Craig Safan

Craig Safan was born in Los Angeles, son of an L.A. native Eugene Safan, who owned a downtown jewelry store. Safan’s father was a B17 bomber pilot during World War II who met his mother, Betty Torchin, in Laredo, Texas while stationed there at the Army Air Force Base. She was a piano virtuoso who had studied at the Cleveland Conservatory.

After this experiential background in jazz, Safan found his way into classical music indirectly. "I never studied the classics," he said. "The first piece of classical music I ever studied was Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and that was because I read about it in Leonard Bernstein's book The Joy of Music. So my musical education has been sort of backwards – Joplin to Gershwin to jazz to Stravinsky."

In recent years Safan has returned to composing for theater, though he remains active in scoring for film and television as his time allows. In 2005, he was asked if he would compose music to accompany some of the acts for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Safan accepted the challenge, immersing himself in the world of dare-devilry, superhuman stunts, and performing beasts, and he continued to compose music for the circus through its 2010 season.

Craig Safan won the ASCAP Film and Television Award for scoring a “Top TV Series” seven years in a row, 1988-1994, for Cheers. In 1991 he was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Music and Lyrics for the TV series Life Goes On (1989), shared with Mark Mueller (lyricist). In 2014 he was presented with the Basil Poledouris award for a Film Music Legend at International Film Festival of the Province of Córdoba in Spain.

Safan has also composed extensively for television, notably the hit sitcom Cheers (1982–93), which won for him numerous ASCAP awards for his music. He also scored occasional episodes of the TV anthology shows, Amazing Stories (1985–86) and the revived The New Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985) and The Twilight Zone (1985–86), Supercarrier (1988), the National Geographic Channel special Secrets of the Titanic (1986), and several fistfuls of made-for-TV movies in a number of genres, including Mission of the Shark: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis (1991), Terror on Track 9 (1992), and the Hallmark Hall of Fame film, A Season for Miracles (1999). All of these varied experiences precluded Safan’s being typecast in any one type of film. Safan’s style has often consisted of improvising as a form of composition that allowed him to quickly express himself to the visual story unfolding on the screen.[1]

He scored a number of independent action comedies like The Great Smokey Roadblock (1977), Acapulco Gold (1978), Corvette Summer (1978), Roller Boogie (1979) and the like: fast-paced youth-oriented films with much rhythmic vibe. It came as a change of pace to score a dark thriller like Fade To Black (1980). Initially the music was to have been done by Chris Stein, guitarist for the rock band Blondie, but a contract had never been finalized for him to do so, so Safan was brought in late in the process to provide the film’s score instead. Fade To Black would launch Safan’s most active period in film scoring, the era in which he would be known for a number of large scale action, thriller, and science fiction films, including such films as the atonal and aleatoric Wolfen (1981; after recording, the score was excised from the production along with original director Michael Wadleigh and a new score was composed by James Horner), the jazzy and noirish comedic thriller, Tag: The Assassination Game (1982), the sweeping orchestral spectacle of The Last Starfighter (1984, one of Safan’s finest scores), the swashbuckling adventure of Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985; Safan’s score mixed large orchestra with electronics and Korean instruments), a powerful electronic score from Synclavier for Warning Sign (1985), the Western science fiction TV-movie Timestalkers (1987), the purely electronic score for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988), the compelling and poignant music for Stand And Deliver (1988, also featuring Synclavier), and the sumptuous orchestral score for the 1991 TV Western docudrama about George Armstrong Custer, Son of the Morning Star (1991), and the effervescent, heartfelt, and occasionally zany scores for the popular comedies Major Payne (1995), Mr. Wrong (1996).

One assignment led to another. Writing the title music for California Reich, a 1975 documentary for Walter Parkes, led him to score a low-budget exploitation film called The Great Texas Dynamite Chase (1976), which began his long relationship with Michael Pressman, for whom he would score five more pictures through the 1990s. Meanwhile, he started studying film music and sought out the wisdom of Fred Steiner, Ernest Gold, and Elmer Bernstein. They, each in different ways, became his mentors.

Upon his graduation in 1970, Safan was awarded both "Best Drama" and "Best Music" awards from Brandeis. More significantly, he was awarded a Watson Foundation Fellowship which allowed him to live in London for a year and write music. During that time he mostly wrote pop songs and worked on musicals, his intentions still to become a songwriter.

Craig Safan was born on December 17, 1948 in Los Angeles, California, USA as Craig Alan Safan.