In the music industry, DIY is usually reserved for things like garage rock or hip-hop mixtapes, but back in 1985, a young musician and fledgling shop owner in California named Douglass Fake saw an opportunity to share his passion for film scores with fellow collectors. Gathering a group of investors together, he called composer Basil Poledouris out of the blue, to talk about "Red Dawn." The movie about a ragtag group of high school kids involved in guerilla warfare during a fictional World War III featured a rousing Americana-influenced score from Poledouris—and it wasn’t available anywhere.
"Red Dawn" became the first release from Intrada Records, now a boutique label specializing in high-quality, complete editions of soundtrack recordings from movies old and new. Intrada carries both popular favorites and lesser-known gems from famous film composers like John Williams, James Horner, and Jerry Goldsmith, who released 85 albums on Intrada.
Classic Hollywood scores made up the bulk of Intrada Records' output, but the company also released soundtracks from new movies too, like John Debney and Germaine Franco’s “Dora and the Lost City of Gold," or Michael Giacchino's "Tomorrowland."
In a world of streaming audio, Intrada Records continues to ship compact discs to untold numbers of music fans. Half of the label’s releases aren’t available on any streaming service, and to be honest, it’s unlikely they ever will be, making the discs valuable collector’s items.
Fans also value the attention to detail that Douglass Fake and his team gave to each release, including extensive liner notes about the making of the movies, the composers, the score, and even the production of the soundtrack itself, right down to the microphones used in the recording process.
Intrada soundtrack releases are thorough, including not only the orchestral underscore of the film, but source music (the songs or sounds that characters hear onscreen). Trekkies, for example, know that while Leonard Rosenman wrote a terrific Oscar-nominated score for "Star Trek IV," no soundtrack would be complete without the memorable punk rock pastiche heard in the film on a San Francisco bus by Spock and Kirk. Sure enough, "I Hate You" rounds out the Intrada Records edition of "Star Trek IV."
Special touches like that are what makes Intrada Records stand out—and what made Douglass Fake, who died on July 13 at age 72, the real deal.
