John Williams' shadow

Thinking about one metric of an artist's influence, in light of JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH.

I just finished writing a feature for the L.A. Times on composer Alexandre Desplat, in connection with his score for the umpteenth Jurassic Park sequel, Jurassic World: Rebirth. [UPDATE: Here’s that story.] I’ll reserve my thoughts about that film and its score for private conversation—but more broadly, it has me thinking about John Williams’ shadow.

One useful metric for any artist’s importance or cultural significance is the size of their shadow. Does their work become a template or standard by which other artists are constantly compared? Possibly for decades or more? Do their contemporaries and successors have to continually reckon with or converse with their work, to be forced into choosing either to honor or subvert it, but hard-pressed ever to ignore it?

By this method of measuring, John Williams has cast an insanely large shadow.

In large part that’s because his work was in Hollywood, where “franchises” and sequels and prequels and spinoffs became the coin of the realm during the era of his reign. He had to deal with his own shadow on Jaws 2, and then on The Empire Strikes Back, and then Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and on and on up through the very recent Star Wars and Indiana Jones chapters.

But it’s also a testament to just how culturally omnipresent John was for so many years, giving the musical signature to a staggering number of new myths and dream worlds—from Luke Skywalker to Superman to Indiana Jones to Harry Potter, from Jaws to Jurassic Park. Most of these modern icons are still getting trotted out in new adventures and iterations, and along with their core characteristics and lore comes their iconic music… John Williams’ music, to be precise.

The new Superman trailers have leaned hard into his mythos, almost 50 years after John wrote his Superman theme.

I already wrote a piece on the long, shaggy evolutionary history of Star Wars music, and I could probably churn out thousands of words on any one of these “intellectual properties” and their musical legacies. But today I’m more interested in tracing the wider history—and hearing from the composers who found themselves standing in John’s shadow, and how they dealt with it.

It all started in the 1970s. When big, orchestral, operatic scores roared back into fashion because of Star Wars, a lot of composers started getting asked to sound like John Williams. Uber-talents like Jerry Goldsmith had no problem going big and bold; this was basically just permission to take off a pair of shackles, and epic scores like Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Swarm (which John was originally meant to score) fit the bill while still being completely true to Goldsmith’s unique voice. But even swingin’ hepcats like Henry Mancini got in on the act with scores like Lifeforce. (Mancini always wanted to write giant symphonic scores, and he reportedly grew jealous of his one-time pianist’s abundant Wagnerian opportunities.)

By the 1980s, a new freshman class of film composers was eager to play in this shadow. Bruce Broughton, James Horner, and Alan Silvestri were all given budgets for huge orchestras, and were expected to write tuneful leitmotifs and do the same kind of heroic storytelling that John did so perfectly during that decade. The best composers honored the prompt while still carving their own distinct path, and this was one of the richest decades in film music history because of the special combination of John’s influence, the business still being analogue and adventurous, and a truly inspired crop of young composers.

Obviously this wasn’t all John’s shadow; I’m not that naive. In many ways composers were being asked to return to the kind of big, symphonic storytelling scores of Hollywood’s Golden Age; in other ways they were simply being asked to make movies feel large and opulent, to feel mythic. But John played an outsized role in returning films to this mold, and his scores set the standard.

Composers like Horner were also jealous of his relationship with Steven Spielberg, who built vast canvases that begged for opulent, lyrical scores, and who didn’t then cut those scores (or their composer) to ribbons. Matthew Robbins, who directed the Spielberg-produced *batteries not included, told me the main reason Horner took that job was “because he really wanted to meet and spend time with Steven. But Steven really was loyal to John Williams. He wasn’t about to switch over to James Horner, who I think was lurking.” Horner rightly pegged Spielberg as a filmmaker who made immersive, powerful cinema that bowed to extroverted, emotional, melodic music. “You are in another kind of state,” said Robbins. “Any composer who met Steven would have a glancing dream of: Oh my god—this is a guy who would put me front and center the way he did John Williams.”

Horner found his own freedom with his own simpatico directors, and in animation.

By the late 1980s, John’s shadow was more complicated. Composers like Hans Zimmer were explicitly being asked to not sound like John Williams. The pendulum had swung, and certain directors felt like his melodic operas were old-fashioned and passé. The ’90s were still a rich time for both John and composers of his ilk, as plenty of directors (and genres) continued to want some of that old-time religion, but Zimmer and company were definitely reshaping the direction and style of Hollywood film music.

There were sequels to some of John’s iconic films during this time—Jaws 3-D and Jaws 4, Superman 3 and Superman 4—and they all paid dutiful homage to his iconic themes. But these were mostly pathetic, limping trips back to the slot machine, nobody in the audience really cared how the musical legacy was handled, and John was wise to stay away from the films himself (even if he did write a new theme for Nuclear Man).

