Randy Newman (Meet the Parents) Meet the Parents (2000)
Randy Newman was fifty-six when Meet the Parents opened. The composer of Sail Away, Good Old Boys, and Land of Dreams had spent the 1990s pivoting into film scoring after a long popular-music career — The Natural (1984), Awakenings (1990), The Paper (1994), Maverick (1994), Toy Story (1995), James and the Giant Peach (1996), A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999). By 2000 he had been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song six times without winning.
Newman's score plays the comedy as Americana
The Meet the Parents score is structurally unusual for a comedy of its release window. Most studio comedies in 2000 used either pop-needle-drop scoring (Charlie's Angels) or broad orchestral comedy beats (Big Daddy). Newman wrote a piano-and-small-orchestra score with a distinct Americana register — the same warm pastoral palette he had used for The Natural and Awakenings — and let the comedy emerge from the gap between the score's earnest sweetness and the on-screen disasters.
"Randy's idea was that the music should never tell you something is funny. It should treat the wedding weekend the way the family would treat it. Earnestly. Sincerely. Then the comedy comes from how badly Greg is failing to live up to that earnestness." — Jay Roach, The Hollywood Reporter (2021)
The opening cue, the cab-ride-to-Oyster-Bay cue, and the closing-credits song "A Fool in Love" all establish this register. The music is neither commenting on the comedy nor heightening it; it is doing what the Byrnes household does on its surface — performing pastoral domesticity while the apparatus runs underneath.
"A Fool in Love" earned a Best Original Song nomination
Newman's closing-credits song "A Fool in Love" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 73rd Academy Awards in 2001. Newman lost to Bob Dylan for "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys. He would finally win the following year (2002) for "If I Didn't Have You" from Monsters, Inc., ending a long streak of nominations without a win.
"Randy had been nominated something like fifteen times by then. It became a running joke at the Oscars. We thought maybe Meet the Parents would do it. It didn't. But the next year he finally won, and we like to think the Meet the Parents nomination was part of the build to that." — Jay Roach, Variety (2020)
Newman has scored many of the post-2000 Roach and Tribeca productions
After Meet the Parents, Newman scored Meet the Fockers (2004), Little Fockers (2010), and several other films in the broader Tribeca-Universal orbit. The relationship with Roach extended beyond the franchise — Newman scored Roach's HBO political films Recount (2008) and Game Change (2012). The collaboration is one of the longest-running director-composer relationships in Roach's career.
"Jay and I work the same way. We talk about what the movie is actually about, not about what cues we need. He gives me the picture and I find what the music is. He never asks for anything specific. That's a rare thing in this business." — Randy Newman, The New York Times (2017)
Newman's broader career
The Pixar collaborations — Toy Story (1995), A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Cars (2006), Toy Story 3 (2010), Monsters University (2013), Toy Story 4 (2019) — define Newman's mainstream-Hollywood reputation. Outside Pixar, his most significant scoring credits include Ragtime (1981, his first Oscar nomination), Avalon (1990), Pleasantville (1998), and Seabiscuit (2003). The popular-music career — Sail Away (1972), Good Old Boys (1974), Little Criminals (1977, including "Short People"), Land of Dreams (1988), Bad Love (1999), Harps and Angels (2008), Dark Matter (2017) — runs in parallel and is widely considered one of the most distinctive American songbooks of the second half of the twentieth century.