James Lee Stanley

Years ago, I became acquainted with a remarkable talented and delightful person who wrote a national comic strip.   She came to my shows and was enormously supportive.   She told me that if she ever had an opportunity to help me, she would.  

Needless to say, we’ve all heard that before but this time was different.  She was as good as her word, and hired me to score her Prime Time CBS TV Special “Cathy”.

I had never scored a TV show before but her confidence in me was inspiring and I did the show.   It won an Emmy and I went on to score the other two Cathy Specials as well.

From the success of those TV Specials, I secured the services of a neophyte film agent.   She was delightful and aggressive and I thought I was on my way.

That’s when I found out that there at ten million people in Los Angeles waiting for a chance to score anything.   Competition is more than fierce.  There are seriously talented people who will score a show for free, just for the chance.

We had, needless to say,  little success securing me another scoring gig, but after a while, she asked me to watch a variety show called the Tracey Ullman Show.

It seems that there was a little five minute cartoon on that show that Fox was taking to its own spot as a thirty minute animated series.

I explained to my agent that I had no interest in becoming a guy who just scored cartoons, but she persisted and finally, just before the deadline, I half hearted put something together just to placate the agent.   I really didn’t see where this could go anywhere.

The gig was landed by a fellow named Danny Elfman  (http://elfman.filmmusic.com/),  the series was called The Simpsons. (www.thesimpsons.com/)

The lesson here is that you never know what a real opportunity is, so you do the very best you can everytime you get a chance.   I am not saying that I could have or would have aced Danny Elfman for that gig, but we’ll never know will we?