"John Williams"

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Subject to change.

Hey, 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. Welcome to Smartless.
Smart. cold open and did you hear about the cheese that's been working out i didn't what happened

the dude is shredded yeah welcome to smartless

hello my name is jason hi jason is My name is Sean. Well, I'd love to pod with you guys.
Are you guys up for podding? Sure. Let's get this podding starting.
Let's get this podding started. 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 this i was looking up on how to survive a nuclear war oh seven jason had a good one uh-huh yeah mark it down i know um will anything exciting in your life today this morning still just in uh recovery you want to know how to survive all 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? Oh, right. You're still trying to kick your virus.
Yeah. Sean, what were you saying? You want to what? 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've 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. North Korea is ready to...
They're always saying whatever. You know we're doing a happy feel-good podcast here? I'd like to say really quick, Jason.
Okay. Sorry, do you want to make a statement? I do.
I would just like to say... If I can get in here.
Wait, Willie's got a really... We 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 know. 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? No, 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. Got 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, 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. Did you research a lot of things? I did.
I read all his books. I 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. It 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, fine. 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 tried, you know, 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. Mayer, and he had people from the music department, including Oscar, 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.
That's fantastic. He was a student of Schoenberg.
Did you know that? Wow. You were.
Why? 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? You'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. Jack 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.

Yeah.

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. John, what would you say, that's a great, 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.

Yeah.

You know, the thing of going to movies has become more difficult,

I think, for people, and the alternative is more easy to access.

Yeah.

But we lose something.

I don't know. Going to movies has become more difficult, I think, for people, and the alternative is more easy to access.
Yeah. But we lose something.
I think 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 yeah uh the proscenium the beautiful theater and so on yeah and it was a magic in in all of that i think that that attracted people and we don't have that anymore even in the newly constructed theaters have far less, they're utilitarian, of course, but far less imagination in the way the stages are constructed and so on. Right.
I think in terms, I don't know if this is off the subject, but we think of the music of Bach three or four hundred 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.

Oh, 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

Thank you. 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... From a technological perspective,

have you found that you've changed... But I think 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 surround button pressed on their television, but they're not getting the kind of experience audio-wise that they get in a theater. Do you find that that affects the way you think about creating a balance of of instruments and where they would live in the channels i think i think the answer has to be no because what i'm working i'm i'm thinking of it of some kind of ideal that i know is ever going to be there it makes me want to say to 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. Same is true of singing.
The same can be said of orchestras, I think, also. The difference between so much beautiful work, by the way, of sound design that's done in combination with orchestras.
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 alive, 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.
Some night it's full of magic and the next night it's flat. We say the audience isn't good or how.
Or how are we going to describe it? So I think technology has affected the performance aspect of film, making it very easy to sort of mock 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... Keep 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 it'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. Yeah, that's wild.
And that's the hardest part, I think, of the work. The simplest thing is the hardest thing, you know.
Yeah, 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.
It was a D in the third note, if you remember. Oh, right, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, right.
Yeah, yeah. Right.
And he looked at me and said, really? You think that could work? I thought, yeah, 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.
And what is good about it is that it can be very slow. It can speed up as the shock is approaching or the red herring is approaching.
Right, right. And the orchestra can join.
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.
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Hey guys, everybody should have a support system, right? Who's your support system? My support system, as you well know, talk about all the time, is Scotty. And of course, my two besties, Will and Jason.
Whenever I have a problem, an issue, I talk to them about it. And if they're not available, I will talk to a therapist.
And I've been going to therapy for a long time and it's always great. So think about your favorite leaders, mentors, and idols.
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And now back to the show. You know, it's interesting you say that when you sort of pitch that to Steve and then he maybe is 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? Sorry, 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.
Yeah. 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. They will know Bernard Herrmann and they will know Miklas Roja and so on and so forth.
But they won't know Leggetti 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 who says, I can't believe that. I 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 that's the opposite of Stephen who can't seem to quite get enough music in his.
Right. Different, good for me, by the way.
Right, right, right. A good partner for me.
Was he, go ahead, sorry. No, there's such variation there.
But I think what people truly recognize is that it's true what Bernard Harmon said 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, we recognize the need of it. Actors will be sometimes very unhappy when you play too much music for them.
Yeah. Was the tonal shift and filmmaking shift that you both went through on Schindler's list, was it 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.
Was that exciting to you guys or a little scary for him maybe? You mean the resources in Schindler's chamber music? It was a smaller... Right, yeah.
A lot of single instruments at times as opposed to a more full-bodied orchestral... Some of the scenes were It Prilman alone.
Right. Some of the most breathtaking and horrible things.
I agree, yeah. It was just his style.
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 wouldn't work in Schindler's list.
I don't think it was six trumpets blowing their brains out. I 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.il um do it uh and oftentimes you'll conduct that um but so for for tracy like all the music you hear and in you know take 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 um that's 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 the entire symphony or the entire orchestra do you like doing that? for me it's magic because it is that live performance you're seeing it done, pr pristine, matched to picture. Yeah, and it feels like if you miss one beat.
Well, 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 can't appreciate it it's just so 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., and you can't find it.
It's not published anywhere.

