MRH: The Root of Heaven, which you just released on Blu-ray, contains an isolated mono track of Malcolm Arnold’s score. Do most of the CinemaScope films that were exhibited in stereo and surround sound survive with stereo music stems, or is Roots an example of stereo master tapes that are no longer extant due to various circumstances?

NR: Fox certainly retains separate stereo music elements on most of their CinemaScope films, but oddly, in the cases of the "overseas" productions - where the music was not recorded in the US, like Roots of Heaven - only mono mix-downs or in some instances, nothing at all, remains.

MRH: Was Mysterious Island one of the titles that you’d always wanted to release?

NR: Not really. Again, Grover will say ‘Do you have any interest in…’ For example, that’s how we got Fright Night. I never would’ve thought of Fright Night in a million years. They simply said ‘Look, have you heard of this movie? A remake has just come out and we just did a real nice beautiful Blu-ray transfer of it, but the studio decided that it wasn’t interested in releasing it, so would you like to do it?’

MRH: That’s really fascinating, because it is a huge cult favourite-

NR: As I have subsequently found out. I didn’t know that, and in fact I had never seen the film prior to getting involved in releasing it. I called a couple of sci-fi and horror nuts that I know, and they said ‘Oh my God, Fright Night is one of the most beloved films of the eighties. You have to put that out.’ So we did it based on that.

A lot of the scuttlebutt on the message boards is like ‘How come this crappy label TT is putting out this wonderful film? Why isn’t Sony doing it? ’ Well the truth is Sony isn’t doing most of their catalogue films, just as every other studio isn’t doing most of its catalogue films.

MRH: For you, does part of the learning curve as a home video producer include reading comments from message boards or discussions?

NR: I’d like to say yes but I think the truth is really no… If three people write you and say ‘You must put out (fill in the blank title)’, what those three people that are passionate about a film don’t realize is that they would be the three people that would buy it.

Even with something like the Fright Night Blu-ray, the message boards are agog with the fact that Sony is ‘crazy’that they’re not doing it themselves, yet if Sony did it and had spent the money to release it and market it and then ship 50,000-100,000 units or more than that, they would find that 90,000 of those units would be back in their warehouse in 6 months time.

We haven’t sold out of the 3,000 units yet (and I didn’t expect it to) but the message board people would then say ‘It’s pretty amazing that this rinky-dink outfit hasn’t sold the 3,000 copies,’ and then it becomes our fault that we didn’t sell them, or it’s too expensive, or it doesn’t have any extras, or any other fill-in-the-blank reason why people don’t buy it. They just can’t accept the actual truth, which is there aren’t many people who do want these things, and that is the sad reality of the business that we’re in.

[Editor’s note: Fright Night is now the label’s first sold out title.]

MRH: That’s one of the things I’ve noticed when discussing issues of sales with other soundtrack producers. Sometimes I’m just stunned when they’ll say ‘Well, we haven’t sold that many,’ and I’ll wonder how the heck is that possible?

When Kritzerland, for example, releases 1,000 copies of a title by an A-list composer, you’d think there has to be 1,000 people that would want this; or 500 people that would want a never-before released Ennio Morricone score via an Italian label, or some of the amazing composers represented by Film Score Monthly [FSM], and yet there are titles still listed by vendors as ‘for sale,’ with large stocks on the shelves. I find that baffling because maybe 10 years ago, it would’ve been very different.

NR: I’ll give you an absolute cast-iron example. As recently as say 1991 – that was 20 years ago – it was impossible to get a deal with studios to release catalogue soundtracks, because at that time the re-use payment which was mandated by the American Federation of Musicians made it financially impossible: you would’ve basically had to have paid $50,000 in re-use payments to release any soundtrack that FSM has put out in the last 15 years; not one of them would’ve been possible just 5 years earlier.

Fox was the first studio to have the foresight to say ‘We have all of these wonderful catalogue soundtracks that were never released – ever – so can we put them on CD?’ which is what they originally hired me to do back in 1993.

We started doing it at that time on Fox’s own label, which was distributed through and by Arista. It was part of a big distribution machine, so the cost of doing it could be offset against a certain number of things, but by the time 1995-1996 rolled around and Arista wasn’t as interested in doing those things anymore, Fox decided to let go its own record label and its regular record label staff. I stayed on because I was a consultant, and we tried to figure out with Fox Music’s business affairs, how could we keep it going when the demand for the music was so low, but the price for doing the music was so high.

So, working in conjunction with FSM, I said to [label owner / magazine publisher Lukas Kendall] ‘What if we distributed Fox CDs just through your magazine and we go to the union and we call it ‘the magazine rate?’ They become limited editions, 3,000 units only, they’re sold as part of the subscription to your magazine.’

On that basis, Fox Music business affairs people went to the union, and the union agreed for the first time that they would allow what they then started to refer to as ‘the magazine rate’ which was effective for limited editions, and Fox started releasing a bunch of its titles through the auspices of FSM.

Now, you may have noticed recently that Lukas has decided that he was going to close down his label, and has recently been writing on his website the history of every CD that he put out. He talks about how many were pressed and how many were sold and how many are left, and that shows you that right back in the mid- to late-nineties, 3,000 units for most catalogue soundtracks was too high a number.

We decided on 3,000 because we thought ‘Hell, we’re talking about world-wide. Is there 3,000 people in the world that would support basically a good percentage of catalogue soundtrack releases?’ and we found over the years that mostly to be untrue. Now how shocking is that? There are not 3,000 people in the world that would buy a catalogue soundtrack, or most catalogue soundtracks.

MRH: There have been some cult titles that were expected to sell out, or by complete surprise, sold out in a matter of days.

NR: For every Predator that sold out in 24 hours or every Commando, there’s a Lust for Life by Miklos Rozsa that will sit there for 20 years and not sell at all, and it’s horrible to think that today.

I love the music of Alfred Newman; for me he’s like a personal odyssey, and every time I convince one of our little record labels to go with an Alfred Newman title, I know I am shooting them in the foot because I know Alfred Newman won’t sell at all. And he doesn’t, and nor does David Raksin, and nor does a number of other people.