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Let's get into it.
Thanks for checking out this Jaws Deep Dive.
I want to take you on a journey into my thoughts
on the original Jaws from 1975.
This is one of the greatest films ever made.
No one steps foot onto a beach with humming
Jaws' beat or looking twice to check for sharks.
A lot of people are afraid of the ocean simply
because of this movie.
Jaws is a 1975 American thriller film directed
by Steven Spielberg and based on Peter Benchley's
1974 novel of the same name.
In the film, a man-eating great white shark
attacks beachgoers at a summer resort town,
prompting police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider)
to hunt it with the help of a marine biologist
(Richard Dreyfuss) and a professional shark
hunter (Robert Shaw).
Murray Hamilton plays the mayor, and Lorraine
Gary portrays Brody's wife.
The screenplay is credited to Benchley, who
wrote the first drafts, and actor-writer Carl
Gottlieb, who rewrote the script during principal
photography.
Speaking of Benchley, Jaws is adapted from
his bestselling novel of the same name, which
Benchley based on a series of shark attacks
that occurred off the coast of New Jersey
in 1916 and after an incident where a New
York fisherman named Frank Mundus caught a
4,500-pound shark off the coast of Montauk
in 1964.
Other title ideas Benchley had before settling
on Jaws were “The Stillness in the Water,”
“The Silence of the Deep,” “Leviathan
Rising,” and “The Jaws of Death."
I am not sure that any of these capture the
same magic as the simple title of Jaws.
Spielberg first learned of the book from being
on top of a large stack of papers in his producer’s
office.
He initially thought it was about a dentist.
Believe it or not, Spielberg was not the original
director chosen for the film.
The first director was fired after a production
meeting in which he continually referred to
the shark as a whale.
Three months before production was set to
begin, Spielberg decided he wanted to direct
a different movie because he did not want
to be typecast as a "truck and shark" director.
He went to speak with the producers who knew
he wanted to back out.
When Spielberg saw that they had worn Jaws
crew t-shirts, all three started laughing,
and Spielberg said, “Never mind.”
Early drafts of the screenplay featured a
subplot where Hooper has an affair with Chief
Brody’s wife, which was ported over from
the book.
Another detail left out of the movie from
the book was that Mayor Vaughn was under pressure
from the mafia, not local business owners,
to keep Amity’s beaches open because of
their real estate investments on the island.
The fictional town of Amity was actually Martha's
Vineyard in Massachusetts where the majority
of the film was shot.
Jaws had a troubled production, going over
budget and past schedule.
As the art department's mechanical sharks
often malfunctioned, Spielberg decided to
mostly suggest the shark's presence, employing
an ominous and minimalist theme created by
composer John Williams to indicate its impending
appearances.
In fact, the shark does not fully appear in
a shot until 1 hour and 21 minutes into the
two-hour film.
The reason it is not shown is because the
mechanical shark that was built rarely worked
during filming, so Spielberg had to create
inventive ways (like Quint’s yellow barrels)
to shoot around the non-functional shark.
Jaws was marred with so many technical problems
that the originally scheduled 65-day shoot
ballooned into 159 days, not counting post-production.
The shark weighed in at 1.2 tons and measured
25 feet in length.
Spielberg and others have compared the suggestive
approach of not showing the shark until near
the end of the film to that of director Alfred
Hitchcock.
Universal Pictures gave the film what was
then an exceptionally wide release for a major
studio picture, on over 450 screens, accompanied
by an extensive marketing campaign with a
heavy emphasis on television spots and tie-in
merchandise.
Speaking of troubles during filming, no one
expected the Orca to actually begin sinking
with Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, and Richard
Dreyfuss onboard.
Due to a malfunction, the boat started leaking,
causing Spielberg to send another boat in
a mad dash to retrieve the actors and crew
from the sinking ship.
One camera was submerged, but technicians
were able to salvage the film inside saving
Spielberg from having to add yet another day
to his already backlogged shooting schedule.
After the full-sized shark sank during its
first time in the water, the crew also nicknamed
the shark Flaws or the Great White Turd.
The mechanical sharks were such a disappointment,
partly because their combined cost was $225,000
(nearly $1 million in today’s currency).
In another example of troubles while filming,
George Lucas came to visit Spielberg and uncredited
screenwriter John Milius in the special effects
shop and he stuck his head inside Bruce’s
mouth.
Spielberg and Milius decided to play a prank
on Lucas and closed Bruce’s jaws on him,
but the controls jammed, leaving Lucas stuck
inside.
Bruce’s jaws had to be pried open in order
to rescue the future Star Wars director from
a most embarrassing predicament.
Jaws was set to be released over the Christmas
season, but Spielberg took so long filming
that the movie had a summer release date,
which was traditionally reserved for low-end
movies.
The filming delay is what spurred Jaws to
become the first movie to define the concept
of a summer blockbuster.
The film’s initial budget was $3.5 million,
but it wound up costing around $8 million
to make, the equivalent of $35 million in
today’s dollars.
Benchley himself can be seen in a cameo in
the film as the news reporter who addresses
the camera on the beach.
Benchley had previously worked as a news reporter
for the Washington Post before penning Jaws.
Steven Spielberg also makes a cameo in the
movie: His voice is the Amity Island dispatcher
who calls Quint’s boat, the Orca, with Sheriff
Brody’s wife on the line.
