Music by John Williams

Today on Art of the Cut, we speak with the lead editor, David Palmer, and two additional editors, Sierra Neal and Jason Summers, about the Disney +/Amblin Television documentary, Music by John Williams.

David Palmer edited The History of the World… for now…, The Making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Music of Indiana Jones, The Light and Magic of Indiana Jones, and The Making of Jaws.

Sierra Neal has been on Art of the Cut several times, including for Jim Henson: Idea Man, and Ron Howard’s Pavarotti. She also edited Guns N’ Roses: Live in New York and was an additional editor on the documentary, Carlos (which was previously covered in Art of the Cut)

Jason Summers edited 40 Years of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Schindler’s List: 25 Years Later, The Fabelmans: A Family in Film, and The World of Jurassic Park.

Welcome to Art of the Cut. It’s so good to have the three of you on the show. A couple of years ago for my editing team, I had the Ten Commandments of Editing printed up as a t-shirt. One of the commandments was “Temp not with John Williams. He composeth not for thee.” But you got to actually temp and use the music in this documentary, so that’s pretty exciting. Let’s start out by talking about building the pre-title sequence. Was that written? Or was it discovered in post?

PALMER: It went through many, many variations because director Laurent Bouzereau took all of his interviews and compiled them into a large script, so the first 20 quotes were things that he wanted to see at the beginning.

So I took those and started putting them together with a couple pieces of music.

We got our marching orders from the very beginning: Try not to use too much music at the beginning because anything that’s not attached to a movie or something that you’re not specifically talking about, that’s possibly going to cause an extra ripple with how these things are cleared.

So we went through many debates of what to start with. Something nice and then cut to something a little more propulsive.

Also, of all the powers that be that chimed in at the very beginning one of the worries was: what’s the story? What’s the conflict? Here’s a nice man and his main collaboration was with Steven Spielberg, and they famously have never had a fight.

Our feeling was “What’s wrong with just showing somebody who did everything right their whole life? Here’s 90 minutes of awesomeness!” 

They still wanted to at least hint at some sort of tension at the beginning. So one thing that I popped in amongst some of the bites at the beginning were some of those sound bites showing his problems with the Boston Pops that he had, along with David Newman’s quote about “Back then the people who played in the orchestra thought movie music was crap.”  So that was some kind of drama in his life.

Once we cut that, then some notes that we got back were “This looks too angry or too dark.” So it got dialed back a little. They said, “Don’t take out all the Boston Pops. Just leave a little in there.

We had so many other things to deal with that we kind of left it at a stage where everybody wasn’t completely happy, but they said it’s good enough for now. “It’s a placeholder move on.”

Then towards the end I think that the first thing that Sierra tackled when you came in.

CATANZARO: It was. Sometimes you have got to start at the beginning. Honestly, I think what brought us together in the end was to start with the music.

This film should start with John’s music and living in these memorable themes.

And is there a way that we can bring people in with all of this memorable music and actually kind of tie it together? It sort of wound up a little bit like a mash up in the end, you know. It was really all about the music.

Starting with Jaws just seemed like the most powerful two notes that you could start a movie with, as has been proven. It just seemed like these are the notes and the songs and the themes that we identify with. The genius of John Williams.

David mentioned the note process. Talk to me about managing notes from producers and how sometimes a difficult note - or maybe what you might consider a bad note - can lead to a good result.

SUMMERS: The first wave or the first pass obviously goes through our director, Laurent Bouzereau. I came on about a month after David had already been working on fleshing out the basic story.

I came on to assist him in certain areas while he focused primarily on the music and the musical themes and stories for each memorable score. I helped him build certain sections primarily focusing on John’s early life - more of the personal sections for the first version of the film.

One example of a note that we got early on was that I built out a section about John’s relationship and closeness with Bernard Herrmann, the composer who worked with Alfred Hitchcock for most of his career. They also talked about John’s first wife’s closeness with Bernard Herrmann and their relationship.

And it was a really great story, but when we sat back and we watched the whole film together, Laurent said, “I really like that section, but I think we can lose it.”

