EP#136: Maestro on Elm Street - An Interview with Charles Bernstein

Join Justin, Daniel, and Angelique as they chat with legendary film composer Charles Bernstein about the Elm Street franchise, the early days of composition, underground Jazz clubs in France, navigating the industry, and more!

Charles Bernstein bio:

Talented, prolific and versatile film composer Charles Bernstein was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

His family moved to Los Angeles when he was young, and he eventually conducted his own orchestral music at age sixteen and later studied composition with Vitorio Giannini and Vincent Persichetti at Juilliard in NYC. Bernstein also attended the University of California; he received an Outstanding Graduate of the College Award, a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship and a Chancellor's Doctoral Teaching Fellowship while working with American composer Roy Harris.

His impressively eclectic musical style ranges from comedy to drama to action to horror. Bernstein has supplied the scores for a bunch of enjoyably down'n'dirty early drive-in exploitation features: he turned up the funk with "That Man Bolt," went all-out groovy for the "Invasion of the Bee Girls," and kicked out the tuneful swinging country jams on "White Lightning" (a snippet of this score was used in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill Vol. 1," and more extensively in his "Inglorious Basterds"), followed "by Gator," "A Small Town in Texas," and "Nightmare in Badham County." Bernstein's scores in the horror genre are especially chilling and effective: Among his finest fright film scores are "Hex," "Sweet Kill," "The Entity" (this is one of Bernstein's most inspired, inventive and underrated scores; it was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Music), "Cujo," Wes Craven's terrifying classics "A Nightmare on Elm Street," and "Deadly Friend," as well as "April Fool's Day." Moreover, Bernstein has done scores for a large number of made-for-TV movies.

He won an Emmy Award for his score for the "Little Miss Perfect." His scores for "Enslavement" and "The Sea Wolf" were nominated for Emmy Awards while his score for "The Man Who Broke A 1,000 Chains" received a Cable ACE Award nomination for Original Score. Outside of his substantial film and television work, Bernstein has also done music for Off-Broadway theater, modern dance, and the World Festival of Sacred Music, played jazz in the cellars of Paris, and danced and played folk music with the Greeks and gypsies from the Balkans.

His music is frequently heard in hip-hop samples, and is featured in the 2023 Drake/21 Savage hit, "Rich Flex." Moreover, Bernstein has written the acclaimed books "Film Music and Everything Else" and "Movie Music: An Insider's View." He won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for his writing on music.

Bernstein has been a former Vice President and long-serving member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Governors. He is a current Vice President and Board member of the Society of Composers and Lyricists, and is on the Board of Directors of the ASCAP Foundation. In addition, Charles Bernstein has taught on the graduate film scoring faculty at USC and holds an annual film scoring seminar in the summer at UCLA Extension."

Monsters, Madness and Magic Official Website.
Monsters, Madness and Magic on Linktree.
Monsters, Madness and Magic on Instagram.
Monsters, Madness and Magic on Facebook.
Monsters, Madness and Magic on Twitter.
Monsters, Madness and Magic on YouTube.