On the Trail of: John's Pre-Spielberg Years

Finding treasures and solving mysteries in the funny, fertile period when "Johnny" became "John," but before he became JOHN WILLIAMS

We’ve all been thinking about Jaws recently, in light of its 50th anniversary. I wrote a post about its massive significance in John Williams’ career, and touched on what his life and career were like leading up to that “big bang.” I also recently gave a short talk at the Hollywood Bowl riffing on those same ideas (then watched the LA Phil perform the entire score live to picture).

Jaws event at the Hollywood Bowl, July 5, 2025

But today I want to expound on the strange, fertile, prolific, and somewhat confusing years in John’s life pre-Spielberg by way of my “On the Trail of” series, where I share a little about my methods of investigation and discovery.

First, a confession: I was never terribly interested in most of John’s work prior to Spielberg and Jaws. I wasn’t alive in the 1960s or early ’70s, so I didn’t have any particular nostalgia for the TV or films that John scored during that era. Adding to that, John’s credits pre-Spielberg weren’t really movies I was predisposed to like. (A Guide for the Married Man? The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing?) The more jazzy / comedy scores weren’t my cup of tea, and the movies mostly, well… sucked.

But writing a biography means being curious about every part of a person’s life, and I discovered plenty to admire and find interesting along the way, both in John’s own story during this period but also in the music. This was a kind of way station where John worked with some eccentric auteurs, found his voice and methodology as a film composer, wrote a symphony and flirted with a more classical career, and where he fell in love with England and its musicians, poetry, and folklore.

Although I still stand by my assessment of the vast majority of John’s pre-Spielberg films. (Hey, at least The Paper Chase is good!)

Now, to the trail…

Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY), April 2, 1972

One of the very first things I did was track down Mark Rydell. A lesser known director (at least nowadays), Rydell’s name is very important to John Williams devotees because it was the music in his films—namely The Reivers and The Cowboys—that made Steven Spielberg want to work with John. Rydell is like the John the Baptist of this story, the one who paved the way. Fortunately I had already interviewed Rydell a few years earlier, for a story in the more macabre wing of my weird career: advance obituaries. I was producing a short radio tribute about composer Dave Grusin (which thankfully hasn’t aired yet), and thought it would be great to have Rydell talk about On Golden Pond. (And it was!)

I knew that Rydell, who was now in his 90s, was living at a Hollywood industry retirement home in Calabasas. But these were Covid times (Spring of 2021), so I didn’t think it was likely I would be able to visit him. After some waiting and a little negotiation, the powers that be allowed it, and so, with masks on, I met Rydell in a community room at the facility—armed with LPs of the soundtracks for his films with John, and chaperoned by a very surly nurse. Age had deteriorated some of his memories, for sure, and he repeated himself more than a few times. But he still gave me some great stories and quotes, and I felt an even closer connection to the John Williams that existed Before Jaws.

Rydell joked about how Spielberg stole John from him and “never let [John] go. Steven gave him these remarkable offices at Universal, and he became like a third leg of Steven’s.”

Mark Rydell ca. 1984

Rydell was the only pre-Spielberg director I was able to talk to; the rest were either long gone or past the possibility of interviewing.

So, for the other films and TV work, I had to rely on the usual archival sources: books, newspapers, magazines, library collections, and secondhand interviews. I’m so glad that director Delbert Mann—a pivotal figure who first worked with John on Fitzwilly and who arguably gave John his earliest, most consequential canvas with Heidi—wrote a memoir, and included some of his thoughts on John and his music in it.

I was also thrilled to discover that the Delbert Mann papers, housed at Vanderbilt University, contained a videocassette of Saturday Adoption—a 1968 TV movie that aired on CBS Playhouse and was supposedly scored by John, but which had never been available to watch (or hear) anywhere. When I reached out to Vanderbilt they told me the tape could only be viewed on site, and I was so determined to watch / listen to this long-lost Williams movie that my wife and I booked flights to Nashville for a trip in April 2023. But in the interim since my first inquiry to Vanderbilt, they let me know that, actually, they had a new digital viewing system—and I could screen Saturday Adoption from my home in L.A.

So, the trip was swiftly canceled, flights were refunded… and I anxiously settled in on my iMac to experience a true John Williams rarity. (The tape began with a fun, Williamsy surprise: a lengthy ad for new color TVs from General Electric, hosted by a clean-cut Roy Scheider.) The first score cue for this rather stiff, stagy black-and-white melodrama wasn’t very promising; I took detailed notes, and I described the cue as “a simple, wandering, melancholy piece for slightly jazzy solo flute (alto flute?) and strummed acoustic guitar - doesn’t really sound like JW.” There were long stretches without any music at all, and then short, disposable bits played on solo flute, accordion, guitar, or saxophone. It was a strange, small score—and it sounded nothing like John. Finally, to make things even more confounding, there was no composer listed in the end credits! (Only a music supervisor, Ethel Huber.)

