I thought you all might enjoy seeing this e-mail I received this morning, and my response to it.
Dear Sir or Madam,
I recently purchased this soundtrack from MovieMusic.com. However I was thoroughly disappointed by the contents of this CD. Why wasn't the jazz music provided by Gerry Mulligan and Sam Butera included in this CD. That music was an integral part of the soundtrack, in fact, it is the most important part. The whole point of the movie is that Tony Curtis is playing the part of a saxophone player, yet none of his music is included in the soundtrack???
Who are the idiots who decided to create this CD yet not bother to include the main feature of the soundtrack? Was it Bernstein? Kritzerland? Both? Or someone else?
In any event, this CD is nothing but an empty piece of crap.
Sincerely disappointed,
Name of Sender deleted
And the response:
Dear Sir or Madam
We are pleased to inform you that you win the prize for the single most obnoxious e-mail we have ever received. Congratulations are in order.
We are a record label in the business of licensing soundtracks from various studios. In the case of The Rat Race we licensed from Paramount the soundtrack to a film called The Rat Race, which was composed and conducted by Elmer Bernstein. Now, when we license a soundtrack we can only issue what the studio actually can license - in the case of this particular film it was the score by Bernstein, including some of his original source cues. They did not have nor could they have licensed the Butera and Mulligan source material. There was an album released at the time of the film with Sam Butera and the Witnesses. I can't remember how much of what's on that were the source cues from the film, but it really doesn't matter because the bottom line is that the idiots who actually own the Bernstein score licensed it to the idiots at Kritzerland and the idiots at Kritzerland put it out and sold it to an awful lot of grateful soundtrack idiots all over the world. It's a superb soundtrack and has some of the best musicians in history playing on it, both Hollywood players AND jazz players.
While under the best of circumstances idiotic Paramount would have owned it all, they did not, nor did they even have tapes on any of it. The lack of tapes makes things REALLY difficult to issue as you might imagine, you not being an idiot and all.
We are, of course, sorry that the great score by Mr. Bernstein is not to your liking and that you consider the CD an empty piece of crap. We have two suggestions as to what you might do with it, but we'll just give you one of them: Donate it to a library or a friend who may appreciate its contents.
Sincerely,
The Idiots at Kritzerland
