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Brando got a reaction from WampaRat in Indiana Jones is better than everything
Hook and The Lost World are awesome
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Brando got a reaction from Andy in Anyone here succumbed to 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray?
I have heard of this before. I would love for the tv cut to get a 4K and perhaps an atmos or 5.1 soundtrack. That would awesome to hear more music!
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Brando reacted to Yavar Moradi in Superman(2025) - John Murphy
If we're talking scores, maybe I'd agree. But despite its faults the new Superman film is LOADS better, as a film (and as an examination of the title character) than Man of Steel. It's not even close.
Yavar
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Brando reacted to artguy360 in Is there an accepted consensus on Chamber of Secrets?
I'm totally on board with the speculation that JW stuck very close to the temp score for DoD and TROS. It just makes sense when you think about how much music was recorded for each movie, all the instances of musical callbacks and lifting of specific cues, all the revisions, and how much support JW had throughout the process.
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Brando reacted to mrbellamy in Behind the Moon - a Substack column about John Williams: A Composer's Life
On the Trail of: John's Pre-Spielberg Years
That "Saturday Adoption" story is a fun ride
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Brando reacted to Mr. Hooper in JAWS Is Better Than Everything
That's awesome that it's still preserved. I thought it had been taxidermied, not pickled in formaldehyde.
On my visits to New York, I always had it in the back of my mind to check out the museum to see if it was still there, but now I see it's by special request only.
It saves me the disappointment. Like when I visited SeaWorld Orlando, and realized there was no 'Undersea Kingdom'...
A dark day.
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Brando reacted to Andy in JAWS Is Better Than Everything
Okay here’s a pretty wild update! I’ve known for some time that Roger Kastel’s model for the shark in the poster was a Mako from the American Museum of Natural History.
What I did NOT know is that the specimen is still preserved! This is like finding the preserved remains of the Mona Lisa!
Whats crazy is that the original painting is lost! But the Mako shark who modeled for it is still around!!!
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Brando reacted to enderdrag64 in enderdrag64's Star Wars Cue by Cue
#2.26 ESB (1980) - 7m3 Yoda Raises The Ship (Wook link)
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Brando reacted to Will in Is there an accepted consensus on Chamber of Secrets?
Not an original point, but I'm still curious whether there's any significance to the fact that Ross got an adaptation credit on Chamber of Secrets but only a conducting credit on Dial of Destiny. There seems to be a widespread assumption on here that Ross actually did a lot of the adapting work on DoD (in part because -- especially for some of the action cues -- it's a little hard to imagine JW personally combing through disparate passages of his old scores to find exactly the right few bars to connect things with). But on the other hand, if that was the case, why wouldn't Ross get the adapting credit this time?
As others have pointed out, none of this really matters all that much -- CoS is a terrific score, as is DoD! And we know JW was personally involved heavily in both, so I feel comfortable saying it's "his" music. But obviously we all crave the behind-the-scenes details of how precisely the composing process worked (which we'll probably never get, alas).
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Brando reacted to Bespin Copilot in So... how was your day?
Today, I was officially told at work what I had already anticipated for the past few months. Due to budget cuts in the project I'm working on... a project that’s no longer very high priority... there have been reductions, and my position is one of those being cut. Oh, I’m not losing my job; I’ve been with this company for 25 years this year. I’ll simply be working with another team. In a large company like mine, you sometimes have to accept being treated like just a number.
I’m not complaining, because this doesn’t compromise my career at all. It’s just that a page is being turned, and once again I’m being told: "Move along, you little useless number, and go be a different number somewhere else." I’ll have a great retirement when I leave this company, but still... we do get treated like numbers... I chose this path, I suppose. It’s a small grief, that’s all.
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Brando reacted to Bellosh in Alexandre Desplat - Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)
The world has lot interest in dinosaurs CDs.
-JWFan Rebirth opening credits
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Brando reacted to Ninoners in Superman(2025) - John Murphy
You won't like his movies, because of his opinion on another movie? Wha?
What does one thing have to do with the other? Batman 89 is one of my favorite movies of all-time. I still loved GOTG 1, 3, and Superman.
The space shuttle scene is good, but you know why the space shuttle scene is such a standout? Because it's the ONLY ACTION SETPIECE IN THE ENTIRE MOVIE. That's why it's everyone's favorite part. It's 1 of 1.
In a better Superman film, that sequence would be but 1 of 4 or 5 big setpieces. But after the shuttle, we get Superman catching a few falling objects and lifting a big rock.
I appreciate what Singer was trying to do, but they were so focused on being reverential to Reeve/Donner, that they forgot to tell a good story.
I actually like it quite a bit for about 90 minutes, then comes the most boring 3rd act of any Superhero movie.
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Brando reacted to Mr. Hooper in JAWS 50th Anniversary!