Trends ebb and flow in Hollywood; eccentric studio heads were replaced by global corporations and tech conglomerates, risks grew more and more rare, and a new class of directors came on the scene who grew up on a steady diet of the films of the ’70s and ’80s. By the 2010s, the most powerful currency in the film business—by far—was nostalgia. And so, for the past 15 or so years, we have seen almost nothing but sequels, prequels, “legasequels,” reboots, and movies based on the comic books that many of you (but not me) grew up reading. It’s incredibly bleak.

The strange byproduct of this situation, though, is that John’s shadow grew even larger and more imposing. His themes were just as nostalgic and essential as Luke’s lightsaber or Indiana Jones’ fedora or Superman’s cape, if not emotionally more so. If studios wanted to pluck your heartstrings (i.e., get you to buy a ticket), they just had to tease one of John’s melodies in the trailer for their new recycled product.

John Ottman gladly leaned all the way into John’s shadow on Superman Returns, the first modern resurrection of one of his beloved musical characters (much as Don Davis had done on Jurassic Park III). But when Hans Zimmer was asked to score the Man of Steel in 2013, he was paralyzed.

“For three months, I did nothing,” he told me.

“I just sat there like a deer in front of the headlights. And then Zack Snyder—the sweetest move, the best move he could make—said, ‘Hans, what are you on about? It's just a movie!’ And I'm going, ‘Oh right! It's just a movie. You're quite right.’ And I found a completely different way into it than John did. Absolutely the opposite.

And I know John obviously thought as much about his version as I thought about mine, with the obvious ‘Superman!’ at the end of his phrase—you know, actually putting the name into it, and it being Superman right from the word go. While I was going exactly the other way around. I was going: there is this guy, and he's got these superpowers, and he grows up in Kansas, and his big dream is just one dream—to become more human, to not be a Superman, to just be a Kansas farmer.

But you can understand that everything John had done was haunting me. And it wasn't John, and it wasn't even his music. It was the fans, you know—the rabid fans.”

Ah yes: the fans. When a composer is hired to score a new Superman movie, or a new Star Wars series, or a new Jurassic Park sequel, they are not just burdened with their own reverence for John’s music, or with possibly how John will feel about their approach, or with the director (and studio’s) expectations—but with the army of literal fanatics who have fueled this nostalgia boom. We’re still living in the Comic-Con Era, where whole generations of moviegoers have built their entire identities around particular “intellectual properties” that they grew up with. For them, these movies (and their story canons, characters—and music) are religion, and to play fast and loose with any of it is nothing less than heresy.

Star Wars, it seems, is the most treacherous mythology to tamper with. When I spoke to Natalie Holt about how fans reacted to her Obi-Wan Kenobi score, she contrasted it with the lovely messages she received about Loki. “Obviously Marvel fans are hugely passionate for it,” she said, “but they don't come with quite the same level, of what's the word? Interrogation?”

That’s a kind way of putting it; Star Wars fans have been known to make death threats.

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To a person, at least on the record, every composer who has been saddled with a Williams-founded property is a true, massive fan of his. (Maybe don’t ask Thom Yorke to score a Star Wars show.) They approach these holy artifacts with nothing but respect and reverence. But it’s almost an impossible task to take on a film story that everyone associates with the indelible tunes and inimitable style of John Williams. Do you try and sound just like him and mostly rely on his themes? Do you zig down a completely different path? Do you attempt to split the difference?

I’ve quoted this often, but when John Powell was hired to score Solo he joked with Michael Giacchino that it was like “walking through a minefield in clown shoes.” In other words: you just can’t win.

Giacchino was a last-minute hire on Rogue One—the first Star Wars feature not to be scored by John. Alexandre Desplat was originally meant to score it, re-teaming with Godzilla director Gareth Edwards (who just directed Jurassic World: Rebirth), but when Tony Gilroy took the reins and the schedule was delayed, Desplat took the exit. It wasn’t because he was scared; he’s as passionate and intelligent a John Williams fan as I’ve ever met, and he had deftly carried the baton of John’s legacy on the final two Harry Potter films (which are, in my opinion, the most successful of the post-JW sequel scores).

Well, okay, he was a little scared.

When he got the Deathly Hallows job, Desplat said: “It was extremely frightening—and I was not a kid, but still I was impressed by the task in front of me, because I knew that he had invented so many great moments in Harry Potter, and especially the Hedwig’s theme, that I had to be able to find a way through. I spent weeks playing with Hedwig’s theme—many, many, many, many, many, many versions trying to play with it in any type of transcription, orchestration I could think of before starting work.”

