Music by John Williams: Eminent Film Composer Steps in Front of the Lens at Last
By Kim Hughes
Rating: A
John Williams has a very good friend in Steven Spielberg.
In the sweeping new documentary Music by John Williams, we learn that in 1969, Spielberg vowed to himself to hire Williams to produce the kind of grand orchestral scores that dazzled the 22-year-old aspiring director as he watched a film called The Reivers, scored by Williams in a style that was on its way out of fashion in Hollywood in favour of contemporary music.
“That wasn’t going to happen on my watch,” a disarmingly laidback Spielberg chuckles in the film, adding that with Williams, “The music comes from the sky and envelops him. It’s the purest form of art I’ve ever experienced from any human being.”
Coming from arguably the planet’s most gifted living filmmaker, that’s quite a compliment. Yet it’s just one of countless snappy, memorable, heartfelt quotes from a coterie of very talented people lined up by Music by John Williams to… ahem… sing the legendary 92-year-old composer’s praises.
Spielberg, of course, made good on his word, tapping Williams to score his 1974 big-screen debut, Sugarland Express, thus launching an almost unparalleled and wildly prolific cinematic relationship that would go on to include blockbusters with scores so unique they might have DNA: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Schindler’s List, Catch Me If You Can.
And that’s just some of the films made with Spielberg. Williams also famously scored Star Wars for George Lucas — which Spielberg had to push him to do as Williams was leaning towards working on A Bridge Too Far at the time. He also scored a laundry list of other marquee titles, including a handful of Harry Potter movies, and the pilot episode of Gilligan’s Island.
This last quirky tidbit is pointed out by director J.J. Abrams as a way of demonstrating Williams’ sprawling versatility, which led him to lead the Boston Pops and other orchestras and soloists the world over while still scoring films at a shattering pace.
But where does this talent come from? The film attempts to unpack Williams’ process though there are clearly metaphysical, and possibly otherworldly, aspects at play here that simply cannot be quantified. Lining up his achievements one by one is genuinely startling to comprehend. It’s the film’s narrative engine.
And so, propelled by a carnival of minutiae and loads of clips from the above-mentioned films — with scenes before and after the music was added, notably Jaws from 1975 — Music by John Williams is like a Wikipedia page brilliantly sprung to life, and exquisitely filmed over the decades variously by Spielberg, Lucas, and Ron Howard among others.
Yet for all those visual bells and whistles, the film’s most affecting passage may be Williams’ protracted walk through his roots, detailing how he was born in New York to musical parents. At 15, the family relocated to California where Williams’ drummer father quickly found work with movie studio orchestras. Williams, already a gifted pianist and enthusiast, planted his nose “in orchestration notebooks for decades” thanks to stuff the old man carted home.
A Canadian connection cemented Williams’ future pairing of music to moving images. Stationed in Newfoundland during a stint with the Air Force at the end of WWII, Williams was tapped by a German company to score a film it was making about the Maritime provinces at the behest of the Canadian government. It was his first such venture, and everything snowballed from there.
The depth of detail in Music by John Williams is impossible to overstate, covering as it does his earliest days as a jazz pianist to his 54 (!) Oscar nominations and five wins, as well as his music for the concert stage, his impact on popular culture and aspects of his personal life, including the sudden death of Barbara Ruick, his first wife and mother of his three children, who was suddenly felled by a brain aneurysm in 1974 at age 41.
That Williams remembers so much so clearly is itself extraordinary, and director Laurent Bouzereau has tapped an A-list crew including (but not limited to) Chris Martin, Branford Marsalis, Ke Huy Quan, and Itzhak Perlman to buttress Williams’ depth with sterling anecdotes and observations.
Says Martin, “When Steven Spielberg and John Williams are together, they are a band. And bands are cool.” Presumably, the lead singer of Coldplay would know.
If there’s a (admittedly tiny) bone to pick, it’s that Music by John Williams feels more like a valentine than a traditional warts-and-all documentary. Then again, few have led a life like this. For film nerds and fans of classical and orchestral music, it’s absolutely gold.
Music by John Williams. Directed by Laurent Bouzereau. With Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Ron Howard, J.J. Abrams, Chris Martin, Branford Marsalis, Ke Huy Quan and Itzhak Perlman. Now streaming on Disney+.