With composing credits to Jaws, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones under his belt, some may say it’s about time that musical legend John Williams gets the feature documentary treatment, and Steven Spielberg, Williams’s longtime collaborator, agrees as he takes the helm of a new and upcoming John Williams biopic alongside his production company, Amblin Television, and Imagine Documentaries. Spielberg has announced that he will act as an executive producer for the currently-unnamed documentary honoring the iconic Hollywood composer.
John Williams is possibly one of the best-known – if not the best-known – names on the Hollywood music scene, with the composer, now 92, being behind the soundtracks and iconic themes for film franchises like Jaws, Jurassic Park, and Harry Potter.  If you catch yourself humming a tune from your favorite classic film, there’s a good chance John Williams wrote it. With a career stretching back to the late 1950s, Williams’ credits are almost too long to count, but some of his other works include the soundtracks for The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and the Christopher Reeves era of Superman films in the 70s and 80s.
Since the 1970s, John Williams’ name has become synonymous with the Star Wars franchise ever since he first composed the now-iconic theme for Star Wars: A New Hope in 1977, a project for which he won an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, and three Grammy Awards for, along with being nominated for a fourth Grammy. John Williams would go on to compose the score for The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, Return of the Jedi in 1983, The Phantom Menace in 1999, Attack of the Clones in 2002, Revenge of the Sith in 2005, and the newest trilogy – beginning with The Force Awakens in 2015, making Star Wars one of Williams’ longest partnerships, right alongside the Indiana Jones and Harry Potter franchises.
Steven Spielberg Takes Point on Unnamed John Williams Biopic
As far as his collaboration with Steven Spielberg is concerned, John Williams and Steven Spielberg have previously worked together on a good number of famous films, including Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. (1982), and Schindler’s List (1993), and that’s outside of the Spielberg-helmed films in Indiana Jones and Stars Wars. With a partnership reaching back almost fifty years, it seems only right that Steven Spielberg should be the executive producer of the John Williams documentary that, at this point, is still in its infancy, but that Deadline reports will be executive produced by Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Darryl Frank, Justin Falvey, Justin Wilkes, Sara Bernstein, and Meredith Kaulfers alongside Spielberg himself.
Not much is currently known about the documentary itself and what topics it might cover. Still, it’s probably safe to assume that Spielberg and Imagine Documentaries – the company behind Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues on AppleTV+ and Light & Magic on Disney+ – will have a great deal of information to work with, up to and including John Williams’ current work on Obi-Wan Kenobi and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Are you excited about the Steven Spielberg-John Williams documentary? Let us know in the comments!