It was painful for a second because I put a lot of work into that and I thought it was really great and it worked really well in and of itself, but once I lifted it out and we brought the two pieces together before and after it, I realized that it needed to go.

So there’s an example where a painful note where you realize that the film works better without it. That happens all throughout the process once producers become involved in everything.

Sometimes it can sting for a minute then ultimately - if it’s the right note - then you go with it.

PALMER: Laurent had pretty much laid out everything in the script, but some things were a little bit more movable than other things.

In January - 1st week of 2024 - when I sat down with my, assistant, Ben Hassler, and we got this big script, it was kind of divide and conquer because we didn’t have much time to put this whole thing together. 

What was the schedule like? 

PALMER: By the end of February, beginning of March, they were expecting to see a first cut in two months. Even though they were saying, “We know we’re going to see just something with placeholder cards” they still wanted to see that.

It was very lopsided because we had all this Tanglewood footage and we thought we would use that as interstitial moments - just John kind of out in the world being John or on the golf course, being a human being, enjoying outside nature and trees, which he loves.

There’s a whole chunk where we just kind of showed the footage, but in the screening room that just deadly because they’re just watching a lot of nice shots of Tanglewood for five minutes.

Even though we’re explaining, “This will go somewhere.”it’s still hard for anybody watching it at first glance to see.

I divided up the whole script into 19 segments, and some of them we grouped together like the opening and John and Steven.

These kind of things kind of work together as one piece, then other things - like Star Wars or Close Encounters - that were big in and of themselves that were just treated as one segment.

The year before - in 2023, to get this project going - Laurent had me cut a lot of sizzle reels to show different entities who might want to be in on it or who weren’t sure exactly how this was going to look.

Steven always wanted to do something on John so, in the middle of 2023, I cut at least 12 different sizzle reels - everything from a four minute version to a 20 minute version and saved all those.

One was just a pod on Jaws, and one was just a pod on Star Wars. So saving those came in handy when we got into the project in 2024, because at least we already had a lot of it in some kind of shape.

Do you start with a radio cut first, or do you feel like you really have to put in visuals? How did you how did you each approach a scene? 

PALMER: By radio cut, you mean like just like you hear all their audio, all their bites together? 

Yes.

Editors Palmer, Neal and Summers

PALMER: Basically, one of the assistant editors, a guy named Zach Nuernberger spent all of December 2023 taking Laurent’s script and created a sequence with every single quote. So we hit the ground running. That first week of January we took Zach’s long cut and divided that up in 19 segments.

Interesting. How long was that cut?

PALMER: Two and a half hours - but that was interview bites and nothing else. 

So now you get these 19 segments of just interview bites and you’re trying to open that up and turn it into something with some rhythm to it?

CATANZARO: Yeah. David really shaped the structure of the film. He spent a lot of time shaping the structure of the film with visuals at that point. It was an interesting documentary process for me because there was a script that Laurent had written out that maybe wasn’t exactly word-for-word of the final.

We moved some things. Some documentaries you go in and you really figure out and shape the story from the inside out but this one - because we’re dealing with such an important figure and so many little pieces of these movies and how to connect these dots.

I think Laurent, the director and David spent a lot of time really figuring out that structure. I came in after that point, looking at the scenes, trying to really bring out the music in those scenes in an important way, as a kind of polish pass.

We did a lot of work in those weeks, but I worked very closely with Laurent, who had a vision. He’s known John for a long time. He knows how to craft a story. We just worked our way through it - how to give this man what he’s owed. How to do justice by the music and do justice by the man.

Those were kind of the guiding factors. Then you’ve got the beauty of this music and the cinematic beauty of some of the most memorable moments in cinema history that we all - whether you know it or not - associate with John Williams’ music. Then it’s just doing the best you can to put those pieces together. 

There are so many films, and so many amazing cues to go through. I would say that a big challenging part of this process, I think for all of us, was picking the right cue for the film to guide each scene. That was really the stylistic approach to this movie, Music by John Williams.

We got to use this beautiful music to tell his story. So how to tell each scene using a song from a totally different film? David is a real reservoir of information about John Williams, as was Laurent, and now I’ve got my own reservoir of knowledge, but not nearly where he was at.

