Tony Thomas

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Anthony William "Tony" Thomas (born July 31, 1927 in Portsmouth , England , Great Britain , † July 8, 1997 in Burbank , California , USA ) was a British-American film historian , television and music producer . He has authored numerous books on important filmmakers and was considered an expert in the field of film music and its history.

Life

Anthony William Thomas was born on July 31, 1927 near Portsmouth, England, the son of a conductor in the Royal Marines . He had two brothers, Graham and Ross, and a sister, Christine.

At the age of 18 he went to Canada , where he in 1948 at the radio as an announcer of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation began. Later in his career, he eventually became a writer and producer for the CBC radio program, specializing in the film industry and Hollywood . He later worked as the author and presenter of the CBC television series As Time Goes By and was part of the advice team of the 1962 game show Flashback .

In 1966 Tony Thomas moved to Los Angeles , where he intensified his investigations into film history and became an expert in this area of ​​the still young film studies . He has written several extensive studies on individual film genres , film studios and time periods, including The Busby Berkeley Book (1973), The Films of the Forties (1975), Hollywood's Hollywood. The Movies About the Movies (1975, with Rudy Behlmer ), The Great Adventure Films (1976), The Films of 20th Century Fox (1979, with Aubrey Solomon ), Hollywood and the American Image (1981), The Cinema of the Sea. A Critical Survey and Filmography, 1925-1986 (1988) and The Best of Universal (1990). He also wrote the biographies of Hollywood stars Burt Lancaster (1975) and Gregory Peck (1977), both of which appeared in German in the Heyne Film Library , as well as Errol Flynn (1990). Thomas spent his entire life studying Flynn's life and work and published his writings in 1980.

Tony Thomas was also one of the key authors of the internationally renowned Citadel film books. For this Citadel Press series, he directed the film careers volumes of Errol Flynn (1969), Kirk Douglas (1972), Gene Kelly (1974), Harry Warren (1975), Henry Fonda (1983), Olivia de Havilland (1983) , Howard Hughes (1985) and James Stewart (1988). The volumes about the filming of Marlon Brando (1973) and Ronald Reagan (1980) also appeared in the of Joe Hembus published the German edition of the Citadel Film books in Goldmann Verlag . For the International Film Guide Series , he also wrote Ustinov in Focus (1971), the first detailed account of Peter Ustinov's filmography .

Thomas also released some of his numerous interviews with prominent Hollywood personalities on records, such as Voices from the Hollywood Past. Tony Thomas in Conversation With Six Legendary Celebrities From the Golden Age of the Movies (1975).

Thomas acquired his greatest importance through his activities as a film music historian. As for the film music from “Hollywood's golden era” of the 1930s / 1940s, he had immense knowledge and in the early 1970s he played a key role in gaining artistic recognition for this genre of music, which had been largely overlooked and was ignored by serious music critics. In the early 1970s in particular, thousands of sheet music, recording tapes and other film music archive material were carelessly disposed of in order to free up storage space in the studios. Because the managing directors of many of the large film studios had little sense of history and saw no practical uses for their accumulated historical film and television material. It was above all the destruction campaign initiated by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer of their extensive collection of classic film music manuscripts and original recordings that called a group of rebellious film connoisseurs onto the scene. This group, to which Thomas belonged, was formed in 1974 in the house of the composer Fred Steiner . And a few years later Thomas was one of the founders of the Society for the Preservation of Film Music (later renamed The Film Music Society), on whose board he served for many years.

Particularly significant was his first time in 1973 published study Music for the Movies (dt. Film music, the great film score composer -. Their art and engineering , 1995). This standard work represented the first serious examination of the history of film music and its assessment.

In addition to this theoretical analysis, he also took part in the practical preservation of Hollywood's film music creations by producing a total of more than 50 albums with classical symphonic film music over the years. He founded Tony Thomas Productions and the label Citadel Records, which in the early 1980s exclusively produced 17 long-playing records with the music of Max Steiner for the Max Steiner Music Society and the Steiner heirs. He also produced albums with the film and concert music of all other important Hollywood composers, including Erich Wolfgang Korngold , Alfred Newman , Herbert Stothart and Hans J. Salter and Miklós Rózsa , with whom he got along particularly well.

However, Thomas pursued a different approach than the conductor Charles Gerhardt , who with his record series Classic Film Scores from 1972 onwards succeeded with great success in bringing the classic Hollywood film composers closer to a broad audience. Because while Gerhardt relied on new recordings with the most modern recording technology, Thomas wanted to preserve the historical original recordings, which were often made by the composers themselves, and bring them back to the audience. A concept that did not establish itself on a broader basis alongside new recordings until some time later, since digital mastering made remarkable restorations of historical sound recordings possible.

The Film Music Society honored Tony Thomas in 1993 with the Film Music Preservation Award for "his contributions to the preservation, dissemination and promotion of film music history".

Thomas also worked as an independent writer and producer for television. For the station PBS he produced the documentaries Hollywood and the American Image , Back to the Stage Door Canteen and The West That Never Was , for the Discovery Channel Film Score: The Music of the Movies and Wild Westerns as well as The Hollywood Soundtrack Story and Michael Feinstein : Sing a Song of Hollywood for American Movie Classics . Tony Thomas was also involved in the script for the ABC documentary The Fifty Years of Warner Bros. , wrote for the Steve Allen series Meeting of Minds and worked as a producer and writer for That's Hollywood for three years . He was also one of the authors of the 1979 and 1984 Oscar awards and has also produced some of the sequences of these Oscar shows since the late 1970s. His voice could also be heard frequently on television. He is known not least for his presentations on the annual programs The Kennedy Center Honors and American Film Institute Salutes .

Thomas, who last lived with his partner Lorna Grenadier, had a son, David, and a daughter, Andrea.

Shortly before his 70th birthday, Tony Thomas died on July 8, 1997 at the Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank of complications from pneumonia .

Fonts

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e Obituary by Jon Burlingame in Film Score Monthly, July 10, 1997 ; Retrieved August 29, 2009
  2. ^ History of the Film Music Society ; Retrieved August 29, 2009
  3. ↑ Information on the Max Steiner Music Society ( Memento of the original from April 10, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; Retrieved August 29, 2009 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / maxsteinermusic.com
  4. ↑ Awards of the Film Music Society ; Retrieved August 29, 2009
personal data
SURNAME Thomas, Tony
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thomas, Anthony William (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-American film historian, television and music producer
DATE OF BIRTH July 31, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH near Portsmouth , England , UK
DATE OF DEATH July 8, 1997
Place of death Burbank , California , USA