Gertz died Friday at his home in West Los Angeles, said David Schecter, a record producer and film-music historian who was a close friend. No specific cause of death was given.
From the late 1940s to the late '60s, Gertz wrote music for about 200 movies and television episodes. Among his film credits are Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, Francis Joins the WACS, The Alligator People, The Monolith Monsters, The Creature Walks Among Us, Overland Pacific, To Hell and Back, The Thing That Couldn't Die and Flaming Star.
“He had a tremendous dramatic sense of writing the appropriate music for a picture; he was just a superb composer," said Schecter, noting that most of the work Gertz did at Universal-International in the 1950s was uncredited.
As was customary at the time, he said, the studio used multiple composers on the same picture, such as Henry Mancini, Hans Salter and Herman Stein, but only the head of the music department received screen credit.
