Road to 'Sugarland': La-La Land Records Premieres John Williams' First Score for a Steven Spielberg Film

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Legendary composer John Williams' personal and professional relationship with director Steven Spielberg has yielded 30 film scores, including Oscar-winning soundtracks to JAWS (1975), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Schindler's List (1993), three of Williams' five Academy Award wins in a career that's seen more nominations than anyone currently alive and only less total than Walt Disney. But Williams' first score in Spielberg's filmography was fairly infamous among collectors and fans as one of his only completely unreleased works...until now.

La-La Land Records made the bombshell announcement Saturday that Williams' music to Spielberg's The Sugarland Express (1974) would come to CD and vinyl for the first time, just an hour before a new 4K restoration premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. (The cleaned-up version, followed by a Q&A with Spielberg, boasted a new sound mix that will presumably be available on disc later this year.) Limited to 5,000 units on CD, this release - as ever, produced, edited, mixed, mastered and annotated by Williams' longtime archivist Mike Matessino - closes one of the major historical gaps in The Maestro's discography.

Spielberg - all of 27 years old at the time - conceived The Sugarland Express based on a real-life story of a Texas couple described as a "modern day Bonnie and Clyde": two young, ex-convict parents who took a Texas patrolman hostage and led a low-speed car chase across the state in an attempt to reunite with their young children. Working with writers Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins and producers Richard D. Zanuck and David R. Brown (fresh off the Oscar-winning Universal comedy The Sting), Spielberg crafted a debut motion picture that built upon his work in television, particularly the gripping, suspenseful 1971 TV movie Duel, to innovatively shoot the organized chaos of car crashes and shootouts that fueled The Sugarland Express. Goldie Hawn, then best known for comedic roles in Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and an Oscar-winning supporting turn in Cactus Flower, starred as the driven mother Lou Jean Poplin; William Atherton (now best known for playing iconic jerks in Ghostbusters and Die Hard) portrayed her hapless husband whom she busted out of jail; and Michael Sacks and Oscar winner Ben Johnson (The Last Picture Show) played the patrolman they take hostage and the police captain on their tails, respectively.

Though poor marketing kept the film from finding a commercial audience - the few who attended did not get the expected comedy from Hawn - considerable praise was heaped on Spielberg in his first time as a Hollywood movie director. "In terms of the pleasure that technical assurance gives an audience," The New Yorker's critic and kingmaker Pauline Kael wrote, "this is one of the most phenomenal début films in the history of movies." His technical prowess was praised, along with that of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and co-editor Verna Fields (both of whom would work on the director's biggest hits of the later '70s).

And then there was the matter of Williams, the 42-year-old composer who'd recently earned his first Oscar adapting Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock's song score to 1971's Fiddler on the Roof. His profile recently increased by scoring a string of blockbuster disaster films, Spielberg was particularly influenced by Williams' scores to two Mark Rydell films, The Reivers (1969) and The Cowboys (1972), and enthusiastically took a meeting with the composer. While Williams would revive the then-dormant maximalist orchestral style of scoring by the decade's end, The Sugarland Express was a more intimate affair: evocative country blues led by a harmonica-driven theme (played by Belgian craftsman Toots Thielemans, who'd play on records for Quincy Jones, John Denver, Paul Simon and Billy Joel in his long career) plus some top-flight guitarists and percussionists augmented by a small string section, giving the project a mix of stateliness and enthusiastic, all-American country blues.

For years, only an expanded suite of the theme, performed by The Boston Pops Orchestra under Williams' baton (with Thielemans returning on harmonica), was the only example of the score available on 1991's The Spielberg/Williams Collaboration. Rumors abounded as to why no album release had ever taken place; chiefly, that Williams either felt the material was too short or otherwise didn't hang together as a solo listening experience. A half-century later, his position has changed, and earns producer credit for this 40-minute presentation (including music not in the final film), newly mixed in stereo from the eight-track masters. Matessino, who has now done archival score presentations of nearly every picture in Spielberg's filmography from 1974 to 2005 - only the three Indiana Jones scores, 2002's Catch Me If You Can and 2004's The Terminal have yet to be touched - works his usual magic of restoring the music as well as penning new liner notes that finally tell the musical story of Sugarland and the birth of this unprecedented director-composer union. (As ever, Jim TItus oversees the package design, which is part of the Universal Pictures Film Music Classics Collection branding.)

The Sugarland Express is now shipping on CD, with a vinyl edition to go on sale later this summer. Pre-order your copy at the link below.

John Williams, The Sugarland Express (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack - Universal Pictures Film Music Classics Collection) (La-La Land Records LLLCD 1650, 2024 - original film released 1974)

All tracks previously unreleased