Picture this. You’re a conductor standing in front of an audience, with an entire orchestra glued to your baton, and you’re leading it through the operatic climax of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Steven Spielberg’s 1982 fantasia crescendoes as the title character boards his spaceship and his human friends bid him a tearful goodbye. John Williams’ Oscar-winning score swells with bittersweet grandeur, italicizing many of the minute gestures onscreen with corresponding gestures in the music. This meticulous level of synchronization often relies on a “click track,” a kind of guided metronome in the conductor’s and musicians’ headphones. Then, all of a sudden...the click track cuts out.
“I kind of had a freak-out moment,” says Norman Huynh, who had this very experience while conducting E.T. live to picture in Oregon several years ago (and who conducts Amadeus live to picture with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl this September). But then, he says, “it felt so free after that, because I had the punches and streamers there in front of me—the tempo, essentially—and I felt like I could actually make adjustments and kind of broaden things when needed, and then sync the moments that needed to be there. I haven’t gone back to click since.”
These are just some of the onstage considerations in the prolific phenomenon of concerts in which films are presented with a symphony orchestra playing the score, live. For audiences, live-to-picture concerts are a fun way to reexperience a familiar movie in a communal way—perhaps to introduce a film to their kids or friends—and often outdoors. For conductors and musicians, they are a tightrope walk of exact timing, dependent on technology that didn’t exist until very recently.
David Newman, who will conduct How to Train Your Dragon at the Bowl this summer (as well as the clips-heavy Maestro of the Movies: A Tribute to John Williams), has been conducting film scores live to picture since the 1980s, when he was music director of the Sundance Institute. In 1989 he conducted an original score—his own composition—to the 1927 silent classic Sunrise. Back then, it was projected on film, “so it was infinitely more difficult to synchronize the conductor video with the presentation video,” Newman says. And rehearsing was a nightmare, because “you really couldn’t stop and go back and go forward. You just had to sort of run the film. If they stopped the film, they had to hand-crank it back.”
The very first “live to picture” concert performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic was Sergei Eisenstein and Dimitri Vasilev’s Alexander Nevsky (1938), with a score by Sergei Prokofiev conducted by André Previn in 1987. For the next two decades, it was almost always silent films, or isolated scenes or sequences, that were attempted in concert; anything else would have been logistically impossible. (Pioneers like producer John Goberman and John Mauceri, former Principal Conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, helped develop the systems that made these types of concerts possible.) But around 15 years ago, advances in digital technology allowed for a breakthrough. Not only could films be run off of hard drives, and thus paused and navigated breezily, and not only could those digital “punches” and “streamers”—lines that indicate when to start a musical cue and other helpful directions—be added to the screen on the conductor’s music stand, but in the case of older films, the original score recording could be siphoned out from a mono track that also contained vocals, dialogue, and sound effects.
In 2011, Newman conducted the world-premiere live presentation of West Side Story at the Bowl. What was previously unthinkable became gloriously possible—the LA Phil could perform the sumptuous strains of Leonard Bernstein’s “Maria” and “America” in perfect harmony with 50-year-old recordings of Jimmy Bryant and Rita Moreno (who sang on the beloved 1961 film). “It was like a bomb went off,” says Newman, who brought the same presentation to the New York Philharmonic later that year, “in the sense that obviously the audience wanted it. So when they presented it, people showed up. There was a lot of energy at the concerts. And so I think all the orchestras eventually took notice of it. It was easy to sell tickets.”
Since then, the LA Phil regularly presents complete films in concert—from 1958’s Vertigo, screened at Walt Disney Concert Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in March, to 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra at the Bowl this August. “In the beginning, I thought, ‘Wow, this is going to be extra exciting,’” says Joanne Pearce Martin, keyboardist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 2001. “Because there’s no going back. I mean, there isn’t in a live concert either, but you’ve got these very important moments where synchronization is so important.
“In regular concert playing,” Martin says, “you always have to have this mutual trust. But I think there’s a whole new level of trust necessary in the live-to-picture situation between conductor and musicians. So it’s great when we have somebody up there that we are absolutely comfortable with.” Martin praises Sarah Hicks, who has conducted multiple Harry Potter films and most recently Vertigo with the LA Phil—and also Newman. “David is unbelievable up there,” she says. “He is always so impressive with how much he does off click. He just has such assurance and such familiarity with these scores, and with us, that he feels that he can pull us along exactly to where we need to be. And we always get there with him.”
Among the other unique challenges, the orchestra often gets only one or two rehearsals before the show. Conductors like Newman and Huynh study the scores and the films religiously ahead of time, so they can quickly guide the orchestra into not only the notes but also the dramatic intention of the score. Musicians need to stay exactly in time with the movie but also be prepared to hear rollicking laughter or applause at iconic lines like “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” in Jaws. That’s not exactly something they’re used to in a Mahler symphony.
“There’s nothing to prepare you for the energy that comes off a giant Bowl audience after that,” says Martin, laughing. “And quite often you’ll have a line like that that’s immediately followed by music. So it’s almost like you can’t even hear what you’re supposed to hear. And this is where the trust thing comes in—you are nailed to that podium, and whoever’s up there, they’re going to be going, ‘Ready, go!’...no matter what you hear or can’t hear.”
Tim Greiving is an arts journalist and historian in Los Angeles who specializes in film music. He regularly writes for the Los Angeles Times and has contributed to NPR, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other outlets. His book, John Williams: A Composer’s Life, was published in 2025 by Oxford University Press.