"John Williams"

0:05Hey guys, welcome to the cold open. Hey. Anything you'd like to say? No, Will, you can't start a cold open with a yawn. Sorry, dude. Sean, anything to fire up the cold open with? You want a dad joke? Yeah. Open up the book. Okay. Sorry, listener. Just give us one second. Welcome to our cold open. Did you hear about the cheese that's been working out? I didn't. What happened? The dude is shredded. Yeah. Welcome to Smartless. Smart. Smart. Smart.

0:38Smart.

0:43Smart. Less. Hello, my name is Jason. Hi, Jason. My name is Sean. I'd love to pod with you guys. Are you guys up for podding? Sure. Let's get your pod. Let's get this podding starting. Let's get this podding started. Thank you, guys. That's a good one. I've never heard that. Let's get this podding started. Anything worth talking about? I looked up right before this. I was looking up on how to survive a nuclear war. March 7, Jason had a good one. Uh-huh. We got to mark it down. Okay. I know. Will, anything exciting in your life today? No. This morning? Still just in recovery. You want to know how to survive a nuclear war?

1:24Oh, right. You're still trying to kick your virus. Yeah. Sean, what were you saying? You want to win? Do you want to know how to survive a nuclear war? Or a nuclear bomb? Okay. Run? So you've got to cover your eyes and get down. And then you got to find a basement or something. Okay, man. And we'll be right back. I mean. Because I read a headline this morning when I got up. Like, you know, North Korea has like, is ready to, you know, they're always saying whatever. You know, we're doing a happy feel good podcast here. I'd like to say really quick, Jason. I miss you. Sorry. Do you want to make a statement?

1:59I do. I would just like to say, if I can get in here. Wait, Willie's got a really fast good joke for Jason today. Well, about the fact that dogs can't do MRIs, but cats can. Okay, so here we go. Great. Did you guys get on early? We both watched the same TikTok video. Oh, no. I don't have the TikTok. Anyway. Sean's got a few written down. Go ahead, Sean. He wrote them down. By the way, he went back and he wrote them down. Go ahead, Sean. I don't. You want to hear another one? Milk is the fastest liquid on earth. It's past your eyes before we can even see it. Not bad. Okay. Anything else you want to help the people driving to finish off their car accident with?

2:49No, because they're going to get super excited about our guest today. And now listen, I love when we get a true living legend on this podcast. My guest today served our country in the Air Force, became a renowned jazz musician, and then eventually moved to Hollywood to work on some of the biggest films in motion picture history. I'm sure you're going to guess who it is right away. He is the single most Academy Award-nominated living person. And after Walt Disney, he's the second most nominated person of all time. Anyone in the world from all walks of life could hum his work. Guys, it's the illustrious, incomparable, one of my heroes, John Williams.

3:22Got it. No way. Yes, incredible. Wow. Look at this. Wow. Good day, sir. This is so cool. Unbelievable. Hi, John. Hello, gentlemen. How are you today? I just saw pictures of all three of you, and you looked healthy to me, like three NFL players on their day off. Yeah, that's stretching it. So, Sean, how is it possible you could play Oscar Levant? Well, yeah. I don't know. It shocked us, too. Because I don't look anything like him, I know. No, I know. But I worked on all the things an actor should work on the boys that walked his time. Did you research a lot of things? I did. I read all his books.

4:08I went to the archives at the Paley Center where they have all the old footage and I just spent a couple days there looking at stuff and then I downloaded some stuff on YouTube. You just go nuts when you try to do something like that. Did you have to go to the piano and sort of... This is supposed to be about you, John Williams. John, did you get a chance to see Sean do his play on Broadway? No. No, no. Oh, he was just incredible. I mean, you would have been very impressed with his piano playing ability. Somebody who would know what to look for. This guy's classically trained and he did the entire Rhapsody in Blue solo on stage on a grand piano.

4:57It was incredible. Now, Sean, who did the first performance of the piano concerto of Gershwin? Was it Oscar? No, it was Gershwin, but Oscar recorded the most famous recording of it. Oh, did he? Okay. Yeah. And that's what Oscar was known for, and he tried to, it's a very Salieri-Mozart kind of relationship where they, a love-hate, where Oscar revered Gershwin, but could never be quite like him. Well, the books are wonderful. Yeah. His wit and the whole thing. I met him once. in the office. Oh, you did? Yes, in the office of Louis B. Mayer. Oh, wow. Oh, my God. Accompanying Howard Keel and a woman, his name I can't remember, and they were auditioning Howard and the girl for Louis B.

