Mike Lang: Last News

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Vice Media Group, still grappling with the ripple effects of its bankruptcy filing and aftermath, has tapped Mike Lang, a 30-year-plus veteran of TV, film and game industries who was one of Hulu’s founding executives, as interim executive chairman. Lang joins as executive chairman of the Brooklyn-based media company after serving as an adviser to Fortress Investment Group, one of Vice Media’s former lenders.

EXCLUSIVE: Pixel United, a gaming firm led by former Discovery, Miramax and Fox exec Mike Lang, is developing a second season of Raid: Call of the Arbiter, an animated series based on a well-established mobile game.

Jon Burlingame editorMike Lang, one of the preeminent pianists in Hollywood history, died of lung cancer Friday morning at his home in Studio City. He was 80.Lang played piano (or organ, harpsichord or celeste) on an estimated 2,000 film and TV scores dating back to the mid-1960s, including scores by virtually every great film composer of the past 50 years: John Williams (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Catch Me If You Can”), Jerry Goldsmith (“Gremlins,” “The Russia House”), John Barry (“Body Heat,” “The Specialist”), Henry Mancini (“10”), Alex North (“The Shoes of the Fisherman”), Elmer Bernstein (“The Rainmaker”), Miklós Rózsa (“Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”) and many others.Composer Lalo Schifrin (“Mission: Impossible”) was among Lang’s earliest champions in Hollywood, adding Lang’s piano to what eventually became the Grammy-winning Paul Horn album “Jazz Suite on the Mass Texts” in 1965.