John Williams is possibly the most well-known and celebrated modern composer. Williams has been making music as iconic as the films it appears in for decades. One score is so well-known that it follows Harrison Ford, even into the operating room!

Many of us hum the theme for Indiana Jones when on an adventure or trekking through historic ruins. However, the score tagged along for the man who brought the character to life during a delicate medical procedure.

In a Variety article, Ford said, “When I had my last colonoscopy, they were playing it on the operating room speakers.” Indiana Jones and the Bowels of Destiny?

Sadly, Ford’s last entry into the Indiana Jones franchise flopped hard at the box office. This was thanks to a combination of bad marketing, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and various leaks about the ending/sidelining of Dr. Jones in his own film.

Regardless of how poorly films featuring a John Williams score perform, his music is usually the highlight that outshines even the worst scripts. The maestro remains humble even when his music is so ingrained in pop culture, stating, “If I could be remembered as someone who did his job well and remembered as a good solid musician, I would rest very happily.”

Over the decades, Williams has amassed 54 Oscar nominations, winning five overall. Fiddler on the Roof, Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Schindler’s List netted him the Acadamy Awards. His themes for Jaws, Star Wars, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind also topped the Billboard music charts in the 1970s.

It is also interesting to learn how George Lucas and Williams came together to create the orchestral sound for Star Wars:

“George was very clear to me that the music should be symphonic. I took it to mean late 19th century, maybe European — Mahler, Wagner, Strauss, that period of orchestral writing. He said it should be classical. Not Bach — not classical in the baroque sense, but in the romantic sense, the Byronic sense. Why? Because all the images you’re going to see are images of desolate places or places you’ve never seen before, with people wearing clothes you’ve never seen before. It’s all alien, the whole visual experience. So, the emotional experience should be familiar. It should be a classical modality that describes heroism and romance and adventure and operatic emotions higher than reality.“

While editing may have saved Star Wars as a whole, it was the score the John Williams score that really sewed it all together. 

[Source: Variety]