Did Gottlieb talk about it in his book? It would be nice to have an account from that era, when memories were still fresh... But I'm going by the oldest source that I know, which is the '95 documentary, in which Gottlieb gives credit to Scheider.
But yeah, the waters may be forever muddied by the different accounts given over the years.
At least the old debate over who wrote the Indianapolis speech has been straightened out: Shaw rewrote Milius, who rewrote Sackler.
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Brando got a reaction from Mr. Hooper in JAWS 50th Anniversary!
Idk if we’ll ever have a definitive answer on this. Do we know what he was initially going to say? Or did they kinda come up with “oh hey after we finally reveal the shark, let’s have him slink backwards to the cabin and say this and then we’ll shoot the swim by sequence leading up to the first barrel shot into him”? One of the docs, I don’t remember which one, kinda implies the crew started saying it on the shooting barge and Roy thought Brody should say that.
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Brando reacted to Director of Poltergeist in JAWS 50th Anniversary!
The 90s documentary is like something that would be playing in a line at Universal Studios. Not particularly engaging, but vaguely entertaining informational video that you can watch while nearby to a pathetic outdoor ceiling fan with perhaps a mister in a hot humid switchback line before you enter the main attraction.
Jaws @ 50 is…okay. It feels incomplete. Why can’t they clean up those old interviews from the LaserDisc/DVD? They were surely filmed on something a little higher res. They look like shit.
Why does JJ Abrams need to be in everything about anything we love? This hack has nothing to do with Jaws. Who’s really interested in his opinion?
Listening to these guys trash the mayor, it’s as if they’re talking about an irredeemable character like Ludlow from a very different Spielberg. The mayor has his moment when he realizes he was wrong after the last beach attack before he signs off on Quint. “My kids were on that beach too.” He’s not evil, nor is it evil to act in the town’s best interests when the economy depends on the beaches being open. These characters have layers, they’re complicated, it’s not as simple as ‘The Evils of Capitalism.’
Laurent Bozo tosses in way too many clips from the movie we’ve seen a million times when the behind the scenes stuff is far more interesting. Something about everything he does feels so manufactured and stale.
Speaking of stale, John Williams only appears in archival documentary footage.
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Brando reacted to Mr. Hooper in JAWS 50th Anniversary!
Yeah, I'll admit that the '95 documentary is purely informational and wasn't presented in a slick package. So, in that sense, this update is much more viewer-friendly to the uninitiated, or casual fan.
But I like that the '95 takes its time and walks you through the entire production. I find it to be a cozy and relaxing viewing experience. lol
To answer your question, this new documentary is indeed interspersed with clips of behind-the-scenes footage from various sources...
Some new (an interview with Spielberg I'd never seen, and snippets from his home movies), and some old (interviews from the show 'New England Our Way' and Vineyard resident/beach scene extra Carol Fligor's home movies).
But it's also worth watching to see Spielberg recollect—30 years after his first meeting with Bouzereau—and how he's come to accept 'Jaws' and its esteemed place in his filmography, despite the personal torment that it caused him.
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Brando reacted to Mr. Hooper in JAWS 50th Anniversary!
Watched the premiere of the 'Jaws @ 50' documentary last night...
It was a good refresh of what has become an oft-told story.
Of particular interest for us fans who'd "seen and heard it all" were the new excerpts of Spielberg's home movies.
And one new morsel of information for me was that he'd asked the screenwriters from 'Sugarland Express' to look at the script, and they suggested that the shark blow up at the end, utilizing the air tank.
But for those for whom this documentary served as an introduction, some things felt rushed and the information incomplete, such as when Joe Alves mentioned a "right-to-left shark" and "left-to-right shark," but it wasn't explained what that meant.
One thing that unfortunately wasn't made clear was that Roy Scheider improvised the line "You're gonna need a bigger boat"...
The way Spielberg recollected it, it made it sound like it was his idea. (That's how it sounded to me, anyway.)
I would've also liked to have seen more of Scheider. Bouzereau makes sparing use of his 1995 interview with him.
And it's a shame that Dreyfuss didn't participate, and we're instead shown excerpts from 1995. But again, not enough. It seemed like Emily Blunt got more screen time than either he or Scheider.
The documentary was Spielberg-centric, of course, and really drove home the point that making 'Jaws' was a crucible for him. And you get the sense that, after 50 years, he has finally made peace with it.
It's called "definitive," but for this fan, the definitive documentary will always be Bouzereau's first. The unedited version from the '95 laserdisc set.
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Brando reacted to Quintus in JAWS 50th Anniversary!
Well, when you remember that Spielberg also directed Poltergeist, it makes sense.
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Brando reacted to Director of Poltergeist in JAWS 50th Anniversary!
He’s hospitalized with bronchitis and seems pretty unwell
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Brando reacted to bollemanneke in "John Williams: A Composer's Life" - Biography by Tim Greiving
That will only increase the giddiness.