5:45Mayer, and he had people from the music department, including Oscar. That's crazy. At this audition, and it was in Mayer's office where there was a piano, and I just came in sheepishly in the back door to accompany these people and then leave before the discussion started. Really? I've always adored Oscar Levant. Yeah, he's... That's fantastic. He's great. You know, he was a student of Schoenberg. Did you know that? Wow. You were? No way. Oscar was. Oh, yeah, it was a very serious... Well, Oscar was. You said you were? No, no, no. Oh, Oscar was. Yes, I knew that. But how can I help you guys? What on earth can I possibly give you?

6:18You've already done plenty by agreeing to do this. Yeah, John, you just tipped the fact that you said that you were in Louis B. Mayer's office, which is such a mind blow. Yeah. By the way, I'm Will. It's such a pleasure to meet you. For Tracy, he was a big studio head, like mogul. Film executive, yeah. What were those days like? What were the people, these old sort of iconic studio heads like, guys like Louis B. Mayer? What was your experience with gentlemen like that back in the day? Well, of course, I really didn't have contact or access to them. I did have a relationship with Lou Wasserman, actually, but he was of a younger generation than the Warner Brothers.

6:59Jack Warner, I used to go to the previews of the Warner Brothers films that I did, and Jack Warner always went to those, and I met him three or four times at those previews, and he knew I had something to do with music. I never knew my name, so he referred to me as Beethoven. At the end of the preview, he would say, Beethoven, we need a little more music in Reel 5, and I'd just say, yes, sir, we'll do that. But the other moguls, I'm afraid, were a generation beyond me. But what I would say about them, I think, is they were all ideologues in a way. Early motion picture entrepreneurs, probably a little, when I say ideologues, they were probably a little bit naive in their approach to the world.

7:51Yeah. Were they as showman-y and as gregarious as they're portrayed in the movies as these guys smoking big cigars and, you know, screaming out orders and stuff like that? I think businessmen more than anything. You know, from Eastern Europe, from Brooklyn, from across the country to Hollywood. And really creating from the ground up the business that has been so wonderful all through the last century. now, of course, threatened by all kinds of forces, technology of all kinds, and worldwide production of film that not eclipses Hollywood, but it puts it in a different kind of a frame of lighting and creativity.

8:36John, what would you say, that's an interesting point you made, what would you say, in your opinion, is the greatest threat to this wonderful film industry that has been around for so long now. What, in your view right now, is its most sort of imminent threat to what we've got? Well, probably the access and the easy availability to all manner of things on film and whatever that is available at home. Right. And so the great, I mean, just to flip about it, I mean, the great impediments might be said to be traffic jams and parking lots. You know, the thing of going to movies has become more difficult, I think, for people, and the alternative's more easy to access.

9:29Yeah. But we lose something. I think there's a... The old movie theaters were kinds of sort of temples where people would gather. It was a communal connection once a week. You'd go to the movies or twice a week in this special atmosphere that had a spiritual vibe to it and people were collecting theirs, almost like going to church in a way, the proscenium, the beautiful theatre and so on. And it was a magic in all of that, I think, that attracted people. And we don't have that anymore. Even in newly constructed theatres have far less, they're utilitarian, of course, but far less imagination and the way the stages are constructed and so on.

10:15Right. I think in terms, I don't know if this is off the subject, but we think of the music of Bach three or 400 years ago. There were no concert halls. If you wanted to hear music, you had to go to church to hear an organ, to hear people sing. And that's where you received your music. You wanted to hear a Bach cantata, you heard it in church. Not in the concert hall. The concert hall is in a way constructed to ring the antiquarian bells, I guess you could say, of our collective memory that were gathered for something very, very special and we listen to Beethoven in this atmosphere. Or we go and we watch Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in that atmosphere.

