Song of the Day: Ben-Hur (“Reminiscences”), composed by Miklos Rozsa, is from my all-time favorite film score. This Best Picture won 11 Oscars, a record tied but never beaten.
As I wrote in last year’s “Sacred Cinema” series, this 1959 epic might have won 12 Academy Awards, if Oscar-winning director William Wyler hadn’t launched an ad campaign in Variety in which he publicly praised the script contributions of Christopher Fry, even though Karl Tunberg was given sole screenwriting credit. Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, and Gore Vidal also made contributions to the script. This controversy had a cooling effect on Academy voters, who awarded the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay to “Room at the Top.” Nevertheless, Oscar-winning Best Actor Charlton Heston gave credit to Fry in his acceptance speech, as well as to producer Sam Zimbalist who died a year before the film’s debut.
No controversies surrounded Rozsa’s Oscar for his monumental score, however, one of the greatest orchestral soundtracks ever written. It’s a tradition on this date to highlight a cue from this all-time favorite film. After all, it’s my birthday!
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