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Brando reacted to Maurizio in "John Williams: A Composer's Life" - Biography by Tim Greiving
Interrupting the giddiness briefly only to tell you to keep an eye at The Legacy of John Williams next week for something coming related to Tim's book
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Brando reacted to Edmilson in Is there an accepted consensus on Chamber of Secrets?
Are you referring to the infamous Zam the Assassin during the Quidditch match? Because I'm quite sure that was Williams, and he was just pulling a James Horner-like situation.
The Quidditch scene from HP2 is comprised of four cues, three of which are adaptations of the Quidditch sequence from HP1. The other is "Chasing the Snitch", which contains the AOTC material.
What I believe happened is:
When spotting the movie, Columbus and JW agreed to reuse HP1 Quidditch music for the HP2 scene, because it would require Williams to write long and complicated action material. Since he didn't have the time, they decided that Williams should focus on the other setpieces from the movie: Flying Car, Escaping the Spiders and the battle with the Basilisk. For Quidditch, they'd just reuse music from the analogue scene in Philosopher's Stone. When reviewing the movie, either JW himself, or a music editor, or someone else from the movie's team, decided that score the scene with just reused music wasn't working. Williams, in the last minute, had to write fast a short cue for the climax of the scene (Harry and Draco chasing the snitch and being chased by the Bludger in the stadium's trenches) to help set it apart from the HP1 scene. He didn't have much time to come up with something completely original, so he took a shortcut and reused Attack of the Clones music that was probably still fresh in his head. Mind you, he just used a similar idea from the Zam chase, but took it in mostly new directions.
Remember that JW kept writing and sending stuff even beyond what he agreed to score. Ross said something like "we had to call the pen police to recover John's pen" or whatever. I think he was referring to this particular cue.
Williams saw that the scene would be seen as just a weaker remake of the same scene from the movie that had come out the previous year, so he wrote as fast as he could a short cue to go during the most exciting moment of the Quidditch match.
This is the cue that still haunts JWFans' dreams... But I believe that this was what happened.
But to be honest, the cue I really want to know is "Petrified Justin". I love that cue, and it can't be just Ross' adaptations of Williams suites and HP1 material. Did he wrote that cue as well?
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Brando reacted to Maurizio in Is there an accepted consensus on Chamber of Secrets?
I think this is very good assumption, which may be somehow confirmed by the relatively smaller size of the bookbound handwritten score sitting on JW's shelf at home (just compare it with Azkaban, for example):
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Brando reacted to Holko in Is there an accepted consensus on Chamber of Secrets?
Don't want to type out the entire pages from the LLL booklet, but what it says is:
JW asked Ross to help out because of the schedule even before spotting the film He planned to write new themes but also adapt old themes from the first one, Ross being asked to do the latter and conduct it all JW spotted it with Columbus, called Ross, was very specific what to play where in some areas he could start with, he also began writing new themes and suggested Ross could use that too to expand on music from the first JW in an interview said he enjoys adapting old themes to new situations so he did some of that himself too Richard Dyer reported JW would compose 40 minutes of music which surely can't be right Conrad Pope said any Ross sketches were sent to JW in Tanglewood where he'd play through them and approve them or give notes Music editor Peter Myles said to him the only difference was JW wasn't physically there Ross said even late in the schedule he got new music from JW and told him he'd send the music police to confiscate his pencil Ross also says on the "adapted by" credit, possibly just in marketing speak of course: "That was something that John insisted on from our first meeting. The reality, however, is that Chamber of Secrets is a John Williams score beginning to end". So he was definitely very involved with the whole process. What I've been wondering for years too is just to what extent: to take an example, Flying Pixies. The different levels of involvement he could've had:
Tell Ross to just take some action music from the first, whatever (not likely) Tell Ross to do something similar to Flying Keys Tell Ross specifically to adapt bits of Flying Keys Tell Ross specifically which bars of Flying Keys to bring over, with some connecting material wherever needed Tell Ross specifically which bars of Flying Keys to bring over and how to connect them with new material where needed, like what held chord to use for the skeleton falling down on what instruments Sketch it out himself noting what to bring over and sketching the new connecting stuff himself, by which point Ross's involvement is basically only as orchestrator as usual, and of course conductor who can make podium changes if required. I guess until complete paperwork and phone call transcripts and handwritten first sketches all leak for every single cue, we'll never know for sure
I'm still more confused by why certain cues were tracked from the actual HP1 recordings when shit like Eat Slugs, just badly looped bars from a HP1 cue with virtually no progression, was rerecorded.
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Brando got a reaction from Jurassic Shark in AMISTAD (1997) - 2022 2-CD 25th Anniversary Expanded Edition produced by Mike Matessino
No no, YT Music was Google Music’s replacement. Now if you have a playlist made on YT it will link the those playlists and anything you’ve uploaded there. I don’t have a CD player in my car so I uploaded it there to listen to on my phone and my computer at work.