And so my husband, Scotty, scoured the internet.

We 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.

It'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? It's a little fast.
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.
Right. The kids trying to get E.T.
back to a 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.
Yes, sure. How fast do you have to go on a bike to go over the moon? 17,500.
That's hysterical. And they land and the spaceship lands and E.T.
and his little friends, earthling children say goodbye to E.T. and 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? Maybe 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 the 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.

And 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 that end.

And you record the music where all the rubati,

the phrasing and so on 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 which is what he did and i 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 and 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. Right.
Yes. Yeah.
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 particular. The right fight for it.
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... Oh, really? Really? ...is intimidating that way.
Yeah. I can say it glibly.
But to reduce it a little bit, I would say The Close Encounters was... had that kind of feeling about it.
Incredible. Somehow something about that grammar.
I think it was 1977. And I had done first Star Wars and Close Encounters the same year.
Wow. 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 in the universe where we are and where we may be going it deeply affected me as a young boy me 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.

Yes.

People don't know that you wrote,

that's true, actually.

That's a true story, JB. That's really hard um john um can the um what portion of that um iconic dun dun dun dun was scripted um 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 the moment that you came up with uh with those notes i think the script asked for five notes i believe and i and my first sort of attempts at that i kept saying to steven it's much easier to do seven.
But seven, five is like a doorbell. It's like a signal.
Where seven notes, you just get over that tump. 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 in six and seven were those big, heavy, bom, bom. That's right.
No, no, four and five. Break the glass.
One, two, three, four, five. Bom, bom, bom.
And then there was, bom, bom. That was a response.
That was the response. That was such a language.
So then I took some paper. I still have the papers.
And I think I wrote about, I don't know, 100 or more five-note motifs in any intervallic relationship up-down, so to speak. And no consideration of length of the notes.
It isn't da-bee-bum, bum-bum. It doesn't do that.
And I kept playing them for Stephen.

He'd come over to my piano and we'd go through these things. And we both kept circling this one without deciding.
And finally one day in frustration, we weren't getting anywhere, and he said or I said, let's just use this one. It seems fine.
Yeah, fine. It seems fine.
But it was scripted that the strategy of the scientists were to communicate with the ship via five musical notes. Sound.
Yeah. So that must have been enormously… Intimidating.
Intimidating, right? Because you're like, it's not score. It's actually language that they've written into this script, and I got to come up with what the language is.
That's right. Wow.
That's true. Well, there's a lot of the conversation that we now know back and forth between this computer, Truffaut and his group, and the ship's answers was much more elaborate with color and lights.
Stephen eventually correctly cut it down a little bit so it was more manageable. But it's a wonderful idea.
I mean, there are, like Kodai was a Hungarian composer with this idea of hand signals that's almost like deaf people would hear notes. And Scriabin, a Russianussian composer who was obsessed with the idea of color and and red is is a certain kind of note or a certain texture and so on so a lot of work had been done and you know not really very scientific work at all but it was so primary it was like how how you would maybe would elect to communicate with a child that doesn't yet know language that That's what was so powerful and evergreen and universal about it.
And then when the conversation gets going and they're getting into a conversation, I mean, John, that was just magic how you just made that all blossom and it just became like a celebration. And they all got all carried away.
It's just incredible. It was all written out.
I have it so on and put into a computer to produce it. But John, it's true.
Like what Jason says is, and again, I'm sort of going back and doubling down on this, but the idea that Jay and Sean too, that we as young men, we were still single digits. I was about eight when that, seven or eight when I came out.
But I understood that. Yeah.
In a way that was meant to be understood in a way that my parents could understand. I could understand it emotionally.
What was going on? Leaving the theater with my mom in the parking lot, I said to her, I want to be taken. You know? And I was serious.
She said, we wanted you to and they gave you back. Yeah.
Right? They wouldn't take you.

You're a return.

He told me that just last week.

One thing I would say at this point is that it's probably true

that music is older than language.

Yeah.

And that's deeply embedded in all of our structure.

