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 Mark Adler brings to his work as a composer a broad background in both film and music. At age 16 he created an award-winning animated short, which the New York Museum of Modern Art acquired for its permanent archive collection. A year later, he was the recipient of an American Film Institute grant for his original screenplay. He studied piano privately for fifteen years, and was initially a music major. His return to music followed graduation from film school at UCLA, where he studied film scoring with David Raksin. In the late 1970s and early '80s, Mark played keyboards for a number of groups in Northern California, including a stint with the Heart of Gold Band, fronted by former Grateful Dead vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux.
The 1980s were a renaissance for documentary film in the San Francisco Bay Area and Mark was soon scoring many of those projects. During this time, he also worked briefly as a music editor for such directors as Milos Forman, David Lynch, and Francis Ford Coppola. (His music editing credits include "Amadeus," "Blue Velvet," and "Godfather III").
Mark's feature film scores include Paramount Classics' "Focus," based on the novel by Arthur Miller and starring William H. Macy and Laura Dern, with the soundtrack released by Milan Records. He has been a regular at the Sundance Film Festival, having scored ten Sundance films over the years. These include the Miramax film "Picture Bride," which won the Audience Award in 1995. His soundtrack for that film was released by Virgin Records and the Main Title was featured in the 1997 compilation, "Miramax Films Greatest Hits." Other credits include the Wayne Wang films "Eat A Bowl of Tea" and "Life Is Cheap," numerous National Geographic Specials, and three Oscar-nominated feature documentaries. Recent feature projects include "Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School," featuring Robert Carlyle, Marisa Tomei, John Goodman, and Mary Steenburgen. He just completed the score for "Bottle Shock," starring Alan Rickman, Chris Pine, Bill Pullman, Rachael Taylor and Freddy Rodriguez.
In 1999 he won a Primetime Emmy for his work on HBO's "The Rat Pack," which featured Ray Liotta, Joe Mantegna and Don Cheadle. Other TV movie scores include Hallmark Entertainment's "Forbidden Territory: Stanley's Search for Livingstone," starring Aidan Quinn and Nigel Hawthorne (for which he received a 1998 Primetime Emmy nomination), "Flowers For Algernon" starring Mathew Modine, and two Hallmark Hall of Fame productions. In 2000 he composed the new theme for the long-running PBS series, "American Experience."
He also wrote and produced source music for the Philip Kaufman films "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," and "Henry and June," and was involved as a producer in the recreation of indigenous Brazilian music for the Saul Zaentz production "At Play in the Fields of the Lord." He composed original music for "The Road To Memphis," directed by Richard Pearce as part of the Martin Scorsese-produced series, "The Blues." This range of experience has resulted in an eclectic musical style, often drawing on jazz, folk, world music, and traditional orchestral idioms.
Mark was co-chairman of the 2002 Film and Television Music State of the Art Conference, and is a vice-president of the Society of Composers and Lyricists. He is a past member of the Music Peer Group Executive Committee of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and he currently serves on the National Awards Committee. As a performer, he can be heard playing piano on his scores for "Eat A Bowl of Tea?," "Picture Bride," "Focus," and "Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing and Charm School."
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