乔瑟夫·布鲁克斯

Joseph Brooks (born Joseph Kaplan; March 11, 1938 – May 22, 2011) was an American songwriter, composer, and filmmaker. He was a successful author of commercial jingles during the 1960s, before pivoting to a filmmaking career. His 1977 romantic drama You Light Up My Life, which he wrote, directed, produced, and scored, spawned the hit song of the same name, earning Brooks an Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, and a Grammy Award.

Brooks became the subject of an investigation after being accused of a series of rapes. He was indicted in 2009, but killed himself on May 22, 2011, before his trial.

Early life and singing career

Brooks was born Joseph Kaplan on March 11, 1938, to Jewish parents in Manhattan, and grew up in Manhattan and Lawrence, Long Island, New York. In later interviews, he claimed to have started playing piano at age 3 and writing plays at age 5, following his parents' divorce. As a child, he also developed a stutter that, according to his production partner Robert K. Lifton, disappeared when Brooks sang or acted. He later attended five different colleges, including Juilliard, but did not graduate from any.

In the late 1950s, Brooks pursued a career as a singer-songwriter, adopting the name "Joey Brooks" (later changed to "Joe Brooks" or "Joseph Brooks"). He released several albums on Canadian-American Records as Joey Brooks, and on Decca as "Joey Brooks and the Baroque Folk". When his singing career failed, he drifted into advertising and occasional songwriting work, although he sporadically released several more records throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Advertising, film and stage career

In the 1960s, Brooks composed advertising jingles for clients including Pepsi ("You've Got a Lot to Live") and Maxwell House ("Good to the Last Drop Feeling"). He received numerous Clio Awards for his work, as well as a People's Choice Award. Credited as "Joey Brooks", he also wrote the song "My Ship Is Comin' In", a Top Ten UK hit in 1966 for the Walker Brothers.

In the 1970s, after becoming wealthy from his advertising work (at one point claiming to have 150 commercials on the air), Brooks began composing for films. He wrote music for the American release of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), Marjoe (1972), and The Lords of Flatbush (1974), in which he was also an investor. He wrote "Blue Balloon (The Hourglass Song)", sung by Robby Benson as the theme song for the film Jeremy (1973), and claimed to have written, cast, and directed most of Jeremy, although Arthur Barron is the sole writer and director of record. New York Times film critic Roger Greenspun recognized Brooks's claim, writing, "it seems fair to suggest that, in whatever proportion, both men were involved in the authorship of the film."

Brooks next developed his own film project, You Light Up My Life, which he wrote, produced, directed, and scored on a budget of about $1 million. The romantic drama about an aspiring singer, starring Didi Conn, was a box-office success despite poor reviews. Brooks's title song for the film was an even bigger success; a cover version by Debby Boone reached #1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart and held that position for 10 consecutive weeks, at that time tied for the longest Number One reign in the chart's history. With sales of over five million copies, the song was the biggest hit of the 1970s and earned Brooks a Grammy Award for Song of the Year, an Academy Award for Best Original Song, a Golden Globe Award, and an American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) award.

Brooks attempted to follow up his success with a similar romantic drama, If Ever I See You Again (1978), which he not only co-wrote, produced, directed, and scored, but also starred in, as a composer of TV commercial jingles much like himself, despite no significant acting experience. The title song became a moderate hit for Roberta Flack, peaking at #24 on the Hot 100 chart, but the movie received very bad reviews and was a box-office bomb. Brooks was subsequently involved in several other films, directing and scoring Invitation to the Wedding (1983), in which Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud appeared, and co-producing Eddie and the Cruisers (1983) (which he did not score). In the late 1990s, he and his then-wife Christina Bone began developing a film titled Sara's Life Before It Became a Movie, which was never released.