The Associated Press obituary of Schifrin states that John Williams was originally in talks to compose the score for De Palma's film, but that Williams wanted to compose a new theme for Mission: Impossible. De Palma wanted to keep Schifrin's theme, and so, the AP states, "Out went Williams and in came Danny Elfman, who agreed to retain Schifrin's music." There is some truth there, but it leaves out part of the story. After Williams was out of the picture, De Palma and Cruise enlisted Alan Silvestri, who indeed composed an unused score for the film after De Palma realized it was all wrong in tone. De Palma then worked very closely with Elfman, who composed an extraordinary score for the film, which beautifully incorporated Schifrin's theme.

Here's a portion of the Associated Press obituary:

Lalo Schifrin, the composer who wrote the endlessly catchy theme for "Mission: Impossible" and more than 100 other arrangements for film and television, died Thursday. He was 93.

Schifrin's son Ryan confirmed that Schifrin died due to complications from pneumonia. He died peacefully in his home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family.

The Argentine won four Grammys and was nominated for six Oscars, including five for original score for "Cool Hand Luke," "The Fox," "Voyage of the Damned," "The Amityville Horror" and "The Sting II."

"Every movie has its own personality. There are no rules to write music for movies," Schifrin told The Associated Press in 2018. "The movie dictates what the music will be."

He also wrote the grand finale musical performance for the World Cup championship in Italy in 1990, in which the Three Tenors — Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and José Carreras — sang together for the first time. The work became one of the biggest sellers in the history of classical music.

Schifrin, also a jazz pianist and classical conductor, had a remarkable career in music that included working with Dizzy Gillespie and recording with Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan. But perhaps his biggest contribution was the instantly recognizable score to television's "Mission: Impossible," which fueled the just-wrapped, decades-spanning feature film franchise led by Tom Cruise.

Written in the unusual 5/4 time signature, the theme — Dum-dum DUM DUM dum-dum DUM DUM — was married to an on-screen self-destruct clock that kicked off the TV show, which ran from 1966 to 1973. It was described as "only the most contagious tune ever heard by mortal ears" by New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane and even hit No. 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968.

Schifrin originally wrote a different piece of music for the theme song but series creator Bruce Geller liked another arrangement Schifrin had composed for an action sequence.

"The producer called me and told me, 'You're going to have to write something exciting, almost like a logo, something that will be a signature, and it's going to start with a fuse,'" Schifrin told the AP in 2006. "So I did it and there was nothing on the screen. And maybe the fact that I was so free and I had no images to catch, maybe that's why this thing has become so successful — because I wrote something that came from inside me."

When director Brian De Palma was asked to take the series to the silver screen, he wanted to bring the theme along with him, leading to a creative conflict with composer John Williams, who wanted to work with a new theme of his own. Out went Williams and in came Danny Elfman, who agreed to retain Schifrin's music.

Hans Zimmer took over scoring for the second film, and Michael Giacchino scored the next two. Giacchino told NPR he was a hesitant to take it on, because Schifrin's music was one of his favorite themes of all time.

"I remember calling Lalo and asking if we could meet for lunch," Giacchino told NPR. "And I was very nervous — I felt like someone asking a father if I could marry their daughter or something. And he said, 'Just have fun with it.' And I did."

"Mission: Impossible" won Grammys for best instrumental theme and best original score from a motion picture or a TV show. In 2017, the theme was entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

U2 members Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. covered the theme while making the soundtrack to 1996's first installment; that version peaked at No. 16 on the Billboard 200 with a Grammy nomination.

A 2010 commercial for Lipton tea depicted a young Schifrin composing the theme at his piano while gaining inspiration through sips of the brand's Lipton Yellow Label. Musicians dropped from the sky as he added elements.

De Palma's reimagination of Antonioni’s Blow-Up follows a sound effects man for raunchy slasher films (John Travolta) who witnesses a presidential hopeful's death. Spinning back his recording of the fatal car crash, he discovers an anomaly in the audio that suggests a bigger conspiracy. Responding to Chappaquiddick and Watergate and set amid a fictional "Liberty Day" in Philadelphia, Blow Out is a must-see screening before the Fourth of July!

Also at Doc, Brian De Palma’s siren song to seediness and cinema, 1981’s “Blow Out,” a deeply doomy melodrama of moviemaking and morality that looks better every year. The ending is brutal, and our flag is still there. Doc Films, Thursday, July 3, 4pm, 8:45pm.

