Hollywood Flashback: John Williams' 'Star Wars' Score Won a Golden Globe and an Oscar
Writing the script for 1977's Star Wars, George Lucas drew inspiration from late-romantic symphonies by Richard Wagner and Antonín Dvorák and the ravishing film scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood). He wasn't sure what his space epic would sound like, but he knew he didn't want it to have one of those modernist, atonal scores that had accompanied sci-fi films since 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still (composed by Bernard Herrmann and featuring a theremin).