John Williams is the brilliant composer behind film scores like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, and more. On this episode, we take a look --- Sponsors: https://vanman.shop/discount/TAKEOVER - Use code TAKEOVER for 10% off your order https://www.vesto.com/ - All of your company's financial accounts in one view https://www.costofglory.com/cog-retreats/texas-retreat - Austin Retreat with the Cost of Glory. Use code TAKEOVER for $200 off. HTTOTW Premium - For all endnotes, takeaways, and bonus episode, subscribe to How to Take Over the World Premium --- Stay in touch: Twitter/X: @BenWilsonTweets Instagram: @HTTOTW Email me: [email protected] Sources: Music By John Williams on Disney Plus John Williams Always Settles The Score - Vanity Fair John Williams: The Force Is With Him - uDiscoverMusic The Force Is Still Strong with John Williams - The New Yorker An Interview with John Williams - Symphony.org --- Writing, research, and production by Ben Wilson.
Chapter 1: Who is John Williams and why is he important?
If you don't know who John Williams is, I want you to take a second and think of a tune from a movie soundtrack. Not a musical, but some background music from a movie. Something you can hum. Alright, take a second. Maybe try and hum it. Okay, so there's a good chance that what you thought of was... Or... Maybe it was Or maybe Or possibly, da-na-na-na-na-na-na.
If you thought of any of these tunes or Jurassic Park or Jaws or E.T., you were thinking of a song written by John Williams. He's widely regarded as the greatest film composer of all time. He's a true genius, a one of one, just an extraordinary artist. He's one of those few people who transcended and changed their medium.
In music composing, he's been nominated for a record 54 Oscars and won five of them. He's won six Emmys, four Golden Globes. Ultimately, it's not the awards that make him worth studying. It is the brilliance of his music. There are certain time periods that are known for artistic brilliance. 19th century Germany for music, 15th century Florence for painting, 20th century Paris for writing.
Chapter 2: What awards has John Williams won?
And I think that the late 20th century American film industry will go down as one of those great time periods. And few people have contributed as much as John Williams to that brilliance. Steven Spielberg called him, quote, the single most significant contributor to my success as a filmmaker. George Lucas said of Star Wars, quote, I truly believe that the soundtrack is half of the movie.
Star Wars basically would not be Star Wars without John Williams' music. It's great music that inspires and moves you, and there is so much of it. The director, J.J. Abrams, has a great quote about the amount of great music that John Williams has produced. He said, It's a little bit like when you're talking about the Beatles.
Any one song from the Beatles would be any other band's greatest thing, and they would live off that forever. John is like that. Any one of his scores, arguably, would be any other composer's accomplishment of a lifetime. So let's see how one man created so much fantastic music. This is John Williams.
I'm going to show you how great I am. I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, I'd like to take this chance to apologize to absolutely nobody.
Hello, and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson. I've been thinking of doing a John Williams episode for a while now. I absolutely love his music, and I thought it would be interesting to see how he did what he did. And then one day, I see that this documentary has come out on Disney Plus called Music by John Williams. So I thought, OK, let's see if this is any good.
And it was. It's great. And so I thought, all right, this is a good time to do an episode on John Williams. This documentary, I love it. It's entertaining. It's moving. It's mostly a celebration of John Williams and his music. And so for my purposes, I wish I had focused more on how he does what he does. But that's okay. That's just not the kind of movie that it is.
So I would really recommend it if you're looking for something to watch this holiday season. Also in preparation for this episode, I just went through and read a bunch of articles and interviews that I could find. And I'll link those in the show notes as well if you want to learn more. So let's get into it. So John Williams was born in 1932 in Flushing, Queens, New York City.
He was born into a very musical family. His father was a professional drummer. And he provides some pretty good material for the Polgar theory of genius. For those of you who haven't listened to the Laszlo Polgar episode, he was a researcher in Hungary, and he believed that genius was teachable.
And he had this whole method for raising a genius, and it involved starting children in their field very young, preferably around age four, And he managed to implement this method with his own children. And he turned all three of his daughters into extraordinary chess prodigies.
