David Raksin, RIP

David Raksin, one of the best American film composers, died Monday. Here's a link to an interview he did in 1998. My favorite Raksin score, perhaps because it's my favorite of the movies he scored, is Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful, a tribute to the pleasures and pains of Hollywood's then-collapsing studio system. The soundtrack is out of print, but the DVD includes many of the soundtrack cues as an extra (including an alternate version of the haunting, long-phrased title theme).