And you understood it, not linguistically, but musically or spiritually in some way. Yeah.
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changer all right back to the show john you know all of your music every single time like we're talking we see et or schindler's list or raiders of the lost ark or whatever it is star wars star 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Evokes emotion, right? A very deep emotion. Is there a piece of music that you've written or another composer has written that to this day affects you emotionally every single time like your music does to me and us? Oh, that's so difficult.
Beethoven 9th, Ode to Joy. Yeah.
I start there, I guess. Yeah.
One thing I wanted to add about the five-note signal, which is after the fact rationalization, but you have what is re, do, do, do, so, okay? Re, do, do, that's the tonic note. Do, again the tonic note down.
And sol, sol in music, which is the fifth degree, is an equivalent in language to a conjunctive but or and. So if I say da, da, da, ba,ba-boom, that's not over with.
Right, right.

If I do da-da-da-ba-boom, that's five one.

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

So you're soliciting a response.

Right.

would be the end would be a period

but what this does

is

maybe

yeah

it's really interesting

yeah

you're asking for a response

from the ship

it's what Maybe. Yeah.
Yeah.

It's really interesting, yeah.

You're asking for a response from the ship.

It's what you remembered as a child, somehow,

that you know it's part of a sentence.

It's an ellipses, yeah.

But it's not a complete sentence. I think once you realize that,

there's great power in the fact that it doesn't settle.

Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense.
It's a musical version of a hand being left out. An olive branch.
Reaching for someone. Yeah, like, come back to me or grab this.
Let's unite. It absolutely works.
And you don't need to think about it. It does that for us.
Yeah, that came across.

John, I have a question from my husband, Scotty,

who is a self-proclaimed expert

on just about everything you've ever composed

and or recorded.

It's true.

It's totally true.

He says, this is from Scotty,

there's been a longstanding rumor over many years

that you played piano for the soundtrack recording sessions

for the film version of West Side Story. Is that true? Yes.
So that's you on the album playing piano. Yes.
That's crazy. Oh, wow.
That is crazy. I played that in the pit a long time ago, and it's really, really hard.
Yeah, it is, yeah. Like, especially the prologue.
It's just all over the place. Especially at a dinner theater, it was tough because you got mashed potatoes thrown at you.
Wait, wait, John, it is true. I think a lot of Lenny's music was awkward, frankly.
You played it, so you know why and how that's said. But it's a lot of part of the animated energy that he left in his music.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. John, when you first started, first of all, you grew up in, tell me where you grew up again, Brooklyn or? Yeah, Queens, Long Island.
Queens, Queens, Queens. And then when you studied jazz as a kid, did you always know that, like when did the love of film composing come in? Like did you always want to do that or were you happy being a musician on broadway and theaters and gigs i i never frankly planned to develop as a film composer at all my father was one of the things that he did in his professional life as a musician was to play in in studio orchestras.
And so as a teenager and I was a serious piano student, I really wanted to be a concert pianist. He took me to recording sessions in the studio and I became fascinated by what people were doing to score the films, how it was orchestrated, written and so on.
Wow. eventually, my job was playing piano in those orchestras.
You mentioned that I played in Westwood Story. I also played way back some Like It Hot.
Do you remember that? Yeah. That was you playing in the movie? Yes, I played on that.
And the apartment. Do you remember the apartment? Yes.
Sure. Yeah.
Yeah, Promises, Promises is based on The Apartment. And Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face.
So my introduction to writing for film was through the influence of older colleagues for whom I played the piano. And they said, can you orchestrate? And I said, yes.
well, here's a piece for next Tuesday, orchestrate this for me, which I did. And then just at that point in my development, television became very, very popular, and I did a lot of television, Alcoa Theater and Chrysler Theater.
And as Will said, Gilligan's Island. It's crazy that you wrote music for that.
And were you happy to move away from television again, or did you like that? It must be such a faster process, of course. Time-wise must have been working.
It was such a slow, unplanned process, I must say. Really moving from television to feature films.
I think at that time in my life, it was wonderful because i had so much more time to work on the feature film television show if you did alcoa theater for example it was an hour show which you would have to write it within a week 25 minutes of music or so orchestrated and conducted and so that was hard yeah do a film, may have 25 or 30 minutes of music,

but you have six weeks to do it,

and a higher fee, and a better orchestra, and so forth.

So it was a gradual step up that was evolutionary

rather than anything planned.

And is it true you can play six instruments?

I read piano, bassoon, clarinet, cello, trombone, and trumpet.