Why had this thing been attached to John for so long on IMDb and in other filmographies? The reason for that was clear: John was indeed hired to score it, as documents in the Mann papers confirm. One letter details that an orchestra recording date was reserved for John in New York, on November 18, 1968; another, to John’s agent (Marc Newman) outlines the details of his contract (a $5,000 fee, plus first-class airfare to New York); and his credit was listed among a preliminary set of instructions for all the credits that needed to appear as art cards. Funnily, the credit was typed as “Johnny Williams,” but the “ny” was then rubbed out. This was happening right as “Johnny” was becoming “John.”

But like I said: that card does not appear in the actual credits of the film, and there was no orchestra on this score.

I was regularly meeting with John by now, so I asked him point blank if he had scored this:

TG: Right after Heidi, you did a TV thing for Delbert Mann called Saturday Adoption. Do you remember that? You recorded in New York. It was like a teleplay, a very kind of contained play, black-and-white. And your cues are mostly just connective, sort of between scenes.

JW: Are you sure about that?

I have correspondence that confirms Johnny Williams is attached, and recording on these dates. Now, it doesn't sound like you, to my ears, so I was suspicious of it. But it was Delbert Mann, it was between Heidi and Jane Eyre…

I don’t think so.

That doesn’t ring a bell?

I don’t think so, no. And it was done in New York?

Yeah. He was editing in New York.

See, I probably would have been in London at that time.

It was right around the time you were in London for Chips.

Yeah, I don’t remember that. That doesn’t sound right.

The smoking gun really came in the other, major treasure trove I lucked upon pertaining to the pre-Spielberg era. In Arthur P. Jacobs’ papers at USC, there were carbon copies of a batch of letters that John wrote during the months he was working on Goodbye, Mr. Chips. These letters had already proven useful to previous archival CD projects—establishing dates, the address of John’s rental flat in London, etc.—and when I looked closer I found a letter John wrote from London, postmarked on the exact date that had been reserved for the Saturday Adoption recording sessions. It was gray and overcast, he wrote, and he had been called back to arrange a new version of one of the songs in Mr. Chips.

So, a massive spoiler for the very small handful of super-nerds who care: John Williams did not score Saturday Adoption!

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There was so much gold in that collection of letters from 1968 / ’69. Not only did they contain bits of factual information and breadcrumbs that helped me nail down dates and places, but they also revealed a lot about what was going on in John’s life at this extremely transitional moment, and even how he was feeling and reacting to some of it. He shared a more vulnerable and funny side with Lionel Newman and André Previn, talked about how giddy he was to meet Sir William Walton, defended the seriousness of one of his early concert works, and more. (I would have killed to have correspondence from the other periods in his life, but this was all I ever uncovered.)

When I was in London in the fall of 2022, I tracked down the two flats John rented there—the first for Chips, the second (and more substantial) for when he and his whole family moved to London for his work on Fiddler on the Roof.

21 Tregunter Road, in Kensington

Research is so much fun. I stumbled on, or was generously sent, so many incredible treasures along the path of writing this book. I discovered an early roll of photos of John from right when he moved back to Los Angeles in 1956, in an archive in Indiana. I found doodles and letters both to and from John, thanks to family members and libraries that held on to them. At the American Heritage Museum in Wyoming were drafts of Bergman lyrics to some of John’s songs, as well as Adolf Deutsch’s papers, which offered more clues and fun relics.

In the holdings at UCLA, I found the recording sessions and written scores for The Reivers, including Lalo Schifrin’s rejected score.

John gave an incredibly detailed, insightful interview about his collaboration with the Sherman Brothers for the documentary The Boys, and the sons who directed that graciously shared the entire, unedited transcript with me.

I also spoke to Robert Altman’s children, Joey Walsh, and Elliott Gould to flesh out the unorthodox collaborations and strong bond between John and Altman; I even found Stomu Yamash’ta, the wild virtuoso playing (and groaning) on John’s all-time craziest score, for Altman’s Images. Other interviews who shed light on the pre-Spielberg John Williams included Lionel Newman’s daughter, Carroll, and various other Newmans; both Rocky and Mike Lang, whose father Jennings Lang was an early promoter of John’s at Universal; Kenneth Wannberg and Leslie Bricusse, both of whom I called not long before they died; and—of all people—Mia Farrow, who was married to André Previn around the time John lived in London, and who has remained his friend since.

I can’t wait for you to read the two chapters that detail John’s Hollywood career before he had that fateful lunch with Steven Spielberg in late 1972, and before Jaws permanently reoriented his flight path. I may not have been very interested in the work from that period before, but in researching the book I found it—and the characters in it—to be absolutely riveting, and filled with riches.