Best Clint Worthington Podcasts (2025)

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#75: Trading Paint/Running with the Devil 50:16

Play Pause

1y ago50:16

50:16

Nathan and Clint return after another short hiatus to break down another two-fer of VOD dreck -- first with Travolta's slow-moving racing drama Trading Paint, then with Cage's gonzo Tarantino/Guy Ritchie drug-biz knockoff Running with the Devil! Pledge to our Patreon at patreon.com/travoltacage Follow us on Twitter @travoltacage Email us questions …

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Jay Wadley (Franklin) 41:13

1y ago41:13

41:13

When last we spoke to composer Jay Wadley, he'd just finished scoring the mercurial Charlie Kaufman film I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Four years and a million projects later, the Charles Ives Award-winning composer (and co-founder of music production house Found Objects, with previous guest Trevor Gureckis) has been keeping busy, from films like …

1
Mike Post (Law & Order, Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta) 39:40

1y ago39:40

39:40

This week, I talk to legendary TV composer Mike Post about everything from the Law and Order dun-dun to his original album of musical suites. If you've had a TV turned to a network station anytime in the last forty years, you've heard Mike Post's music. A stalwart in the TV scoring game, he is the voice of so many police and law procedurals, from T…

1
#74: Speed Kills/A Score to Settle 44:54

1y ago44:54

44:54

This week, Nathan and Clint dig back into the classic mold of Travolta/Cage double features -- unfortunately, it's for more late-aughts VOD dreck. First up is Speed Kills, a Dollar Tree Casino riff starring John Travolta as a fictionalized version of speedboat manufacturer and mobbed-up multimillionaire Donald Aronow (here "Ben Aronoff"). It looks …

1
#73: Color Out of Space 45:37

1+ y ago45:37

45:37

This week, Nathan and Clint stare into some glowy rocks for a single serving of Cage in Richard Stanley's Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space! Serving as a spiritual followup to Mandy (with its cosmic-horror stylings and full-on Rage Cage moments), Color Out of Space puts Cage in another tale of rural tranquility disrupted by neon-tinted raving…

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Vince Pope (True Detective: Night Country) 30:02

1+ y ago30:02

30:02

This week's guest is RTS winning and BAFTA-nominated composer Vince Pope, a London-based composer who cut his teeth on scores ranging from Misfits to episodes of Black Mirror. But his most exciting collaborations of late have been those with filmmaker Issa Lopez, starting with her 2017 magical-realist horror film Tigers Are Not Afraid. Now, the pai…

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#72: Inconceivable/Looking Glass 48:22

1+ y ago48:22

48:22

This week, Cage plays two flavors of bad husband in a pair of VOD-ready erotic thrillers! First, we cover the Gina Gershon-starring Inconceivable, an overamped Lifetime movie about a crazy mommy (Nicky Whelan) who cozies up to a well-to-do couple (Gershon, Nicolas Cage) whose IVF-born child just so happens to be from her egg. Hitchcockian antics en…

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Carlos Rafael Rivera (Griselda, Monsieur Spade) 41:43

1+ y ago41:43

41:43

Grammy- and two-time Emmy-winning composer Carlos Rafael Rivera has spent the last decade building moody, complex musical worlds around complicated characters. His earliest prominent work was with regular collaborator Scott Frank on films like A Walk Among the Tombstones, and the Netflix miniseries Godless. But it was his mercurial work on Frank's …

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#71: 211/Between Worlds 43:28

1+ y ago43:28

43:28

This week, we're back to the unfortunate Nic Cage double features -- this time with our boy Nicolas on either side of the law! First, there's the staggeringly sloppy cop thriller 211, in which Cage plays an aging cop who teams up with his fresh-faced rookie son-in-law and a teenage ridealong to thwart a four-man bank robbery in Massachusetts. It's …

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Anthony Willis (Saltburn) 34:57

1+ y ago34:57

34:57

This week, we're catching up with one of the Oscar-shortlisted Best Score nominees -- Anthony Willis' score to Emerald Fennell's lavish, mysterious thriller Saltburn. Fennell's second directorial feature, after Promising Young Woman, is a kind of Brideshead Revisited by way of Tom Ripley and mid-2000s party culture: A mysterious young bloke named O…

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#70: Mandy/Gotti (with Jordan Morris) 1:07:11

1+ y ago1:07:11

1:07:11

This week, Jordan Morris (Jordan Jesse Go!) returns to the pod for a seminal moment for both our boys -- a 2018 that saw Nic Cage rise from the VOD ashes to enter a new era of cult acclaim, and John Travolta take his biggest swing-and-a-miss yet! First, there's Panos Cosmatos' Mandy, a trippy bit of horror-fantasy psychedelia in which a logger (Cag…

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Dave Porter (Echo) 32:21

1+ y ago32:21

32:21

For nearly fifteen years, composer Dave Porter has been the musical voice of the Breaking Bad universe -- having scored every season of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and the film El Camino for good measure. Now, he plies his penchant for atmospheric, guitar-driven thrills to the MCU, with the new Disney+ series, Echo. A spinoff of Hawkeye, Echo h…

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Paul Leonard-Morgan (The Pigeon Tunnel) 35:31

1+ y ago35:31

35:31

This podcast has had a long and fruitful relationship with composer Paul Leonard-Morgan, the man behind the scores of films like Dredd and Limitless, among countless others. But two commonalities have permeated the scores he's discussed with me: Errol Morris and Philip Glass. For the former, he teamed up to score Amazon's Tales from the Loop; for t…

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#69: American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson 48:46

1+ y ago48:46

48:46

Happy new year, boys and ghouls! Our first episode of 2024 (and the first after a bit of a hiatus) finally puts the spotlight back on Travolta after a string of Cage double-features and Johnny T failures. Blessedly, the television gods granted him the kind of role his 2010s VOD output could not: His mannered, theatrical turn as OJ Simpson lawyer Ro…

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Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (All of Us Strangers) 26:44

1+ y ago26:44

26:44

This week, we're joined by Ivor Novello and BIFA-nominated composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, a Paris-born artist who has made quite the name for herself in the last few years. Getting her start building scores for friends in film school who needed music for their short films, Emilie quickly cut her teeth on films like 2018's Only You and 2019's …

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Mark Sonnenblick, James McAlister (Theater Camp) 46:17

1+ y ago46:17

46:17

As we've seen this year, and my interview with the songwriters behind Dicks: The Musical some weeks back, 2023 has been a surprisingly solid year for original musicals. But as the year draws to a close, I wanted to highlight one of my favorite films I saw this year, all the way back at Sundance: Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman's Theater Camp. Set i…

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Mac Quayle (Leave the World Behind) 27:41

1+ y ago27:41

27:41

This week, we talk to composer Mac Quayle, who burst onto the scene in 2015 with his Emmy-winning score to Sam Esmail's mysterious, genre-bending series Mr. Robot. Since then, he's enjoyed healthy collaborations with Esmail and fellow showrunner Ryan Murphy, for whom he's scored everything from American Horror Story and Pose to 9-1-1. For his lates…

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Jerskin Fendrix (Poor Things) 29:50

1+ y ago29:50

29:50

This week, I'm thrilled to talk to English musician and nascent film score composer Jerskin Fendrix about his score to the wacky, surreal, oddly poignant new film from Yorgos Lanthimos: Poor Things. Starring Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, the creation of Frankenstein-ian scientist Godwin Baxter (played by Willem Dafoe), the film delves into her ongoin…

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James Newton Howard (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Night After Night, All the Light We Cannot See) 32:31

1+ y ago32:31

32:31

This week's guest is an Emmy winner, a Grammy winner, and a nine-time Oscar nominee, whose scores have graced the big and small screens since the 1980s. James Newton Howard is the voice of many of your favorite scores, from co-scoring the Dark Knight Trilogy with Hans Zimmer to his Oscar-nominated score for Paul Greengrass' News of the World. Now, …

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#68: Mom and Dad/The Humanity Bureau 43:59

1+ y ago43:59

43:59

Nic Cage plays sad dad figures of children (or child figures) facing the threat of violence this week! First up is The Humanity Bureau, another piping hot cup of Redbox dreck with Cage as a renegade agent for a dystopian future agency meant to track the populace's productivity on a dying Earth. Unfortunately, that mostly takes the shape of shoddy g…