They went through the depths of the archive of the music. A lot of tracks that you probably didn’t recognize right away - or maybe if you were a real John Williams nerd, you might - but we tried to bring music from all different places. It was using the music as inspiration.

PALMER: Laurent has known Steven for 30-some odd years, and Steven has recorded - With either his video camera in the nineties, or the super eight camera in the seventies, eighties, then some high-end cameras more recently - he recorded every single one of the scoring sessions, plus he even recorded Brian de Palma’s, The Fury score recording.

So you also have that option of: do we use some of his home movies? He covered everything, so we were able to get in some of the the Jaws and the Close Encounters recording sessions.

It was just amazing to hear cues that - for me - were so familiar, but you hear half of it, then John says, “Stop. Everybody try this.” There they are recording that thing that I’ve heard for 50 years. 

Once you’ve broken up these 19 segments and you get one of these segments. What is the evolution of that? What’s your approach? What do you do? 

SUMMERS: David is a savant when it comes to John Williams’ knowledge. He brought in much of his own library and stuff that predates Steven Spielberg and his relationship. So he was very much focusing on the music and telling the story of the musical career.

So when I came aboard, David and Laurent basically broke off a chunk for me that started with John Williams being born and leading through his high school career.

That’s what I started on. So it starts off as a radio edit. From there, it’s diving into this archive that we got from John’s daughter and family as far as early pictures, building out the story of his home life, his family life, growing up on the East Coast.

Then in high school, moving to California and training, on the piano and being part of his high school bands, digging into archives of Los Angeles at the time or New York.

Trying to find different shots to illustrate the story that brought him up through high school and then into his military career, pulling things from different online sources or from the archive. 

Then as far as scoring that it’s not a specific cue. If you’re editing the Star Wars section, you’re gonna use Star Wars music.

I was pulling from different lesser known scores, just trying to fit music that was the mood. David also had a bunch of the recordings from John’s jazz career.

He had done some jazz albums and so when we were started to talk about his love of jazz or watching his father work on movie scores when he was young on the studios I would just put that stuff in there just to keep it moving, not knowing whether or not we could clear this stuff or how that was gonna work in the end.

In the beginning it was just setting a vibe and I think some of that stuff stayed in the film. In the end they brought in John Williams’ personal music editor, Ramiro Belgardt.

He was very involved in finding replacement tracks if needed that could be cleared. Clearance became a big issue in the end as far as which recordings of certain pieces could be used. I know they were swapping that out in the final mix.

PALMER: Laurent could tell you some stories about being completely done and walking away from Skywalker sound, then getting a call saying, “You need to take something out.”

But when we were cutting they told us to cut as if we had full use of everything. “Don’t limit yourself,” which is good in most ways, but then you start running into, “This studio is gonna be a problem.

Can you dial this back?” And you say, “That’s the whole centerpiece of the scene!”

You’re never gonna tell the full story but you also gotta hit the 90-ish minute ballpark that Disney and Imagine Docs wanted to hit. That does seem to be the most digestible length for a mass audience. 

Talk to me about the order of things. How much of that was scripted? I think Sierra mentioned that things did get moved around a little bit like Sugarland Express, then Jaws and Fable Men’s, that wasn’t necessarily an order. What was the guiding principle of the order of the story was told?

PALMER: For the most part, chronologically seemed to make the most sense, but at the same time we were always talking about getting Steven in there and getting Star Wars in there early.

Also, ‘cause you’re dealing with the type of documentary that has no narration, you are solely depending on the soundbites and the people that you interviewed to either give you a full story and maybe, if you’re lucky, a little turn to the next thing, or else you just gotta keep inventing these turns.

And if you jump out of sequence then you’ve gotta have a good way of letting everybody know, “We’re popping forward a moment to see this, but don’t worry, we’re gonna go back and see what it was like growing up.”

So those things in the first act were these puzzle pieces. Somebody was telling us always: bottom line - play the hits.

You wanna hear Jaws. You wanna hear Star Wars. You wanna hear a little Superman. You wanna hear a little Raiders.

