Ronald Stein

For 12 years, from 1955 until 1967, Ronald Stein was a mainstay of the B-movie industry as the principal composer for the films of producer/director Roger Corman, and one of the regular composers for American International Pictures and Allied Artists. The son of a movie theater pianist from the silent era, Stein was born in St. Louis and educated at Washington University. He entered film music after a stint in the army during the early '50s. There were too many musicians and not enough work to go around in Hollywood during the mid-'50s, but Stein was fortunate enough to cross paths with Roger Corman, who was producing and directing low-budget films for American International Pictures and needed music for his latest feature, Apache Woman. Stein delivered a more-than-competent score in very short order and was signed to a five-year contract that immersed him in the world of B-movie production. Over the next decade, he became associated with low-budget sci-fi films (The Day the World Ended, It Conquered the World, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, and Attack of the Crab Monsters), horror films (The Undead, The She Creature, and The Haunted Palace), and teen exploitation titles like Hot Rod Gang, Runaway Daughter, and Reform School Hellcats. Stein occasionally worked on projects for other, bigger studios, such as Ted Post's (The Legend of Tom Dooley) at Columbia Pictures and Peter Bogdanovich's debut film, Targets for Paramount Pictures. He wrote more than 140 film scores between 1955 and 1970, some of them extraordinary in their effectiveness -- it could be argued, for example, that Stein's music was the essential final ingredient in making Corman's Attack of the Crab Monsters or Nathan Juran's Attack of the 50 Foot Woman work at all, despite their threadbare production values and brisk shooting schedules. His music and reputation advanced along with the films that he got to score, and by the end of the 1960s, he was writing the music for such films as Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People and Richard Rush's Getting Straight. After 1970, most of Stein's movie work was in film production rather than composing, and he spent the early '80s teaching at the University of Colorado in Denver.

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide