One of the unfortunate effects of a dismal box-office return is that a studio will decide not to create marketing tie-ins or produce an original soundtrack of the songs featured in the film. While a great soundtrack can get people in the theaters sometimes a studio will decide whatever marketing tie-ins there might be are not worth the financial risk. This has happened with several films over the years, particularly in the earlier-Internet era, when it wasn't so easy to sell items online or push physical items out of the brick-and-mortar stores.
One film that suffered from not having an OST issued was the 1998 Alec Baldwin vehicle Thick As Thieves. For years jazz aficionados have decried the lack of an official soundtrack from the film. The TAT OST is one of the few things I'd ever gladly purchase from the trunk of someone's car in the parking lot of a drugstore if they were selling them as copyright-violating burned compact discs. The music is that good.
The dark crime film, which is likable enough and reminiscent of the later Payback, did not exactly rake in the cash. The follow-up OST was never collected or produced and that oversight in awesomeness has been a sharp spike of agony in any jazz-fanatic's heart ever since. Even those who do not really care for jazz could do worse than have these songs in their collection. Several years ago a fan of the film's music, Brian Chernicky, took the trouble to gather as much information as he could about the soundtrack and put a list of the songs up on his website. Sadly, his site seems to be defunct and all links to his pages are dead.
But then that's where the Internet Archive comes in. The Internet Archive is a large database of films, music, websites, software mostly all royalty-free. I can spend hours going through the old movies and unintentionally hilarious Public Service Announcements. I recommend you support it in some way either through kind words or financially, either personally or by supporting those who would fund it.
When personalities like Rush Limbaugh, John Byrne or Sylvia Browne say something inaccurate,
inflammatory or stupid and delete it from their sites so they can deny they ever made an insane statement, the Internet Archive and the usually helpful Wayback Machine is often there to help you recover the proof. Some sites can't back-pedal fast enough in their and try to erase their crazy claims from their websites once they realize their base is turning on them or the media, for once, doesn't play along and pour gasoline on the fire.
So stymied with being unable to get to the list I entered his URL into the Wayback Machine and was pleased to find that the page, last updated in 2007, has been recorded for prosperity. Since Mr. Chernicky did all the original hard work in and research I'm not going to copy his page verbatim. Instead, I'll supply a link to his page via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
If you want some great Martini-time jazz bad enough, and I believe it is worthwhile, many of the tunes can be purchased in various vinyl, CD or digital formats. One of these days someone is going to gather up all the songs featured in the film and make a mint.
Enjoy!
Update!
Brian's site is still up, just was down for a bit. Here's the link to his site, so stop in and say yo.
In my browsing for all things Futura I came across an early 1960s jazz album by Bernie Green bearing the same name as the Planet Comics heroine from the Golden Age of comic books. While Bernie Green had a prolific career in television as a musical director and spent decades at rather generic task work he was also a surprising musical innovator. Comic book fans may be familiar with his work if not his name for Mad Magazine as the force behind Musically Mad from 1959.