Is that right? It's incorrect on all counts. Thank you.
Thank you. I tried to play all of them.
I spent time with piano, of course. Yeah.
One of the things I love so much about listening to classical music is that it is the closest thing we have to a time machine because reading that music, playing that music,

note for note, verbatim, is exactly how they heard it,

save the conductor adjusting time or pacing or whatever,

is exactly what they heard 200, 300, 400, 500 years ago.

And those were their rock concerts.

And so when you're sitting there,

you're listening to one of these orchestras

play one of these pieces of music,

it's as close to the exact experience

people in the past had

in anything we can do, I think.

It's a very unifying thing.

Yeah.

One of the things that draws our humanity, congeals it. I think what you say about listening presents something very hopeful, I think, about music.
We mentioned before that it's not language. It's something general.
It may be in the end that Bernstein was right that it is international. It goes beyond language.
We're talking about the divisions of the Oxford and Fifth and the Fifth being the conjunctive. It's something that I think we can place a little hope in, that it's something we all may share at an intellectual level that isn't particularly linguistic.
Is there a piece of music that you've written, and now I'm going to get into the regrets, do you have something that you've listened to and you go, I wish I had just done it like this, like that you've driven home from recording, you've just scored a thing that we all are really familiar with, but when you were driving home, you thought, I wish I had done it a little bit differently. Do you have any regrets in that way? Yeah, because as actors, we do that all the time.
Yeah, we do it all the time. i wish i had done it a little bit differently do you have any because as actors we do that all yeah we do it all the time i wish i had done this scene oh you know you sometimes you drive home and you get into your driver and you go oh that's what the scene was about finally or when you see it finally up on the screen yeah we all do we all do that it's absolutely wish that could be better or a change of note or phrase or whatever timing.
Absolutely. You know, John, we didn't even touch on your time in the military, the U.S.
Air Force. Nor have we touched on golf.
Our golf, yes. But really quick, so many of your themes, especially Raiders and Superman and, you know, the Darth Vader theme, they're all very militaristic.
They're very march. They feel like they...
Is that inspired by your time in the military or is that just what was required for the film? I think probably the latter, what was required at the moment. Although one of the things that I...
I did have wonderful opportunity in service to orchestrate for military band, because there were not a lot of publications for that instrumental combination available beyond Sousa and a few other earlier lights. Were they any good, those bands? Oh, yes.
Well, presently, our military bands, Marines and Army in Washington, are superb. Superb, yeah.
The Marine Band in Washington, there's a brass section that is equivalent to the Chicago Symphony. I mean, it's not an exaggeration to say.
Wow, wow, that's cool. It's absolutely fantastic.
Our principal trumpet, Tom Hooten in L.A. Philharmonic, is the former Marine trumpeter.
he did I don't't know, two or three years in the Marine band there

and then came here and auditioned and won Los Angeles Philharmonic.

So it's been a big tradition in our country,

band-to-band tradition.

Tell me about this wonderful routine you have at our... Will and i are also at the same golf course that you play at and and we will see you almost every day uh about four or five o'clock you'll take the cart down to the bottom of the hill in the first hole that's you'll park it and then you will walk the rest of the hole play your ball out um do you go on to the second hole or is that enough? And is it just a sort of a meditative, wonderful routine? We're not stalking you, but we have seen you.
It's always such a thrill. Everybody always stops and says, hey, look, there he is.
I've been going up there for close to 50 years. You would never know it by the way i play i don't i never

did play well it's gotten worse over the years you work too hard but i sit all day at the piano from early in the morning lunch just keep working so i had to keep this old bag of bones moving i have to walk and i'm living very close to the course so i can go up there and walk for and i try to walk for an hour.

So that could be holes one, two, three, and four,

or one, two, three, and four,

or one, two, six, and seven, depending on the traffic and so on.

That's good.

And I get a cart so that I can stay out of the way of people like you guys who can really play.

Well, and that first hill is kind of a bear.

But you're always alone,

which I love because I'm

a bit of an alone guy myself.

Is that on purpose or is that just because

you don't want to schedule around anybody else?

It's very relaxing. You don't have to entertain

anybody or be entertained.

I can mull and meditate

things flashing through

my mind. But you've got to know that

we play with, Jason plays with people all the time

and he never entertains them.

So, I mean, that's...

You know, it's... things flashing through my mind.
But you've got to know that we play, Jason plays with people all the time and he never entertains them.

So, I mean, that's, you know,

that's possible.

Also, any golf course,

such a piece of beautiful work,

particularly when there's nobody on it.

You can see the contours of this glorious green.

It's a big park.

It's a beautiful invention.

