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career as a hockey player, or as a guitarist.
Little did he know that hockey would one
day be the key that would open the door to a job
in the music business.
Homme attended Berklee College of Music in
Boston, then kicked around in a
few bands and gained some recording experience,
before heading west in 1989. In Los
Angeles, he quickly discovered the city already
had too many great studio musicians.
He found a job to make ends meet and began
coaching and playing amateur hockey.
"I ended up on a team with some agents and
other entertainment people. I was
hating my job and asked if anyone knew anyone
in the music business." A teammate
gave him the name of Bill Schrank, vice
president of music production at Warner
Brothers Studios, and suggested that he write a
letter, since Schrank was too busy to
talk on the phone. Soon afterward, Homme was
unemployed and beginning to worry
about his lack of prospects. About a week after
he had sent the letter, he decided to
try to reach Schrank by telephone. "I was
walking downstairs to make the call and the
phone rang, and it was him on the other end of
the line." Homme was invited to
come by the studio to talk, where he learned
about jobs he never knew existed,
including one he thought he would be perfect
for: the one Schrank held. "He said,
`Good luck! There are about seven of these jobs
in the business, one per studio.'"
Over the next eight months, Homme was only able
to get three or four interviews
in unrelated fields. He even offered to work
for free, just to gain experience, but was
turned down for insurance reasons. At the point
when things looked desperate,
Schrank Homme was hired as manager of music
production at Disney Studios.
Unaware of his status at his new job, Homme
recalls, "I was taken to my office by my
assistant (I would have taken the job as my own
assistant) and she said, `You've got a
meeting tomorrow morning at eight.' I said,
`Will there be any executives there?' She
said, `Duh. You are an executive.' It was
really kind of wacky and unbelievable,
because I got the job I dreamt
about."
Determined not to lose this opportunity, Homme
learned his duties while
working on the 11 films and sound tracks then
in production. Over the next four
years, he worked on a total of 75 films. A few
months after DreamWorks was formed,
he came on board as the equivalent of vice
president of film music (there are no titles
at DreamWorks), working on such box office hits
as
Gladiator, Almost Famous, and
Academy Award winning films
Saving Private Ryan, American Beauty, Catch Me
If
You Can, Road to Perdition, and Collateral.
Homme still plays on a hockey team,
which includes some of the industry's most
successful actors, agents, producers, and
directors, and credits it as being the single
most important networking tool he has
ever discovered.
www.dreamworks.com
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