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Chapter 3: What was John Williams' early life like?
by another student at at their high school to me that's amazing it just shows what is possible with a good education system anyway so he scores his first piece to this play in high school and he's working really hard at piano performance all through high school when he graduates the korean war is going on and so johnny joins the air force as a member of the band
He's stationed in Nova Scotia, where he actually has an opportunity to score his first film, which is a little informational film about Nova Scotia, which is a province in Canada. But after his stint in the Air Force, he moves back to New York to study at Juilliard, which is the best music school in the United States. And at first, he's just focused on becoming a pianist, a performer.
He's playing in bands, you know, like he's playing jazz music, and he's also playing in studio bands for movies, for films. And as the pianist, he does sometimes have the opportunity to compose just a little bit. He'll write little fills for himself that will go with the music. But he's not composing entire scores yet. Entire, like a score just means the, yeah, the full background music.
But since he has composed before for this one little movie in Nova Scotia, and because the work he does on the piano is good, he starts getting small opportunities to compose here and there, mostly for television. And this part of his work grows and grows until he has to give up playing the piano, which was good. He knew he wasn't a world-class pianist.
He couldn't keep up with someone like Van Cliburn on the classical side or Oscar Peterson on the jazz side. And besides, composing paid more. And he had three kids at this point. He had married Barbara Ruick, an actress and singer, in 1956.
And by the way, this is neither here nor there, but you have to give it to the guy for marrying a beautiful young actress and doing so before he becomes rich and famous. Because I wouldn't call John Williams a particularly handsome man. He's not ugly, but he's not super handsome. So clearly he must have had some charm or charisma to land this beautiful young actress. But he does.
He marries this woman, Barbara Rueck, and they have three kids. And so he's got this growing family and he wants something that pays a little more. So he's happy to take on more composition work rather than continuing to just play the piano. So for a long time, he composes what you might call genre music. So this is not high-minded, dramatic stuff.
It's comedies, westerns, stuff like that, stuff that clearly fits into a premolded genre. But it's a lot of different things, and he's really busy. So he's, once again, he's a master of practice, this time with composing. Because he is like in the trenches. He is a blue collar composer, if that makes sense.
You know, when you're composing new music every week for Gilligan's Island or Lost in Space, both are shows he actually did. You don't get to really put a ton of art or high minded ideas into these scores. you really just get good practice at the nuts and bolts of writing scores that work for television and film, right? When something funny happens, you need to do something like this.
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Chapter 4: How did John Williams start his career?
Quote, I felt like she was helping me. It was just a funny kind of feeling that I had, and I still have it. And I think in some way I grew up artistically or gained some kind of energy or penetrated what I was doing a little more deeply. The busiest, most successful period of my life in film started immediately thereafter.
And yeah, this would kick off the most incredible artistic run that any film composer has ever had. That includes Jaws, Star Wars, Superman, Indiana Jones, E.T., Schindler's List, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter. All that is in the future. And I mean, there's other great scores that I haven't even mentioned, right?
Saving Private Ryan, all the sequels to many of the movies we've talked about, Home Alone. I mean, it's just, it's an incredible run. And I find it really remarkable that he attributes that change in some way to the ghostly assistance of his dead wife. And I don't know. I believe him. Who am I to say that John Williams is wrong about why things changed for him?
Or maybe the second explanation which he gives is more correct, that going through this intense grief in some way unlocks an added depth of emotion in his work. I don't know. What I do know is that many of the great leaders and achievers often accomplish some of their greatest work only after going through their greatest trials and rejections and moments of depression.
So Walt Disney loses his business and has a complete nervous breakdown in 1931, right before he goes on this epic run of Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and everything that would follow after that. J.K. Rowling writes Harry Potter after going through a horrible divorce and escaping an abusive relationship.
Washington suffers a massive failure in the French and Indian War before he succeeds in the Revolutionary War. Winston Churchill has a quote that has become a cliche at this point, but I still think it's a great quote. It is, if you're going through hell, keep going. And I think that's appropriate here.
John Williams kept going, and he not only survived this incredible tragedy, but somehow, someway, it made him even better. So after this tragedy, this very young director asks to meet with him. His name is Steven Spielberg. And Spielberg, if you don't know, is, spoiler alert, he goes on to become one of the great directors of all time.
