The Queen’s Gambit

Composer
CARLOS RAFAEL RIVERA

Songwriters
WILLIAM HORBERG
ANNA HAUSS
ROBERT WIENRODER

Music Supervisor
RANDALL POSTER

MODERATED BY STEVE GREENE (IndieWire)

Screening Link available upon Registration

YouTube Live Stream Q&A:
Tuesday, August 10, 1:00PM PT

Based on the novel by Walter Tevis, the Netflix limited series drama The Queen’s Gambit  is a coming-of-age story that explores the true cost of genius. Abandoned and entrusted to a Kentucky orphanage in the late 1950s, a young Beth Harmon discovers an astonishing talent for chess while developing an addiction to tranquilizers provided by the state as a sedative for the children. Haunted by her personal demons and fueled by a cocktail of narcotics and obsession, Beth transforms into an impressively skilled and glamorous outcast while determined to conquer the traditional boundaries established in the male-dominated world of competitive chess.  TV-MA | 60min

Carlos Rafael Rivera is an Emmy Award-winning composer, whose career has spanned several genres of the music industry. His collaboration with director Scott Frank includes the score for Netflix’s Godless, starring Jeff Daniels and Michelle Dockery, and the critically acclaimed The Queen’s Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Joy and produced by Steven Soderbergh, for which Carlos received several awards, including an SCL Award.

As a guitarist, he has performed on stage as the opening act for The Who at the Hollywood Bowl; he composed the music to Universal Pictures’ A Walk Among The Tombstones, starring Liam Neeson, recorded studio sessions for Island/Def Jam, and Universal Records; and had songs featured on feature soundtracks (Crash, Dragonfly), as well as Netflix’s Firefly Lane, ABC’s Scrubs, MTV, and VH-1. A protégé of Randy Newman, he earned a DMA in Composition at USC’s Thornton School, where he studied with Donald Crockett and Stephen Hartke. Carlos loves to share his knowledge by mentoring young composers and serves on the SCL Board of Directors. He resides in Miami, Florida. 

William Horberg is the founder of Wonderful Films, an independent film and television production company. He recently produced The Burnt Orange Heresy; Flag Day; The Queen’s Gambit; The Promise; Crash Pad; and Black Nativity. His other productions include Disconnect; Therese Raquin; The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman; and Death At A Funeral for Columbia Screen Gems. 

Previously, Horberg was the President of Production at Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. During Horberg’s tenure there, SKE, in association with Universal Pictures, financed Academy Award nominee Paul Greengrass’; critically acclaimed United 93, as well as executive-produced Billy Ray’s Breach. The company’s other productions, which Horberg executive-produced, include Kasi Lemmons’ Talk to Me; Frank Oz’s Audience Award-winning Death at a Funeral; Jon Poll’s Charlie Bartlett; Ira Sachs’ Married Life; Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl; and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. Additionally, Horberg served as an executive producer on Greg Mottola’s Adventureland and Stephen Belber’s Management. Horberg was also an executive producer on Focus Features’ Milk, starring Academy Award winner Sean Penn and directed by Gus Van Sant. He was also the producer of Marc Forster’s The Kite Runner based on the international best-selling novel by Khaled Hosseini, for Dreamworks and Paramount Vantage. Prior to forming Wonderful, he was partnered for 12 years with Academy Award-winning filmmakers Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella in their film and television production company, Mirage Enterprises. During Horberg’s tenure at Mirage, he produced such films as Mr. Minghella’s Cold Mountain; The Talented Mr. Ripley; Phillip Noyce’s The Quiet American; Tom Tykwer’s Heaven; Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors; and Steven Zaillian’s Searching for Bobby Fischer. Horberg was formerly a Senior Vice President of Production at Paramount Pictures. He is the Chair Emeritus of the Producers Guild of America, East.

Anna Hauss was born in Berlin, 1993. She grew up in a creative family and started singing at a very young age. At the age of 12, she wrote her first own song and began to learn the guitar. Shortly after she started her first band and participated in youth theatre projects. After high school she recorded her solo debut Summerbreak with some friends she met at the music school in Berlin. In 2014, she moved to Leipzig to study Jazz singing at a music conservatory. Since then she worked with her band Still In The Woods and recorded 2 studio albums (Rootless Tree and Flying Waves), accompanied by extensive touring throughout Germany and Europe. In 2019, she composed the piece “I Can’t Remember Love” for the Netflix original series The Queen’s Gambit together with Robert Wienröder to lyrics by William Horberg. Furthermore, she is working as a vocal & songwriting coach at the stage school Academy in Berlin and acts in different musical projects as a singer, composer, guitarist, and lyricist. 

Robert Wienröder was born in 1991 and grew up in Fulda in the state of Hessen, Germany. He started with classical piano lessons as a kid and began playing jazz in the big band of his school a few years later; soon he was invited to several Hessen-wide jazz orchestras. Between 2015 and 2020 he studied jazz piano at the University of the Arts in Berlin. During this time period, he won several prizes with different bands: for example the Creole Global Music Contest and the European Jazz Award at the Internationale Jazzwoche Burghausen. Furthermore, his band Still In The Woods released two albums (Rootless Tree, Flying Waves), accompanied by extensive touring throughout Germany and Europe. In 2019, Anna Hauss from Still In The Woods, lyricist William Horberg and Wienröder together wrote the piece “I Can’t Remember Love”  for the Netflix original series The Queen’s Gambit. Currently, he is living in Berlin as a freelance composer, pianist, and piano teacher.

Randall Poster is among the most highly regarded music supervisors working in film and TV. Poster continues to work with many of the world’s premier filmmakers, including  Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Richard Linklater, Todd Phillips, Todd Haynes, and Christine Vachon. His work consistently moves across pop-culture defining projects from Zoolander to Tiger King, from School of Rock to The Queen’s Gambit, from The Grand Budapest Hotel to Kids. Poster is a two-time Grammy award winner. In 2020 Poster produced the acclaimed film The Devil All The Time, directed by Antonio Campos and starring Tom Holland, Riley Keough, Robert Pattinson, Jason Clarke, and Haley Bennett.

*** IMPORTANT – PLEASE READ ***

FREE for current SCL members (click HERE to check membership status).

Attendees will be emailed a Screening Link upon Registration and a Q&A YouTube Live Stream link on Tuesday, August 10, 10 minutes before Q&A start.

Attendees can ask questions on YouTube chat, and the SCL Host will pass them on to the Moderator. The SCL Member Code of Conduct applies to online Q&As.

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