Fear is a problem with film music and films; people want to be conventional, and there's more commercialism today. If you are not daring in your art, you're bankrupt.

North reused themes from the rejected score for The Shoes of the FiAlex Northrman Shanks (1974) and Dragonslayer but the score itself was unheard until composer Jerry Goldsmith rerecorded it for Varèse Sarabande in 1993. It was in New York that he met Elia Kazan (director of Salesman) who brought him to Hollywood in the '50s. His commissioned score for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is notorious for having been discarded by director Stanley Kubrick.

Alex North (December 4 1910 – September 8 1991) was an American composer who wrote the first jazz-based film score (A Streetcar Named Desire) and one of the first modernist scores written in Hollywood (Viva Zapata!).