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Zemeckis and Silvestri, 2000
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Information about Silvestri's background:
Alan Silvestri was born to second-generation immigrants on March 26, 1950, in New York City. First experimenting with music at a very young age in Teaneck, New Jersey, Silvestri began to consider a career in music instead major league baseball at the age of 15. He attended Boston's Berklee College of Music, but had been there only two years when he moved to Las Vegas and began touring with R&B legend Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders band. Silvestri attempted to secure work as an arranger in Las Vegas, never once considering going to Los Angeles. Enticed by an offer to do the arrangements on a friend's album, he did finally move to Los Angeles. Silvestri arrived there to find that no actual recording contract had been issued, and after buying back the fraudulent agreement, he was stranded. While staying at the Travel Lodge motel on Sunset Boulevard, Silvestri met Bradford Craig. As a lyricist for some projects with Quincy Jones, Craig had been nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award. He gave Silvestri some arranging assignments, which turned into the break he had been waiting for. A small production company had mistakenly asked Craig (only a lyricist) to score a film for them, and Craig literally put the phone on hold and asked Silvestri if he wanted to score it instead. Accepting the job at the age of 20, Silvestri's first score would be 1972's The Doberman Gang.
Having never scored a film and knowing nothing about the process, Silvestri picked up a copy of Earl Hagan's book "How to Score a Film" and read it cover to cover the night before his meeting with the film's producers. Nevertheless, his viable work for The Doberman Gang triggered a succession of low-budget film assignments for Silvestri until he landed a job with the hit TV series CHiPs in 1978. Silvestri scored approximately 120 hours of this popular show, and had just started to make a living as a composer when it canceled. After a work drought of some 18 months, Silvestri's phone rang again on a late 1984 night. One of the music editors that Silvestri had worked with on CHiPs said that a film he was working on was desperate for a musical sound that they hadn't been able to find to date. The conversation that Silvestri had with director Robert Zemeckis that night would prove to be one of the most important of his life. Zemeckis asked him if he could put together three minutes of music that would go with a South American sequence in Romancing the Stone. Based on Zemeckis' description, Silvestri stayed up all night in his home studio creating a three-minute demo for their meeting the next day. Upon meeting Silvestri, Zemeckis was immediately sold on his musical style, and the two men, wearing identical sweaters that day by chance, would both be launched a solid collaboration with Romancing the Stone.
Every single film Alan Silvestri and Robert Zemeckis would produce together would prove to be a success: Back to the Future Part I, II and III, Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Contact, What Lies Beneath, Death Becomes Her and, of course, Romancing the Stone. They also worked together on the TV-series Amazing Stories (1 episode) and Tales from the Crypt (3 episodes). Immediately after Romancing the Stone, however, Silvestri still had difficulty finding work for mainstream films, providing an electronic effort for Cat's Eye and a last minute orchestral score for Fandango in 1985. When Zemeckis would approach Silvestri for their first seriously big collaboration, he was nervous about his ability to write huge, inspiring orchestral music for a hit film. But for Back to the Future, he did just that, and received two Grammy Award Nominations for his achievement. Now comfortable in the industry, Silvestri went back to his musical roots and wrote electronic scores for The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Delta Force, No Mercy, and Flight of the Navigator in the late 1980's. His tense, atmospheric score for Predator in 1987 would begin a collaboration with producer Joel Silver that would lead to a sequel and several other assignments. With Alan Silvestri and Robert Zemeckis still bouncing kinetic energy off of one another, Silvestri received another two Grammy nominations for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in 1988.
Silvestri would get the opportunity to score several large-scale sci-fi and action films in the 1990's, something he had once considered inconceivable in his musical aspirations. After a monumental score for James Cameron's The Abyss in 1989, he would offer strong orchestral scores for Judge Dredd in 1995, Contact in 1997, Cast Away in 2000, The Mummy Returns in 2001, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life in 2003. He also continues scoring children's films and romantic comedies, with an occasional interlude into the realm of suspenseful underscores. But Silvestri's greatest highlight is Robert Zemeckis' 1994 masterpiece Forrest Gump. With this score Silvestri proved that he could also easily compose the more 'heavy-weight' dramatic, emotional music that a diverse movie like Forrest Gump needed. Silvestri received universal appreciation for his score, and that attention was translated into nominations for an Academy Award, Grammy Award, and Golden Globe. In between his scoring assignments, Silvestri lives with his wife and son in the Northern California town of Carmel. They own a ranch with cattle, horses, and other various livestock. Silvestri removes himself from his studio to work at the ranch and ride the tractor for long hours. He also has a large piece of ground with grape vines used for growing his own wine. Silvestri is slated to compose the music for yet another Zemeckis film, The Polar Express, in 2004.
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In twenty short years, Alan Silvestri has
transformed himself from a guitarist, drummer and arranger in various bands
to one of the world's most in-demand film composers. Viewing composing from
the perspective of a member of a sports team, and after composing several
dozen scores for major motion pictures, Silvestri still creates music with
the same zeal he had when he started in the business almost by accident.
Through late night improvisation and a willingness to learn any genre of music, Silvestri continues to produce high quality scores and establish himself in Hollywood as a melody wizard and a musical chameleon. He has experimented with almost every type of film genre: comedy, action, romance, science fiction, animation, horror, drama, fantasy, western, thriller, slapstick, and adventure. His collaborators agree that it is truly remarkable that Silvestri is able to handle every genre exceptionally well. He instinctively has a deep understanding of what the core and emotion of a movie is and consequently produces music that fits perfectly within the film.
