Michael Small, 64; Wrote Music for Movie Thrillers

Michael Small, a film composer best known for his work on thrillers, including "Klute," "The Parallax View" and "Marathon Man," has died. He was 64.

Small died of prostate cancer Nov. 25 in a hospital in New York City.

Beginning with "Out of It," a 1969 teen movie co-starring Barry Gordon and Jon Voight, Small scored more than 50 movies and TV movies, including "The Stepford Wives," "The China Syndrome," "Brighton Beach Memoirs," "Comes a Horseman," "Night Moves" and "Continental Divide." He also wrote music for commercials and documentaries, including "Pumping Iron," the 1977 bodybuilding documentary featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"He was a brilliant, brilliant composer," director Bob Rafelson told The Times on Wednesday.

Small scored four films for Rafelson, including "The Postman Always Rings Twice," "Black Widow," "Mountains of the Moon" and the HBO film "Poodle Springs."

Recalling their work on "The Postman Always Rings Twice," the 1981 adaptation of the James M. Cain novel starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, Rafelson said the story of a steamy affair between a drifter and the seductive wife of a roadside cafe owner who plot to murder the woman's husband contains the elements of a thriller. But Rafelson viewed the film primarily as a love story.

"So I didn't hire Michael because he wrote great thriller music," Rafelson said. "I hired him because he could write soaring, beautiful romantic melodies, and 'Postman' is a perfect example of that."

The score Rafelson said he loved the most was the one Small wrote for "Mountains of the Moon," his 1990 film about two English geographers who search for the source of the Nile River in the 1850s.

"There was this huge aspect of discovery that had to be in the music, of a world opening up to them, of the enthralling pride and feelings somebody has for seeing something for the first time that nobody had ever seen or described to them," Rafelson said.

Small's score, he said, "captured that sense of awe."

Born in New York City on May 30, 1939, Small grew up in Maplewood, N.J. His father, Jack Small, was an actor who became well-known in the New York theater world in the 1950s booking shows for the Shubert organization as general manager.

"When I was 4, I could pick out the tunes from 'Showboat,' which was in my father's summer stock engagement in Louisville," Small recalled for the film journal Music From the Movies in 1998.