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Marius de Vries, Karl Saint Lucy (Dicks: The Musical) 31:18

1+ y ago31:18

31:18

Sometimes, the dumbest things are the most delightful -- and that's certainly the case with A24's riotous new musical, Dicks: The Musical. A tongue-in-cheek (and other places) song-and-dance comedy, Dicks: The Musical started out as an hourlong show at the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York City, written by and starring Josh Sharp and Aaron Jacks…

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#67: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse / Teen Titans GO! To the Movies (with Alonso Duralde) 54:00

1+ y ago54:00

54:00

This week, we take a break from the DTV dreck to get a little more...animated, let's say, with a pair of charming animated Nic Cage jaunts into the world of superheroes! And we've got our trusty sidekick, Alonso Duralde (Linoleum Knife), to join us on this crime-fighting crusade! First up is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Peter Ramsey, Bob Pers…

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Yair Elazar Glotman (Reptile) 29:07

1+ y ago29:07

29:07

This week, we speak to composer Yair Elazar Glotman about his score for the latest prestige thriller from Netflix, Reptile, a stylish neo-noir starring Benicio Del Toro as a mercurial detective looking into the murder of a real estate agent. Everyone's a suspect, from the victim's boyfriend (Justin Timberlake) to the creepy guy down the street (pla…

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#66: I Am Wrath / Vengeance: A Love Story 42:59

1+ y ago42:59

42:59

This week, Travolta and Cage go down the revenge rabbit hole (again) in two Cage-produced schlockfests centered on middle-aged men with bad wigs and leather jackets shooting people in the face. Go figure! First is I AM WRATH, a low-budget JOHN WICK riff that was originally meant to pair Cage with director William Friedkin! Instead, we drew the shor…

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Dascha Dauenhauer (Golda) 21:53

2y ago21:53

21:53

Historical biopics of famous leaders are a very familiar genre at this point: Great Men (or in this case, Women) of history navigating war or struggle or controversy with the stiff-upper-lip resolve history has granted to them. Guy Nattiv's Golda is certainly no exception, though it innovates not just with its presentation, but with its subject: Is…

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#65: In a Valley of Violence / Arsenal 48:34

2y ago48:34

48:34

This week, Travolta returns to the fold.... in a good movie this time?! Nathan and Clint break down two tales of violence and revenge, both throwbacks in their own way: one to the spaghetti Westerns of the '60s and '70s, the other to, I guess, Deadfall? First up is Arsenal, a chintzy DTV Cage vehicle with a twist: this time, apropos of nothing, he'…

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John Powell (Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie) 23:45

2y ago23:45

23:45

Composer John Powell has been composing film scores since 1997; whether it's How to Train Your Dragon, The Bourne Identity, or Solo: A Star Wars Story, you've likely heard and loved at least one of his scores. He earned an Academy Award nomination in 2010 for the epic, uplifting sweep of How to Train Your Dragon, and has three Grammy nominations fo…

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#64: USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage / Army of One (with Abby Olcese) 53:19

2y ago53:19

53:19

This week, The Pitch's Abby Olcese joins us for two Nic Cage-fronted true stories of dubious execution! First up is Larry Charles' Army of One, a grating retelling of the real-life tale of Gary Faulkner (Cage), who was arrested in Pakistan hatching a plot to kill Osama bin Laden in 2010, all for 'Murica. In theory, it could be a neat little dramedy…

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Tune-Yards (I'm a Virgo) 39:35

2y ago39:35

39:35

Ever since his 2018 feature debut Sorry to Bother You, Oakland-based musician Boots Riley (of The Coup) has built a reputation as one of our most imaginative, socially-minded filmmakers, combining abject surrealism with biting commentary on the complex interweavings of race and capitalism in American life. (With a healthy dose of absurd comedy, of …

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#63: Criminal Activities / Snowden (with Matt Goldberg) 53:21

