Hill, A.W. 1951- (Andrew Warren Hill, Andy Hill, Andy W. Hill)

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Hill, A.W. 1951- (Andrew Warren Hill, Andy Hill, Andy W. Hill)

PERSONAL:

Born 1951. Education: Tisch School of the Arts, B.F.A.; attended the University of California, Los Angeles.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Hollywood, CA. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, novelist, composer, musician, producer, and educator. Columbia College, Chicago, IL, Department of Film and Video, production manager and instructor in music for filmmakers during the 1980s, instructor in music composition, 1999—, director, M.F.A. program in music composition for the screen, 2006—. Worked as a music supervisor at film studies, including Disney (1989-1996), MGM, Fox, Warner Brothers, and Sony. Independent music producer and consultant. Producer of musical projects, including Elmo in Grouchland, Sony, 1999. Worked as a touring musician.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Grammy Award for Producer/Best Musical Album for Children for Elmo in Grouchland; Best New Science Fiction Award, Independent Publishers Association for Enoch's Portal.

WRITINGS:

Enoch's Portal (novel), Champion Press (Vancouver, WA), 2001.

The Last Days of Madame Rey (novel), Carroll & Graf Publishers (New York, NY), 2007.

Also author of screenplay Telsa.

ADAPTATIONS:

Enoch's Portal has been optioned for film by Paramount Pictures.

SIDELIGHTS:

Writer, composer, and musician A.W. Hill is a prolific producer of music for Hollywood productions. He has been particularly heavily involved with musical films from Walt Disney studios, and has worked on well-known Disney features, such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and The Lion King. Hill was responsible for the melding of popular singer Elton John's music with the African pop rhythms of The Lion King, which helped the movie gain international recognition. An independent music producer for major studios such as Disney, MGM, and Warner Brothers, Hill also serves as director of the Music Composition for the Screen program at Columbia College in Chicago, a position he assumed in 2006.

Hill is also a novelist whose first book, Enoch's Portal, is a thriller based deeply in spirituality and mysticism. The book focuses on the character of Stephan Raszer, a private detective who is also an expert in the occult, arcane lore, esoteric knowledge, as well as a proficient wielder of modern-day technology. Melding activities of secret societies and a number of conspiracy theories, the book follows Raszer's involvement in a frenzied, five-continent-spanning search for an important treasure.

The Last Days of Madame Rey, Hill's second book, brings Raszer back for a second adventure involving the strange and the mystical. Drawing on his prodigious knowledge of the arcane, Raszer involves himself in the attempt to retrieve Fortis Cohn, a gay Jewish lawyer, from his unlikely position as advisor to a group of neo-Nazis, the Military Order of Thule, taking refuge somewhere in the sprawling landscape of Mount Shasta. The death of one of Cohn's friends leads Raszer to a Gypsy fortune-teller, Madame Rey, who has in her possession a coded message from the murdered man, given to her after she conducted a disturbing tarot card reading for him. Assuming the disguise of a geologist and vulcanologist monitoring strange underground earthquake activity at Mount Shasta, Raszer attempts to locate the neo-Nazis. Calling on his sometime-assistant, April Blessing, to try to strike up a relationship with the group's leader, Bronk Vreeland, and find a means for Raszer to infiltrate the organization. Soon, the two detectives have managed to uncover important information about the group's plans and abilities, which puts them on the run to prevent implementation of a plot involving global destruction. In assessing the novel, a reviewer on MyShelf.com remarked that Hill's "writing is tight and flowing, even in didactic places. His characters are well-drawn and believable, though eccentric and sometimes bigger than life. Yet they all fit within the parameters of this most unusual story." The book, "likely to appeal to fans of mysticism and sci-fi, is a Tolkien-like battle between good and evil that obviously demands a sequel," commented a Kirkus Reviews critic.