![]() ![]() Even if he’s not cutting his highly animated visuals to John Williams’s prerecorded score (as he did with the grand finale of E.T.), it often feels like he is. Watching a Spielberg movie is like watching music-the way the camera swoops and dives, rising and resolving like a beautiful melody, capturing emotion in motion. “He has that rhythmic sense in his whole being,” Williams said in 1993 for The Making of Jurassic Park book, “and I think that is one of the great things about his directing-this rhythmic, kinetic sense he has.” He’s even said that if he weren’t a filmmaker, he’d probably be a composer-“a starving composer somewhere in Hollywood.” His longtime music man, John Williams, has more confidently said that Spielberg would have made a good composer. He played the clarinet in school bands and accompanied his own high school musicals. As a kid I could sing every one of its songs by heart-and I did sing them, until I wore out the patience of my entire family.” I loved the West Side Story cast album from the first time I listened to it. As Joseph McBride detailed in his 1997 biography on the director, Spielberg’s mother, Leah, played the piano constantly while he was in utero and with him on her lap when he was an infant, and in his note for the new West Side Story soundtrack, Spielberg writes: “It was my mother’s love of music, combined with my insatiable appetite to understand everything about movie making, that led me to start collecting motion picture soundtrack albums when I was young. His love affair with the genre began in childhood, when Spielberg’s parents limited his movie-watching diet to “general audience” pictures like Disney, Audrey Hepburn movies, and musicals. “Since the day I met Steven, he has talked about, on and off forever, ‘I really want to do a musical. “There’s always a fairy in Steven’s ear wanting him to turn things into musicals,” says Bonnie Curtis, who started as Spielberg’s assistant during Hook and went on to produce Saving Private Ryan and the dystopian sci-fi film A.I. And 30 years ago this month, Hook-the movie about Peter Pan from the director who was frequently accused of being Peter Pan himself-was nearly Spielberg’s first musical. The new film, which arrives in theaters this Friday, follows a long trail of dalliances with musical set pieces, teased productions, and almost-musicals. He’s finally cashed that promissory note with West Side Story, his equally reverent and utterly Spielbergian homage to the classic 1957 Leonard Bernstein musical. ![]() “I still have a mad chocolate craving to direct a conventional musical,” Steven Spielberg told Premiere in 1997, although it was a craving he talked about since pretty much the beginning of his career 50-plus years ago. ![]()
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