Bio Continued:

Melnick is currently adapting Pete Hamill's Snow in August for Broadway, in collaboration with lyricist Mindi Dickstein (Little Women) and book-writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark, the musical adaptation of American Psycho, and creator/producer of Riverdale and Sabrina).

Melnick has contributed scores to over three dozen films, television shows and documentaries. His scoring credits include the Steve Martin comedy L.A. Story; The Only Thrill, with Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard; Horton Foote's Convicts, with Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones; and Bob Saget's truly obscene Farce of the Penguins, with... penguins. His television credits include PBS feature-length documentary, Cinema's Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood; Indictment: The McMartin Trial; Grand Avenue; and Lily Dale, also by Horton Foote.

A once and future journalist, Melnick was nominated for Columbia School of Journalism’s Robert F. Kennedy Award for Minority Reporting while still an undergraduate, for his feature reporting on the Navajo and the Oglala Sioux. His article on his grandfather, legendary theater composer Richard Rodgers, appears in the May-June 2019 issue of The Dramatist.

Melnick attended Harvard College, Berklee College of Music, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He also studied privately with jazz pianist Jaki Byard. (Disclosure: he dropped out of Harvard one year shy of a degree in order to study music at Berklee, which he similarly abandoned seven semesters later when offered his first film scoring assignment. He does, however, have a perfectly nice high school diploma, of which he is inordinately proud.) Melnick grew up in New York, the product of an extraordinary entertainment family. In addition to his illustrious grandfather, his father was the late film producer Daniel Melnick (All That Jazz, Straw Dogs, Altered States, Footloose, Roxanne, That's Entertainment, and the seminal television comedy Get Smart). His mother was Linda Rodgers (composer of "Three to Make Music," "A Child's Introduction to Jazz" and numerous popular children’s songs).

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER

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