When I decided to go to a country that subsidized music, I went to the Soviet Union for two years.

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!).