Maurizio

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2025-11-11/hollywood-bowl-names-stage-for-john-williams-spielberg-lucas-composer

LOL that scene was also used by Spielberg during the AFI masterclass he did with JW in 2012 as an example of great use of music in film... To which JW quipped, "You picked a very fancy composer!" Jokes aside, I think it's a tad too much to speculate about how much JW's current physical condition would impact the sheer number of notes he's able to write for this new score. Despite some distasteful jokes made recently on this board, nobody here knows the actual status of his health currently, but all seems to point to the fact that he's doing good. If he wouldn't be able to sustain the load of scoring a full picture, he wouldn't have done it. For all we know, he seems perfectly able to compose music that sounds rich and interesting, as the new Vienna piece clearly showed. I too don't expect something as busy as "Zam the Assassin," "The Quidditch Match" or "Anderton's Great Escape", but that doesn't mean that he will end up writing just pads of long notes or resort to cut-and-paste minimalistic motors.

It’s not a favour to Williams, it’s the actual rule of the category: “For concert/performance films or music documentaries. Award to the artist, video director, and video producer.”

It's pretty sure to guess that both Spielberg and Zemeckis have frozen rights on most of their stuff. The studio may own the IPs, but even when the original makers will be gone, those rights can still be enforced by their heirs. Of course ruthless executives can try to force their way nonetheless, as it happened to Michael Crichton's heirs with the botched ER remake that ended up being turned into another show called The Pitt. It seems like Dante is completely out of the studios' orbit these days. He may be looked at as too old or too outside of the system to hand him a big studio film.

It's with great sadness that I report the sudden death of Jim Self, the renowned tuba player and studio musician legend who performed on countless film and television soundtracks as principal tuba, including dozens for John Williams, who referred to him as "one of the greatest instrumentalists of his generation." For the Maestro, he performed on countless classic scores including Close Encounters, Home Alone, Hook, Jurassic Park, A.I., Minority Report, Indiana Jones 4 among many others. In many of those soundtracks, you can also hear him playing intricate and athletic solos. In addition to be one of the most famous instrumentalists in the world, Jim Self was also a devoted teacher and mentor for the next generation of tuba players. Jim sat down with The Legacy of John Williams in 2020 for an expansive career interview, reminiscing fondly his many years as principal tuba for John Williams: https://thelegacyofjohnwilliams.com/2020/11/10/jim-self-podcast/ In 2021, he was one of the panelists of the L.A. STUDIO LEGENDS: THE REUNION video special produced by The Legacy of John Williams: https://thelegacyofjohnwilliams.com/2021/12/23/l-a-studio-legends-the-reunion-video/ Jim was a tremendously kind and loving man, he was a fan of the Legacy work and always supported it with great generosity and kindness. He will be dearly missed.

It looks like Williams has always been pretty unscathed by such negative criticism and prejudice. He always preferred to focus on doing good work rather than giving weight to the opinions of detractors. He may have been annoyed or even upset by such criticism, but I don’t think he ever lost sleep over a negative review or a panning article.

Williams mentions Robert Graves in the introductory note of his Symphony No.1 as printed in the program book of the 1972 performance with the LSO: https://thelegacyofjohnwilliams.com/2019/10/08/john-williams-early-concert-works/

It’s been one of Spielberg’s visual trademarks since Duel…

Cameron doesn’t hide one bit his love for JW and really wears his influence with pride. I think it’s good because he shows devotion to the craft and certainly displays a great talent for orchestral writing for such a young age (he’s 23!). Plus, he’s genuinely humble and sincere. I’m pretty sure we’ll hear great things from him. He needs to find his own Spielberg!

It reads like the ultimate backhanded compliment (I expect no less from Lebrecht), but I always laugh hard when I see classical snobs showing penitence toward Williams and film music in general. They’re at least 40 years late, if not more. Also, the stealings he mentions are totally off the mark.

Because some people are borderline paranoid and prefer to believe to conspiracy theories. It’s one of the crux of our modern times.

Pretty sure it refers to Bill Ross and Mark Graham.

