LOS ANGELES — When John Williams, composer of such classic movie scores as “E.T.,” “Indiana Jones” and “Superman,” accepted the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award, he confessed a slight misunderstanding on one of his signature films, “Star Wars.”
“For the first film I wrote a quite heated love theme, with a melody … and a torrid climax, thinking that Luke and Leia were lovers,” Williams said, during a witty and self-effacing speech at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. “I found out two years later that they were brother and sister.”
Despite the mix-up, he managed to create the most indelible film music of a generation, a theme that recurred, like a superhero’s fanfare, in speeches throughout the evening.
George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, JJ Abrams, Harrison Ford, Drew Barrymore, Kobe Bryant, Bryce Dallas Howard and Seth MacFarlane paid tribute to the composer, who has 50 Academy Award nominations, the most of any living person.
The AFI Achievement Award Gala was broadcast on TNT this week, and it will be followed by an encore presentation on TCM Sept. 12 during a night of programming dedicated to Williams.
Music was, rightly, front and center, as Idina Menzel sang an operatic rendition of Williams’ atonal “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” theme from the audience and Gustavo Dudamel conducted a youth orchestra through an emotional medley from “Schindler’s List.”
Williams, 84, is the first composer to receive the honor in AFI’s 44 years of giving it, and he was quick to point out predecessors who had been deserving, such as Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann.
“I am enormously grateful to film for giving (composers) the broadest possible audience worldwide that any composer has ever enjoyed,” Williams said. “Certainly Beethoven would have shunned (Hollywood), but Wagner would have had his own studio out there in Burbank with a water tower with a big W on it.”
Williams, who was born in Queens, N.Y., and began his career as a jazz pianist, is still working, with a score for Spielberg’s “The BFG” out this summer, and music due on the 2017 “Star Wars” film.
In talking about the “Indiana Jones” theme that played as he took the stage, Harrison Ford was more direct. “That damn music follows me everywhere,” Ford said. “It was playing in the operating room when I went in for a colonoscopy.”
