Who has more Academy Award nominations than any other living soul? It's not Meryl Streep. It's not Steven Spielberg. But you're getting warmer. With five wins out of 45 nods, it's Mr. Spielberg's long-time composer John Williams.

I saw the legendary conductor perform his hits with the L.A. Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl this weekend. He opened the second half of the show with the most famous two notes in film music history.

Jaws forever changed the way Hollywood handles summer. But if it wasn't for Williams' score, the film would have sunk like shark poop and we might still be spending our summers watching cheesy B movies at the drive-in.

While Williams has created equally memorable music for other directors -- for such beloved franchises as Star Wars, Superman and Harry Potter -- Spielberg has only tried making one movie without Williams (The Color Purple). The director-composer relationship is obviously an important one to Spielberg.

If you want to hear what a collaborative partnership between a director and composer sounds like, look for the DVD of the 2003 film The Cooler. In addition to an excellent commentary track on the nuances of the film itself, first-time director Wayne Kramer devotes an entire second commentary track to discussing the film's score with its composer, jazz trumpeter Mark Isham (Crash, Point Break).

Kramer is such a movie music fanatic, one gets the impression from this commentary that the only reason he became a filmmaker was to create visuals to put new movie music to. An avid collector of soundtrack CDs, Kramer loaded his temp track with cues from his favorite composer's scores, never dreaming he'd be able to get the busy Oscar nominee for his low-budget indie.

Far from being a two hour back-patting session, the track plays like a masters-level course in film composing. They cover the use of motifs and how those themes expand to complement the character development by switching lead instruments. More importantly, however, they give interesting tips about when to start a cue, or when to go against the emotion of a scene, that would be counter-intuitive to most neophyte filmmakers and composers.

Above all, the collaborators advise keeping an open mind. For instance, temp music chosen by the director to give the composer an idea of what he's looking for is a common problem. "We're looking for something different and better," Isham says. "The times when the temping process can sort of betray you is if you fall in love with it and can't see beyond it."

Case in point: Alex North, whose music Williams paid tribute to during the first half of his concert this weekend, wrote and recorded an original score for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. At the last minute, Kubrick decided to keep the temp music in the finished film. Thus, "Also Sprach Zarathustra" is now eternally inseparable from the black monolith and the Starchild. Maybe Kubrick made the right call. Or maybe we've all experienced the pitfall of becoming too attached to temp music.

Dan Margules is a Los Angeles based screenwriter and a board member of the Scriptwriters Network. His award-winning short film, Begleiter, features an original score by world-famous jazz drummer Alphonse Mouzon (Weather Report) and is available in a Special Edition from Amazon.com or happy-the-dog.com.