Jeffrey Gold

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Jeffrey Gold (born Jeffrey Frederick Thompson, March 13, 1968 in Rock Island, Illinois)

Award-winning filmmaker, playwright, and film composer originally educated as a physicist and mathematician at the United States Naval Academy, University of Utah, and the University of Cambridge, England. Also, blowhard gasbag totally lacking self awareness.

1 Early life
2 Science
3 Film scoring
4 Playwriting
5 External links

[edit] Early life

Jeffrey Gold was born in Rock Island, Illinois, and then moved with his family to Heidelberg, Germany when he was 18 months old. A strapping and cosmopolitan toddler, Jeffrey insisted the family relinquish its comfortable, bourgeois American existence, for a bohemian, ex-pat life abroad. He lived in Germany (Heidelberg, Horrenberg, Oftersheim, and Sandhausen) until he was 11 years old. He attended the Theodor Heuss Schule in Horrenberg until the fourth grade. His family then moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he attended the Catholic parochial school, Holy Cross, for grades five through seven. Don't even get him started about that one priest. The family then moved to Bangor, Maine, where he attended St. Mary's School and was a classmate of Naomi King, daughter of famed writer Stephen King. At St. Mary's School, Jeffrey began honing his skills in the insufferable and irrelevant practice of name-dropping, which would later become the Grand Stabilizing Mechanism around which nearly all his later social, academic, and professional activities would prove to revolve. A move to Honolulu, Hawaii (Waikiki, later Hawaii Kai, and Salt Lake, Oahu) resulted in his attending Henry J. Kaiser High School for ninth grade and Moanalua High School for tenth grade. A move to Salt Lake City, Utah resulted in his finishing eleventh and twelfth grades at West High School. This is all very culturally significant.

[edit] Science

After graduating, he couldn't manage attending U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland (class of '91). He bailed out out in his first year (less than one hundred days from Herndon), and ran to the University of Utah, where he scraped together a degree in physics and a minor in mathematics. While underachieving there, a professor mistakenly included his name on eight papers in mathematics and physics because he happened to be in the room during research in thermoacoustics, magnetoencephalography, thin film sputtering and metal evaporation, and photoluminescence, and annoyed mathematician Don H. Tucker while he worked on the problem of the Twin Primes in Number Theory. Before (barely) graduating from the University of Utah, he attended a beginning film making class which he described as "the beginning of the end for physics" (without any awareness of how stupid that sounds). Jeff claims to have snuck into Cambridge University's MPhil Programme in Microelectronics and Semiconductor Physics at the Microelectronics Research Centre at the world-renowned Cavendish Laboratory of the Department of Physics, but his acquaintances think he was just avoiding an angry husband and drinking cheap cider. While hiding in England he became a lifetime member of the Cambridge Film and Television Society (CFTV) and a member of the Cambridge Gliding Club. While in Cambridge, he allegedly produced the documentary Children of the Wind, and attended the regular Sunday Fitzwilliam film screenings hosted by the college priest, and later interviewed and was accepted into the prestigious London International Film School in 1997. Most of the people who know him question the veracity of most of these claims.

[edit] Film scoring

Composed the score for Abby Singer and co-wrote the main theme When You're a Millionaire with singer/songwriter Paul Luscher. The Abby Singer filmscore went on to win the Jury Choice Gold Medal for Excellence at the 2004 [Park City Film Music Festival] and was as Semi-Finalist in the 2004 [Moondance International Film Festival] filmscoring competition.