Luckily, he said, director David Yates ultimately didn’t really want much of that theme, “so it opened to me another way of entering into Harry Potter. Of course, as soon as the editing room was using some of John's music as a temp track, it became hell—because I don't write like John. Nobody writes like him. And I had to erase it from my ears and try to do what I can do. And Star Wars I didn’t do, so at the end of the day I was lucky somehow,” he laughed.

Giacchino was, perhaps, the modern composer best suited for the task of painting with nostalgia. He’s an avatar of the fan generation, and has largely made a career out of playing with the action figures of his boyhood in scores for new Planet of the Apes, Spider-Man, and Star Trek movies. In fact, just one year before he did Rogue One he scored Jurassic World—doing the delicate fan-tango between John’s beloved oldies and his own original ideas. Poetically, Giacchino got his start as a media composer doing a Lost World videogame for Steven Spielberg.

After he gave an enthusiastic yes about scoring Jurassic World, Giacchino told me at the time, “I was both sort of very nostalgic about how this all started, but then at the same time completely terrified—because I was like, ‘Oh wait, that was John Williams. He did that. [Laughs] And now I have to do that?? What did I do? Why did I say yes to this?’”

When he took over Rogue One, with just four weeks to score the entire colossal picture, he said there simply wasn’t time to be intimidated by John’s shadow. But, he also said:

“I had a similar issue the first time I did Star Trek, and I almost overthought it too much, because I was like: Oh my God, it’s Star Trek. So when Star Wars rolled around—obviously I grew up with it, I love it, all my original toys I still have. I’m a huge fan. So part of me was just like: Give it to me; I know what to do with this. And I really just delved into the story.

I learned on Star Trek not to let the legacy of the past get in my way—which I did a little bit in the beginning of that one. This time, I just sat down and talked story with both Tony Gilroy and Gareth Edwards, and we just got into what this movie is about. And that just helped launch me.”

Powell, characteristically, has been much more blunt about how intimidated he was when he agreed to score Solo—but he also had the unique benefit of collaborating with John, and working with an original new theme by the master.

“Most of the time I was just frightened,” Powell told me in 2017. “But because John was on it, I thought: well, this will be really interesting. It just felt like something I should challenge myself with, but would also really build some more muscles for me. I thought: This is a good thing to do. This will really challenge me—and it might break me, but it might challenge me to write better.”

(I did a new interview with Powell for my book—along with Desplat—and the section on Solo is both very funny and also moving.)

There have now been a dozen or more Star Wars films or streaming series scored by new composers. Multiple Harry Potter sequels, four Jurassic World movies, a new Home Alone, and now another Superman reboot. Other than being an utterly depressing state of affairs, where all we get served now is just microwaved leftovers of the slop from our infancy, the sheer volume and plethora of these assignments have given composers more and more leeway to inch a little further from John’s shadow and color outside the lines he drew. Some—like Nicholas Britell and Ludwig Göransson (as I’ve argued)—have done a bang-up job defining their own signature.

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I love talking to Desplat about John Williams. I was actually 15 minutes late to my Zoom interview with him last week because I was late leaving John’s house—which meant Alexandre had no choice but to forgive me, and also eagerly ask me how John is doing. He raves about John’s unchallenged spot on the throne, and said that whenever he hears a composer or musician talk disparagingly of John Williams, “I want to punch them.”

I’ve been in an almost yearly dialogue with Desplat since 2008, when I first interviewed him (about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). Again and again he has sung the praises of our mutual idol, and Desplat has articulated as well as anyone the importance of John’s shadow. In 2010, speaking to me about Deathly Hallows, he said:

“We can’t avoid that John Williams began with his very strong print. His themes are always incredibly strong and memorable, and also his orchestrations are of a rare virtuosity—which has always stunned me. He’s the master, what can I say? He’s the man. He’s the last tycoon of American movie music. So that’s everything said there. He drew a line, and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try and challenge this line. With humility, but with desire ... It’s a kind of battle.”

In our very first interview (and maybe this was the moment I fell in love with the guy), Desplat said:

“Whatever anyone can say about his work—‘he’s too much this,’ or ‘not enough of that,’ or ‘I don’t like John Williams’—he is the master. There’s no other master in America. He’s the one. And I wouldn’t write melodies like I write, if any good, if I’d not listened to John Williams. I would not be as obsessed by orchestration if I’d not listened to John Williams, because he’s also the one who made the orchestra still going and alive in the ‘70s and ‘80s.”

And so, beyond all of the nostalgia strip-mining and the sacred canonical texts of his franchise character themes, the “shadow of John Williams” is actually more significant. He revived and perfected an elegant craft, a masterful way of scoring movies and telling stories with melody and a symphonist’s artistry. That shadow has too often been ignored—or, more likely, it’s just been too daunting for most modern composers to even approach. But the question “Should I score this like John Williams?” ought to be more than just an obstacle or a practical consideration for film composers today.

It’s a dare.