And he's just working on his first major motion picture called the Sugarland Express. And here's what Spielberg says happens next, quote, by the time I got my first job directing my first feature, I probably had already collected 500 soundtrack albums. And I was one of those fan boys of motion picture scores. But in the 60s and early 70s, motion picture scores were becoming an anachronism.
In other words, an orchestral score was no longer preferred. They got music of the era. It was a scary time because I really thought it was the end of that great era of orchestral scores, and I was not going to let that era end on my watch with my movies. I had fallen in love with a score from a movie called The Reavers.
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Chapter 5: What major films did John Williams score?
It's very popular. People love it. And it really launches the careers of both Williams and Spielberg and wins John Williams' first Academy Award for Best Original Score. Remember, he'd already won one for Fiddler on the Roof, but that was for an arrangement, not for an original score that he had written. So then they work together on another great film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
But Williams' next big, big break comes in 1977 when Spielberg's good friend George Lucas starts directing a space movie called Star Wars. And Spielberg tells George Lucas he has to work with John Williams. And George Lucas, who was a fan of jazz music, he says, Johnny Williams, isn't he a jazz pianist? And he was surprised.
He says, but hey, he figures, okay, Spielberg, great director, knows what he's talking about. And so he brings John Williams on board. George Lucas and John Williams have a very close collaboration. One thing I love about Williams is that he knew when to listen and when to insist. So with Spielberg on Jaws, he insists that this two-note theme is a good idea and get Spielberg to see the vision.
On Star Wars, there's one scene in particular where Luke Skywalker is on his little rural farm on Tatooine, on an alien desert planet. And he's watching the sunset. It's actually two sunsets because it's an alien planet with a twin sun star system. And he's considering the adventure before him. And it's one of the most evocative moments of the entire movie. And it is so because of the music.
So John Williams writes something for this scene and George Lucas asks him to change it. And so listen to what happens. Listen to what Williams originally wrote. And by the way, Spotify might take this down because I'm taking directly from the documentary. But for now, let's try this. This is from the documentary and it's George Lucas talking first over John Williams' original score.
And then next you hear the music from the same scene after George Lucas had given him some feedback.
Every once in a while, there'd be a cue, and I'd say, well, that's not what I had in mind here. I said, I really want it to be more like this. And he would say, OK, I'm going to write this tonight, and I'll come back tomorrow with it. I've been with a few composers who just simply said, well, that's not what I want. They sort of insisted it be their way. And then you can bump heads.
I never baptized with Johnny. He was a prince the whole time. I truly believe that the soundtrack is half of the movie. Star Wars basically would not be Star Wars without Johnny Windows music.
Okay, so as you heard, like it goes from kind of ho-hum to this amazing, amazing motif. And it creates this great scene. And so I think this is one of those things that great leaders figure out over time.
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Chapter 6: How did personal tragedy influence John Williams' work?
And he still composes, mostly sequels, kind of finishing up stuff that he's already done. But he did The Fablemans, which was an original movie. So yeah, I mean, he still composes and he's still sought after. Much of his success derives from his partnership with Steven Spielberg, with whom he has a very close relationship to this day.
Because those are, you know, you think about Saving Private Ryan, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Indiana Jones. These are all Spielberg movies. And that's some of his best known music. But it's not just them. He also composes for Oliver Stone. He does JFK for Oliver Stone. Chris Columbus, he does Home Alone for the director Chris Columbus.
Roland Emmerich, he does The Patriot for Roland Emmerich. He works with Ron Howard and a number of other lesser known directors. All right, let's take a quick break to talk about Vesto, which gives you all of your company's financial accounts in one view. So if you're a founder or an executive and you want a real-time look at your company's financial performance, then you need Vesto.
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It's just one long extended up. As I said, he won five Academy Awards. Even that is maybe somewhat misleading. There's this phenomenon where people don't like to reward the same person over and over and over again. So you see this a lot in sports.