We also knew that you wanted to get those upfront, or at least to tease ’em, then the lesser ones are gonna be the first ones that fall by the wayside.

CATANZARO: Fablemen’s seemed like the appropriate music for his childhood, so it wasn’t like each song drove the structure of the narrative, the scenes and the story was still there. The music that was more free for us to play around with these things. 

What about archival footage? 

PALMER: We were bringing things in daily and Laurent was still interviewing people while we were cutting. He would sometimes call from an interview with John - he did about five or six interviews with John and a couple with Steven - and sometimes he would get so excited if something happened.

He’d say, “Oh my God! I just got the most amazing quote from John!” So you’d say, “What section?” And he would tell you and you’d say, “Oh no! I’m working on that now!” Then, he would say, “Take a look at this. I’m sure it’ll fit. It’ll be our new opening."

So you are constantly accommodating or rethinking the order of things as new interviews came in but also that worked to our advantage because if we didn’t have a little turn or we were very light on a certain subject Laurent would say, “I’m going in to interview David Newman tomorrow should I concentrate on something?”

And we’d say, “See if he has any memories of this or at make sure he says the title.” So many times somebody will talk about a movie and never say the title of the movie.

As I was working I’d say, “It’d be great if we went to one of the stock houses to get a shot of Flushing, Queens.

Sierra, can you address how things were organized so that you could find the material. How was it laid out?

CATANZARO: I think it was mostly laid out by source. We had our Spielberg archive. We had all these films. We had various other archival sources. There were a lot of photos from his personal archive. It was an evolving process.

You think you’ve got something shot for a certain scene and then you cut it and you think, “I don’t think we need this.”

Then down the line - when you’re finishing and you’re trying to really make those final connections in the film - those final synapses - then you go back into your footage and your bins and you find something that maybe Laurent had shot that we didn’t have a purpose for before, but it really connects the pieces or a piece of archive or a special photo that we haven’t used.

So with archive - with this mixed medium that we have, in archival documentary, it is a living, breathing process. “Is this one gonna work? No, it’s not.

So let’s find something new in the archive. What haven’t we used yet? We have this beautiful concert that we haven’t used.” And that visual could really help you.

Because he was a conductor, he’s standing at the front of these big orchestras, so we made the most of the best visuals we could find from the archive.

Were the editors able to collaborate in any way or how were you interacting with the other editors or didn’t you get that opportunity?

SUMMERS: I mostly worked when David was on in the beginning. We would meet periodically throughout. I would show David stuff, he would show me stuff, then Laurent would come in and we’d all sit down and watch sections.

We would do that periodically, but for the most part, it was interacting with our assistant editors. I was constantly asking, “Hey, can we get this? Can we get that? I need a shot of this.” Or “Can we ask the family for more pictures of John as a young boy.

It was a constantly evolving process, but we would be popping in and commiserating and showing each other stuff throughout the process. I think that’s a good way to work. I like to be in the same location physically if we can, for the most part. 

PALMER: And also for our first deadline, you just wanted stuff that looked like a show. There are gonna be a lot of sticky blobs of just end-to-end quotes that we hadn’t touched yet, that were gonna drive them nuts anyway, so let’s try to make as much of it look like a show without any gaps as possible.

If we don’t have a clip? When in doubt at least use the poster. Movie posters can get you a lot of mileage. 

Tell me about the montage of John Williams’ movie and TV shows credits.

CATANZARO: The Peter Gunn and Gilligan’s Island and To Kill a Mockingbird montage. It was actually something that was used throughout the cut.

PALMER: One of the videos that I created in 2023 ended up being a good go-to for some of that stuff ‘cause all of those were title treatments - either off TV shows and movies themselves or off the trailers that sometimes had better artwork.

So that - along with the sizzle reels - often became what I immediately pulled from to see if an idea would work.

Let’s talk about the choice to do a story beat like John’s resignation from the Boston Pops. Jason mentioned a story segment that he edited together that got left on the editing room floor. Talk to me about the decisions you made as a post team with or with Laurent about what’s gonna go in and what’s not gonna go in. 

SUMMERS: That story was always gonna be a part of it. The interesting thing about that one that I remember is after our very first assembly, that story came later, even later than Raiders in the cut.

