{"id":10262,"date":"2022-01-08T20:12:49","date_gmt":"2022-01-08T20:12:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10262"},"modified":"2022-02-02T16:30:32","modified_gmt":"2022-02-02T16:30:32","slug":"windmills-and-fields-in-the-thomas-crown-affair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10262","title":{"rendered":"‘Windmills’ and ‘Fields’ in ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 Lyricists Marilyn Bergman, who died today aged 93, and her husband Alan Bergman won the best-song Oscar in 1969 with Michel Legrand for \u2018Windmills of Your Mind\u2019 from \u2018The Thomas Crown Affair\u2019 but they owed a debt to the Beatles.<\/p>\n

Norman Jewison, the Canadian filmmaker who directed the picture, told me he had used the Beatles\u2019 \u2018Strawberry Fields\u2019 as a temp track for the glider scene with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. \u2019There\u2019s something repetitious about the song,\u2019 he noted. \u2018I said \u201cI need something like this\u201d. That\u2019s when Michel wrote this strange piece and the Bergmans came up with \u2018Round, like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel\u2019 and it was all inspired by \u201cStrawberry Fields\u201d.\u2019<\/p>\n

Alan and Marilyn Bergman also won an Oscar for writing the lyrics to the title track from \u2018The Way We Were\u2019 with Marvin Hamlisch. In 2004, Beatles producer George Martin presented them with a lifetime achievement award at the World Soundtrack Awards in Gent. The WSA\u2019s Marian Ponnet noted, \u2018It\u2019s a very tough task to write a really brilliant song and they have mastered the element of simplicity that moves the heart.\u2019<\/p>\n

Marilyn Bergman, then president and chairman of ASCAP, thanked the many composers and filmmakers the pair had collaborated with naming Sydney Pollack, Mark Rydell, Barbra Streisand and Norman Jewison. Alan Bergman made the evening especially memorable when he performed their two Oscar-winning songs as scenes from the films screened behind him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 Lyricists Marilyn Bergman, who died today aged 93, and her husband Alan Bergman won the best-song Oscar in 1969 with Michel Legrand for \u2018Windmills of Your Mind\u2019 from \u2018The Thomas Crown Affair\u2019 but they owed … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,1263,8,2257],"tags":[5160,3215,3216,3212,2732,5161,2217,3747,3213,842,872,1585,1129,1248],"class_list":["post-10262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-music","category-recalling","tag-strawberry-fields","tag-the-thomas-crown-affair","tag-windmills-of-your-mind","tag-alan-bergman","tag-beatles","tag-faye-dunawaye","tag-gent","tag-marian-ponnet","tag-marilyn-bergman","tag-marvin-hamlisch","tag-michel-legrand","tag-norman-jewison","tag-steve-mcqueen","tag-world-soundtrack-awards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10262"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10276,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10262\/revisions\/10276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}