Three-time Academy Award-winning songwriter Marilyn Bergman (who just stepped down as the president of ASCAP) and her husband Anthony Bergman, have completed work with renowned stage and film composer Marvin Hamlisch (“Take the Money And Run,” “The Sting,” “Ordinary People”) on Steven Soderbergh’s black comedy, “The Informant,” starring Matt Damon that is due in theaters October 9.
She wrote the lyrics for Hamlisch’s songs to “The Way We Were” (which she shared an Oscar for) and won additional songwriting Academy Awards for “Yentl,” and “The Thomas Crown Affair.”
Is Soderbergh going to inject some ironic, grand ’70s pop melodrama into “The Informant”? Could be wickedly humorous if orchestrated subtly enough, but then again not underplayed either (modern audiences will have to surely readjust though). We haven’t heard grandiloquent teardrop-pop like this in movies for far too long, frankly. Hamlisch also co-wrote “Nobody Does It Better” for the 1977 James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me,” and we can all agree that song rules.
Meanwhile, at yesterday’s Congressional hearing in Van Nuys about illegal movie downloading, Soderbergh reportedly proposed a not-yet-passed French law project (nicknamed DADOPI) that would cut off an offender’s internet service after three warnings.
Here’s Barbara Striesand singing, “The Way We Were,” that was written by Hamlisch and the Bergmans.