'When I look at a film without the music it's like lively death.' So says Steven Spielberg , director of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1941, all with scores by the American composer John Williams. Williams now has the composer credit for some 45 feature films, among them How to Steal a Million, Jane Eyre , Towering Inferno, Superman, Star Wars. Many directors will admit that music is crucial to a film's success, yet the composer's name is rarely known to the general public. This film looks at the craft and the pressures of film music through the work of JOHN WILIAMS , with extracts from several films, and sees him at work on his latest, the second of the Star Wars trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back, which has its London premiere on 20 May.