Risk and Trivial Pursuit | 1, 2, 3

No, Johnny-or-was-it-George, great performers don't wear Beatles wigs. Because people who wear those wigs are only capturing the very sheen of the very surface of the greatness of what's underneath.

On one game to which I had been assigned, I was asked to do "normal game music" (which, for this kind of game, meant Techno) and when I suggested some different approaches, I met with a brick wall. The developer actually wanted not to do something that was unlike other games. I was asked, "George, did it ever occur to you that there is a reason that all movies use the same kind of sound for certain types of scenes?"

Extreme close up: The Fat Man's face remains polite.

Zoom in, fade to flashback of The Fat Man at USC Film School, sweating his nuts off studying film and music with every bit of devotion he can muster. Split screen. The game developer who asked the question is gargling beer at a frat party, and he's still wearing diapers. He shouts out drunkenly that he wishes he could be just exactly like John Travolta, then he passes out in the punchbowl. Fade back to The Fat Man's face, and zoom out. Reality begins again. The Fat Man speaks:

"Yes, Friend, but which among those is a great movie sound track? They're all imitating Star Wars, which was pretty much the first movie to use that sound. Star Wars itself, the leader, is a great soundtrack -- loved, admired, and imitated. In order to achieve that, wouldn't you think that you would have to innovate?"

He paused for a long time, then said, sincerely, "How does one go about innovating?"

It was another Star Trek moment. "What is this 'Love', Captain?" "Brain and Brain. What is Brain?" "Kiss? Tell me more about this... 'Kiss.'" I'm sure I could have explained every bit of it to him quite well, and changed the course of his life, and probably given him religion, too, by simply saying, "You have to take RISKS," but right then I had to use the john.

Anyway, speaking of which, back to Mr. Williams. Yes, John wrote the music for Star Wars. Important, substantial music, and the first of its kind. A person could do worse than imitate him, so go ahead and do it. BUT, to use the "Be Like Johnny" model to be great, you might do well to keep going.

Begin by imitating his compositions, but go on to learn how to create his feelings.

When you imitate his orchestration, continue, and learn how to be evocative of emotions.

When you imitate his greatness, learn how it progresses; learn how it leaves its own roots behind.

A layman might only see the music as an object, frozen in time and space, and he might copy that and think he has done something wonderful. But here, there is no room for the Hand of God.

A more experienced musician would notice that the object has velocity. He would say, "Ah, I see where that came from, and I see where it was going. It represents an improvement on what went before," and he would copy that improvement, too.
Dianne's eyes widened as she drew her hands to her mouth and whispered, "Oh my god!"

But the object also has acceleration, and an overall formula to whose rules it dances across a multidimensional Cartesian plane.

The master learns as much of this formula as he can, admires it, wonders at its unfathomable mysteries. And then he writes his own.

Let's not forget that John Williams is not just credited with Star Wars. He also wrote the beautiful solo violin theme of Schindler's List. Before all that, he did, without imitating anybody I know of, the King of Movie Themes People Like to Imitate: Jaws. And you know those hilarious strings in Gilligan's Island? Guess what? Look in the credits. Johnny Williams. Same cat.

The guy has history. He changes. He adapts. He makes his own sounds, and they come from his life and the composers he looks up to. Then the sounds come to life, people imitate them, they become a part of who we are. The object has position, velocity, acceleration, and a mysterious formula.

In fact, the story of Star Wars is that Lucas had used Holst's The Planets as a temp track to the movie, and had liked it so much that he had originally only hired John to reorchestrate that piece. John stood up to him with the suggestion that he be allowed to write some new music.

So I guess that when they ask you for John Williams, don't take it as a request for his melodies and orchestration. The client may not realize it, but he's really asking for a brush with Greatness. The appropriate thing to do is be as great as John, and, like him, do something that moves the player in a way that only you would have thought of.

Since I hinted that it is impossible, we know that naturally it is possible to be great by wearing the Wig. Once, I asked my friend Michael Land how it was going, and he was sad. For the seemingly endless series of LucasArts Star Wars games, Mike had been analyzing and editing John Williams' actual Star Wars scores into tiny bits, dissecting them, rearranging them, composing little bits of filler, and recreating the most amazing John Williams Hamburger Helper Casserole you'd ever heard. He would have rather been doing what he termed a "creative project" which would call for original music, such as the (great) Monkey Island and The Dig scores he'd done. But, nonetheless, it was one job for which you would be hard pressed to argue a case against John Williams Star Wars-style music, and Mike had turned the sights of his Mighty Creative Battering Ram toward that wall. In the end, the music he made was indistinguishable from that created by the Johnmeister.

So I says, "Hey, Mike, you choppin' John?" And he says, "Yep. I'm choppin' John."

And I says, "I think you're gonna be choppin' John till you're jammin' with Jimi."

Next page | You cannot innovate by only doing what has worked in the past
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