We are smack down in the middle of summer which got us thinking about the beach and
then of course about tasty beach suits.
Which then got us thinking about shark attacks, after all sharks are nature's
number one threat to all beach shoots, not just the tasty ones.
Also Jaws had its 40th anniversary last year and
we totally blew our opportunity to cover it back then so better late than never.
Here are seven things you didn't know about Jaws.
Probably. (Sound)
Sure, Jaws is super great and
everybody loves it now but no one loved Jaws while they were actually making it.
>> That's not part of place.
>> The production was a total nightmare,
it ran so long and over budget that the cast and crew nicknamed it Flaws.
Get it?
Flaws.
(Laugh) You get it.
(Laugh) >> Here's just how bad it got.
The original shooting schedule was supposed to be from
May 1st to June 28th, 1974.
A quick two months, in and out.
Well, that two months ballooned to seven months.
And four of those months were at sea.
In all honesty, I'm not sure how Steven Spielberg didn't get fired.
I mean, nobody knew he was Steven (Bleep) Spielberg back then, but still.
The studio, the producers, and
Spielberg all completely underestimated how challenging it would be to shoot any
real body of water instead of on the studio lot.
There were planes flying overhead they had to avoid and then for
all the parts to take place on the Orca, if another boat appeared on the horizon,
production will have to shut down and wait for
it to be completely out of view which took a freaking hour and a half.
And they couldn't just flip around and
shoot in the opposite direction because that would've taken even longer.
They'd have to pull up anchors, change around the lights and cameras.
Trust me, it was a whole situation.
On top of that they were doing special effects that had never been done before on
water without the help of CGI.
It was the 70s, no one knew how the hell to get a 25 foot shark to
jump onto the stern of a boat. >> Aah!
>> Producers David Brown and
Richard Zanuck later said if they had actually read the source material for
Jaws a second time through they would have never greenlit the movie in
the first place.
Because they would have realized just how hard it was going to be to make the movie.
On the other hand it's a really good thing that those guys decided to half-ass
their jobs because now we have Jaws.
(Sound) Jaws was shot primarily in Martha's Vineyard.
And the movie is credited with the boom in tourism that the area has experienced in
the decades since.
Plenty of other films have gone on to shoot there, too.
But let's talk about why Spielberg chose Martha's Vineyard in the first place.
The main reason he wanted to shoot there was it was the only location they found
where, if they were far enough out from the shore he cold turn the camera in
any direction and not see land.
Unfortunately, you could still see plenty of other boats but
we already covered that.
Anyway, Spielberg felt that the audience needed to feel the isolation that
the characters felt at sea.
And if audiences could see beach they'd feel like the characters could always just
turn around and go back to safety on land.
It takes away the tension of the whole situation if you can just go
running back to base, you know?
Moving on.
(Sound) You probably knew already that Jaws is based on the book because if you
didn't then it means you definitely didn't watch our episode of
what's the difference on it, and that is just hurtful.
Anyway, what you probably didn't know is Peter Benchley the author of Jaws is
actually in the movie.
That's him right there playing the reporter.
By the way Benchley butted heads with Spielberg over the movie's ending
along with other things that were changed when adapting the book for the screen.
But it should come as no surprise that Benchley was very happy with the film in
the end and he admitted that Spielberg had made the right call.
>> Why, you son of a (Sound)
>> He also that that was boom a bonus
thing you didn't know.
(Sound) It's a fairly well known piece of
trivia that the nickname for
the shark on the Jaws set was Bruce after Bruce Waymers Steven Spielbergs lawyer.
But you may not have known that there was another nickname for
the shark, The Great White Turd. >> A what?
>> See, another thing that slowed down
production on Jaws was shark problems.
More often than not, the mechanical sharks they had simply didn't work properly.
That's why the shark barely has any screen time if you actually pay attention.
It's a good hour and two minutes before we even see the shark in the movie,
which is, boom, a bonus thing you didn't know.
They had different Bruce's, or turds for
different shots that they'd pull around in the water with the crane arm.