So goes the description under the YouTube trailer for Video Heaven, which was posted today by JoBlo Movie Network. Back in the Winter 2014 issue of Cineaste, Perry was interviewed by Richard Porton, who asked the filmmaker how working at Kim's Video influenced his film education:

That overlapped with my time at NYU. I distilled it down to one point: Working at a place like that taught me not to be afraid of what I liked. Film school teaches you to be very afraid of what you like. You don't want to be the one who stands up in class and says, 'I think Sylvester Stallone is an incredible director.' You're going to look like an idiot, especially at NYU where everyone is trying to be as highbrow as possible. Working at Kim's taught me, working with people like Sean [Price Williams], to like what you like. But you have to defend what you like about these films. You could come into Kim's and say, 'I want to rent the two-tape edition of The Mother And The Whore.' Eustache is an incredible filmmaker. But you needed to defend why you were renting Staying Alive or Rocky IV. Stallone is an incredible filmmaker and even Jean Eustache respected him.

That's a lesson you'll never be taught in an academic setting—how to equally appreciate high and low cinema. At NYU, people might see Brian De Palma as a trashy filmmaker who made pulpy movies in the Eighties. When you were working at Kim's, Brian De Palma was the master.

Here is the text of the letter, as printed in the November 29, 1960 edition of the Columbia Daily Spectator:

Managers' Movies

To The Editor:

The Board of Managers has done it again. No great work of film art seems to be safe from their clutches. They carelessly prance on mutilating everything tihat comes within their leprous grasp.

They began their ignominious career by utterly defiling J. Arthur Rank's The Red Shoes. Never let it be said that the Board of Managers didn't carefully prepare their grizzly rape of this film. First they assaulted it aurally by distorting Brian Easdale's beautiful ballet score until it sounded like primeval gurglings from the depths of a quicksand swamp. But that was just the beginning of the evening's nightmare. Next the harpies preceeded to ravish the visual elements of the film. First, they managed to destroy the tempo of the film by creating fade-outs and black-outs at the discretion of the projectionist. Secondly, they caused fifteen minute breaks between reels so as to distroy any dramatic tension or mood the previous reel had created. I walked out of this destruction of an art form as many people did—even though this is one of my favorite films. But I came to tihe J. Arthur Rank version not the distortion of the Board of Managers!

This whole past nightmare was relived ... in The Board of Managers presentation of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. The Film had not been on two minutes before I realized, to imy horror, that the phantom of the film was at his black art once more. The nightmare proceeded with the customary fade-outs and ultra low key projectionproduced by the phantom's hand across the projector lens.

There is absolutely no excuse for the complete incompetence which saturates ihe Board of Managers Film Series. They can't hide behind the ruse of technical difficulties" because they have new equipment thus making the only difficultieshuman inadequaties. I project a film series at Barnard and Sarah Larwence and never have I had difficulties mildly comparable to those that are visited upon the Board of Managers. And finally if the Board of Managers don't enact radical improvements in their presentations then they should not be allowed to continue defiling Film Art.

Brian De Palma '62
Columbia College

Phantom of the Paradise, the cult classic 1974 Brian de Palma film that reworked Phantom of the Opera and starred songwriting icon Paul Williams as the manipulative music producer known as Swan, is being made into a stage musical by Williams and Sam Pressman, whose father, Ed Pressman, produced the original.

“I’m excited about having a chance to deliver what fans have been suggesting for years… POTP as a stage musical,” Williams said in a statement to MovieMaker. “I think it’s time has come!”

In addition to starring in the film, which De Palma wrote and directed, Williams composed the score and wrote the songs. Pressman told MovieMaker that he and Williams have spoken to multiple potential writers for the stage musical, including American Psycho and The Shards author Bret Easton Ellis — though no commitments have been made.

Pressman told MovieMaker that he, Williams and Ellis had “such an amazing dinner — Bret’s such a true fan of Phantom and of Paul, and it was awesome to introduce the two of them in person.”

Ellis has also mentioned the meeting on his podcast, though again, nothing is settled in terms of the stage musical’s writer.

Asked about De Palma’s potential involvement in the new stage play, Pressman said there were potentially “different paths… it’s just so early.”

De Palma has been considering a Phantom of the Paradise stage musical for decades. Pressman noted that he recently revisited a libretto, or book, that De Palma wrote for a prospective stage version of the film back in 1987. Pressman has also discussed the project with De Palma.

“We certainly want Brian to feel honored,” Pressman said. “I went to go see Brian last fall, to talk about the dream. Phantom was an early and significant film for him and I’d say the favorite film of my father in his career. I think the chaos and originality of the whole experience was deeply inspiring.”

Pressman noted that the plan is to open the stage play “not on Broadway” but “building to that stage.”

