When Worlds Collide: The Sugarland Express, Jaws, & more—Creation of a Composer-Director Legacy, Part 1—Event Summary

[ On 23 August 2025, Bill Boston and Tim Grieving presented an ASMAC webinar titled When Worlds Collide: The Sugarland Express, Jaws, & more — Creation of a Composer-Director Legacy, Part 1. The following is a review by ASMAC member Tim Bloch. ]

Anyone who has been to a movie in the last 55 years has likely encountered the music of John Williams, and if they follow any facet of film culture, they know his music as the sound accompanying movies that became not only film classics, but major cultural events of the time. John Williams isn’t just the musical voice of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and the Harry Potter dynasty, though that is how he is known to the public. He is known in a different way than the successful film composers that went before him because his work is not just a component of the successful movies that defined an era, but the musical voice, on film, of the American Dream.

The early development of John Williams’ career shows us his evolution from studio musician and orchestrator to full-time film composer and his work with the directors who facilitated that transition. Working as Johnny Williams, he was a jazz pianist and orchestrator in the 1950s (I found out today that he played Hammond organ on Mr. Lucky, one of Henry Mancini’s iconic themes) and by the 1960s he was already scoring films as a composer. Williams became friends with André Previn, a massively talented pianist, composer, and conductor in several genres who made his start in Hollywood at the age of sixteen and quickly skyrocketed to the top level of film composition. As a mentor, he encouraged Williams to continue his classical composition, and later presented several of them as a conductor. Despite his success and fame, in 1965 Previn left Hollywood in his rear-view mirror: he was tired of penny-pinching producers, tin-eared directors, and the whole paraphernalia of the Hollywood jungle, and quickly transitioned successfully into the role of major symphony conductor.

On the basis of his own experience, Previn encouraged John Williams to follow him out of Hollywood and escape what he perceived as the tinhorn crassness of the film industry; for him, there was no more joy in toiling in film studio orchestra rooms and grinding out what he saw as empty and ephemeral commercial composition. Williams was sympathetic to that view at first, but a meeting with a young film director eventually not only kept him working in film music, but also allowed him to break down many of the artistic barriers that had traditionally held film composers back, and opened the way to a career that ultimately transformed the art of film music itself.

In 1970, Steven Spielberg was still an apprentice film director at Universal studios, working in television and learning his craft under the watchful eye of Sidney Sheinberg when he attended a studio rehearsal for John Williams’ score of Mark Rydell’s film The Reivers in 1969. His score for The Reivers, an adaptation of a William Faulkner novel, shows Williams starting to find his own voice, expanding the scope of what film scores were often limited to at that time and providing a musical expression of the American experience that Copland had touched on in his own symphonies and scores. Spielberg was entranced: this was music that inspired him, that voiced both his own ideals and also the concepts of the movies he was already planning to make, and he resolved to work with Williams as soon as he was given a real film. That first film was The Sugarland Express, and even though it wasn’t a big hit, John Williams provided the music. After that, Spielberg was given Jaws to direct, and Williams’ score in that movie made him a household word.

Before he was a household word, however, John Williams was a prolific film composer who was relatively unknown outside of the business, and the presentation here by Boston and Greiving shows us how that transition came about. Bill Boston played us two scores that were among the first to illustrate Williams’ unique voice: The Reivers, taken from the William Faulkner book, and Jane Eyre, a television production that demonstrated his use of orchestration to create varying moods. Jane Eyre takes us into a brooding landscape full of dark and complex emotional colors, and showed his capacity to enhance a dramatic narrative, but The Reivers was the film that entranced Spielberg: buoyed up by Williams’ soaring music, it captures a feeling about this country that has inspired artists, reformers, political figures and anyone who has dreamed of a future built upon the higher octaves of the American experience. And while Williams does not borrow melodies from him, the famous pastoral landscapes painted by Copland are also evoked by Williams here, and they lift Mark Rydell’s narrative of the Mississippi countryside into an American epiphany that Spielberg immediately recognized and fully intended to express in his own productions. These two scores also demonstrate, early on in his career, a protean quality of Williams to generate almost any mood, with any texture, in any genre: his music was not thematically confined in any way, and Spielberg immediately felt the power of that versatility.

Working with Spielberg gave John Williams a different perspective on his work, which resulted in his re-commitment to film music, so Previn’s escape into classical music would be his own: though he would continue to write classical music, John Williams would not follow him down that road. Because of his work with Spielberg and later, George Lucas, Williams was able to work in productions that not only expanded the expressive capacity of film, but also his collaboration with directors who had definite ideals, and insisted upon expressing those ideals onscreen. The concept of films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, and Star Wars had been unthinkable ten years before, when André Previn was sweating in the studio orchestra pits on projects which did not inspire him and for directors for whom he did not admire, but Williams entered into a New Hollywood universe that had re-defined the possibilities of not only action and narrative, but also expanded the role of the film score and enabled it to explode out of its previous anonymity into an expressive capacity that the older composers could not have dreamed of. The immense success of scores like Jaws and Star Wars catapulted him into the bright lights of a public recognition also undreamed of by the composers in previous generations: before John Williams, the average moviegoer did not know the names of the composers for the films they saw, but he appears today on the Academy Awards stage or the concert podium as a public figure with a recognition factor unimagined in the Hollywood of yesterday.

Besides giving us the soundscape of many of the most iconic films of the past several generations, John Williams is now a Name and a Face to the film-going public, and that alone would ensure his immortality. But, even more significantly, the energy, color, and optimism of his compositions have inspired not only our collective imagination, but also our hopes for the future and the triumph of the better angels of our own nature.

William (Bill) Boston is a composer and orchestrator who has worked for 35 years in film on such projects as I, Robot, The Day After Tomorrow, Flight of the Phoenix, Repo Men, and many others. He has also been a tutor and lecturer in film studies, and today provided us with an essential and in-depth view of not only the most important film composer of the last fifty years, but also the world that he lives and works in.

Tim Greiving is an arts journalist who has contributed to the New York Times, NPR, Variety, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Royal Albert Hall and the Disney corporation, and has just released the first biography in the English language of John Williams, titled John Williams: A Composer’s Life (Oxford University Press, 2 Sep 2025). 

We look forward to part two (on Saturday 4 Oct 2025) of the informative and incredible collaboration of these two men on the later career of John Williams, and I direct further questions to not only Mr. Greiving’s informative biography, but even more essentially, the music itself.

—Tim Bloch