Little Shop of Horrors

This was our first foray into the world of movie-musicals; pre-dating “The Little Mermaid” by a few years. Howard and I wrote a new song for Audrey 2, called “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space”. And we rewrote “(Don’t It Go To Show) You Never Know” as “Some Fun Now”. Other than those songs, the entire score was from our Off-Broadway musical.

So it was quite a shock when our film’s “dramatic underscore” composer, Miles Goodman, received a Golden Globe “Best Musical Score” nomination for his 8 minutes of adaptation of my music. It turned out that, as the composer of a work that was presented first on the stage, I was ineligible for that honor. Thank God the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rectified that situation by nominating “Mean Green Mother”. We didn’t win. But we got our first taste of the Oscars. And I was determined that, in the future, whenever possible, I would compose the dramatic underscore for my own film musicals.