2y ago53:21

53:21

This week, Matt Goldberg (formerly of Turner Classic Movies, currently of the Substack Commentary Track) joins us for the mighty return of... gasp.... John Travolta in a good role? First, we cover Jackie Earle Haley's directorial debut, Criminal Activities, a messy but ultimately interesting Tarantino riff in which a group of down-and-out high scho…

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Ian Hultquist (The Walking Dead: Dead City) 40:13

2y ago40:13

40:13

Much like the zombies that infest its world, the Walking Dead franchise simply refuses to die. With Dead City, the shambling hordes make their way to the island of Manhattan, an urban hellscape now infested with the remnants of a dead civilization. And in the middle, two of the original Walking Dead's main characters, Maggie (Lauren Cohen) and Nega…

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Jongnic Bontemps (Transformers: Rise of the Beasts) 41:19

2y ago41:19

41:19

Veteran composer Jongnic "JB" Bontemps took a long and winding road to film scoring. Despite showing an early passion for scoring (and studying music at Yale), he didn't immediately enter that world. Instead, he sought a tech career, becoming a software developer and entrepreneur. But music came calling again, and JB found himself studying film sco…

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#62: The Trust/Dog Eat Dog 49:43

2y ago49:43

49:43

This week, Nathan and Clint are pleasantly surprised to find two non-stinkers in Cage's 2010s output! First, there's The Trust, a darkly-comic heist thriller about two amoral cops (A mustachioed Nicolas Cage alongside a wiry, disaffected Elijah Wood) who plot to steal a mysterious stash from unknown criminals, only to find themselves wayyy in over …

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Daniel Pemberton (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) 33:41

2y ago33:41

33:41

In a relatively grim year for superhero movies, both critically and at the box office, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is blissfully bucking that trend. Building off the dizzying, kaleidoscopic animation style and storytelling of Into the Spider-Verse, Across the Spider-Verse manages to elevate what worked about the previous film and roll it in…

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Ronen Landa (Paul T. Goldman) 44:55

2y ago44:55

44:55

How do you write the score to someone else's self-mythology? That's the challenge this week's guest, composer Ronen Landa, faced for one of the year's most idiosyncratic, difficult-to-describe shows, Peacock's Paul T. Goldman. A strange mix of documentary comedy and wish fulfillment, the show follows the titular man, a nebbishy middle-aged guy who …

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Ariel Marx (A Small Light, Sanctuary) 37:35

2y ago37:35

37:35

When last we spoke to composer and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Marx, we broke down her haunting, curious score to Hulu's miniseries Candy. But she's been as busy as ever since, bringing her signature sense of experimental sparseness to projects on both the big and small screens. Most recently, she's lent her unique musical voice to two intriguing p…

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#61: Life on the Line/Pay the Ghost (with Brock Wilbur) 56:20

2y ago56:20

56:20

We're back, baby! After a couple of months of hiatus (and a whole new set of chompers for Nathan), Travolta/Cage is back on the case! We're not the only thing that's returned: not only do we have guest Brock Wilbur (co-author of Postal, Editor in Chief of KC's The Pitch) popping back on the show, we finally see the vaunted return of John Travolta t…

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Stephen Barton and Frederik Wiedmann (Star Trek: Picard) 51:04

2y ago51:04

51:04

The third season of Star Trek: Picard had a lot on its shoulders: It was the final season of its show, as well as a bombastic, blockbuster-level bow for the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. For its first two seasons, Patrick Stewart and the showrunners shied away from Starfleet uniforms and shiny utopias, and Jeff Russo's score reflected tha…

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Pat Irwin (Rocko's Modern Life) 27:19

2y ago27:19

27:19

In the 1990s, Nickelodeon was a bastion of surprisingly sophisticated children's animation, and few shows demonstrated that freewheeling sense of absurdity than Rocko's Modern Life. The tale of a beleaguered wallaby surviving the wildest adventures with little more than a smile on his face and his close-knit group of friends, it was a generation-de…

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Ron Wasserman (Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always) 24:07

2y ago24:07

24:07

It's morphin' time! Thirty years after Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers hit the airwaves and thrilled '90s latchkey kids the world over, the franchise has stayed strong through 29 seasons, dozens of incarnations, and more Zords than you can shake a Power Sword at. But one of the elements that made it such a mainstay was its shredding, hard-rock theme …

