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...score to Star Wars to make people(mainstream audiences) more appreciative of film scores?
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If recollection serves, that summer the Main Title from Star Wars was all over the radio getting air play. The lesson the studios took away was we should create pop versions so music listeners will really enjoy this stuff. So the Close Encounters album the same year included a single with a pop version of the alien communication music. The next year, they did a pop version of Can You Read My Mind from Superman. Nothing changed with Star Wars from a public standpoint except that people discovered John Williams so he became a "star composer" and therefore a great commercial choice for conducting Pops concerts.
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In order to gain popularity, film music has to not only be good (or at least catchy) but also be written for a film that is both popular with audiences, and calls for music which is more noticeable.
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas made very popular movies, and also wanted the music to play a foreground role, so John Williams was able to really show what he could do when scoring their films. Millions of people went to see Jaws, Star Wars and CE3K, and had a memorable experience in which the scores played a major role.
Spielberg and Lucas were also very trend-setting, so John Williams was sought-out by other filmmakers to provide the same type of large-orchestral, "foreground" type of score (thus scores like Superman and Harry Potter also proved popular).
But movies like Diamond Head, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno -- though they were very popular -- didn't call on Williams to be as expansive and "in the foreground" as later films, so those earlier scores weren't so noticeable, or interesting on their own (I'm a huge John Williams fan -- and even I never listen to any of those scores).
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No one but us weirdo's listens to "background music".
I think it´s mainly the idea of orchestral music that does not intrigue the masses.
And those who enjoy classical movies look down on film scores because they are not "the real thing".
So scores fall in a category between popular music and serious music which naturally is a very small one.
However, with concert tours of scores being performed live or "easy listening"-composers like Hans Zimmer bridging the divide between pop song and film score, this genre gets much more attention than before.
But it will always be something for connoisseurs.
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