Greatest possible luxury in a crowded urban area. It's incredible.
I've gotten quite, I've been doing it too, I think I've told you this, JB. I'll go sometimes on a Sunday afternoon by myself and then just strap my bag on and just walk by myself and play nine holes at sort of three, four o'clock.
It's my favorite, yeah, it's my favorite thing to do. Yeah.
It's just so good. Great recreation.
Next time we see you out there, fair warning, I'm going to run up and give you a handshake, a hug, or a tip of the cap or something. Great.
I love it. John, thank you for being here today.
Thank you so much. What a thrill.
This is like one of my... You're such a massive inspiration to me as a pianist, as a wannabe composer in my early 20s to everything you've ever done.
And, you know, I always say I want to retire when I'm 60 and then I start looking at your resume and I get a second wind because I'm just like, it's just unbelievable.

Think about all the incredible work we wouldn't have

had he stopped at 60.

Yeah.

It should be noted, John,

and Sean might not say this because he's embarrassed,

but there have been, in the 20 plus years

that I've been friends with Sean,

there have been too many times to remember

the times that he's referenced, mentioned you,

referenced your music, referenced what you've done. It's absolutely incredible.
And I know it's such a thrill for him that you're here and for us as well. I guarantee you he's 10 seconds away from tears.
Yes, he truly is. You've had a real impact on this young man's life.
Yeah, you have. And mine as well.
You have created my love of classical music because of what you've done for... Not true.
That was my entry point to it, was just being such an incredible fan of movies and focusing on the music and what that does and then discovering classical music. And I listen to it all day, every day.
There'll never be another one like you, ever, ever, ever. Well, thank you, Chance, so much for this.
I've enjoyed it, all three of you. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure.
Don't even possibly think of 60 as an age to retire. No, no, I'm just throwing it out there.
That's a teenager. No, thank you, John.
You guys have got years and years of productive work.

From your lips.

Enriching everybody.

You do, absolutely do.

Enjoy.

It's there.

You have it.

Thank you so much, guys.

Great, great pleasure.

Thank you, John.

Love you to pieces.

What a thrill.

Thank you.

Bye.

That's how appropriate was that remark?

Yeah, so listener, right as we were signing off,

he said to his assistant, he said,

huh, so that was a pod.

Yeah.

I'm really taken with that interview. I could have asked him so many things.
I know. You know that Steven Spielberg played clarinet on Jaws,

but he played it so bad that they put the sound into the local marching band

because it wasn't great.

So it's actually Steven playing,

and it's some kid faking it in the movie.

So funny.

And then Steven played clarinet in 1941,

the movie 1941.

Is that the movie?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, and his son was the lead singer of Toto. Like, we didn't even.
Is that the movie? Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway, and his son

was the lead singer of Toto.

Like, we didn't even get to that. Who?

His son. John Williams' son

is the lead singer in Toto? Yeah.

Wait, what? Yeah.

Swear to God. Why didn't you bring that up?

Joseph, you always talk about you have 80.

I got 80 million questions I want to ask. I did, but I didn't

want, we didn't get into his family.

So, and I wanted it to make it about him and, you know, but I guess't want... We didn't get into his family, so I...
80 million questions.

And I wanted it to make it about him, you know,

but I guess that is about him.

That's his son.

That's insane.

But, yeah, he's...

That's pretty cool.

Yeah.

Oh, my God, you're right.

He's kind of got the eye of the tiger.

I can see that.

His son.

That's not Toto.

Is it?

Eye of the tiger, no.

Toto's Africa.

Well, who did Eye of the Tiger?

Survivor.

Survivor, yeah.

Really?

Yeah. Yeah.
Guys, I've got to go, but. All right.
Okay. I don't think he ever, in Jaws, I don't think he ever scored the moment when Jaws actually took a bite out of anybody, did he? Bite.
Wow, you really have to go. I really do.
I love you both. And we'll see you next week on SmartList.

Nobody wanted to say anything about my restraint.

I had so many bits in there.

He was talking about the Marines and their horn section.

I was going to say, Sean, you blew a Marine.

All of them.

I mean, and I never said it.

Listener, please go to SmartList Extras for all of Will's bits from this week.

I had so many that I didn't do. You can only find an organ in a church.
All that. None of it.
I didn't say any of it. Good for you.
Good restraint. Love to love.
Love. Goodbye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye.
Grant Terry, and Rob Armjarf. Smartless.
Hey friends, Jason here. we're so excited the smart list has officially joined the Sirius XM family we can't wait to announce new surprise guests who we know that you'll love if you want to be the first to hear new episodes ad-free and a whole week early subscribe to Sirius XM podcasts plus on Apple Podcasts or visit SiriusXM.com slash podcasts plus to start your free trial today.
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