Working as a film composer, his scores appear in many independent films and documentaries, including Twilight (Physics In The Twilight), Isles In The Midst Of The Great Green Sea, Monk, Children of the Wind, Reach, Edge Running, The Racketeers, and, most recently, in Ken Verdoia's PBS documentary, Promontory. He was the composer and an associate producer of the awards-winning independent feature film Abby Singer. The score won the Jury Choice Gold Medal for Excellence in the 2004 Park City Film Music Festival and was a semi-finalist in the filmscoring competition of the 2004 Moondance International Film Festival. His Elegy: Adagio For Strings has been lauded internationally and was featured in the book MP3: Music on the Internet by Rod Underhill and Nat Gertler, part of The Complete Idiot's Guide series (ISBN 0-7897-2036-1). He won the 2006 Best of State Award for Best Original Composition for his film score work.

In 2006, he contributed music to the short documentary Eritrea: Living in a Border War.

He is a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

[edit] Playwriting

He has written a number of award-winning plays, including Horst and Graben in the Context of the Unfinished Man, Fitch Todd, Horst and Graben at the Chateau Godot, Dedekind, Execution at Paradais Island, Percolation Theory, and Displacement: A Fish in Water Story.

Jeffrey Gold was a member the Playwright's Group for more than three seasons, through the auspices of the Salt Lake Acting Company (SLAC) under dramaturg Mike Dorrell (BBC's Soldier, Soldier, Pictures of a Floating World) and playwright-in-residence Julie Jensen (Two-Headed, Last Lists of My Mad Mother, Wait!). He has had a public reading of the play-in-progress 'In The Pursuit Of Svetla' and a public reading at the American Express/Salt Lake Acting Company New Play Sounding Series of the absurdist comedy 'Horst and Graben in the Context Of The Unfinished Man' (ISBN 1-60003-029-7). 'Horst and Graben' was also read at the 2002 Sawtooth Writers Conference founded by David Kranes (Sundance Theater Lab) and playwright/essayist Jeff Metcalf (Where To?). Horst And Graben was a winner of the 2002 CrossCurrents Cultural Five and Dime Playwriting Competition and was produced at the Just Off Broadway Theater in Kansas City, Missouri during March 14-29, 2003. It was also selected for the 2003 Boca Raton Theatre Guild Short Play Reading Festival and was a finalist in the Ten by Ten in the Triangle, North Carolina. It also won and has been selected for production in the Shorts in Winter Playwriting Festival at the Theatre Orange, North Carolina in February 2004. The comedic tragedietta, 'Fitch Todd', was read and extremely well received at the Salt Lake Acting Company on December 15, 2002. It went on to win the 2004 New Voices/New Words Playwriting Competition and was read on January 21, 2005 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It also received a reading at the City Art Evening of Short Plays on February 16, 2005, won the Seahorse Award at the 2005 Moondance International Film Festival stageplay competition, and then was a winner in the 2006 Silver Spring One Act Festival in Maryland. He has recently finished the plays 'Dedekind', 'Horst and Graben at the Chateau Godot', and 'Candycane Hurricane'. Dedekind recently won the Experiments In Ink V Playwriting Competition and was produced on February 12-15, 2004 at the University of Utah's Department of Theatre. His one act play, 'Execution at Paradais Island' was a finalist in the stageplay competition of the 2004 Moondance International Film festival. His play Percolation Theory was a Finalist in the 2005 Theatre Publicus Prize for Dramatic Literature. He is currently working on other short and long form plays including Waisenhaus, The Unexpected Autobiography Of Spressa Perlesi, The Tyranny Of The Lucky, and Parker's Peace. He on the 2005 Best of State Award fr Playwriting/Screenwriting and the 2006 Best of State Award for Playwriting.

Hailing from an artistic family, Jeffrey also, although uninvited, hangs around film sets, mumbling about all the amateur techniques he sees, and rolling his eyes a lot. He wears many hats simultaneously. Notably, his least favorite is the grimy Arby's visor forced upon his brow daily. His works have premiered at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Centres in Piccadilly, London and Cardiff, Wales, on television and radio, and at regional film festivals in the United States. He was an executive producer of the independent feature film Summer Solstice, based on his story Atlantic Summer, starring Karen Black, Joe Estevez, and Jenell Slack.

He is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.