Spielberg was chosen to direct Jaws by producers
Richard Zanuck and David Brown (who had also
worked with the then-28-year-old director
on his 1974 film The Sugarland Express) because
of his film Duel, which featured a maniacal
trucker terrorizing a mild-mannered driver.
The producers thought the movie was thematically
similar to the story for Jaws, making Spielberg
a great fit.
Spielberg nicknamed the shark Bruce after
his lawyer, Bruce Ramer.
Despite making a name for himself with gritty
TV work like the killer trucker flick Duel,
the then 27-year-old Steven Spielberg was
coming off of the Goldie Hawn box office flop
The Sugarland Express when Jaws went into
production.
A perfectionist by nature, the young filmmaker
was under mounting pressure from the studio,
producers, and the film’s accountants to
deliver even in the midst of mechanical problems,
inclement weather, and temperamental actors.
Spielberg had several mental breakdowns and
spent many sleepless nights in his cabin amid
growing fears he was going to be taken off
the film.
To combat his anxiety and insomnia, he had
a pillow sent from his home in California
and slept with a stalk of celery underneath,
because the smell soothed his nerves.
Maybe if Quint had celery in his pocket he
wouldn’t have ended up in a shark’s belly.
Scheider got the part of Chief Martin Brody
after overhearing Spielberg talking to a friend
at a Hollywood party about the scene where
the shark leaps out of the water and onto
Quint’s boat.
Scheider was instantly enthralled, and asked
Spielberg if he could be in the film.
Spielberg loved Scheider from his role in
The French Connection, and later offered the
actor the part.
Scheider improvised the now-famous line, “You’re
going to need a bigger boat.”
Charlton Heston was considered for the role
of Police Chief Martin Brody, but Spielberg
decided to go with a less-known actor because
he didn’t want the audience to immediately
identify Brody as the heroic savior based
on Heston’s previous film roles.
Heston reportedly refused to ever work with
the director.
Spielberg initially approached Jon Voight,
Timothy Bottoms, and Jeff Bridges to play
oceanographer Matt Hooper.
When none of them could commit to the role,
Spielberg’s friend George Lucas suggested
Richard Dreyfuss, whom Lucas has directed
in American Graffiti.
Dreyfuss would later accept the part because
he thought he was terrible in the title role
of the film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
a year earlier.
When actors Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden,
the first and second choices to play the grizzled
fisherman Quint, respectively, both turned
Spielberg down, producers Zanuck and Brown
recommended English actor Robert Shaw, whom
they had previously worked with on 1973's
The Sting.
Shaw drank quite a bit on set and was often
a volatile presence, but he also frequently
worried about his taxes.
The native Brit was reportedly being pursued
by both the IRS and British taxmen causing
the actor to flee the country on weekends
for Canada to avoid facing a tax liability
for spending too many hours on U.S. soil.
In fact, Shaw had to forgo his salary on the
film in order to make amends with the IRS
for his charges of tax evasion.
In early drafts of the screenplay, Quint was
originally introduced while causing a disturbance
in a movie theater while watching John Huston’s
1958 adaptation of Moby Dick.
The scene was shot, but actor Gregory Peck,
who plays Captain Ahab in that movie, owned
the rights to the film version of Moby Dick
and would not let the filmmakers of Jaws use
the footage, so the sequence was cut.
Jaws was initially rated R by the MPAA.
But after some of the more gruesome frames
of the shot showing the severed leg of the
man attacked by the shark in the estuary were
trimmed down, the film was given a PG-rating
(the PG-13-rating wasn’t created until after
Spielberg’s own film, Indiana Jones and
the Temple of Doom, caused the MPAA to change
the system in 1984).
The poster for the film still reads that the
movie “MAY BE TOO INTENSE FOR YOUNGER CHILDREN.”
The original ending in the script had the
shark dying of harpoon injuries inflicted
by Quint and Brody à la Moby Dick, but Spielberg
thought the movie needed a crowd-pleasing
finale and came up with the exploding tank
as seen in the final film.
The dialogue and foreshadowing of the tank
were then dropped in as they shot the movie.
Jaws was the first movie released in more
than 400 theaters in the United States, and
the first movie to gross over $100 million
at the box office.
It was the highest grossing movie of all time
until Star Wars was released two years later.
One of the biggest scares in Jaws comes courtesy
of fisherman Ben Gardner’s head popping
through an underwater hole in his chewed up
boat.
More surprising than Ben’s severed head
is that the scene was reshot in editor Verna
Fields’ swimming pool in Van Nuys, California,
six months after principal photography wrapped
in New England.
Unhappy with the original version, Spielberg
borrowed the props and some film equipment
from the Universal backlot and set everything
up in Fields’ pool, adding milk to the water
to give it the same murky look as the water
in Martha’s Vineyard.
The scene was seamlessly cut back into the
film and has been making audiences jump ever
since.
Spielberg was not originally a fan of the
film’s now-iconic theme song.
The first time he heard John William’s opening
track, he laughed at its simplicity.
He later conceded that the music made the
movie more thrilling.
While the mechanical sharks were destroyed
after filming, the Orca—the film’s famous
boat—ended up at Universal Studios in Hollywood.
Steven Spielberg would often visit the boat
and reminisce about the movie that launched
his career.
So that wraps this one up.
I want to hear from you.
Post your thoughts on this video and let me
know how Jaws impacted your love for horror.
That's it for this episode.
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But, most of all, make sure you keep it horror.
