Brothers Jon and Al Kaplan moved to Los Angeles in 1996 to study concert composition at USC. After surviving three brutal years under the film music-hating faculty, they finally made it to the film scoring program and graduated with degrees in concert composition. Whoopee! Jon and Al are struggling, world-famous film and TV composers, but they also love musicals -- especially Stephen Sondheim, Ashman and Menken's work, Leslie Bricusse's Scrooge, and Trey Parker and Marc Shaiman's South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. It was out of this love that Silence! The Musical was born in late 2002. What began as a handful of songs Jon and Al produced to amuse themselves eventually became a website with a cult following in 2003. Silence! was covered in magazines including Entertainment Weekly and Maxim, and aired on radio shows like XM's Opie and Anthony and Howard Stern's 100. In 2005, Jon and Al composed several new songs and expanded Silence! into an actual musical. They wrote an Airplane!-styled screenplay, Silence! The Musical, that was adapted for the stage by Tony-nominee Hunter Bell; the show was mounted by director and Tony-nominee Christopher Gattelli at the 2005 NYC Fringe festival, where it won the "Overall Excellence Award" for Outstanding Musical. After seeing the show, Tony-winner Marc Shaiman (Hairspray, Misery) said “Bravo!” In 2010, Silence! re-opened in London at the Above the Stag Theatre; Uncle David flew Jon and Al to the premiere. Since Silence!, Jon and Al have gone on to compose completely unfunny music for the NBC reality show Starting Over; a John Ford silent film entitled Just Pals, which was included in the Ford at Fox DVD Box Set; and a series of Walt Disney web advertisements. The Kaplans also wrote two seasons worth of Super Nintendo-styled underscore for G4's cartoon series Code Monkeys. In 2009, the brothers wrote comedy (not music) for the MTV Movie Awards, and arranged Andy Samberg's "Lonely Island Medley," which was performed by LeAnn Rimes, Chris Isaak and Forest Whitaker. Jon and Al next scored The Hills Have Thighs, the controversial erotic film that aired on HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and TMC, and the Syfy Channel original film Dinocroc Vs. Supergator. In their spare time, the Kaplans have continued to pursue their first love of writing unstageable theater works; having finally learned iMovie, they have recently produced a series of viral video musicals, including Conan the Barbarian: The Musical and Terminator 2: The Opera, the brothers' biggest hits to date. In closing, the Kaplans' father always told them that the mouth is the most disgusting orifice on the human body. He was a dentist before he died, but he ran his practice into the ground because he hated the human mouth so vehemently. Instead, he followed his heart and went back to teaching music to children. This brings up the most important point: If you work hard, persevere, and follow your dreams, you will eventually die and turn into a skeleton like Dr. Kaplan. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.