They had one for when he'd swim from camera left to camera right.
Another one for right to left.
One for front facing shots.
And one that was just the shark fin.
Unfortunately, none of them really worked.
In fact, the first time they tested the shark in actual water, it sank to
the bottom of the Nantucket Sound and they had to have divers recover it.
Spielberg and the producers feared that the whole incident might have been the end
of their careers.
Obviously it wasn't, but yeah,
I can see how it might have been pretty embarrassing at the time.
You know, leaving your big old turd at the bottom of the ocean and
then having to hire some guys to fish it out for you?
That's a drag.
Next thing.
(Sound) >> I can go slow ahead.
Come on down and chum some of this (Bleep).
(Sound) >> The Great White turd wasn't the only
thing that sank during production.
One day during shooting,
the Orca started sinking for real, like when it wasn't supposed to.
Steven Spielberg prioritized getting the actors off the sinking boat because let's
face it, it's above the line people first, then women, then children, and
then maybe the sound department.
But when the Orca was sinking perhaps the most valuable thing of all went underwater
with it, the cameras.
Thinking on his feet, the cinematographer Bill Butler realized that they might still
be able to save the film inside.
At the time, they were shooting on a film stock that used a saline process.
So he figured that if they acted fast enough, the ocean water might not ruin it.
The team managed to ship the film off to get it developed quickly enough that they
didn't lose a single frame.
They were able to save it all.
Now if they had been shooting Jaws today on DSLRs, or their iPhones,
or something, I have a feeling this story would have ended a lot
less good. >> Now, I think that I am familiar
with fact that you are going to ignore this particular problem until it
swims up and bites you on the ass. >> Going back to how little
we see the shark in Jaws, the #sharkproblems that plague production
are probably the number one thing that helped the movie be what it is.
It forced Steven Spielberg and his crew to come up with creative solutions to working
around the malfunctioning turd, like this whole sequence with the barrels.
The idea of even attaching the barrels to the unseen shark was a direct
result of not being able to shoot with Bruce.
If it had been the era of digital effects they would never have come up with this
idea, which is easily one of the most memorable moments in the whole movie.
(Sound) Try this, I made it myself, pretty good stuff.
(Laugh) >> Thanks.
>> Let's end on a thing about Robert Shaw,
who played Quint.
Because Robert Shaw was a pretty legendary party animal, I mean the guy could drink.
But with a production that was already spiraling out of control,
the filmmakers wanted to rein him in a bit and would assign a PA to essentially
babysit him and make sure he didn't go off and get drunk between setups.
What happened instead was the second any real authority figures were
out of earshot, Shaw would take the PA to go get drunk with him
because he didn't like to drink alone. >> So
we drink our legs. >> (Laugh) The PA would get obliterated
and they'd have to send another PA to take the next drinking shift with Shaw.
In fact, when they shot this scene with the speech about the USS Indianapolis,
Shaw has real whiskey in his cup.
He actually wrote his speech for this scene himself, boom, bonus, thing.
But kept forgetting lines and going off his own script.
The next day Shaw apologized to Spielberg confessing that he was so racked out drunk
that he didn't remember anything and begged for another shot at it.
And they did do it again, but what we see in the final film are bits and
pieces from both days.
So there are parts of his speech where he's mid-blackout and
parts where he's Stone Cold Steve Austin.
I mean, sober.
The only way to really tell any difference is in some of the closeups
his eyes are watery on account of the hooch.
So have fun spotting the drunk takes the next time you watch Jaws.
Huzzah!
It's time for me to get out of here and force a PA to get loaded with me, but as
we often do, we have way more Jaws things that we didn't have time to get to today.
So with a thumbs up if you guys want a part two that doesn't acknowledge Jaws 2
or Jaws 3-D, or Jaws 4 Just Jaws,
that's the only one we're going to talk about, the only one.
Be sure to check out cinefix.com and subscribe for
more truish things about movies.
And sometimes malfunctioning mechanical turds
right here on things you didn't know.
(Music)