Posted on 02/08/2022 7:04:40 AM PST by Borges
John Williams, the man who changed the way we hear the movies, turns 90 today.
As the key Hollywood composer during the blockbuster era of the 1970s and 1980s, Williams had an astronomical career alongside the likes of filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
With his music for their movies, Williams revived the romantic orchestral sound of Hollywood's Golden Age — the sound pioneered by composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner at the dawn of the talkies — and reinvented it for a new era.
“John Williams has been the single most significant contributor to my success as a filmmaker,” Spielberg said in 2012.
On the numbers alone, Williams has had a career like no other. If you were going to the movies between 1970 and 1990, every second year would have had a number one box office hit with music by Williams.
(Excerpt) Read more at abc.net.au ...
Irwin Allen’s TV shows, Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants. He was listed as Johnny Williams back then.
The big money is in music for cinema, not symphonies, but Williams has done both.
If his music sounds "the same", it is partly for some of the movies being "the same". In several cases, he was writing music for sequels of movies he had already scored, so there is no helping that. Had he not been tapped for so many sci-fi/franchise epic films he might have been seen in a different light. His scores for two Mark Rydell films - The Reivers with Steve McQueen and The Cowboys with John Wayne are nothing like his Star Wars/Superman scores. The Cowboys is one of the great western scores, IMO.
Hahahahahaha, that is a visual I will have difficulty getting out of my head!
Every time they’d make a new Star Wars movie, be they the prequels from the late 90’s (I think) or the more recent ones, the first thing I ask is if John Williams is making the music. LOL
Jerome Moross - The Big Country soundtrack (and a believable movie.)
Jaws - stupid movie where the men didn’t have sense enough to go to sea with fully automatic weapons and plug Jaws as soon as it came up for bait. But then the movie would have been over in a half hour.
Star Wars - futuristic high tech, but still dog fighting, only in space ships instead of biplanes. When that movie was made jets had been shot down by SAMs 5 miles away 10 yrs earlier in VN, and Gary Powers U2 shot down from a lot farther than that almost 20 yrs earlier.
Harry Potter - (puke) anti-christ training
John Williams - The Reivers This IS Americana.
I mean in real life they would call the coast guard wouldn’t they?
He’s taken OK movies and turned them into blockbusters.
Henry Mancini.
“living composer”
Mancini’s work lives on. :-)
I notice some movies released last month are already on HBO. They don’t seem to last long in theaters these days.
I remember when Star Wars was described as a “Space Western”, which it kinda was.
I’m partial to Elmer Bernstein.
And since I like dead ones better than the live ones at the moment (though Willliams comes close), I’ll throw in Maurice Jarre.
And there was the Quint (sp) character, telling the other two, during a drunken night on tbe boat, about the sailors dying from shark attacks after the USS Indianapolis was sunk. IMO, an experience like that would not have led him to want to be the only boat and crew, and take days to eliminate a threat.
But that’s the fantasy part of the movies, making the ridiculous believable.
***It was the expectation of when it would appear from the deep!***
Yeah, we all knew it was a mechanical shark but still got a thrill when it poked it’s head up during the chumming scene!
I still enjoy that scene!
Reminds me of when we were over on Lake Tenkiller and I saw a rope off the pier in the water. pulling up the rope I suddenly came face to face with the BIGGEST catfish I have ever seen! I let go the rope!
Yann Tiersen is one of my favorites, especially his score for Goodbye Lenin.
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