And one of the first feelings I had - and I said right away - was that the Boston Pops needs to come earlier because we have a string of home runs from basically Star Wars, Close encounters, E.T., Raiders, then we talked about the Boston Pops.

I said, “Why don’t we move that more where it chronologically started in the story when he actually started conducting concerts due to the popularity of Star Wars?

That way we break up this string of grand slams that he was hitting and fit in a little bit of conflict, so not everything was going swimmingly for, two decades?” David agreed and I think Laurent was game, then we tried it and it worked.

PALMER: Part of it also was the opportunity that deleting some of this stuff provided because

Star Wars was in a slightly different place and it was longer ‘cause we decided to go straight to a little bit of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi right there.

We thought that if we shorten that then kick right into Close Encounters then you’ve got the back-to-back space epics. Then you’ve got Zubin Mehta doing his concert at Anaheim Stadium, then John subsequently conducting at the Hollywood Bowl.

That seemed like a natural thing that began a whole different career for him, then be able to take a break from the movies and go into his Boston Pops. 

SUMMERS: And talking about that conflict that happened there really opened up the whole idea of Tanglewood and this whole other side of his career.

Let’s talk about the Coldplay/E.T. theme intercutting. I thought that was really interesting. Were those cut separately then you decided to put them together? Or were they always designed to be intercut? 

SUMMERS: That was an idea that Laurent had, and it was also championed by one of our producers at Amblin, Darryl Frank. He’s a big Coldplay fan and wanted as much of Chris in there as we could. That was originally a much longer sequence.

PALMER: It was such a long sequence because one of those notes you get was that the more of Chris Martin they can see the better you for this first go round. To his credit he’s super enthusiastic. He really does love the music. 

CATANZARO: It’s a good moment because he’s so genuinely in love with the theme of this music, so you get to really see that connection that people have to a song or music that really speaks to them.

So you just lean into that. Once we got the footage of them doing their walkout onto stage, it was easy to have fun with the intercutting. 

One of the things that interests me about documentaries especially is that it always seems like the audience watches the film and feels like the way it ended up was the way it always was. Like it’s just born that way. But obviously you go through such an evolution from where it starts to where we get to see it. Can you talk about something that you edited and how it changed and why it changed?

CATANZARO: We showed the scene of a movie with and without the John Williams score behind it, and this was a device that was used throughout the film to show the impact of John’s music.

You have these great movies to cut with these great memorable, iconic scenes and you have to pay them their due respect. We had to change that scene a little bit to really show the impact of the music.

So what exact moment are you gonna choose? Where does the music swell? And then when you take out that music, it falls flat and feels dry. We kept trying to hone these scenes as we go and make them have the most impact that they could.

We have great art that we wanted to showcase. We’re dealing with an artist here. You really wanna find the best way to showcase his music, his work, and these films while telling the story.

Was the ending scripted the whole time, or did you find the ending in editorial? 

PALMER: Much like the beginning, that was an evolution that started with a few notes of people saying they wanted one thing, but it was coming from different angles.

They wanted something super uplifting and super joyful, but then there’d also be these notes of, “What’s John think of all this after having done this for his entire life?” John had great quotes about music and every aspect of his work.

He’s very modest concerning talking about himself, so you have to hunt for these nuggets. I had put together a lot of these thoughts on life and, intercut them with how I felt about what he’s done.

The first music I used was the big finale cue from Sugarland Express, which had just been remastered.

When Laurent watched it he felt it was a little too dark. He wanted something a little happier, but there were also things that we wanted to take out of that and put somewhere else, so that was just left as a placeholder. Then Sierra, I think then you got the colossal job of tackling. 

CATANZARO: I didn’t pick the music, but it was from Space Camp.

PALMER: There was a whole day where Laurent wanted to start with the music, which is understandable, so I found a great cue from Angela’s Ashes that’s called “Returning to America” or “Coming to America.” It’s very proud and it builds.

We went through several cues, then I started playing I. I said, “If you want full-out happy there’s these two cues from Space Camp. 