The Independent's Kevin E G Perry's obit of Harris includes this paragraph:

Yulin landed one of the most memorable roles of his career in Brian De Palma’s Scarface in 1983, playing corrupt police officer Mel Bernstein alongside Al Pacino’s titular drug lord. In a 2023 retrospective of the film for The Independent, Geoffrey McNab praised their work together, writing: “In certain moments here, for example, when [Pacino] confronts his sleazy, double-crossing mentor Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia) and the crooked cop (Harris Yulin), he behaves as if he is on the Old Vic stage in some blood-soaked tragedy. He’s hammy but magnificent.”

Harris Yulin, a chameleonic character actor who for more than six decades portrayed guys whom critics described as unsympathetic, soulful, menacing, corrupt and glowering, both onstage and onscreen, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 87.

His wife, Kristen Lowman, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was cardiac arrest.

Inspired to pursue an acting career when he first took center stage at his bar mitzvah, Mr. Yulin never became a marquee name. But to many audiences he was instantly recognizable, even as a man of a hundred faces.

He played at least as many parts, including J. Edgar Hoover, Hamlet and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Other roles ranged from crooked cops and politicians to a lecherous television anchorman.

“I’m not always the bad guy,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “It just seems to be what I’m known for.”

He wasn’t just any bad guy. One reviewer characterized him as “an eloquent growler.” Another wrote that “his whiskeyed voice sounds just like that of John Huston.”

Honors followed. Mr. Yulin was nominated in 1996 for a Primetime Emmy Award for playing a crime boss on the comedy series “Frasier.” For his work in theater, he won the Lucille Lortel Award from the League of Off-Broadway Theaters and Producers for his direction of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful” in 2006. In the late 1990s he won Drama Desk nominations for acting on Broadway in “The Diary of Anne Frank” and Arthur Miller’s “The Price.”

Early in his career, in 1963, he was cast in “Next Time I’ll Sing to You,” starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons, Off Broadway at the Phoenix Theater. The play bombed, he recalled to The Times in 2000.

Mr. Yulin made his Broadway debut in 1980 in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s “Watch on the Rhine.” He also appeared in Broadway productions of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit” (1992) and Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” (2001). And his performance in 2010 as Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” at the Gate Theater in Dublin, got rave reviews.

Mr. Yulin’s first major film was the offbeat comedy “End of the Road” (1970), as a college teacher opposite Stacy Keach. He played Wyatt Earp in “Doc” (1971); a corrupt Miami police detective in “Scarface” (1983), alongside Al Pacino; an irate judge in “Ghostbusters II” (1989); and a White House national security adviser in “Clear and Present Danger” (1994), with Harrison Ford.

Reviewing “Doc” in 1971, Roger Ebert wrote that Mr. Yulin and Mr. Keach “have such a quiet way of projecting the willingness to do violence that you realize, after a while, that most western actors are overactors.”

On television, beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Yulin appeared on “Ironside,” “Kojak,” “Little House on the Prairie” and other shows. In the following decades he took on roles in the 1985 mini-series “Robert Kennedy and His Times”(playing Senator McCarthy), “Murphy Brown” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” More recently he was seen on “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “Ozark.”

“Mr. Yulin’s characters are quintessentially weary of this world, worn out by its ugliness and many disappointments,” Tara Ariano and Adam Sternbergh wrote in the book “Hey! It’s That Guy!” (2005), a who’s who of character actors. “No one knows better than those characters all the ways in which humanity and its various institutions can be corrupted and destroyed — primarily because Yulin’s characters have been tasked with destroying them.”

Mr. Yulin was born Harris Bart Goldberg on Nov. 5, 1937, in Los Angeles. Abandoned as an infant on the steps of an orphanage, he was adopted when he was 4 months old by Dr. Isaac Goldberg, a dentist, and his wife, Sylvia. (Yulin was a surname in Dr. Goldberg’s family in Russia; Mr. Yulin adopted it for professional reasons.)

He attended the University of Southern California without graduating and served in the U.S. Army for a year. He then embarked on a short-lived career as an artist in Italy. “I tried to be a painter for a while in Florence, and I was extremely bad at it,” he told The Times in 2000.

In 1962, after trifling with architecture as well, he moved to Tel Aviv, where friends urged him to try directing and acting. He did. At some point, through one of his father’s patients, he was introduced to the actor and drama coach Jeff Corey.

Mr. Yulin married the actress Gwen Welles in 1975; she died in 1993. In 2005, he married Ms. Lowman. His stepdaughter, the actress Claire Lucido, died in 2021 at 30. His wife is his only immediate survivor.

In addition to acting and directing, Mr. Yulin taught at the Juilliard School and the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University.

He acknowledged his stature in the acting world in an interview with The Irish Times in 2010. “I’m not that high-profile,” he said. “I just do the next thing that comes along.”