Jeffrey Frederick Gold (born Jeffrey Frederick Thompson, March 13, 1968 in Rock Island, Illinois) is an American filmmaker, film producer, playwright, and film composer educated as a physicist and mathematician at the United States Naval Academy, the University of Utah, and the University of Cambridge, England.[1]
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Jeffrey Gold attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland (class of '91). He left before the end of his first year (less than one hundred days from the "Plebes no more" ceremony at Herndon Monument) and transferred to the University of Utah where he completed his Bachelor's degree in pre-professional physics with a minor in mathematics. While an undergraduate, Jeffrey Gold published eight papers in mathematics and physics and worked as an undergraduate research assistant in thermoacoustics, magnetoencephalography, thin film sputtering and metal evaporation, and photoluminescence, and worked with mathematician Don H. Tucker on the problem of the Twin primes in Number Theory.[2]
Before graduating from the University of Utah, he attended a beginning film making class which he described as "the beginning of the end for physics". He attended Fitzwilliam College of Cambridge University[3] in Cambridgeshire, England, having been accepted into the MPhil Programme in Microelectronics and Semiconductor Physics at the Microelectronics Research Centre at the Cavendish Laboratory.
While at Cambridge, Gold became a lifetime member of the Cambridge Film and Television Society (CFTV) and a member of the Cambridge Gliding Club, and produced the documentary Children of the Wind.
Jeffrey Gold was an associate producer of the awards-winning independent feature film Abby Singer (named for Abby Singer) for which he also composed the film score and co-wrote the main theme, When You're a Millionaire, with singer/songwriter Paul Luscher. The film score for Abby Singer won the Jury Choice Gold Medal for Excellence at the 2004 Park City Film Music Festival[1] and was a semi-finalist in the 2004 Moondance International Film Festival filmscoring competition.
Gold's 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 in the PBS documentary Promontory (Promontory, Utah), which was produced for KUED by Ken Verdoia.[1]
Gold's "Elegy: Adagio For Strings" was featured in the book MP3: Music on the Internet by Rod Underhill and Nat Gertler, part of The Complete Idiot's Guide to... series (ISBN 0-7897-2036-1). Gold won the 2006 Best of State Award for Best Original Composition for his film score work. In 2006, Gold contributed music to the short documentary Eritrea: Living in a Border War.
Gold's film works have premiered at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) centres in London and Cardiff, on television and radio, and at regional film festivals in the United States. He was an executive producer of the 2003 independent feature film Summer Solstice, based on Gold's story "Atlantic Summer."
Jeffrey Gold has written several plays, including Horst and Graben in the Context of the Unfinished Man (ISBN 1-60003-029-7), Horst and Graben at the Chateau Godot, Fitch Todd, which won the Moondance Seahorse Award[4] after being selected as a finalist in the 2005 Moondance Film Festival's stage-play competition in Boulder, Colorado, Dedekind, Execution at Paradais Island, Percolation Theory, and Displacement: A Fish in Water Story.
Gold is a member of ASCAP and the Dramatists Guild of America.
Before age two, Jeffrey Gold moved with his family to Germany (Heidelberg, Horrenberg, Oftersheim, and Sandhausen) where they lived until Gold was eleven years old. The family later lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico; in Bangor, Maine where Gold was a classmate of Naomi King, daughter of writer Stephen King; in Hawaii (Honolulu, Waikiki, Hawaii Kai and Oahu); and in Salt Lake City, Utah.