THE BIZ : Scoring Big

Dan Slider wanted to compose the score for the independent production “Russian Holiday” and the director wanted him to do it. There was just one problem: Whoever got the job would have to conduct the 70-piece Kirov Ballet Orchestra, and director Greydon Clark needed to be convinced that Slider wouldn’t choke.

So Slider, who’d done plenty of TV work (including the main theme for “America’s Funniest Home Videos”), wrote some sample themes and took them to the Los Angeles Composer’s Guild, a 3-year-old organization that puts together a full orchestra so its 180 members can record audition and demo tapes. Next thing he knew, he was heading to St. Petersburg. “The director wasn’t sure I could handle it, but now all of a sudden I’m telling him, ‘Look, this is what I did. I stood at the podium and conducted an orchestra! I can do it for you!’

“If you can get a live orchestral demo rather than a synthesized version of your score, you already have an edge with producers,” says guild founder and director Gloria Ching, who’s now scoring her first feature film, “So Love Returns,” for Matovich Productions.

Twice monthly, Ching books a 60-piece orchestra of top studio musicioans players who regularly play for film and TV, and guild members can buy half-hour time slots for the orchestra to play. Such orchestra sharing allowed Bahman Saless, a UCLA film-scoring student to net work on one of the trailers for “Carlito’s Way.”

And it’s not just novices that are taking advantage of the Ching’s plan. Veteran TV composer David Bell (“Murder She Wrote,” “In the Heat of the Night”) recorded three one-minute sample themes for a TV Western, one of which became the theme for last year’s CBS Western “Ned Blessing.” His cost: $1,200 as compared to $22,000 for a full-scale union recording session. “Getting an orchestra together is such an overwhelming task,” says Bell, “But it’s impossible to learn to compose unless you can hear your work, and there’s no other way to do it than with players. This is what composers dream about.”