I don't think this is true. After The Last Crusade, Spielberg, Lucas and Ford convened it was enough and everyone was more than happy to let go. Nothing at that point seemed to indicate they were willing to do more and nobody seemed to have been infected by the nostalgia virus that would've spreaded later on. When Lucas officially announced the Star Wars prequel trilogy and a fourth Indiana Jones film as part of the Lucasfilm revival in 1994, they agreed to do one more, but as it's notoriously known they had a hard time agreeing on a script (the pact has always been that the script should satisfy all three parties on the same level). Then everyone got busy with other projects and personal things, so it wasn't until 2005 that they seriously committed to put the fourth one on the launching pad, but at that point it seemed like everyone wasn't exactly enthused with the idea of doing more. Indy 5 was mandatory after the Disney purchase, but again the fact there were lots of problems with the script and that Lucas wasn't involved made everything look like a forced project. I know many fans craved for more Indiana Jones adventures and have the series become a very long one in the footsteps of the James Bond films, but the reality is that the Indy films were kind of lightning in a bottle type of creative ventures, made possible because of the fortunate conjunction of talent, youthful spirit and timing of these people getting together to make something fun.

The trades referred to it as an “event film” based on an original idea by Spielberg and some of the cast talked about it as “classic Spielberg” so a lot of people made the assumption that this is going to be something along the lines of CE3K/E.T.

There are no aliens in A.I. The creatures showing up in the final act are super-evolved Mechas.

That’s the assumption that people made. “It’s a UFO movie therefore it’s titled The Dish.”

I think this is another winner! It’s a really fabulous piece in which Williams clearly enjoyed getting a license to have an unlimited amount of fun with the genre and style. It seems that Williams reflected not just on what Johann Strauss could’ve done if he had an expansive orchestra and richer harmonic vocabulary, but also on the subsequent experiments made by Richard Strauss and Dmitri Shostakovich, who both wrote homages to the Viennese waltz in their own unique ways. There are hints of classic Hollywood film music too, as the waltz continued to live in the scores of Steiner, Rozsa, Waxman, etc. The only (minor) quibble is that the violin cadenza in the middle sounds perhaps a bit forced in a piece like this, but overall it doesn’t ruin anything. In a nutshell, it’s a fabulous piece. Let’s hope it’s being recorded and released soon.

Once and for all, the alleged working title The Dish was a wrong assumption by whoever picked it up from the original article—“The Dish” is the name for every scoop article at Deadline.com, who revealed some of the casting members for the first time. The fact that the film still doesn’t have an announced title isn’t a novelty for Spielberg—Bridge of Spies was “Untitled Cold War Thriller” for a very long time, while The Post was called “Pentagon Papers Drama” for a while. About the fact that the two men are planning this as a final grand statement on their collaboration, I think it’s just hindsight assumption from our part as fans. Certainly they know they don’t have another ten movies together ahead of them and for the last 10 years they’ve been likely aware that each collaboration could’ve been the last one. However, the fact they’re still playing ball means that first and foremost they enjoy the actual process of doing it, without thinking too much if this is the tenth, twentieth of thirtieth time doing a movie. They love their job and they love each other. It’s really the perfect match.

It's an absolutely sweet and lovely piece. It has the forlorn, wistful character of other Williams adagios, but there's also a speck of serenity. I hope it will become part of the instrument's repertoire.

This is not an official announcement, but something that was spilled informally at a public event by the president of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, therefore the more casual wording used, but it's clear that what he's saying is that Williams is writing the music for the new Spielberg film. What else he should've intended? I can only suppose that an official press release with the announcement will be made at some point sooner rather than later.

I don’t think Woetzel was supposed to break the news, but now the cat is out of the bag and everyone should be cheerful. He said “he’s in LA doing what he does—he’s working with Steven Spielberg on his next film.” It doesn’t take a degree in English literature to understand that he’s implying that Williams is composing the music for it.

Williams rarely go full narrative/storytelling-like when writing concert music, even in short occasional pieces like this. However, both the title and his notes reveal that he definitely let his imagination go in picturing a scene from mid-19th century Vienna and pick up the reverberations into the writing. As he talks about in Tim’s book, JW often ponders about the value of the past, its effect on the present tense and the power of nostalgia in evoking experiences we may have not lived personally, but whose echoes are part of our upbringing and cultural DNA.

If there is one "guilty pleasure" in Spielberg's canon, this is it. I just love it top to bottom and JW's music is friggin' brilliant. If you don't get your blood pumping when the ostinato builds up before the climax, well, you're missing something.

Williams did separate percussion sessions on a few occasions (AOTC, ROTS, Memoirs of a Geisha) and also choir, but in general he avoids stemming like plague. I think such decisions are more a result of a compromise with the sound mixers, who may need separate elements for the final dub.