CATANZARO: It was full of adventure and it was something that wasn’t so recognizable, but had all the elements of the great John Williams scores in it, so it seemed really to work really well.

Then for when the credits hit, we went with Hook, which I think was a also a fully dramatic, glorious, sweeping arrangement of music.

I think both those tracks, the kind of the B side and the A track both had that quintessential John Williams sound to them.

The other thing Jason mentioned that I thought was very interesting was that there are so many pieces of music that are instantly recognizable, but for something like the gratitude section near the end, talk to me about finding John Williams temp music that is simply to underscore the theme of a story in this documentary. What do you use for something like that gratitude piece or something where you’re not looking for Jaws or Star Wars or Close encounters?

CATANZARO: I don’t know what music wound up in that scene in the end, but it was hard, I’ll tell you that to find the right cue. 

PALMER: This is also the thing about editing is that if you’re changing music on a daily basis, the first thing you put is just as equal in your mind as the last thing you put in. Laurent might have had to make a swap out when he was at the sound mix.

When we all got to go to the premiere of the documentary - for the opening night of the AFI Festival - I was seeing some of swap-outs for the first time. I thought I knew what was coming up, then it was. “Oh, they had to change that!” or “Oh, they lost that clip and they put in a poster.”

Laurent would call me and say, “We lost a clip from The Simpsons. Can you think of another Simpsons clip? I think it was “Duel of the Fates” - something had a choir, so there’s an extra fee that you pay.

We finally found a clip where Bart is doing the same things as at the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark - diving under the closing garage door and Homer runs into it. It’s done with the actual John Williams Raiders music. 

CATANZARO: There were a few great moments that Laurent shot with John at the piano playing different themes from throughout his career. Beautiful playing. The man who created this thing is now performing for us very casually, very intimately.

I thought that footage was really too good to pass up, so we ended up using it as not necessarily a structural device, but something in the film that intermittently came in as a transitional element that would ground us in a scene. Let’s pause for a second. Listen to this incredible musician play, then keep going on our story.

SUMMERS: Right when I came on the project, one of the things I asked Laurent if I could take a stab at first was John telling the story of the loss of his first wife.

When I’m approaching any of the documentaries that I’m doing, I’m always looking for the emotional core, and how the emotional core affects the broader ideas that are presented.

So that was one of the first things that I worked on. Because of what happened with his wife - her passing a at such a young age and leaving him with yhree teenage children - he wrote a violin concerto for her that we were able to use in that section to illustrate the emotion of that scene.

That’s what stands out to me. It was something that connected me more to the story emotionally. scene 

PALMER: For me it was the Star Wars section. Getting to dive into the stuff that - as a kid inspired me. Paul Hirsch talking about all the classical pieces that were used to temp Star Wars before they even knew who they were getting to do the music.

You can hear all those influences, but you hear how John grabbed that and just ran with it. He gave them what they wanted from their temp score. Then George almost looks like he’s reliving being at the recording session, where he says, “When you hear it on the piano…”

And he’s got a sour expression. Then he almost does this kind of gulp, and says, “It’s like giving birth. You’re just kinda waiting and you don’t know what’s gonna happen or if it’s gonna turn out right.

Then, being able to go to the, opening of “A long time ago in a galaxy far away” then to have that pause before crashing in the music.

I think Laurent boosted that to 11. At Skywalker Sound that was like the hardest hit of anything in the movie. Then being able to go from there to J.J. Abrams talking about the album, which might still be to this day the highest selling orchestral album ever.

But JJ talking about, back in 1977, you couldn’t just watch something again on VHS. The best thing you could do if you couldn’t go see the movie over and over again, was to buy the soundtrack and just stare at the cover while you listen to the music.

That’s exactly what I did. And when he’s talking about all these different soundtracks he’d buy, a lot of those are my albums that we scanned the cover of because we couldn’t find a better one in our archives. So it was nice being able to follow a little bit of what he was talking about that I agreed totally with.

This was such an interesting discussion. I want to thank you all for your time. It was really great talking about this documentary. Thank you. 

PALMER: No, thank you

CATANZARO: Thank you. 

SUMMERS: Thank you.