Paramount to mark 100th year with movie music at Hollywood Bowl

Paramount Pictures is celebrating its 100th birthday this year and what better place for this Hollywood institution to throw a party than the Hollywood Bowl?

On Sunday night, Jason Alexander will host the event, which features Oscar-nominated composer David Newman conducting the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and music from such Paramount classics as “Wings” (1927), “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961) and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981).

FOR THE RECORD:
Paramount’s 100th anniversary: In the Aug. 30 Calendar section, an article about a celebration of Paramount Pictures’ 100th anniversary at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday night said that the program would include music from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” It will include music from “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” —

Among the composers represented in the program are Franz Waxman (“Sunset Boulevard:); Henry Mancini (“Breakfast at Tiffany’s”); Nino Rota and Carmine Coppola (“The Godfather” trilogy); John Williams (the Indiana Jones films); and Irving Berlin ( 1942’s “Holiday Inn”).

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Special guests including the Oscar-nominated veteran composer Lalo Schifrin (“Cool Hand Luke,” “Mission: Impossible” TV series), Academy Award-nominated Alan Silvestri (“Forrest Gump”) and Oscar-winning Michael Giacchino (“Up”), who has composed several films for Paramount including the two last “Mission: Impossible” movies, 2011’s “Super 8” and J.J. Abrams’ 2009 reboot of ‘Star Trek.”

“I am happy to be there with Lalo Schifrin,” Giacchino said. “I remember when I worked on my first ‘Mission: Impossible’ movie, I felt like I needed to talk to him and figure out if it was OK that I was doing the movie — the same way you would go and ask a father if you could marry [his] daughter. We had lunch together. I said, do you have any suggestions or anything I should do? He said just have fun.”

Though the recording studio Stage M has since closed down at Paramount, Giacchino has fond memories of recording there when he was scoring Abrams’ TV series “Alias.”

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“I felt like I was getting this incredibly lucky ticket to go back in time,” said Giacchino. “I grew up in New Jersey, I was far away from everything that was Hollywood, but in my mind I always imagined what it would be like to be on a movie lot. The first time I got to go on the Paramount lot, I felt this is exactly what I had in my head.”

Newman will be conducting his favorite score — Williams’ indelible Oscar-winning composition from Steven Spielberg’s 1981 classic “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

“I am 44,” he said. “I was the prime target for the movie when it came out. I saw ‘Raiders’ 13 times in the theater!”

The evening will feature scores from Paramount’s rich history, including Rudolph Kopp’s for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 epic “Cleopatra,” Berlin’s “You’re So Easy to Dance With” from “Holiday Inn,” Waxman’s chilling finale of Billy Wilder’s 1950 “Sunset Boulevard,” Bernard Herrmann’s psychological-tinged romantic score to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 “Vertigo,” Silvestri’s spirited music to “Forrest Gump” as well as Giacchino’s compositions.

Newman, who is a member of the Film Music Society and on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said the Bowl has done “almost more for film music than any other institution in the world because of this movie night.”

He noted that because there are generally no orchestrations for the vast majority of classic film scores, the Bowl has “spent a lot of money and a lot of time and expertise in making this music playable. It is like a gift.”

Though these movie night concerts “are difficult to be put together,” said Newman, “people are absolutely charmed by the whole communal kind of process.”

‘The Big Picture: Paramount’s 100th Anniversary’

Where: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave.

When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $11-$160

Info: Call (323) 850-2000 or go to https://www.hollywoodbowl.com

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susan.king@latimes.com