I can forgive George Lucas for all of his late epic Star Wars prequels only because, only afterwards, did Lucas revisit his first film, the minimalist dystopia, THX -1138 (1971), correcting the audio artifacts that plagued the earlier video releases and making the soundtrack available on the DVD as a standalone special feature. (The soundtrack is also available independently on CD.)

If you’ve seen any of the original Mission Impossible episodes or seen Cool Hand Luke then you’ve heard Lalo Schifrin’s incredible jazzy scores and sensitivity to the director’s vision. For THX -1138, it is obvious that Schifrin was paying attention to the work of Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, Carlos’ teacher Vladimir Ussachevsky, and the plethora of sound explorers and music geeks pioneering the advent of electronic music and noise in the late 60s and 70s. Before this film, I had no idea Schifrin had dipped his toe in these (now) deep waters.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“THX-1138” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.