Alan Silvestri

Biography

Silvestri was born on March 26, 1950. His grandparents emigrated in 1909 from the Italian town of Castell'Alfero and settled in Teaneck, New Jersey. He grew up in Teaneck and graduated in 1968 from Teaneck High School. He attended Berklee College of Music for two years. He was a drummer for a short time in 1966 with Teaneck-based rock band The Wildcats.

Silvestri moved to Los Angeles in 1970. "I came to Hollywood in 1970 broke...I didn't even have any goals or plans. I didn't even go to the movies. And I knew nothing about composers or composing," he said.

In 1972, while he was working intermittently as a session guitarist, the producer of the low-budget action film The Doberman Gang asked him to score the picture. Silvestri agreed, despite a lack of experience: “I went out and bought a how-to-compose book by Earl Hagen... At one point I was using beer cans for percussion.”

From 1978 to 1983, Silvestri was the main composer for the television series CHiPs, writing music for 95 of the show's 139 episodes. Silvestri met film director Robert Zemeckis when they worked together on Zemeckis's film Romancing the Stone (1984).

Since then, he has composed the music for all of Zemeckis's movies, including the Back to the Future trilogy (1985–1990), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Death Becomes Her (1992), Forrest Gump (1994), Contact (1997), Cast Away (2000), The Polar Express (2004), Beowulf (2007), A Christmas Carol (2009), Flight (2012), and The Walk (2015).

In 1989, Silvestri composed the score for the James Cameron-directed film The Abyss. Since 2001, he has also collaborated regularly with director Stephen Sommers, scoring the films The Mummy Returns (2001), Van Helsing (2004), and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009).

Silvestri has composed the scores for four Marvel Cinematic Universe films: Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), The Avengers (2012), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019). His themes and motifs from those films have been referenced and reprised by other composers in multiple other MCU films.

Silvestri has also composed music for television series, including T. J. Hooker (one episode), Starsky & Hutch (three episodes), and Tales from the Crypt (seven episodes).

In 2014, he composed the award-winning music for the science documentary series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. He wrote new songs with Glen Ballard for the live-action film adaptation of Disney's Pinocchio.