11:00Oh, that's so interesting. I think all of the social changes and pragmatic aspects of all of this has changed so much that I think that spiritual aspect of the experience of seeing films is largely gone, a complex series of reasons for that. Yeah. But I think they... From a technological perspective, have you found that you've changed, wanted to change, resisted change, had to change the way in which you think about your scores in that when people are watching at home, for the most part, they're not in the best sound environment possible. A lot of them are watching in stereo. Some have the sort of the surround button pressed on their television, but they're still, they're not getting the kind of experience audio wise that they get in a theater.

12:03And do you find that that affects the way you think about creating a balance of instruments and where they would live in the channels? I think the answer has to be no, because what I'm working, I'm thinking of some kind of ideal that I know is ever going to be there. It makes me want to say there are other differences. I think the technologies and special effects that can be accomplished make it unnecessary to do a 10-minute, one-take, complicated dance number by Fred Astaire where the actual performance is something that is breathtaking. We don't know that it's not edited, but we can feel that aspect of physical exertion and mastery of one's body.

12:52Same is true of singing. The same can be said of orchestras, I think, also. So the difference between so much beautiful work, by the way, of sound design that's done in combination with orchestras is now a wonderful development. However, if we have a scene that's four minutes long and the orchestra's going to play that in the studio, we may make five takes of that four-minute scene and each one is different. One take is a live, is a performance that is above and beyond spiritually all the other four. And you have to believe that the audience will respond to that. It's like live performances, as you all know, are different every night.

13:38Some night it's full of magic and the next night it's flat. We say the audience isn't good. Right. Or how are we going to explain it? So I think technology has affected the performance aspect of film, making it very easy to sort of muck up something that is beyond most people's ability to do. Yeah, that makes sense. Which brings me to a question I have about your process. I read somewhere that you don't read the scripts on purpose, and the first time that you're exposed to the film is the rough cut and the edit. And when you're sitting there watching the movie, whether it be Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Jaws, whatever it is, Indiana Jones, do you, are you...

14:22Keep going. I know, it's just unbelievable. Are you crafting a melody in your head as you're watching it? And then is that the melody that we actually end up hearing? Or how does that process work for you? Or is there temp in there? Yeah, is there temp?

14:41It's good, if possible, not to even read a script or see anything until the thing has been edited when we can form first impressions that will lead us in our work more effectively than almost anything else. You read a book, you cast it, you develop the atmospheres and so on, and you can be very disappointed if you see a director's impression of what that would be. Yeah. Or delighted and surprised also. It's not always possible. We have to discuss certain things with the directors maybe before it's been finished. your second question about maybe I can call it thematic inspiration if you like that is not something I just pick up immediately when I see the film in my case it's going back to the piano working a theme or two or three manipulating them into something that seems inevitable like it's been there always and that's the hardest part of the work The simplest thing is the hardest thing.

15:49Yeah, and is it true that when you did Jaws, E, F, E, F, E, F, E, F, that Spielberg thought you were kidding? Is that true? Is that true? Well, it is true. I wondered what to do about the shark, but he came in and I played, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There was a D in his third note, if you remember. Oh, right, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. Right. And he looked at me and said, really? You think that could work? I thought maybe I had lost my mind. And I don't really remember the conversation, but it must have been something like, well, Stephen, I think when the cellos and basses and the orchestra do it, it can be very ominous.

16:31And what is good about it is that it can be very slow. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It can speed up as the shark is approaching or the red herring is approaching. Right, right. And the orchestra can join. and it can be deafening if it needs to be. Yeah, the horns come in there, and that's an alert. Yeah, exactly. And we will be right back. And now, back to the show. You know, it's interesting you say that you sort of pitch that to Stephen, and then maybe he's a little reluctant or he thinks that you're kidding. Do you notice, or have you noticed over the years, because it's such a collaborative experience working on a film, and when you're working with a director, have you noticed that maybe they didn't start with, they didn't have such an appreciation of music in the same way that you do and that they've learned or have certain directors learned to become, that you've in fact educated them over the years and that their sense of, their sophistication when it comes to approaching music has gotten much better?

17:35Sorry, this is a poorly worded question, but after working for years with Stephen, have you noticed that his ability to appreciate what you're doing has gotten more... Collaborative. Yeah. And sophisticated. It's a tough one because there's so much variation in the training of these directors and the tastes that they develop or don't develop. And their educations are all at a different level and from different angles and so on. If you talk about a Bartok violin concerto or something most of them will not know what that is. Right. Most film directors will know, have some familiarity with film music.

