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Poor_Man_S_HirschFeld

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  1. One shouldn't forget the final battle was very hard to cut together. It very differently written (with Luke taking two turns to bullseye the exhaust port and no countdown to the destruction of the rebel base), plus the effect shots were coming in very late. The first assembly wasn't particularly successful and Marcia Lucas had to rebuild the sequence from the ground up using placeholder footage. I suppose during this phase the filmmakers started playing around with temp music as well and decided which beats played better with or without score. I should also re-watch the scenes from The Battle of Britain, Squadron 633 or The Dam Busters that inspired the final battle to see how they were scored. I find the scene works superbly as it is. Wall-to-wall scoring of the finale works better in E.T. for instance because the different beats that compose the sequence are vastly different in emotion, whereas the SW finale is more about the military tactics (but as already duly noted, the music kicks back in as it all becomes about Luke fulfilling his destiny)
  2. I could not stream the episode from Belgium... I suppose I must install the BBC Sounds app.
  3. Colbert is a Star Wars nerd through and through. I wonder if he would pull a Seth McFarlane on John Williams and quiz him about minor SW themes
  4. Thor, will the last episode of your walkthrough touch upon Williams' later ventures in television music, like Amazing Stories or the theme for Kenobi?
  5. Bravo Thor, I'm enjoying this series a lot. In spite of calling myself a JW fan, I was largely unfamiliar with his early TV work, so thank you for introducing me to it. It's pretty amazing to notice how much of Williams' inventiveness, taste and flair was already there from the very beginning. Just a note: I use Castbox as a podcatcher on my smartphone and while I was able to add 'Celluloid Tunes', it now looks like the rss feed has no longer been updated after episode 73 (first installment of your walk-through). I had to listen your latest two-parter using the browser.
  6. I'm always on the fence about weighing in the biographies or personal traits of artists in my assesment of their work. The biographical/personalistic approach to art criticism is not always useful. On the other hand, when the work artists really intrigues, inspires or touches me, I become really curious about their life, thoughts and deeds outside their output. I try not to idolize anybody, because most people are flawed and sometimes the greater the achievements, the bigger the flaws. John Williams public persona is an affable and very dignified one, I'd say he carries himself as someone who holds some kind of public ministry, with a demeanor that would suit a monarch, or a Supreme Court judge or a faculty dean. Now, whether in his private he's a shining examples of any desirable human virtue, I can only speculate. I think it's clear he's incredibly disciplined and industrious, as the poll puts it, and this combination is very admirable. I think any composer working in Hollywood got to be a workhorse, but I have the feeling in many cases people have to work around the clock and regularly impose grinding working schedules on themselves. John Williams somehow seems to be able to be very productive while maintaining an almost 9 to 5 routine.
  7. Wasn't one of the biggest motivators for John Williams to start releasing official sheet music exactly the plethora of bad arrangements that started circulating after the success of Star Wars? I believe musicians call these 'take downs' and I remember reading somewhere that Williams is not very happy with the practice. If one looks at how much effort Williams did put in releasing his works in some form or another so that they can be played, it's hard to accuse him of being an enemy of sheet music. Quite the opposite, especially when thinking how sheet music was treated by the studios in the past. Fox and Disney were probably better at saving and archiving, but the rest of them used to throw away everything to save space! It was up to the composers to take good care of their stuff (something Williams learned from Bernard Herrmann). And even when composers do preserve their work, it's not a given that the material is properly catalogued, proof-read, revised, labeled and organized. We should keep this in mind when thinking that any official release of sheet music requires quite the effort from many people. And I'm sure that given proper time, a lot of Williams' sheet music will become available (I really hope the Julliard is prepping adequately and hiring people to organize Williams' personal scores). I can understand the frustration in seeing a lot of 'crowd-sourced' sheet music disappearing (either when it's shared for free or for money), but I think it's a prerogative of the publishers and authors to keep a good degree of control. The ease of access that digital technology allowed kind of spoiled us into thinking we are owed to find anything we desire.
  8. I can totally picture Lynch playing the annoyed John Ford from Spielberg's anecdote. Just watch this scene from Louis C.K's show a few years back
  9. For what is worth... I thought the movie was brilliant. I'm not an easy audience to please and while I may be better disposed towards Spielberg than any other filmmaker, I also rise the level of my expectations considerably when it comes to someone of his caliber (for the same reason I'm flabbergasted by Bob Zemeckis' poor results in recent years). In this WSS, the level of bravura filmmaking alone is worth the price of admission (and let's face it, if you are doing a musical, you better have some cinematic muscles to flex), but for me the real success are the performances. Spielberg can really cast a movie, especially the side roles. I also adored the genuine retro vibe of many sequences: at times it felt and looked like a real 50s musical, and that warms my heart like nothing else.
  10. I'm familiar with that comment made on the LegacyofJW podcast (hehehe). Let me elaborate a bit on that. Of course, to state that John Williams' music is of such caliber that no one else's can compare and therefore is not enjoyable would be silly. If anything, John Williams actually helped me appreciate music more, of any kind, by any artist. If it's just a matter of taste, meaning JW's music has a particular, very specific flavour that I prefer above all others, and I cannot get the same kick from any other composer, well... that can be said of any composer or musician with a strong personal voice, be it Bach, Strvinsky, Danny Elfman or Paul Simon. My point was rather that being exposed to Williams at a very young age and in the context of popular mainstram media, maybe instilled in me the expectation that any piece of popular entertainment would display the same lavel of sofistication. Not that as a youngster I would have been able to articulate it, but it was almost like demanding of every major hollywood movie to have rich yet direct thematic material, detailed counterpoint, cristaline orchestrations and sofisticaded harmonies. To be fair, there have been plenty of scores by many other composers doing just that, but nonetheless we are talking of a very high bar, hence the idea of 'being spoiled'. The only real instance of me getting 'spoiled' to the point I stopped enjoy other works in a field has been the tv show The Wire. To this day no matter how much I can appreiate a series, I stilll end up thinking "Well, it wasn't The Wire".
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