LOS ANGELES – Composer Graeme Revell will be honored as the Richard Kirk Award recipient at the 2005 BMI Film/TV Dinner to be held Wednesday, May 18 at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. The award is given annually to a composer for his outstanding work and contributions in motion picture and television music. The event will be a black-tie, invitation-only dinner that will also honor the composers of the top-grossing films of the past twelve months as well as the top-rated prime-time network television series and cable programs. BMI’s President & CEO Del Bryant will host the awards dinner with BMI’s Vice President, Film/TV Music, Doreen Ringer Ross.
Revell, a New Zealand native who’s known for the blending of traditional ethnic music and ambient sounds such as New Age effects, ghostly vocals and tribal percussion, most recently scored “The Hard Goodbye” vignette in director Robert Rodriguez’s “Sin City.” His composing and ominous percussive film noir score fuels Mickey Rourke’s frenzy of vengeance in that segment of “Sin City.”
Revell started his scoring career after picking up on rhythms in patient vocalizations at an Australian hospital for the mentally ill, where he was working as an orderly. His experiments with recordings of human and insect sounds and industrial machinery led him to create the early industrial band SPK. Their cinematic theatrics, featuring slides and films of surgery and the use of flame-throwers and oil drums, convinced directors George Miller and Philip Noyce to employ him on “Dead Calm,” for which he won an Australian Film Industry Award for Best Score. His unique style has been responsible for the riveting atmosphere of some of Hollywood’s most tense thrillers, such as “Open Water,” and “The Negotiator,” darkest dramas including “The Crow,” “Blow” and “The Insider,” and exhilarating actioners like “Collateral Damage,” “Chronicles of Riddick” and “Pitch Black.” Graeme Revell worked in the swashbuckling style of Korngold and Williams on Robert Rodriguez’s “From Dusk Till Dawn” and he has furthermore proven an aptitude at scoring big budget blockbusters, with “Spawn,” “Daredevil,” and “Tomb Raider.” Proving his sound can successfully cross both genres and platforms, Revell’s mixture of melody and sound design was instrumental in setting the mood for the first season of “CSI: Miami.”
The BMI award for Outstanding Career Achievement is named after past BMI Vice President Richard Kirk. Past recipients of the award include John Barry, Randy Edelman, Danny Elfman, Charlie Fox, Jerry Goldsmith, Earle Hagen, Michael Kamen, Alan Menken, Mark Mothersbaugh, Thomas Newman, Mike Post, Lalo Schifrin, Alan Silvestri, Richard and Robert Sherman, W.G. “Snuffy” Walden, John Williams, Patrick Williams and Hans Zimmer.
BMI, founded in 1939, is an American performing rights organization that represents approximately 300,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers in all genres of music. Through its music performance and reciprocal agreements, it grants businesses and media access to its repertoire of approximately 4.5 million musical works from around the world.