Dole

Well, there certainly is a difference in the amount of underscore in Star Wars vs. ESB and ROTJ. Star Wars is a beautifully spotted film. I don't think the same can be said about the other two films. Williams wrote a lot of music he probably didn't need to write (e.g. the duel scene in the Carbon-Freezing Chamber) in the two sequels. I know you specifically said you're talking about orchestration rather than the amount of music, but I don't think that in discussing the differences you can ignore the fact that Williams wrote much more music for the sequels, and that much of that extra music, although nice to listen to, was rightly dropped from the final films.

Gershwin wrote "Rhapsody in Blue" in a hurry after reading in the newspaper that he was supposed to be composing a new piece for a concert scheduled for the next month.

How is it that the living dead would require any greater suspension of disbelief than angels/demons, an immortal knight, or a guy who can rip a person's heart out without killing him?

Yes...and replace Gimli's axe with a walkie talkie.

I love movies from the 20s, 30s. and 40s. There's something wonderful about so many of those films that I can't quite explain, but I think it has something to do with the fact that the medium was so new, fresh, and experimental back then. That's true not just about the black & white films, but also the animated features like Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia as well. And Claude Rains is one of my favorite actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood. He's excellent in everything from Invisible Man to Lawrence of Arabia. Oh, and anyone who hasn't taken 3 hours out of his or her life to watch King Kong and Bride of Frankenstein should be whipped. Great groundbreaking movies with great groundbreaking scores.

No, Conan the Barbarian should have.

I didn't include that year, which was a pretty competitive one. Field of Dreams, The Fabulous Baker Boys, and Williams' own Born on the 4th of July all joined Last Crusade to finish behind The Little Mermaid. Don't forget Batman, Glory. and Henry V. Stupid Academy!

Ah of course, he along with coppola sugested that Lucas Re-Edited and shortened the last battle. A battle that Williams had already scored. You know the rest. Actually, if I remember correctly, Williams scored the original edit, then Lucas re-edited the battle sequence per Spielberg and company's advice and Williams was forced to cut and paste to fit that version. Then after the score was recorded, Lucas decided to go back to something closer to his original version of the sequence and consequently the score was cut to pieces. But I think that the final battle scenes don't reflect the Spielberg vision. But I could be remembering incorrectly.

Too bad. It's better than the first two Harry Potter scores. no its not. "The Ballroom Scene" and the "Dance of the Witches" alone are vastly superior to anything in either of the two HP scores. Furthermore, WOE was an original score for Williams, versus SS and COS which are nice, but often uninteresting, retreads of The Lost World, Hook, the SW prequels, and WOE. "Harry's Wondrous World" is a beautiful piece, but any score that waits until the end credits to deliver the best it has to offer can't be all that amazing. Sorcerer's Stone is superior to Witches, and Hook. SS isn't a retread of Hook in any form. It is the best score of the 21st century. Witches is a fine score but not a masterpiece. I guess Superman isn't amazing because its best piece the Love Theme is at the end. I'm not saying Witches is a masterpiece. I'm just saying it's better than SS and COS. And SS isn't anywhere close to being the best score of the 21st century. It's not even the best Williams score of the 21st century. It wasn't even the best Williams score of 2001. As far as Superman goes, I think a case could be made by the brave that there are one or two cues in the score before the end credits that are pretty mind-blowingly amazing, beginning with the "Main Title." What cues in SS even come close to the brilliance of "Harry's Wondrous World?" None.

Too bad. It's better than the first two Harry Potter scores. no its not. "The Ballroom Scene" and the "Dance of the Witches" alone are vastly superior to anything in either of the two HP scores. Furthermore, WOE was an original score for Williams, versus SS and COS which are nice, but often uninteresting, retreads of The Lost World, Hook, the SW prequels, and WOE. "Harry's Wondrous World" is a beautiful piece, but any score that waits until the end credits to deliver the best it has to offer can't be all that amazing.

American Graffiti

Too bad. It's better than the first two Harry Potter scores.

Sad. A true pioneer of filmmaking. RIP.

Just thought I'd pass this along for anyone who's interested. Turner Classic Movies here in the USA is running a 1998 interview they did with Heston tonight at 8 PM Eastern time. I caught half of it when they ran it earlier this afternoon. It was interesting as most of their interviews are if you're interested in film history.

Don't know if this has been posted before, but if not...about 3 minutes in, George Lucas goes 0 for 2 recognizing Star Wars music.

Nice of the guy to thank this website and give it a little plug. On another note, who the hell requested "For Always"?! Honestly!

I can't believe you're the only one so far that put AI at the top. It's Williams' masterpiece of the 21st century, IMO.

RIP Mr. Heston. I was just watching (of all things) Wayne's World 2 the other day and wondered how he was doing.

Does he mean that one of the movies is not very solid, or that he did not appear in the Last crusade lenghty prologue? I think that was Spielberg talking, not Ford.

Anna and the King of Siam Beneath the 12-Mile Reef Citizen Kane (McNeely re-recording) The Day the Earth Stood Still (McNeely re-recording) The Egyptian The Ghost and Mrs. Muir Journey to the Center of the Earth Joy in the Morning Marnie (McNeely re-recording) North by Northwest On Dangerous Ground Psycho (Herrmann re-recording) Psycho (McNeely re-recording) The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (Debney re-recording) Taxi Driver The Three Worlds of Gulliver (McNeely re-recording) The Trouble with Harry (McNeely re-recording) Vertigo (McNeely re-recording) Plus some compilation albums by Herrmann, Gerhardt, McNeely, etc.

RIP. I'm mesmerized everytime I see this man on screen. Great actor.

I agree with Joe that the formulas are screwed up and it's somewhat ridiculous to try to come up with exact figures. However, I think it's just common sense to admit that most of the films that are in the top 20 as adjusted for inflation are in fact among the higest grossing movies of all time if ticket prices had remained the same since 1930 to the present. Something like 70% of the American public went to a movie every week in the 30's and 40's before TV came along. Today, I think it's less than 20% on a good week. If 70% of Americans went to see a movie next week, the top grossing film at the box office would vault itself into the top 10 in one weekend. Films like Snow White, Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, The Ten Commandments, etc. broke all kinds of records when they were released, and they were re-released several times. Unless you knew the number of tickets sold and how much $ each was sold for, it would be impossible to come up with an exact figure for an inflation adjusted gross. But at the same time, I think that not recognizing that a film like Gone with the Wind must have taken in at least somewhere near Titanic's cash haul if people had been paying 1997 ticket prices in 1939 just defies logic. Just my thoughts.

Well, Frank Churchill committed suicide shortly after finishing Bambi.

I think it depends on the film and how the music is treated in the film. I'd fallen in love with "The Meadow Picnic" before I saw AOTC and it was painful to hear it edited so poorly in the film.

As I recall, War of The Worlds was pretty hyped. And Universal spent an outrageous sum of cash hyping Jurassic Park.