Unlike the thrilling flight of fantasy and historical epics that Steven Spielberg and composer John Williams dreamed up together – from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “Lincoln” – “The Fabelmans” was an intimate diary of Spielberg’s own childhood. And Williams felt every emotion within his frames.
“I think it’s the most personal score John has ever written for any of our collaborations,” says Spielberg.
Williams notes that his work was only made possible because of the director’s great vulnerability to being with the film. “It was incredibly generous of him to be especially willing to share the adolescence pain of the divorce,” says Williams, 91. “I thought it was amazing that he would reveal such personal aspects of his life so close to death. It was blunt and the soul.”
The score that inspired it earned Williams his 53rd Oscar nomination – the most of any man alive.
Because he has known his collaborator for so long, it is only natural that the composer also got to know Spielberg’s deceased parents. Arnold Spielberg was a radio operator in a B-25 bomber during World War II, and when Williams served in the Air Force in the 1950s, “I took one trip in a B-25,” he says. “It was the loudest plane I’ve ever heard. It’s a twin-engine plane and the radio bell is at the top, where I was stuck. When I thought of Arnold and his many flights in that thing, I thought of him in a very heroic way.
Spielberg’s mother, Leah, gave up a career as a concert pianist to raise her children, and she would always come to Williams’ scoring sessions.
“My mom adored him,” says Spielberg, 76, “and he adored her.”
Williams wrote a nostalgic, lullaby-like piano theme for the film’s lightly fictionalized version of mother and son. When he auditioned for Spielberg on piano, the director began to cry.
“He was very, very emotional,” says Williams. “He really loves his parents, deeply.”
That theme, to Spielberg, “means how much John loved my mother and how much John loves me.”
Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano), Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) and family friend Bennie Loewy (Seth Rogen, back to camera) in “The Fabelmans.”
(Merie Weismiller Wallace / Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment)
The first time it is heard is actually towards the end of the film, during the closing scene between Spielberg family stand-ins Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) and teenager Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) in the family kitchen. In fact, there is very little original score in the 2 ½ hour film – an anomaly in a cinematic collaboration that is always drenched in music.
“The movie sort of tells you where it needs music or what it would benefit from without music,” says Spielberg. “But where there is scoring, it is extremely necessary.”
More dominant are the vintage film scores that Sammy uses as soundtracks for his amateur films, and the classical piano pieces performed by Mitzi – including sonatinas by Friedrich Kuhlau and Muzio Clementi, and especially a piano concerto by Bach that accompanies a virtuoso sequence in which Sammy discovers the greatest secret from his mother while recording a home video.
“We both agreed that the score would be more or less focused on the piano,” says Williams, “and that there probably wouldn’t be an orchestra—a great expressive music delivery for a movie like this that was so personal and introspective .”
Williams penned a few other intimate clues: a hopeful haze of strings and delicate celeste and harp notes bookend the odyssey of the future filmmaker, and the Fabelmans’ heartbreaking divorce announcement is scored with a helplessly repeating piano question and string chords welling up like tears .
Another key theme is the dreamy minor waltz for celeste and strings that accompanies Mitzi’s ballet dance around a campfire, while her husband Burt (Paul Dano) and secret love Bennie (Seth Rogen) look on. Spielberg’s mother often hummed to herself when she danced, and he considered not having a score, but decided it was “a great opportunity for John to imagine the kind of bittersweet music my mother would have loved to have with her.”
“The closer it got to a floating dream, the better we seemed to be,” says Williams, who thought to revisit that theme later, when Burt sees a photo of his ex-wife.
“I always like to say that John musically rewrites my movies,” says Spielberg. “And a callback like that is absolutely necessary, and so powerful, when Burt looks at the photo and he’s suddenly overwhelmed.”
The film ends with Sammy leaving the office of his hero, director John Ford (David Lynch), and hopping off to his future. Williams tried to score that moment with the Irish folk song “The Rakes of Mallow,” used in Ford’s film “The Quiet Man,” then tried an extended quote from his score from “Jaws.”
The latter felt too on-the-nose — Spielberg had already broken the fourth wall twice — so they finally went with just a hint of “Jaws” shanty theme and an Irish-sounding jig. “I thought what we did would be missed by most people,” says Williams.
Many of the great marriages between filmmaker and composer, such as Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, end in divorce. But Spielberg and Williams have created the most enduring and arguably the most important in Hollywood history.
“Fifty years in Earth time is a long time,” says Williams, “but in cosmic time it’s a wink.” It’s less than a second in a sense how you measure these things. But if you are not bored with what you are doing, time never weighs heavily on you.”
