Two years ago on December 13, 2007, I was dropping off a very special gift to the producers and executives of a major Dreamworks movie. The producers and executives had heard about GiftDay from their entertainment industry colleagues and had hired our premium-level service to come up with a 40th birthday gift for the star of their movie. The GiftDay concept had captured the producers' and studio's imagination; the group felt that a GiftDay gift would be a unique and thoughtful gesture for their actor just prior to his start of filming. The gift itself is an amazing story - one that began exactly 40 years earlier on December 13, 1967.
On December 13, 1967, Jacqueline Du Pre teamed up with one of the most famous conductors of the 20th Century, Sir John Barbirolli, together with arguably the greatest orchestras in the world, the London Symphony Orchestra, to record one of the most important and beautiful cello pieces ever written: Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 2 in D Major.
And all of this was happening at Abbey Road Studios in London, the most famous recording studio in the world.
On the other side of the globe at the moment the recording was taking place, Eric Marlon Bishop was born in a small East Texas town. The boy was abandoned seven months later and raised by his grandparents. At the age of 5, he started taking piano lessons and a few years later he was singing in a church choir.
The East Texas boy eventually became the Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx. Cut to 2007 when Foxx was handed a script for a film called "The Soloist". The project was based on the true story of musical prodigy Nathaniel Ayers, a cellist who dropped out of Juilliard, when he developed schizophrenia. Ayers eventually wound up homeless in downtown LA, where he continued to play his music on the streets and where his faded genius was ultimately discovered by a Los Angeles Times reporter who helped him turn his life around.
Foxx knew he had to do the movie and signed on to play Ayers. But Foxx had to do one thing first... he had to learn to play the cello.
GiftDay located a 78 RPM recording of Du Pre’s performance at a used record store in Los Angeles. (If you'd like to listen to or purchase a version of this recording on iTunes, click HERE.) The gift was inexpensive but the thought and poetry behind the gift and its meaning was priceless. The movie's producers and Dreamworks understood this. They knew that beautiful music was born on December 13, 1967, and that they had a 40th birthday gift "hit" on their hands.
GiftDay endeavors to find meaning and poetry in gifts - so that they can be used to tell the gift recipient that they are unique and special and that they have been thought about, considered and fussed over.
Because everyone likes to be treated like a movie star on their birthday. Even movie stars.