18:19They will know Bernard Herrmann and they will know Miklas Roja and so on and so forth. But they won't know Ligeti or even less esoteric things than that. I don't know if you all remember Martin Ritt, a director who was a theater director in New York, came out here like Kazan and did some wonderful films, was very suspicious of music in his film. He'd come from Broadway where we didn't have background music or rarely had it, and he wanted people to believe what they were seeing and what they were hearing was real. And so you have put a symphony orchestra behind this dialogue scene and a man like Martin says, I can't believe that.

19:03I don't need to have that. I've created the scene. My actors have done the job. you don't need to help them and and that's the opposite of steven who can't seem to quite get enough music in his film right different good for me by the way yeah right right right yeah partner for me was he um go ahead sorry no i i i there's such variation there but i think what what people truly recognize is that it's true what bernard harvin said there's no such thing as a silent film we go back when the silence we had the silence we had organ or we had an orchestra in the pit we had somebody playing a violin something it would animate and music seems an inseparable part of filmmaking and whether it's contemporary electronic music or classical romantic music yeah we we recognize the need of it actors will be sometimes very unhappy when you play too much music for them yeah yeah was was the was the tonal shift and and filmmaking shift that uh you both uh went through on schindler's list was that a comfortable transition for him into what was a much more pared-down approach by design, I'm sure, and much more potentially, I don't know, sophisticated is the right word, but it was definitely a departure from what you guys had been doing for so long.

20:36Was that exciting to you guys or a little scary for him, maybe? You mean the resources in Schindler's chamber music was smaller? Right, yeah. A lot less single instruments at times as opposed to a more full-bodied orchestral. Some of the scenes were Isaac Prilman alone. Some of the most breathtaking and horrible things. I agree, yeah. Whether it was a conscious decision to make it a more intimate chamber music kind of thing was something we must have made either unconsciously or through dialogue. I'm guessing something like da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. I don't think it was six trumpets blowing their brains out.

21:18I don't think it would work quite well. Right, right. So we stay with this up early, a much better idea. You know, you mentioned earlier the magic of a live performance and what a shame it is that the audience can't truly enjoy that because they can't fully trust it because of the process of putting together a score. But one of the greatest cultural things I find in Los Angeles, of which there aren't many, I think everybody admits, is at the Hollywood Bowl when they run a movie on the big screen and they pull all the music out and they have the L.A. Phil do it. And oftentimes you'll conduct that.

22:00So for Tracy, all the music you hear, take Jaws for example, if you pulled all the music out of it and you just watched the movie with all the dialogue and sound effects, that's something. but the music is an enormous character in any John Williams film. And so they just pull all that music out and then they play it live with the entire... Right, the picture, yeah. Yeah, the entire symphony or the entire orchestra. Do you like doing that? I mean, for me, it's magic because it is that live performance. You're seeing it done, pristine, matched the picture. Yeah, and it feels like if you miss one beat...

22:37Well, there's energy too, right? Yeah, it's just stunning. I love it. I like doing it. Yes, it is fun. I also like not doing it. Meaning I can play the score for the audience in the theater or at the bowl without the film, without the distraction of the film. And I can describe to the audience, they're about to hear the kind of virtuosity they hear in action scenes and so on where the music is extremely difficult to play. it's a virtuoso level which when you watch the film you you can't appreciate it it's just too much all right yeah so i i can take it very happily both ways with film or without it wait talk about uh things that are difficult to play we might have to cut this but i try to get the end credits music to et and you can't find it's not published anywhere and so uh my husband scotty scoured the internet.

23:39We finally got it. This is me playing the end, which is one of my favorite pieces, and it's so hard because you write very difficult music.

23:52It's crazy. It is difficult, yeah. It's insane. Sean, that's really good. Sean, you knocked me out. It's a little fast. I was just a little bit slow. I think you wrote it slow. I think you wrote it slow. It is a little fast. Sean, take the note, okay? Take the note from John Williams. But now tell people the story of the last 15 minutes of E.T. because that's fascinating. Just a moment ago you said Stephen really loves a lot of music in his movies. Yes. So what happened in the last 15 minutes of E.T.? Well, you remember the last 15 minutes had started with the bike chase. That's right. The police chasing the kids.

