- Born
- Died
- Birth nameLouis Ronald Stein
- Nicknames
- Ronnie
- Leonard Morand
- Composer, conductor, pianist and author Ronald Stein was educated at Washington University (BA), the Yale School of Music and the University of Southern California. In college he wrote musical shows. He was named the assistant musical director for the St. Louis Municipal Opera in 1950, 1951 and 1954. He served in the US Army Special Services at Fort Dix, NJ, from 1952-1954. Reurning home, he became the piano soloist for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1955. From that year to 1959 he was the music director of American-International Pictures, and in 1964 became the associate musical director for Phoenix Star. He joined ASCAP in 1956 and his popular compositions include "Raymie"; "Mexico City"; "Romantic Idyll"; and "The Garden", plus the film themes for Dime with a Halo (1963), The Littlest Hobo (1958) and Of Love and Desire (1963).- IMDb Mini Biography By: Hup234! (qv's & corrections by A. Nonymous)
- Spouse
- Children
- At mid-century as a young hopeful film composer, he wrote to the music department heads at the film studios in search of advice or suggestions. He received only one reply, and that from Lionel Newman at 20th Century-Fox, who said simply: "Don't come.".
- He and Les Baxter were staff composers at American-International Pictures for several years, but never actually met, according to Baxter in a 1981 interview. Eight AIP movies had co-scores by Stein and Baxter.
- Gave Francis Ford Coppola tuba lessons.
- An alumnus of Washington University in St. Louis, MO.
- His son is Victor Warren, an actor/writer/director.
- I treated every project that I've ever worked on--and some of them have been fairly miserable--with the greatest of respect. My question to myself, always, in any work I've done, was that my contribution had to be equal to or greater than anyone else's individual contribution. That's always been the way I've approached it. This is also the way I treated it, budget-wise: never wasting money, even if I wasn't paying for it. I treated it with a great deal of respect, first of all because the medium, to me, deserved it; and secondly, because the cooperation of all the people involved in order to get a film mounted is important.
- I usually go to the theater to see the films that I've scored just to see if what I've accomplished came out the way it should be for the effect on the audience. The first night The Haunted Palace (1963) came out, I went to a small theater on Hollywood Boulevard, and I was sitting toward the back, and in front of me was sitting a little girl and what looked like her parents on either side. And I don't know if there was too much theme, but about the last time Vincent Price walks down the hall and while he was doing that the theme came in again . . . to me, like a classic Frankenstein (1931) type of romantic theme, with Tchaikovskian overtones . . . and there's no dialogue, and it's about the third time you've heard that theme, and the little girl said out loud, "Oh, that music!" Well, that made my evening because she meant it in a kind of excruciatingly electrifying or exotic way.
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