The Billion-Dollar Composer

Pinar Toprak’s second child arrived a week early. Her first had taken “his sweet time,” so the composer hadn’t worried about scheduling an expensive 60-piece orchestra session—to record her score for the animated film Light of Olympia—a week before her due date in the spring of 2008, even under the gun of a four-day cancellation policy. She finished writing the last cue on a Friday evening, sent it to her orchestrator, and bought a tub of Nutella to celebrate.

Then, her water broke. She gave birth, lied to hospital staff about why she needed to be discharged early, left at 1 a.m.—and was conducting the orchestra shortly thereafter with a 30-hour-old infant, nursing him during 10-minute breaks. “It’s crazy,” she admits, laughing. “But at the time, I did what I thought I had to do.”

The composer for film, TV, and video game projects as wide-ranging as the feminist superhero blockbuster Captain Marvel, HBO’s wry docuseries McMillions, and the highest-earning game of 2018, Fortnite, Toprak is described by friends and colleagues as “tenacious”—a problem solver fueled by perseverance. And by all accounts, she has had to be.

In a field that has always been dominated by men (and white men, at that), Toprak is the first woman to score a movie that grossed $1 billion, and she remains one of the few female