Features

Douglass Fake, a film score champion who produced hundreds of archival soundtrack releases and reissues as the founder of Intrada Records, has died at 72 after an extended illness.

There is no better primer on his life and work than can be read at the label’s official site, courtesy of Joe Sikoryak, one of the label’s longtime designers. When anyone of note passes away, and that outpouring of condolences and memories flows like a river, it can be easy to take a step back and investigate the way we react. It’s easy to make such tributes about the writer as much as the person they are memorializing, and while there’s often a knee-jerk reaction to that, I think it’s a crucial process to how we process loss. I write all that to ask your indulgence as I share one small but heartfelt story about Doug.

When The Second Disc started in 2010, I wanted us to cover as broad a base of genres and styles of catalogue music as we could. Even before pop, classic rock and R&B – let alone genres I’ve only explored more deeply since immersing myself in music archiving, from country to jazz and hip-hop – soundtracks were my first great love. There is a passionate community of those fans on the Internet, likely because score enthusiasts are (said with absolute adoration and as much self-awareness as possible) absolute nerds. That passion and attention to detail plays itself out in hearing the music that moves us onscreen, even under layers of dialogue and sound effects, and we are quite lucky that so many labels exist – harmoniously, even! – to stoke that passion with boutique releases of film music.

One of my goals with this site, in championing those other genres, was to do whatever I could to inform people who’d not yet discovered labels like Intrada (or La-La Land, or Varese Sarabande) what magic they were capable of releasing – to try to make that community of enthusiasts a little bigger. Just months before I built the earliest WordPress version of this site, Intrada had made me a fan for life with their debut release of Alan Silvestri’s score to Back to the Future. The previous summer, I’d interned at Universal Music Group’s catalog label UMe, and had heard from someone in business affairs that a release of BTTF was on the table, likely within the year – but I’d not expected it to come so soon, and I joyously bought myself a copy.

With the brio of youth, I then fired off an excited e-mail to Intrada’s main address thanking them for making so many score fans happy with this release. I was shocked to receive kind responses from both Doug and one of the label’s other driving forces, Roger Feigelson, expressing gratitude for and encouragement of my enthusiasm. Without such thoughtful responses, it is entirely possible that The Second Disc might not exist in quite the same way; it helped push me to do what I could to spotlight the people putting in the work on music preservation and restoration.

And what work it was. Over the last 15 years, Intrada has reissued and expanded scores to (simply alphabetically from my shelves) Alien, An American Tail, Dick Tracy, The Eiger Sanction, JAWS and its sequels, King Kong Lives, Monsignor, Predator, Psycho II, The River, Rocky IV, SpaceCamp, Toy Story 3, Up, War of the Worlds, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Willow, not to mention countless others, from First Blood to The Ten Commandments. In a business like soundtrack licensing, where working with labels and film studios in concert looks and feels like a herculean effort, to see just that small fraction of his work written out is impressive.

But, in grieving a loss, it’s less about what a person did and more about who they were. For Douglass Fake to have shown that kindness is as clear an example of who he was as one can imagine – and it’s one of many reasons The Second Disc team is keeping Doug, his family and friends in our hearts today.