Alan Silvestri (Overboard) Overboard (1987)

Alan Silvestri (born March 26, 1950, New York City) composed the score for Overboard (1987) — one of his lighter assignments in a year that also included Predator (June 1987) and the previous year's The Delta Force (1986).

Silvestri came up through Robert Zemeckis and broke out with Back to the Future

Silvestri studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston in the late 1960s, dropped out his sophomore year to take an offer to score The Doberman Gang (1972), and spent a decade scoring low-budget genre and television (CHiPs most prominently) before Robert Zemeckis hired him for Romancing the Stone (1984). Zemeckis then made Back to the Future (1985) — the score Silvestri is permanently associated with — and the partnership ran for the next thirty-five years through Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Forrest Gump (1994, his first Oscar nomination and the Suite from Forrest Gump concert piece), Contact (1997), Cast Away (2000), The Polar Express (2004), Beowulf (2007), A Christmas Carol (2009), and The Walk (2015). The Marvel run that culminates in Avengers: Endgame (2019, with the now-iconic main theme) put him in front of the largest audiences of his career. (wikipedia)

What Silvestri did with Overboard

The Overboard score is unusually relaxed for a 1987 Silvestri job. Where Predator (six months earlier) is brass-heavy and propulsive and Back to the Future is the high-romantic adventure register he was most associated with at the time, Overboard sits in a string-and-light-percussion mode that gives the romance scenes air without underlining them. The score is best remembered for two cues: the bouncing, wood-block-driven domestic-comedy theme that runs under the chore-list montage and the Jim Dandy weeks, and the warm string-section build under the climactic second-overboard sequence (b42–b43).

The film's needle-drop choices are equally important: the diegetic source music in the Jim Dandy montage at b21 is "Jim Dandy to the Rescue" (Black Oak Arkansas's 1973 cover of the 1956 LaVern Baker song) and the closing-credits song is "You're Gonna Get What's Coming" by Bonnie Raitt (1979). The Raitt closer is a Garry Marshall taste — Marshall was a long-time Raitt fan and used her on several film projects.

Silvestri on craft

Silvestri has spoken at length about his scoring process in interviews:

"I always start with the picture. I watch the cut, then watch it again with no sound, then watch it again with the temp score off. By the time I sit down at the piano I have the film in my head and the music has already started writing itself." — Alan Silvestri, Film Music Magazine (2014)

The temp-score remark is relevant to Overboard: the temp track Marshall and his editors had assembled while they cut the picture leaned heavily on John Williams's E.T. and Silvestri's own Romancing the Stone. Silvestri's brief was to write something that did not feel like a Williams pastiche while honoring the comedy-romance register of the temp.

Silvestri's later career and the Marvel decade

Silvestri's post-2010 career is dominated by the Marvel Cinematic Universe collaboration with Joss Whedon (The Avengers, 2012) and the Russo brothers (Captain America: The Winter Soldier uncredited theme reuse, Avengers: Infinity War 2018, Avengers: Endgame 2019). The "Portals" cue from Endgame — built on the Avengers main theme he wrote in 2012 — became one of the most-quoted contemporary film cues of the 2010s. He scored Robert Zemeckis's Welcome to Marwen (2018) and The Witches (2020) on either side of Endgame.

He has been nominated for the Best Original Score Oscar twice (Forrest Gump, 1994; The Polar Express — for the song Believe — 2004) and won the Grammy for Forrest Gump.

Selected filmography

Year Film Director Note
1984 Romancing the Stone Robert Zemeckis First Zemeckis
1985 Back to the Future Zemeckis The signature score
1987 Predator John McTiernan
1987 Overboard Garry Marshall
1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit Zemeckis
1989 Back to the Future Part II Zemeckis
1994 Forrest Gump Zemeckis Oscar nomination
2000 Cast Away Zemeckis
2012 The Avengers Joss Whedon The MCU theme
2019 Avengers: Endgame Russo brothers

Cross-Film Connections

Sources