Yes, he most certainly did do the music for ROBOT MONSTER. Bernstein made his film debut scoring a fairly major picture for Columbia called SATURDAY'S HERO in 1951. But soon after, he fell under suspicion of having had Communist sympathies. Unlike hundreds of others in the movie industry, Bernstein was never blacklisted, but became what was called "gray-listed", not banned outright but generally avoided by the major studios. It was during this time that he wrote the music for RM; he had to earn a living. That same year he also wrote the music for another sci-fi immortal, CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. But his career eventually began picking up. In 1956, Cecil B. DeMille asked his longtime composer, Victor Young -- who wrote many beautiful scores for films from the 1930s, mainly for Paramount -- to write the music for THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Young, however, was in declining health and racing to complete his work on AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS, so he recommended Bernstein, whom he knew and admired. Amazingly, despite Bernstein's iffy track record in Hollywood at that point, and past suspicion of being a "Red", the politically ultra-conservative DeMille hired him...and the rest is movie history. (PS: Victor Young died later in 1956, at the age of only 56, and received his only Oscar, for AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS, posthumously at the 1956 Academy Awards, held in spring 1957. He never lived to see his protege Bernstein become one of the most successful composers in film history.)
reply
share