20 Minutes More Music From Films

“Gone With the Wind,” “Gigi” and “An American in Paris” are among the prized MGM sound-track albums in a new CBS Special Products series.

New ? Most of those scores have been available for years--many of them even in CD. So, what’s new?

The main answer: more music.

Dan Rivard, staff producer for CBS Special Products, said that the albums in the new series feature, on average, 20 minutes more music than earlier versions of the same sound-track albums.

“Most of these movies were released in the ‘40s and ‘50s when the 10-inch record was still the norm and that meant you could only get about 20 to 30 minutes of music on the album,” Rivard said this week by phone from his office in New York.

“The result was the record companies had to leave off some of the music from the film in order to make the sound track fit on a single album. Even after the (12-inch) LP and cassette made it possible in the ‘60s and ‘70s to get more music on an album, record companies mostly stuck to the 30- or 40-minute versions of the albums when re-releasing them.

“What we have done is take advantage of the greater capacity of CDs to make more of the original music available.”

CBS Special Products--which licensed the MGM sound-track library from SBK Record Productions Inc. in 1988--launched the series last fall with “The Wizard of Oz.” The album--part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the movie--was a big success by reissue standards, registering sales of more than 150,000.

Now, the company has released eight more MGM scores in CD, highlighted by “Gone With the Wind.” Rivard said that the additional music includes the overture and “exit music.”

In the album’s liner notes, Bruce Eder explains that major motion pictures around the time of “Gone With the Wind” in 1939 frequently were released with exit music, which played to a blank screen after the end credits as the theater emptied.

Besides composer Max Steiner’s music, the 58-minute CD features some dialogue from the film, including Clark Gable’s much quoted line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

The other titles now available are “An American in Paris” (the music of George and Ira Gershwin), “Brigadoon” (Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe), “Easter Parade” (Irving Berlin), “Gigi” (Lerner and Loewe), “Kismet” (Robert Wright and George Forrest), “Show Boat” (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II) and “Singin’ in the Rain” (mostly Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown). Ken Robertson was in charge of the digital editing and remastering for all the albums.