Michael Jordan has four MVPs, LeBron James has five, but in reality, both of them were probably the best basketball player in the world for at least a decade, at least 10 years. But it gets boring to reward the same guy over and over. Bill Belichick, probably the greatest coach in American football history, only coach of the year three times.
Again, even though he's probably the best coach in American football for over a decade. So no one else has won five Academy Awards for music composition, at least in recent history. But if you were actually giving the award out to the best original score of the year, John Williams probably would have won it at least 10 times. He's also written other things.
He wrote a fanfare for the Olympics, which the Olympics doesn't have an official theme. So there are a few Olympic theme songs, but his is my favorite. He also wrote some original symphonic music, which is very modern sounding, quite dissonant, quite strange. Frankly, it goes over my head, but people who understand this stuff say that it is quite good.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the Jaws score?
He learned how to compose music in the trenches of television production. Even before that, he studied hard to learn the basic theory of music and composition. He said, quote, my nose was in harmony, counterpoint and orchestration books for decades. One word I would use to describe John Williams's music is transcendent. It taps into something primal.
It urges you toward adventure and wonder and love. It evokes all these beautiful emotions, but Williams didn't achieve transcendence in his art by obsessing over transcendence or obsessing over adventure and wonder and love, but he obsessed over his craft. And I think that is often the case. As Picasso said, when art critics get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning.
When artists get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine. And Williams didn't spend years thinking about form and structure and meaning. He spent years thinking about where to get cheap turpentine, metaphorically speaking. There is a great scene in the documentary where he's getting ready to conduct a symphony and he puts on his conductor's jacket, beautiful white jacket.
And he says, these are my work clothes. This is what I do my hammering with. And I really think that is how he approaches it. It reminds me of a concert I went to, The Killers. I think The Killers are the greatest rock band of the 21st century. I think the only other band you can really make a case for is Coldplay. I think. I don't know. Anyways, regardless, they're a great rock band.
And I went to their concert and the lead singer, Brandon Flowers, gets up there and he's in this bright jacket and he looks like a lounge singer that you would find in Las Vegas. And he actually did. He grew up in Las Vegas going to casinos and clubs and seeing these kind of workaday bands playing in lounges.
And he gets to the last song of his set and he says, guys, I have the flu and I have done my best to get through this set and I have, but I'm sorry, it's getting me now and I just can't come out for an encore. So this is it. Good night, everyone. And everyone was very appreciative, right, that he had worked through having the flu and had played his full set.
And I just realized, wow, this guy approaches his music like a craft, like a working man, right? You got to show up for work. You got to do the work, even if you're not feeling your best. He wasn't a diva at all. And I think that is what made him so great. And I was reminded of that when in this documentary, John Williams is asked what he wants his legacy to be.
And he says he doesn't like talking about legacy, but at the end of the day, he wants to be remembered as quote, a good, solid musician. I think it's very ironic and counterintuitive that by focusing on being a good, solid musician, he has become so much more than that. So be a craftsman, put on your hard hat, grab your lunch pail and approach your work like work.
And just think about how to do a good job, perfect the details of your craft and those lofty things like transcendence and meaning and greatness will follow. My fourth takeaway is related and it is get your reps in. John Williams was the most prolific composer of his generation. He worked really hard for countless hours.
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Chapter 8: How did John Williams revolutionize film scoring?
Just think about that Star Wars theme, right? Using those horns. Anyways, doing the safe thing leads to mediocrity. And John Williams never did the safe thing. He always did the bold thing. And that's why his music is so, so good. So there you go. Those are my takeaways. That is the life of John Williams. I hope you enjoyed it.
If you'd like to know more about John Williams, I strongly suggest watching Music by John Williams on Disney+. Thanks for tuning in, guys. I know this is a more obscure figure, but I just loved learning about John Williams. So even if movies and music aren't really your thing, hopefully you enjoyed learning about one of the great artists of our time. So that does it.
Until next time, thank you for listening to How to Take Over the World. Before we wrap up, one plug for Speechify. All the greats are obsessed with learning as much as possible. They have this incredible thirst for knowledge. And Speechify is a tool that can help you learn more and learn faster. It turns any written content into a podcast, articles, books, textbooks, and even emails.
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