24:30The kids trying to get E.T. back to the spaceship. and they accelerate to escape velocity, which I understand is 17 ,500 miles an hour. And we buy that. And the kids fly over the moon. I got that detail from NASA, by the way. How fast do you have to go on a bike to go over the moon? 17 ,500 miles an hour. That's hysterical. And they land and the spaceship lands and E.T. and his little friends, earthling children say goodbye to E.T. It's very sentimental. And at the end of the sequence, the ship will go up and does a whirling left turn to the flourishes of trumpets at that moment and so on. So in that 10 minutes, there's probably, in every minute of the 10, there are probably 10 sync points, okay?

25:27Maybe more. Somebody's foot, bicycle going up, something falling, whatever. Almost like a cartoon, but you don't want to hear it that way, but you want to support at least in the style of this thing, this film. And so on the day of recording, I had the orchestra and we rehearsed a piece and made a few takes. And I could accomplish the first two minutes, which we could have done separately, and I had problems in four syncing. The orchestra wanted to bloom out or blossom out a little bit more than the film would allow me to do. Right. Or some concentrated action film that sped up and sped up and arrived here, so a little quicker than I wanted to get the orchestra to it.

26:15And I really couldn't get the sync the way it should be. And I finally said to Stephen, I can't seem to be able to get this right. he said we'll turn the film off we know where the sync points are the music is constructed for for that end and you record the music where all the rubati you know the phrasing and and so on is is done to for musical satisfaction the revival the breathing of the whole thing and he offered to recut the film and he said i will just recut the film to the track to your music which is what he did which is crazy and I really believe that there's a kind of a this is not a rabbi placing himself there's something operatic about that last 10 minutes yeah that I think without that give and take breathing of the whole orchestra the way they wanted to and the way the bows finish here but not here this kind of kinetic if you like is more satisfactory seems to be more satisfactory than a take that is slavishly in sync.

27:20Right. Yes. Yeah. Gosh. I love that that demanded it, that that music demanded that the film be cut to it. I mean, it shows the power of the music. Has there ever been a film or a project that you've come into and you've thought, yeah, this is going to be great, and then you realize that you were intimidated by it or you thought, you just gave an example of a difficult situation you were in, but was there ever something that you thought like, I don't know if I have I don't know if I can do this if I can match the power of what's on the screen with the right music have you ever been intimidated in that way he's like no look at me yes every film is intimidating that way I can say it glibly but to reduce it a little bit I would say the close encounters I had that kind of feeling about it somehow something about that grammar.

28:23I think it was 1977. And I had done first Star Wars and Close Encounters the same year. And it was, talk about a head turn thing. I had really struggled to get out of Star Wars and into Close Encounters. Talk about spiritual aspects of, I mean, the whole end of that film took us to a place, a high place. And the orchestra had to, it almost has a religious quality to it. Yeah, for sure. And where Star Wars is all fun and fanfares and action and comedy and all the rest of that. But this was a more serious thought about our circumstance in the universe, where we are and where we may be going. It deeply affected me as a young boy.

29:11Me too. It was the first film that I, you know, I was young when it came out, but I saw it and I've seen it so many times over the years. It's one of the only films that I will re-watch consistently. And it did have that, it's funny you say that. That one and the first Teletubbies, right? And Teletubbies, obviously. And also your score for the Gilligan's Island pilot. People don't know that you wrote, that's true actually. That's a true story, JB. That was really hard.

29:40John, what portion of that iconic was scripted and what portion of it was open to your autonomy? You know, it's sort of like, how was that described in the script? Where did the script stop and where did you pick up? And do you remember the moment that you came up with those notes? I think the script asked for five notes, I believe. And my first sort of attempts at that, I kept saying to Stephen, it's much easier to do seven but but seven five is like a doorbell it's like a signal where seven notes you just get over that and now you've got when you wish upon a star if you like I don't know how many notes that is in the phrase but it becomes a melody rather than a signal so six and seven were those big heavy bom bom no four and five Break the glass.