The Paper Chase is the acclaimed 1973 comic drama about Harvard law students, starring Timothy Bottoms, Lindsay Wagner, and John Houseman as the tyrannical Professor Kingsfield. John Williams wrote an eclectic score emphasizing the film's myriad social worlds: a beautiful love theme in the style of the light pop of the day, with characteristic Williams touches; pseudo-Baroque music (like Family Plot) and arrangements of Bach and Telemann for the academic environment; two jazz-rock source cues; and a haunting, noble theme ("The Passing of Wisdom") used for the students' fascination with Professor Kingsfield.

The Poseidon Adventure is the classic 1972 Irwin Allen disaster epic, for which Williams wrote a stirring, legendary main and end title theme for low brass building to full orchestra. The interior cues evoke dread and claustrophobia as well as the single-minded drive of the protagonists to escape alive. The score bridges Williams's television work for Allen in the '60s with the more symphonic style he used on his famous blockbusters of the late 1970s and '80s, and has been requested by fans for a quarter-century.

The CD also includes the six-minute "Main Title" to Conrack, the acclaimed early '70s Martin Ritt drama starring Jon Voight as a schoolteacher on a poor South Carolina island. The music features Williams's uplifting Americana writing, as heard in The Cowboys and The River, with a gentle bluegrass bent.

This album of previously unreleased John Williams tracks was drawn from clean, best-possible archival sources, with roughly 15 minutes surviving in stereo. The 16-page color booklet includes rare photos from the 20th Century Fox archives and track-by-track liner notes by Jeff Bond and Jeff Eldridge.