Just a small controversy about John Williams and his iconic movie scores.

How embarrassing, hahahahaha!

Here's the video I mean!

Hahahahaha!

I don't know if he plagiarized Holst, but he was definitely influenced by him.

it's like this-

agent calls williams... do you want to write a score for a big budget space adventure?

williams - what's it called?

agent - star wars.

williams' brain - mars the god of war from holsts' planets...

williams' mouth - ok.

I'm guessing it goes with working with Steven Speilberg, who has shamelessly ripped off previous sources for his material. One notable example would the INDIANA JONES franchise.

In 1954 a movie called SECRET OF THE INCAS was released starring Charlton Heston as Harry Steele, the original Indiana Jones -right down to his battered fedora, beard stubble and attitude- as he plays a treasure-seeker who combs the mountains of Peru for golden artifacts facing peril and foreign agents at every turn. And Heston even repeated that costume two years later playing a Ringling Brothers' circus boss in De Mille's 1956's GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.

The similarities between SECRET and RAIDERS are obvious and if you listen closely you'll even hear a familiar little musical theme that was also later cribbed by John Williams. Even an opening gong under the Paramount mountain logo is intact.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK production crew have gone on record as having watched SECRET OF THE INCAS repeatedly so they could recreate the look/feel of the mostly-forgotten movie and even admitting they simply copied a lot from it. I actually had to buy my dvd from England since it was not sold here in the U.S. until recent years - when presumably the rights reverted back to public domain.

Meanwhile, Speilberg insisted his inspiration for RAIDERS came from watching 1930's serials as kid... as he bought the rights to SECRETS OF THE INCAS to keep it hidden away, 'lest comparisons be too easy to see.

And then there's Heston himself. While he normally went to great lengths in his books/interviews to detail his characters, when it came to SECRET he was suspiciously silent, only dismissively saying that he once made a movie at Machu Picchu and it was hard to breathe while doing it. So, did Speilberg also pay off Heston to keep him quiet about Indy's TRUE origins?

Could be!

Here's the full movie of SECRET OF THE INCAS so you can see for yourself.

[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

Last Edited by GSB/LTD on 08/15/2022 07:04 AM

There is nothing wrong with this. John Williams is a very good film composer, and if you were to meet him, he would say sure; I got that theme from Holst's The Planets. Mozart took a theme from Handel's Messiah for the Kyrie in his Requiem, and it wasn't even original to Handel; old stock fugue subject, and though I'm pretty knowledgeable when it comes to "classical" music, I can't tell you who actually wrote it. Of course, with Mozart or even John Williams, most of their ideas are original...

I agree. It doesn’t sound like a ripoff…just influenced. The Led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven ripoff is much clearer. I’ve also heard Bob Dylan is the king of ripoffs.

Well, while Williams excels at taking a simple 5-6 note theme [ala' CLOSE ENCOUNTERS] and turning it into something spectacular with bombastic brass and sweeping strings; the trouble is they are not always HIS notes and I'm not speaking of reworking classic passages but rather ripping off the work of other composers. And that's what he did with David Buttolph's music for SECRET OF THE INCAS as Williams took those six-notes and built the entire score of INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM around them where they are repeated several times using differing motifs.

And when you factor in that SECRET OF THE INCAS was so totally ripped off in creating the RAIDERS franchise, it stinks to high heaven... especially when Speilberg went to such pains to hide that fact by killing off public access to SECRET so nobody would be any wiser until over 25 years later when fans finally started to get their hands on PAL copies of that 1954 film as I did.

And Buttolph was no slouch himself: in his 30-yr career primarily as a movie composer he scored films beginning in 1939 [including 1953's classic HOUSE OF WAX] before moving to TV in the 50's where he penned themes for shows such as MAVERICK, WAGON TRAIN, 77 SUNSET STRIP, LARAMIE and THE VIRGINIAN.

There's no doubt that John Williams is one of America's greatest composers, but to suggest his work was all original is absurd -particularly since most film composers DON'T do all the scoring themselves; just like pop artists they all have teams of ghost-writers who are intimately familiar with their style who do the grunt work... but it was always Williams who accepted those Oscars.

Yes, I am familiar with that. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven did all their orchestrations themselves, even if it wasn't as good as Mahler's.

No, they did not. Actually, virtually all of the classical composers had "copyists" who would transcribe [or try to!] the symphonic works of their masters; and often those copyists would suggest alterations that would ultimately be embraced/used by that composer in the final versions we know today. That's why scholars go nuts today when any unknown scores -written in their OWN hands- are discovered.

There's an excellent [and little-seen] 2006 film called COPYING BEETHOVEN starring Ed Harris as the temperamental master that illustrates this practice very well.

Good movie, but highly speculative, like Amadeus. Sure, Mozart had copyists. Most of what we have is in his own hand now; his wife destroyed his sketches. Mozart was a real person, and he wrote some nice music, cheated on his wife, and drank way too much.

I believe you'll find the primary thing speculative about COPYING BEETHOVEN was the implied romance between the two lead characters: Beethoven and his copyist. But why carp? As you agreed, it is a good film and Harris really embodied the irascible Ludwig von.

While I don't focus on music so much, I am a historian who collects relics from all periods from Egypt's first dynasty to last year; and in my collections I own samples of hair from both Beethoven and Franz Schubert as well as a copy of the life mask that Beethoven dashed to the ground after he impatiently ripped it from his face... and since you mentioned Mozart, I also have a piece of wood from his home in Vienna.

Likewise I've been blessed enough to have seen original manuscripts written by the hands of all three of the above as well as Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Handel, Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Strauss.

The Cornell University Library has an archive second to few in their Great Composers and Musicians Collections and it was those conservators who informed me of how often copyists were utilized.

WELL-WORTH a visit to Ithica, NY, if you can arrange a viewing! But choose wisely: they only allow you to view one folder at a time...

Last Edited by GSB/LTD on 08/15/2022 12:38 PM

Williams borrowed from Prokofiev