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Gerald Fried, 1928-2023
Composer Gerald Fried died on February 17, 2023, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, from pneumonia. He was 95.
Gerald Fried was born in New York, New York, in February 1928, and grew up in the Bronx. He attended the Juilliard School of Music, initially as an oboe player, and later as a composer and conductor. After his graduation in 1945 he was first oboist with the Dallas Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony and New York’s Little Orchestras. He moved to Los Angeles in 1957 and played for one season with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Fried had been introduced to movies by director Stanley Kubrick, a childhood friend; Fried scored the director’s first short, the 1951 film Day of the Fight, and went on to score Kubrick’s first four features: Fear and Desire in 1953, Killer’s Kiss in 1955, The Killing in 1956, and Paths of Glory in 1957.
After his move to Los Angeles Fried began composing and arranging music for television, and worked on numerous popular shows, including M Squad, Shotgun Slade, Riverboat, Gilligan’s Island, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible, and Mannix, among many others. Perhaps his most famous piece of score was for ‘Amok Time’, the second season premiere episode of Star Trek, which featured a now-iconic fight sequence between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. Read more…
UNBELIEVABLE!!!!! – Gerald Fried
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The only reason I’m writing a review of the score for Unbelievable!!!!! is because it is likely to be the only chance I ever get to review a new score by Gerald Fried. For those who don’t know his name, New York-born Fried is a legend in classic TV music circles. He wrote the famous ‘Spock vs. Kirk’ fight music for the Amok Time episode of Star Trek in 1967, and he wrote episodic scores for some of the most iconic shows in television history, including Mission: Impossible, The Man from UNCLE, Lost in Space, M Squad, Gilligan’s Island, and Wagon Train, among many others. But Fried also has outstanding big screen credentials too; he was the first choice composer for a young director named Stanley Kubrick, and scored his debut efforts Fear and Desire in 1953, Killer’s Kiss in 1955, The Killing in 1956, and Paths of Glory in 1957. He received an Oscar nomination for his score for the documentary feature Birds Do It Bees Do It in 1974, and then won an Emmy for co-scoring the groundbreaking miniseries Roots with Quincy Jones in 1977. Fried is 92 years old now, and prior to this film hadn’t scored a full-length narrative feature since 1988, 33 years ago, but somehow director Steven Fawcette lured him out of retirement to write music for this project. Read more…
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