Composer Alan Silvestri left the Berklee College of Music to tour with Wayne Cochran & the C.C. Riders, though the school later awarded him an honorary doctorate.
∙ He wrote his earliest compositions for low-budget feature films, as well as for nearly 100 episodes of the TV series CHiPs. ∙ Silvestri has worked on 21 films with director Robert Zemeckis, including Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Forrest Gump. ∙ He has been nominated for nine Grammy Awards, winning three of them—for his work on The Bodyguard, Cast Away, and The Polar Express. ∙ His scores can be heard in some of his era’s highest-grossing films, including Predator, The Mummy Returns, and several Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbusters. ∙ In 1998, Silvestri and his wife founded a vineyard in Carmel, California. ∙ He won two Emmy Awards for his work on the Peabody Award-winning documentary series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.