Background
Born February 3, 1906 in Poland, Paul Sawtell started his career at RKO
studios, then moved to Universal, where his first assignment was The Pearl
of Death, part of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes series.
He returned to RKO during the second half of the 1940s and also worked for
various independent producers, such as Aubrey Schenk at Eagle Lion, and
Harry Sherman at United Artists. In 1951 he began a relationship with
producer/director Irwin Allen when he scored the Oscar-winning documentary
The Sea Around Us. Begining in the late '50s, Sawtell became extremely
busy scoring science fiction films such Kronos, It! The Terror From Beyond
Space, The Black Scorpion, and The Fly, amid his usual spread of Westerns
and dramas. He joined Irwin Allen's production team, scoring films such as
The Story of Mankind, The Big Circus, The Lost World, Five Weeks in a
Balloon, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. During the 1960s, he
remained busy in features, co-writing the music for such familiar science
fiction titles as the Italian-made The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent
Price, but by the middle of the decade he had largely moved to television,
working on Allen's series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, for which he
wrote the well-known title theme. He died on August 1, 1971.
Restrictions
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Library. Literary rights, including copyright, are retained by the
creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to
determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or
her heir for permission to publish if the Performing Arts Special Collections does not hold the
copyright.