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Billy Goldenberg, a two-time Emmy-winning composer and 21-time nominee who was musical director for Elvis Presley’s 1968 “Comeback Special” and worked on scores of shows ranging from Night Gallery and The Young and the Restless to Columbo, Kojak, Rhoda and Steven Spielberg’s Duel, has died. He was 84.

The news was confirmed on social media by Goldenberg’s friends Leonard Slatkin and Gary Gerani, but no cause of death was given. Read their tributes below.

Goldenberg worked on hundreds of films and TV programs — mostly the latter — during a career that spanned four decades. His early work included 1960s TV specials from Barbra Streisand and Ann-Margret and serving as music coordinator for the pop music series Hullabaloo.

In 1968, he was set as musical director for NBC’s Presley program that would come to be known as the ’68 Comeback Special. A few years later, Goldenberg would work his another showbiz legend,...

Billy Goldenberg, the Emmy-winning composer and songwriter, died Monday night at his home in New York City. He was 84.

Goldenberg wrote the themes for such 1970s TV series as “Kojak,” “Harry O” and “Rhoda,” composed the pilot scores for “Night Gallery” and “Columbo,” and won Emmys for the TV-movie “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom” and miniseries “The Lives of Benjamin Franklin,” “King” and “Rage of Angels.”

He expanded his 1975 “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom” song score, with lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman, into the score of the 1978 Broadway musical “Ballroom,” directed and choreographed by Michael Bennett of “A Chorus Line” fame. It earned eight Tony nominations including Best Musical.

Reminiscing Wednesday about their collaboration on “Ballroom,” Alan Bergman told Variety: “Billy was one of the rare composers who was also a dramatist. Lots of people can write melodies, but you could tell Billy the situation, what the characters were feeling,...

I've ranted once or twice about some of the geekier goodies I've found through Netflix, but somehow this one got by me. It'd been a while since I'd visited Hacking Netflix, which is an excellent blog by the way, and it was there that I read ... huh, what's this? I can now view All* my "Watch Instantly" titles through my Xbox 360? Really? Well I just had to check that out.

My system needed to update to the jazzy new 360 dashboard, but introducing my Xbox to my Netflix queue was remarkably easy. Now, you can't exactly browse through the Netflix website -- in fact the 360 system only accesses your Wi queue. But I watched two episodes of Heroes (Season 3) and the whole of Sam Peckinpah's The Killer Elite (starring James Caan And Robert Duvall!) in one enjoyable sitting. (Yeah, I'm a good sitter.) Just another reason that Xbox is cooler...

Richard Widmark, the actor whose menacing portrayals in numerous film noir thrillers made him synonymous with the genre, died Monday at age 93. According to news reports, the actor passed away at his home in Roxbury, CT after a long illness. Widmark appeared on both radio and the stage before making one of the most auspicious -- and audacious -- debuts in film history as the giggling killer Tommy Udo, a man who pushes an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs, in the 1947 thriller Kiss of Death; the film earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, a Golden Globe for New Star Of The Year, and a contract with 20th Century Fox. His portrayals of hard-boiled men, sometimes criminals, sometimes just plain amoral, made him an instant star, and he played villains in The Street with No Name, Road House, and Yellow Sky. He notoriously menaced Marilyn Monroe in Don't Bother to Knock, played a racist criminal in No Way Out, and was a pickpocket caught up in a Communist spy ring in Pickup on South Street. Widmark proved he could also play against type as a doctor tracking down a killer infected with the bubonic plague in Panic in the Streets, and a doomed con man in Jules Dassin's Night and the City. The actor worked consistently throughout his career, adding Westerns to his repertoire with roles in Broken Lance, The Alamo, Cheyenne Autumn (directed by John Ford), and How the West Was Won, and appeared in the Oscar-winning Judgment at Nuremberg as well. He segued into television in the 1970s as Madigan (based on his 1968 film of the same name, directed by Don Siegel), and received an Emmy nomination for 1972's Vanished, where he played the President of the United States with a secret to hide. Other notable films during the 1970s and 1980s included Murder on the Orient Express, The Domino Principle, Coma, and the film noir update Against All Odds; his last role was in the 1991 political drama True Colors, after which he retired from filmmaking. Widmark is survived by his second wife, Susan Blanchard, and his daughter, Anne, from his first marriage to screenwriter Jean Hazlewood, who died in 1997. --Mark Englehart, IMDb staff...