Williams had married singer and actress Barbara Ruick in 1956, the same year she appeared in her most memorable role in the film version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Carousel—playing Carrie Pipperidge, the young woman who sings of marrying a hardworking local man and having a full house of children. Ruick found her own version of that, performing roles only sporadically over the years as she and Williams raised three children and he worked tirelessly on his musical projects. In the documentary, Williams notes that he often did his composing in the relative quiet of soundstage offices rather than their noisy kid-filled home. Like many fathers in that era, he prioritized his professional work over household duties, and his daughter, Jennifer Williams, recalled sliding notes under his door to get his attention when he would be “scribbling away” at home. Sometimes he brought the kids into his process, like when he composed the theme to the 1965–1968 TV series Lost in Space on a souvenir-store ukulele during a family vacation to Hawaii.
“There’s no doubt that John was an amazing father, but it’s absolutely true that when you’re devoting yourself to an art form, and one that’s very demanding…it’s a choice. And it’s a hard one,” Bouzereau says. “That type of achievement doesn’t come for free. I wouldn’t necessarily call them sacrifices. I would call them choices that impact your personal life. I don’t think it’s unique to John. It’s anyone who is dedicated to a career that is not only feeding the family, but feeding your soul. When you’re a creator, I think that it’s very hard to disconnect and say, ‘Well, I’m not going to do anything for two weeks,’ because you’re always in the process of creating or wanting to create. He says that it’s his oxygen.”
Barbara also felt the need to get back to her own work as a performer. In March 1974, when the kids were all teenagers, she left home to go on location in Reno, Nevada, to appear in her first onscreen role in over a decade—a scene-stealing part as a feisty cowgirl barkeeper in Robert Altman’s comedy California Split. She never returned home. While away on the production, a brain aneurysm caused her death at the age of 41. A heartsick Williams abandoned music to focus on consoling his family while grieving. “I didn’t work for a long time,” he says in the documentary. “I just didn’t want to deal with films and stories and characters and so on.”
Even decades later, Williams says that it’s difficult for him to talk about. “There’s been some pain in his life. When you get past a certain point, he gets quiet,” his grandson, Ethan Gruska, says in the film. “I think he expresses himself through music.”
Inevitably, Williams picked up his composer’s pen and found refuge in his work, writing a violin concerto not for a movie or TV series, but simply for Barbara. “Her father was a violinist. She loved the violin. She always wanted me to write something for her, which I never did until she passed,” he says in the documentary.
How did Bouzereau get Williams to open up about that time? “I said to him, ‘John, I love the first violin concerto. Where did this come from?’ And he said, ‘I lost my wife,’ and went into a monologue about it. So I approached him through music.”
Looking at his filmography, it’s hard to detect when the break came. Williams has credits on the disaster movies Earthquake and The Towering Inferno at the end of 1974. It may merely be that his priorities flipped, and the work of being a single father took over. “In his mind, he took a break,” Bouzereau says. “He couldn’t do anything for a long time, is what he says. What it felt to me is that time stopped, and even if he was working, I don’t know that he was processing it in the same way.”
The following year, the composer who frequently had four to five credits per year worked on just two films: the Clint Eastwood climbing thriller The Eiger Sanction and the second feature film from a young director he had befriended. The movie was about a shark.
As Williams returned to work after reconnecting with his children and reorienting his life, he established a close friendship with two young filmmakers who were about to revolutionize pop culture. It may be no coincidence that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas seemed like kids to him too. At a joint appearance last year to discuss their five decades of work together, Williams kept referring to Spielberg as a “teenager” when they first met. “I have to correct you,” Spielberg teased him. “I was 24.”
“You certainly didn’t look it,” Williams replied.
Bouzereau says the composer was galvanized by their “wild energy and their wild ideas,” but also appreciated their respect for the musical traditions he had spent his life perfecting. They were more interested in reviving and adjusting the classical style rather than tearing it down completely. “Those guys are changing cinema [but] they were like, ‘Let’s make changes, but stay the lovers of the cinema that we grew up on,’” the filmmaker says.
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English (US) ·