Irving Gertz

Irving Gertz was, for many years, a mainstay of Hollywood's music industry, composing music for more than 200 movies in a career spanning from the late '30s through the 1960s. Born in Providence, RI, he was a natural musician and recognized before his teens that he would have a career in music. He studied at the Providence College of Music and came of age at the dawn of the Golden Age of Hollywood film music -- he was later among the first arrivals to the film capital who could claim to have been influenced directly, as a young filmgoer, by the early work of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, and Alfred Newman. Getting established in Hollywood took some time, however; he initially impressed Columbia Pictures' management in New York, who referred him to studio president Harry Cohn in Hollywood, who hired him at the end of the 1930s. No sooner had he started to settle into work at the studio, however, than the war broke out, and Gertz spent the years 1942-1945 in the United States Army Signal Corps. After World War II, he was rehired by Columbia, first as a music advisor and music supervisor, then as a composer. His earliest composition credits date from 1947, in the studio's B-movie unit. He left Columbia in the late '40s and jumped to Universal Pictures after a stint with NBC radio. At Universal, Gertz became part of the studio's system of scoring by committee, writing portions of the scores of various movies to which he was assigned, which included genre classics such as It Came From Outer Space and The Incredible Shrinking Man, which became some of his most familiar work in the decades that followed (but which also contained music by Herman Stein, Henry Mancini, and others as well. Between work at Universal and scores for various independent producers, he was busy throughout the 1950s, and in 1960 he was hired by 20th Century Fox, where he spent the next dozen years as a composer and music supervisor, not only in feature films but also on various television series produced by the studio, including Land of the Giants. Since the 1980s, Gertz has concentrated primarily on writing music for the concert hall.

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide