Alan Silvestri

Silvestri studied at Berklee College of Music before touring as a guitarist and working in television scoring through the 1970s, building a reputation for versatile, propulsive genre work well before his career-defining partnership with Robert Zemeckis began. That partnership started almost by accident, on a modestly budgeted film neither of them expected to become a hit.

Zemeckis's musical partner and a master of momentum, the Back to the Future fanfare and the jungle percussion of Predator could not be more different — and both are perfect for what they're doing. He first worked with Zemeckis on the little-seen 1984 comedy Romancing the Stone, a partnership that has since spanned more than a dozen films across four decades, becoming one of the longest continuous director-composer collaborations in Hollywood.

His triumphant Back to the Future theme remains one of the most recognizable orchestral fanfares of the 1980s, rivaling John Williams's work of the same era, and he went on to score some of the era's biggest action and adventure franchises, including much of the Predator and Avengers series.