By CRAIG HAVIGHURST
Staff Writer

A few weeks before Christmas, about 15 Nashville songwriters found themselves in the Studio City, Calif., home of stockbroker and music enthusiast Brian Caramadre.

For the writers, it was a familiar setting: a house concert, with small groups of writers taking turns in the spotlight. The music lasted from early evening until well after midnight.

But it was an evening of business as well as pleasure. Many in the crowd of more than 200 were music supervisors, the people who decide what one hears behind the action or credits of movies and television programs.

The artists — including noted Nashville writers Deana Carter, Jamie O’Neal, Dean Miller and Stephony Smith — were showcasing not only their own work, but their publishers and a Nashville community eager to broaden Hollywood’s idea of what Nashville songwriters and composers have to offer.

Nashville artists, writers, publishers and record labels have had a string of success in Hollywood in the past four years, but event organizers Melissa Sckoff, the casting director for the CBS-TV show JAG, and Liz Morin, a former Los Angeles television executive who is now creative manager with Scream Marketing and Copyright.net here in Music City, believe that with a concerted campaign, film and TV music could become Nashville’s newest growth industry.

"I knew you could make a lot of money getting songs on TV and in film," Morin said of the origins of her efforts. She began with a similar showcase in August and plans to continue with another in May. "I wanted to get (networks and film studios) clued in that Nashville has the material. All they have to do is hear it. Everybody who was out there made some kind of contact."

Now is a critical time for Nashville publishers to find new markets, because the core market in new country albums has slowed. Hit songs are being cycled through radio playlists more slowly than ever before, and hit artists are cutting records less frequently, sometimes with two years elapsing between releases, when a new album every nine months used to be routine.

Moreover, Morin said, "right now in Nashville you’ve got the same producers producing everybody, so if they don’t like your songs, you’ve got six artists who won’t cut your songs. It’s very hard right now. That’s why we need to branch out."

"Maybe five years ago (film and TV) wasn’t such a big deal," said Jewel Coburn, owner of Ten Ten Music Group. "Now, we’re focusing on it more. It’s certainly growing and we’re getting a lot of requests."

Showcases like Morin’s also give independent publishers a chance to compete against Nashville’s largest publishers, most of whom are under the same corporate umbrella as movie and television production companies. "A lot of the bigger publishing companies have their own people who strictly work with movies and TV. I wanted to give smaller companies the chance," Morin said.

Nashville’s history with Hollywood goes back many decades, from Republic Pictures’ 1940 film about the Grand Ole Opry to relatively contemporary bridge-builders like Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 and John Travolta’s Urban Cowboy, which launched a Nashville record boom.

But the past four years have been especially fruitful. In 1997, Robert Duvall’s film The Apostle drew extensively on Nashville gospel and country material for a "songs inspired by" album. A year later, Dreamworks produced two soundtracks, one sacred and one secular, for the film Prince of Egypt that were stocked with Nashville songs and artists. The Horse Whisperer earned an Academy Award nomination for MCA recording artist Allison Moorer’s version of A Soft Place To Fall. And the film Hope Floats produced a hit soundtrack that earned Garth Brooks two Grammy nominations, plus exposure for numerous Nashville artists and writers.

Very recently, the soundtrack for the film Runaway Bride produced the first exposure for Martina McBride’s hit I Love You, and in a more traditional vein, producer T-Bone Burnett came to Nashville to steer the making of the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers film O Brother, Where Art Thou? And Marty Stuart recently earned a Golden Globe nomination for his score of Billy Bob Thornton’s All The Pretty Horses.

A featured song in a film can net a publisher upwards of $30,000, and far more if it appears on a hit soundtrack album, but those kinds of sales are rare. Local publishers say that on a day-to-day basis, they’re equally focused on landing those less-noticeable song placements that earn tidy sums on a quick turnaround basis.

Ree Guyer Buchanan, president of Wrensong, said she recently placed a song in the background of a scene in the show Party of Five that snagged $7,000 each for the publisher and record label. She’s made a new push in Hollywood’s direction in recent years, she said, with frequent trips and a Web site that went up in May of last year to showcase songs for music supervisors. She also markets some of her catalog through new Nashville online business songcatalog.com, which lets music buyers search for appropriate music by topic, genre, style and a range of other criteria for almost any commercial use.

"It’s just like song plugging," Buchanan said. "You’ve got to be in the middle of it and in the pulse of it, to know exactly what they need. It’s even a quicker business, because the TV people are looking for the episodes that are happening this week."

The Country Music Association is in on the game, too. "In the last year, there’s been a lot of discussion internally about how do we rev this up," said Rick Murray, the CMA’s senior director of strategic marketing. "We’re looking at a New York and L.A. strategy."

Murray said that in addition to showcases at Hollywood talent conferences, the CMA courted Fox TV for a year and landed an episode of the animated King of the Hill in which the Hill family visits Nashville’s Fan Fair.

Nashville’s extensive Christian and gospel music community has seen similar growth on the West Coast. Rick Cua, vice president, creative with EMI Christian Music Publishing, said his company scored 30 song placements in television and film this year, improving on a little more than 20 the previous year. Song placements include television’s Dawson’s Creek and Party of Five, and a song in an upcoming HBO movie about the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1956.

"We have really connected with that community," said Cua, who makes three or four trips to L.A. every year. "We’ve made it a point to go out there and get to know them."

He’s helped crack some preconceived notions about Nashville music and Christian music, he said, noting that the vast majority of his placements have been used in scenes or contexts that have nothing to do with religion.

Greg Yantek is a music supervisor for ABC who sees Nashville’s stock rising on the West Coast. "I work with a lot of people who are … stubborn about country music," he said. "But everybody is slowly learning that Nashville is out there to help us and that there are a lot of tunes in Nashville that aren’t country."

He added that Nashville publishers generally cut better deals than large West Coast publishers, making Music City a bargain for music supervisors.

Perhaps more than any other thing, publishers with West Coast leanings want to convince the music buyers that Nashville can offer music from any genre.

"When you come from Nashville, right away there’s a stigma on the music that it’s all country. That’s just not true," Buchanan said. "We really have to dispel that."

Craig Havighurst covers the music industry for The Tennessean. He can be reached at 259-8041 or chavighurst@tennessean.com.