He has been associated with some of the most successful fantasy-adventure films of the last decade, his work has been among the most important elements of the two dozen films he has been involved with, yet he remains, like his profession, highly underrated, upstaged by the more visibly appreciative elements of special effects, cinematography and cast.
His profession is film music, and his name is Alan Silvestri. A self-taught musician who came into the film industry through happenstance, Silvestri has scored big with such films as Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future, Outrageous Fortune, No Mercy and Delta Force, becoming, in the space of a little more than four years, one of Hollywood's hottest new composers. Much of his work has been for fantasy/adventure films (including the soundtracks of Cat's Eye, Clan of the Cave Bear and Predator), marking him as a composer well-attuned to genre movies. His most challenging assignment may be the Disney/Amblin coproduction, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which reunited Silvestri with director Robert Zemeckis and, as with Romancing the Stone and Back to the Future, resulted in an especially winning marriage of music and image.
Toontown Tunes
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a film he was actually involved with for almost two years before its premiere, having been first called in by Zemeckis in October 1986 to pre-score source music cues heard from bands, pianos and other instruments actually seen on screen and which therefore had to
He composed or orchestrated beforehand. Silvestri worked on the movie on and off through the next year, and in December 1987, he became attached to post-production full time. By then, the film's rough editing was finished enough for him to time, compose and record his original score, an assignment which wasn't completed until early June 1988, a scant two weeks before the film's opening date.
[…]
