How many movies has John Williams scored?
Composer John Williams is responsible for many of cinema’s most recognisable melodies. From Star Wars to Indiana Jones, from Home Alone to Harry Potter, Williams’ musical overtures have become inextricably linked to the stories they soundtrack in the minds of millions of movie-goers.
He’s rightly regarded among the greatest music artists ever to have graced the world of cinema. His principal musical themes for some of Hollywood’s biggest franchises earned the status of pop classics typically afforded to rock and roll royalty. Perhaps his greatest achievement is making an entire species of the natural world synonymous with one of his compositions.
At the same time, the sheer breadth of his body of work and the longevity of his career scoring movie soundtracks led him to set some records, which will take some beating. For example, earlier this year, he recorded a whopping 54th Oscar nomination for his score of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. While 54 might seem like a huge number of films to have worked on in and of itself, it doesn’t come close to the total number of pictures Williams has contributed with his music.
Having graduated from the celebrated Julliard School of Performing Arts and the Eastman School of Music, Williams began his career as a film and television composer in 1958. Back then, he was just 26 years old, but at the ripe old age of 92, he’s still going with no plans to retire. That’s a total of 64 years in the business. Few can claim to have ever done it better, and nobody has done it as prolifically.
So, what’s the total number of films he’s worked on?
All in all, Williams has scored and/or written songs for a staggering 124 different movies.
His first work of real repute was the score for 1967’s Valley of the Dolls starring Sharon Tate before he adapted Jerry Bock’s compositions for the film version of Fiddler on the Roof in 1971. It was likely his work on Ronald Neame’s 1972 film The Poseidon Adventure that convinced Steven Spielberg to work with him. Three years later, his first true masterpiece of motion picture scoring hit cinemas, with his soundtrack to Jaws launching both his and Spielberg’s careers into the stratosphere.
Since then, Williams has been Spielberg’s go-to composer for his films. The two have worked together on 29 of Spielberg’s movies, which is far and away the most extensive collaboration between any director and composer in the history of cinema.
The two have even released a greatest hits album together. John Williams & Steven Spielberg: The Ultimate Collection, a four-disc box set featuring 34 pieces of music composed by Williams for Spielberg’s movies, came out back in 2017 to much fanfare.
The fanfare at the start of the collection’s opening track, that is. What else could it be but ‘Raiders March’, the theme music for Spielberg’s franchise Indiana Jones? No one acts better to the sound of a signature Williams brass hook than Harrison Ford, after all.
