This weekend, the endangered remnants of Los Angeles’s millennial hipster-twee scene gathered hungrily around the city’s Hollywood Bowl to celebrate the film music of their fearless leader, Wes Anderson. For those three nights, the arena became a revolving door of Andersonian collaborators. Anderson muse Bill Murray oversaw the festivities in a Steve Zissou beanie and repeatedly dinged a Grand Budapest Hotel service bell. Jason Schwartzman allegedly threw an original cassette of Rushmore’s soundtrack into the crowd—twice. And the notoriously press-shy Anderson—thankfully free from the confines of the Academy museum elevator he got stuck in last week—watched it all unfold from a front-row seat, only appearing onstage briefly.
From his scrappy 1996 debut Bottle Rocket to 2025’s star-studded The Phoenician Scheme, every score and needle drop of Anderson’s 30-year career had its moment in the limelight. Karen O sang the Stones’ “Play With Fire,” Karen Elson sang “Les Temps De L’amour,” and Rogê and Jenny Lewis’s “Zorro Is Back.” Anderson doppelgänger Beck sang Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay,” a gut-punch needle drop from The Royal Tenenbaums; Devo (sans energy dome) played “Gut Feeling” off A Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.
Composer Mark Mothersbaugh and composer-conductor Alexandre Desplat saw the Los Angeles Philharmonic through a number of the films’ more iconic instrumentals, aided by pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, sitarist Karmakar, flautist Aakash Pujara, and flautist-percussionist Kaoru Watanabe. And in a stunning career first, Jackson Browne performed “Fairest of the Seasons” and “These Days,” songs he wrote as a teenager long before Nico eventually popularized them on 1967’s Chelsea Girl.
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