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Trevor Gureckis (Dead Space Remake) 31:38

2y ago31:38

31:38

When last we left composer Trevor Gureckis, he was just beginning his eerie, unsettling work on M. Night Shyamalan's acclaimed Apple TV+ series Servant. But in the intervening years, he's lent his uniquely experimental grasp of both classical and electronic instruments to films like The Goldfinch, Bloodline, and Old. But his most recent project see…

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Austin Wintory (Aliens: Fireteam Elite) 49:46

2y ago49:46

49:46

The 2023 Grammys have come and gone, and the first Grammy for Best Video Game Score has already been awarded (congratulations, Assassin's Creed Valhalla's Stephanie Economou!). But one of her fellow nominees in that category is video game music royalty in his own right -- Austin Wintory, whose score for the acclaimed indie game Journey netted him a…

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Chris Westlake (Star Trek: Lower Decks) 42:07

2y ago42:07

42:07

The Star Trek universe is a franchise with decades of musical legacy, from the original Alexander Courage fanfare to Jerry Goldsmith's nautical bombast for The Motion Picture, all the way to Michael Giacchino's sweeping work on the J.J. Abrams films. But Paramount+'s animated comedy Star Trek: Lower Decks, which follows the bottom-rung officers on …

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#60: The Runner/Dying of the Light 43:48

2y ago43:48

43:48

This week, Nathan and Clint go it alone for two more Nic Cage joints, ones in which he plays characters reckoning with their personal political failings! In The Runner, Cage plays a well-meaning but deeply flawed N'awlins politician whose attempts to heal NOLA post-BP oil spill gets thrown by one scandal after another. Cue the sub-House of Cards po…

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#59: Joe/Rage (with Marya E. Gates) 1:06:04

2+ y ago1:06:04

1:06:04

This week on the podcast, film critic and author Marya E. Gates (read her Substack!) joins us for another double-feature deep dive into Nicolas Cage's 2010s filmography, this time as two men failing to run from violent pasts! In the VOD thriller Rage, Cage plays a former criminal whose successful life on the straight and narrow is disrupted by the …

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Tim Hecker (Infinity Pool) 24:14

2+ y ago24:14

24:14

Today, we're talking about the latest film from director Brandon Cronenberg, Infinity Pool, another in a series of cinematic provocations from the son of acclaimed body-horror maestro David Cronenberg. While his works travel along similar roads -- the alienation of the self from the human body, how class intersects with violence -- the younger Cron…

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Stephanie Economou (Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok) 38:06

2+ y ago38:06

38:06

Earlier this month, the 2022 Grammys ran its first-ever category for Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media -- a long-overdue recognition of the value of video game scores as a legitimate method of expression, and a source of some incredible music. And among an initial crop of stellar composers offering intriguing sounds …

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Simon Franglen (Avatar: The Way of Water) 42:16

2+ y ago42:16

42:16

It's safe to say that Eywa has smiled on James Cameron's long-awaited sequel to his 2009 epic Avatar; a mere two months into its run, Avatar: The Way of Water has grossed more than $2 billion, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing movie of all time as of publication (and the third-highest international box office success). For Cameron, it was a work…

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#58: Outcast/Left Behind (with Dave White) 1:08:51

2+ y ago1:08:51

1:08:51

This week, Linoleum Knife's Dave White joins us for some rigorous religious scholarship surrounding two of Cage's Godliest movies! First, there's Vic Armstrong's adaptation of the best-selling apocalypse novel Left Behind, starring Cage in one of his sleepiest roles as hotshot airline pilot Rayford Steele, who finds himself flying a plane where hal…

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Chanda Dancy (Devotion, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody) 30:01

2+ y ago30:01

30:01

For Texan-born composer Chanda Dancy, 2022 feels like a breakthrough year. She's worked in the film and television composing business for eighteen years, an alumnus of the USC Film Scoring Program and the Sundance Composers Lab, as well as projects like Netflix's The Defeated and Everything Before Us. But she's struck gold with several major projec…