Mark Orton

History

Mark Orton is a composer working in the mediums of film scoring, concert music, and radio drama. He is both a multi-instrumentalist and a collector of antique and unusual instruments, performing on all manner (and era) of guitars, keyboards, and percussion. Mark is the co-founder of Tin Hat, an internationally renowned composer/improviser collective with seven critically acclaimed albums. He has written scores for dozens of films – documentary, narrative feature, and fine art – and has composed music for modern dance, theater, experimental radio, video/art installation, the circus, and the concert hall.

Movies

The Holdovers
Original Music Composer
A curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — a damaged, brainy troublemaker — and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.
Ninety-Five Senses
Music
A heartfelt depiction of a man facing his own mortality while reflecting on the grave mistakes of his youth.
Love Hard
Original Music Composer
An LA girl, unlucky in love, falls for an East Coast guy on a dating app and decides to surprise him for Christmas, only to discover that she's been catfished. But the object of her affection actually lives in the same town, and the guy who duped her offers to set them up if she pretends to be his own girlfriend for the holidays.
12 Mighty Orphans
Original Music Composer
Haunted by his mysterious past, a devoted high school football coach leads a scrawny team of orphans to the state championship during the Great Depression and inspires a broken nation along the way.
The Last Shift
Music
Stanley, an aging fast food worker, prepares to work his final graveyard shift after 38 years. When he's asked to train his replacement, Jevon, Stanley's weekend takes an unexpected turn.
Elsewhere
Music
A man does everything in his power to keep ownership of a seaside cottage he built with his late wife.
Loop
Music
A non-verbal, autistic girl and a chatty boy are partnered on a canoeing trip. To complete their journey across an urban lake, they must both learn how the other experiences the world.
Use Me
Music
Use Me is a provocative thriller following filmmaker Julian Shaw (playing himself) as he makes a documentary about ‘mental humiliatrix' Ceara Lynch (playing herself). Lynch is a new breed of online sex worker who has made a fortune humiliating her willing clientele over the Internet without ever meeting them in person. As Julian delves deeper into Ceara’s bizarre practice he discovers that the line between fantasy and reality isn’t as clear as she portrays it to be. Could it be that Ceara is hiding something deeply unethical from Julian? Perhaps some of her clients aren’t as willing as she has portrayed them to be? When Julian engineers a real-world encounter between Ceara and a slave he believes she has wronged, a game of cat and mouse begins that could have life and death consequences.
Sunset over Mulholland Drive
Music
Hidden away at the end of Mulholland Drive, just north of Los Angeles, lies the Motion Picture & Television Fund. Its residents were once the backbone of American showbiz. The Fund gives them a home and new meaning in their old age. Still going strong in their own studio, they produce short films and pursue other creative projects. This documentary follows one such project from the first brainstorming session all the way to the premiere, revealing enduring dreams and hopes beyond the limelight — and lessons in life and love.
A Place in Hell
Original Music Composer
Inspired by a real serial killer: A disgraced detective on the trail of a serial killer and a group of student filmmakers cross paths at a Halloween fright farm in the dead of winter.
So Much Yellow
Original Music Composer
Set in Northern California in the late sixties, So Much Yellow is a short, dramatic film about a young girl and the family road trip that changes her life forever. Inspired by true stories, this film depicts the difficult decision one family makes to institutionalize their young son who has Down syndrome.
Unleashed
Original Music Composer
When a cosmic event turns Emma's dog and cat into two perfect guys, Emma reconsiders her outlook on dating, hilariously works out her trust issues, and ultimately learns to love herself.
The Lears
Original Music Composer
A modern take on William Shakespeare's King Lear.
Deidra & Laney Rob a Train
Original Music Composer
After their mother ends up in jail, two sisters turn to train robbery in order to support their family.
Heartland
Music
A young Oklahoma artist, struggling with a recent death, finds escape in a reckless affair with her brother's girlfriend.
Pawn Sacrifice
Orchestrator
American chess champion Bobby Fischer prepares for a legendary match-up against Russian Boris Spassky.
People, Places, Things
Original Music Composer
Will Henry is a newly single graphic novelist balancing being a parent to his young twin daughters and teaching a classroom full of college students, all the while trying to navigate the rich complexities of new love and letting go of the woman who left him.
My Old Lady
Music
Mathias Gold is a down-on-his-luck New Yorker who inherits a Parisian apartment from his estranged father. But when he arrives in France to sell the vast domicile, he's shocked to discover a live-in tenant who is not prepared to budge. His apartment is a viager—an ancient French real estate system with complex rules pertaining to its resale—and the feisty Englishwoman Mathilde Girard, who has lived in the apartment with her daughter Chloé for many years, can by contract collect monthly payments from Mathias until her death.
La sedia della felicità
Music
Dino craft practice tattoos, Bruna is a beautician; their studies are facing each other. They learn of a mysterious treasure hidden in a chair that belonged to a woman now dead.
Nebraska
Original Music Composer
An aging, booze-addled father takes a trip from Montana to Nebraska with his estranged son in order to claim what he believes to be a million-dollar sweepstakes prize.
A Tangled Tale
Music
In this unusual romance, hand-tinted sand becomes a metaphor for two souls as they join and separate. A lonely fish, hooked by an angler's line, encounters another in the same dire situation. As the two struggle, the physical connection moves deeper. Is it love or merely a will to survive?
Felix Austria!
Music
Compelled by the inheritance of a mysterious box of letters, American aesthete Felix Pfeifle begins the journey of a lifetime to reach the source of the correspondence: the last heir of the Holy Roman Emperors, aging Archduke Otto von Habsburg. The quest takes Felix across America , over the Atlantic and beyond.
The Revisionaries
Music
The theory of evolution and a re-write of American history are caught in the crosshairs when an unabashed Creationist seeks re-election as chairman of America's most influential Board of Education.
Flat Daddy
Music
As families across America endure the repeated deployment of loved ones to Iraq and Afghanistan, many attempt to fill the void with Flat Daddies and Heroes on a Stick, life-sized cardboard cutouts of their husbands, wives, sons, and daughters serving overseas. The documentary feature "Flat Daddy" uses these two-dimensional surrogates as a connecting thread to explore the lasting impact of the war on the families left behind.
The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond
Music
Tells the story of Fisher Willow, the disliked 1920s Memphis débutante daughter of a plantation owner with a distaste for narrow-minded people and a penchant for shocking and insulting those around her. After returning from studies overseas, Fisher falls in love with Jimmy, the down-and-out son of an alcoholic father and an insane mother who works at a store on her family's plantation.
Comrades in Dreams
Music
Four lives that could not be more different and a single passion that unites them: the unconditional love for their cinemas, somewhere at the end of the world. Comrades in Dreams brings together six cinema makers from North Korea, America, India and Africa and follows their efforts to make their audiences dream every night.
Sweet Land
Music
Set in 1920, Inge travels from Germany to rural Minnesota in order to meet the man destined to be her husband.
The Good Girl
Original Music Composer
A discount store clerk strikes up an affair with a stock boy who considers himself the incarnation of Holden Caulfield.