Dear John: The Extras

Before briefly descending into solipsism over world events, I did have the joy of writing some (hopefully!) thoughtful musings on Music by John Williams, the recently released Disney+ documentary on the last century's best-known film composer (and a personal favorite). Astoundingly, there were a few points that didn't quite fit into my review that I still thought were worth sharing. I entreat you below.

The music fit great. Obviously, a documentary about a beloved musician is going to have some good music, but that's only part of the equation. To his credit, director Laurent Bouzereau has always used Williams' score cues to great effect in his laserdisc and DVD documentaries on Spielberg's films. Here, though, I think due credit goes to the picture's credited music consultant, Mike Matessino. He's one of the most renowned producers of archival film scores out there - a deft editor, mixing and mastering engineer and liner notes writer who is, by all evidence, Williams' chosen authority to present his work on CD and occasional vinyl. (He's also done great work as one of the creative forces behind the director's edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and last year produced an extraordinary box set of the soundtrack to the film adaptation of Rodgers & Hammerstein's The Sound of Music.)

I've been a fan of Matessino since his co-production with the late Nick Redman of double-disc editions of Williams' soundtracks to the Star Wars trilogy Special Edition releases, which feature music that current iterations of the soundtracks on physical and digital media do not. (I've also interviewed him for The Second Disc, wrote liner notes for his 40th anniversary vinyl production of Williams' score to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and - not unsurprisingly - consider him a close friend.) What I believe he's done here is find great pieces for mood and color (like "The Menu" from JAWS 2) that underline the human elements of the doc. (Matessino's latest Williams production is the premiere release of his score to Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express, which gets cited early in the doc; I wouldn't be surprised if his preparation of the score made its way onto the documentary's sound track.)

The conductor clash. A notable point in the film - and a significant development in Williams' career and popularity - is how groundbreaking it was for him to take the baton in public to concerts of film music, starting with a pivotal post-Star Wars gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Williams' position as principal conductor of The Boston Pops certainly raised his profile in the '80s and '90s, and until recently, his regular presence on various podiums around the world was a constant reminder of his vitality. (A live album with the Vienna Philharmonic was far and away the best-selling classical release of 2020.)

It is interesting to consider how these lines blurred between typical orchestral repertoire and film music only a few years before I was born. Film was a newer but not untested medium, and it could've just as easily been, say, Henry Mancini - a very popular conductor with a formidable body of film work - crossing over between these worlds. It's also worth considering how Williams work as conductor (as heard on either of these stellar box sets of his Pops work for the Philips and Sony Classical labels) mostly engages in dialogue with 20th century classical and popular repertoire. There is no Williams take on Beethoven or Handel - does this mean anything?

American ideals, set in Stone. Steven Spielberg brings up, in an interview for the doc, his chief musical collaborator's status as an American original. His elegiac "Hymn to the Fallen" from Saving Private Ryan, the director says, is constantly requested as a number for our military bands. Williams also scored some of Spielberg's most invested work in the American ideals - not only Lincoln in 2012, but also the little-seen The Unfinished Journey, a multimedia project Spielberg helmed at the request of Bill Clinton for Washington, D.C.'s New Year's Eve celebration at the close of 1999. (A recording of Williams' suite was issued in 2002 on the compilation American Journey, which also featured several Williams-penned Olympic fanfares, the theme to NBC Nightly News and other patriotic originals.)

The other side of the coin that isn't discussed nearly enough is Williams' honest and brilliant scoring of three films that offer considerable challenge to gauzy American ideals: Born on the Fourth of July (1989), based on the memoirs of disabled Vietnam veteran-turned-activist Ron Kovic; the controversial assassination postmortem JFK (1991); and the dour portraiture of Nixon (1995) - all directed by Oliver Stone. It's worth taking a moment to square Williams' mainstream (and apolitical) presence with these three films and Stone's eager utilization of the composer. (JFK's score was written uniquely, thanks to Williams' commitment on Hook - conceived mostly as long suites that were later adapted to fit the final cut - meaning he may well have avoided any major thought on the film's conclusions about Kennedy's death.)

The past and the future. A longer cut of Music by John Williams might have pulled harder on the thread of the composer's admitted reticence to coming back for sequel to films he's scored. He affirms that his participation on the nine Star Wars and five Indiana Jones films was out of loyalty to the musical language he created for each series, but it's true: the sequels in his filmography are fairly limited. (His approaches vary considerably, too: JAWS 2 was a marked departure from the original, while Home Alone 2: Lost in New York practically lifted previous passages wholesale with a few new themes for good measure.) Fans of Hans Zimmer, who it's rumored will be denied an Oscar nomination for his work on Dune Part Two thanks to its similarities to the original, have taken Williams to task for receiving nods for his work on the last Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. I can't particularly defend those works as upper echelon, although the latter does have some pretty obvious new themes in place. But the mild furor kind of justifies his position on sequels.

One last aspect of John's career - maybe one of the biggest, now - that isn't really covered in the documentary is where Williams' career activity stands today. When Spielberg's autobiographical The Fabelmans was released in 2022, it was widely suggested that Williams' score was a career capstone (the final Indiana Jones picture was mostly scored and yet to be released). When Williams walked back that (admittedly soft) suggestion in a conversation with Spielberg for American Cinemathique - footage of which features prominently in the documentary - it seemed to take the director by surprise. While his conducting plans for 2024 were all scuttled due to an as-yet undisclosed illness, and he hasn't been seen in public since the music building at Sony Pictures Studios was named after him earlier this year, it is believed that pianist Emmanuel Ax (an interviewee in Music by John Williams) will premiere a new piano concerto of Williams' next year.

The question of "what's next?" for a prolific man who will turn 93 in February is a fascinating one. Matessino's work creating archival presentations of Williams' scores is thorough, and works from his most "classic" period have been issued and reissued, with a few glaring omissions - notably the first six Star Wars and first three Indiana Jones films. (Agreements between film score repertoire owners, reissue labels and the American Federation of Musicians essentially moot the expansion of anything recorded after mid-2005, taking the latter entries of those two series off the table unless serious cash is mounted.) Questions abound: will Disney allow Matessino do work his magic on those films, as many fans desire? Will he instead work on preservation of the lesser regarded "Johnny Williams" works? Will labels and studios work to get any of this archival work available beyond the limited CD releases they enjoy? None of these are fit for a documentary, but they're certainly worth asking. My only hope is Williams gets to bask in our adoration as long as he feels is right.