Berklee hires composer who scored ‘Austin Powers’ movies

By June Wulff, Globe Staff

Hopefully they didn’t pay him “One million dollars!”

Berklee College of Music announced it has signed up George S. Clinton, the award-winning film composer to be the new chair of the school’s Film Scoring Department. The program is a rarity, the only one of its kind, according to Berklee.

When Mike Myers as Austin Powers and Dr. Evil works his magic, it’s to a musical score by Clinton. When Cheech & Chong cavort in “Still Smokin’,” that’s Clinton’s score. And when young composers from the Sundance Institute make it big, they can thank Clinton, who has mentored folks there for more than 10 years. Clinton arrives on campus next week.

In a 2010 feature story about the program, the Globe’s Mark Feeney wrote: Berklee has more than 300 students majoring in film scoring. It offers the world’s only undergraduate major in film scoring. So great is the demand for chances to compose that Berklee students will seek out filmmaking counterparts at Emerson or Boston University, offering to create scores for their student films.