A young pianist at Juilliard listens to his peers and realizes he will never be the best performer in the room, so he pivots to composition and ends up engineering the emotional life of modern cinema. This episode follows John Towner Williams from his 1932 birth in New York as the son of jazz percussionist Johnny Williams, through UCLA, a 1951 stint in the United States Air Force arranging for military bands from Arizona to Newfoundland, and his very first film score, a 1952 Newfoundland tourist video. It then traces his apprenticeship as a Los Angeles session pianist and orchestrator under Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith and Henry Mancini, including playing piano on West Side Story and the Peter Gunn theme.

The conversation explores his first Academy Award for adapting Fiddler on the Roof, his disaster-movie scores, the Beverly Hills lunc ...