The time I tried and failed to buy the Mitchell film score

In 2008, I tried to buy the film score to the legendary in some circles (mostly MST3K fans) Joe Don Baker film Mitchell. I was not successful.

A new MMO called All Points Bulletin was in beta. It was an action RPG in which you played either cops or criminals, and the persistent world descended from that: shoot-outs, car chases, coffee. The hook for me was that the devs touted that music you played in your virtual car could be heard by other players. I don't know how they planned to navigate copyright for that, but it was 2008 and everyone was a little less uptight about it.

I envisioned making a 70s cop. And I wanted to drive around with the Mitchell score blaring.

Some groundwork. I am a huge MST3K fan. I am also, without a hint of irony, a big Joe Don Baker fan. He has a musky, beefy physicality which he brought to every role from the maligned Mitchell to Buford Pusser in the original Walking Tall to his short run as Tom Dugan in In the Heat of the Night (the television version). I own the un-MST3K version of Mitchell on DVD, amongst other Joe Don faves.

I also think the Mitchell score rips. It's pure 70s bombast. Listen to this, then imagine my video game cop riding around with a gun pointed out the window:

The problem I ran into is that the full score no longer exists as near as I can tell. I've looked everywhere online for an upload, an old LP, an 8-track. Nothing. I'm still looking. I've been looking for nearly 20 years.

One afternoon, I got slightly day drunk and came up with the perfect solution: I'd call the film studio which financed Mitchell. Then I would buy the rights to it. This idea sounds like I was a lot drunker than I actually was. My reasoning was quite sober: how much could the score to a Z-grade 1975 cop movie actually cost? I figured I could swing some aging has-been exec 500 bucks and call it a day. Did I have 500 bucks? No, but that's what haggling is for. Boomers love to haggle.

I immediately ran into a problem. The film was made by Allied Artists Pictures Corporation. But they went defunct in 1979 (according to Wikipedia) and were folded into a conglomerate Allied Artists International. When I called AAI, I got through to some mid-level suit who told me that they didn't have the film score but someone else might. Who? I was told one of a number of larger studios or that the rights had ceded to the composer.

Realizing I wasn't going to track down composer Larry Brown, I had another drink and called other studios (I can't remember who almost 20 years later). They told me to call a different studio because of how rights work (I also don't remember the specifics of what they told me about the rights 20 years later). On down the chain until I'd killed about three hours and I was actually day drunk. Then I gave up.

I never did figure out who owns the rights to the Mitchell score. I still want to buy it, but I also figure my master plan of haggling with someone in a small office in Burbank looks a lot harder 50 years after the film's release instead of 30 years. That old dreamer in that old office is probably dead now. I think it'd be pretty expensive.

There's probably a really smart thing to say about media rights management and the labyrinth we've made of things somewhere in this story. I won't do that. I'll leave it at the observation that nobody, not Allied or any of the other studios, knew where it went, if they had it, if it still existed in physical form, or how they could even begin to know those things.

I still dream, too. Of putting the Mitchell score on in my decidedly real, decidedly not a cop's Honda Civic. I want to be bombastic.

All Points Bulletin sucked by the way.