an annual income of $80,000. The total is now soaring like the strings in a climactic moment from one of Hamlisch's scores, as royalties pour in from his own album of Sting music and Barbra Streisand's recording of The Way We Were...
That song was almost scrapped. Hamlisch had written it before the film was shot. When Streisand was ready to make the record four months later, says Hamlisch, "she asked me to compose something more complex." It took lyrical persuasion by the composer to convince the star that simplicity counts...
...Sting, however, was a snap. Director George Roy Hill had already decided to use Joplin's classic rags and, admits Hamlisch, "I was like an East Side tailor. I'd stitch in a minute of music here, 35 seconds there-it took only eight hours to do the whole...
...Manhattan-born son of a Viennese accordionist, Hamlisch as a boy was nicknamed "Fingers" because he avoided sports to guard his hands. He went to work at 19 as a rehearsal pianist for Broadway shows, beginning with Funny Girl in 1964. He squeezed in night school too, graduating cum laude from Queens College. In 1968, at a Broadway party, the pianist met Producer Sam Spiegel, who chatted about a film he was planning to make from John Cheever's short story The Swimmer. Three days later Hamlisch handed him the completed theme for the movie...