Imaginary Worlds - The Shark That Ate Hollywood

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

I didn't want the summer to end without joining in on the 50th anniversary celebrations of Jaws. I spent summers on Cape Cod as a kid, where I often heard that Jaws was filmed nearby on Martha's Vineyard. In fact, I recently went back and visited an exhibit on the 50th anniversary of Jaws at the Martha Vineyard Museum. So this week, I'm playing one of my favorite reflections on the 50th anniversary of Jaws -- an episode from the podcast Cautionary Tales. The host Tim Harford dives deep into the famously chaotic filming of Jaws, and he explores whether we can learn any lessons from the ordeal that young Steven Spielberg went through. This week’s episode is sponsored by Hims and The Perfect Jean. For simple, online access to personalized and affordable care for hair loss and more, visit Hims.com/IMAGINARY GET 15% off your first order plus Free Shipping, Free Returns and Free Exchanges at theperfectjean.nyc when you use code IMAGINARY15 at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them, and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinski. Growing up at Massachusetts, my family went to Cape Cod every summer. If you don't know the geography of the area, Cape Cod is a peninsula. It's about 70 miles south of Boston. And there are two major islands off the Cape, Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. Cape Cod and the islands have a long history. from the pilgrims to the Revolutionary War to the opening chapters of Moby Dick. But there's one piece of history that gets referenced the most.

Jaws was filmed on Martha's Vineyard. I was too young to see Jaws when it came out in the summer of 1975, but I did see Jaws 2 in the theaters on the Cape, and I wasn't scared because there was so much local pride that these movies were made there. They have also never stopped selling Jaws' merchandise, merchandise on Cape Cod and the islands. And that increased exponentially the summer because it is the 50th anniversary of Jaws. I went back to the Cape a few weeks ago. And these trips are always steeped in nostalgia for me. The sunlight has a pink and golden hue that feels warm and melancholy at

the same time. The air has a sea saltiness to it that I've never smelled anywhere else. And I love going back to the old restaurants that I used to go to as a kid with my grandparents. And I took a ferry to Martha's Vineyard. When I got off the boat, I took a taxi to the Martha's Vineyard Museum. They have a new exhibit on Jaws. And we shared a taxi with a family from the U.K. who were interested in seeing locations where Jaws was filmed. When I got to the museum, I asked a ticket taker, whose name is Julian,

how many people have come to see the Jaws exhibit this summer? it's hard to really think it's just been there's been so many people i want to say 500 000 maybe like no like that's that's how it feels to me but like it's this broke like every record the museum had for attendance like at the very height of the jaws week like i wanted to say like we had like 3,000 people in on one day like it was it was crazy yeah and the gift shop i assume is selling well yes The gift shop is telling very well. We have lots of exclusive museum Jaws merch here, and people have been absolutely eating them up.

Like, we've had to order more stock for them, as well as, you know, ship them out to people because, you know, people aren't always here on the island. I walked up to the exhibit where they had production sketches, script pages, tributes to the locals who helped make the film. Some of them actually appeared on screen. And I was actually kind of starstruck.

when I got to a glass case that had the jacket that was worn by the mayor. Oh, my God, this is so excellent. You might remember it's a light blue blazer with anchors stitched on it, which is so perfectly kitchy. They also had, in the exhibit, a fake, severed head from the film. Oh, this is the severed head. Oh, my God. The eyeball popping out. Wow.

Downstairs, there was a replica of the mechanical shark, or at least the head of the mechanical shark. That is incredibly unrealistically huge. I didn't realize how unrealistically huge that shark is. Wow. Jaws was not just a summer blockbuster. Jaws invented the summer blockbuster. We are still living in the movie landscape that Jaws helped create.

For comparison, in 1975, guess what movie was celebrating its 50th anniversary? The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Cheney. The Phantom of the Opera was a monster movie, but the difference between that 1925 black-and-white silent film and Jaws is gigantic. Now jump to 2025. One of the biggest movies this summer was Jurassic World Rebirth. The difference between that movie and Jaws is not a lot. Basically, it's just more monsters and digital effects. And of course, Jurassic World Rebirth is the seventh film in the Jurassic series, going back to Jurassic Park, which was directed by Steven Spielberg. Spielberg was 27 years old.

when he made Jaws on Martha's Vineyard. Everything that could possibly go wrong on that production went wrong. Before Jaws, he was a young guy with a lot of buzz around him in Hollywood, but he was mostly untested as a filmmaker. What he went through on the set of Jaws would have broken so many other inexperienced filmmakers. He came out of it with a masterpiece. He emerged as Stephen Spielberg.

I marinated in all the 50th anniversary celebrations of Jaws this summer. And the one that stuck with me the most was an episode from the podcast Cautionary Tales. The host of the show, Tim Harford, dives deep into the famously messy history of Jaws. And he explores whether there's anything we can learn from the experience that Spielberg went through. I thought I knew a lot about the making of Jaws, but I learned so much. much from listening to this episode, and I want to play it for you now. So here is the host of Cautionary Tales, Tim Hartford. It was a shark bigger than anything previously seen in these waters. Far bigger. The Great White is an apex predator, but this specimen was truly at the top

of the food chain. Normally a shark reaching 14, 15 or 16 feet would be considered large. But snout to tail fin, this monster measured 25 feet, the length of a school bus. Its body was thicker too, and its huge jaws were set with rows of jagged teeth, each one the size of a shot glass. Most great whites are content to feast on seals, small whales or other sharks, but this creature was billed as a true man-eater. This shark would swallow you whole, a little shaking, a little tenderizing, and down you'd go. Rumors of its existence had swirled around the island community of Martha's Vineyard since the early summer of 1974, but the creature only surfaced in the world.

waters of Nantucket Sound, as July gave way to August. When it breached, it did so in full view of several boatloads of horrified witnesses. This bad fish was the stuff of nightmares, and many there that day had endured sleepless nights dreading this encounter. But the reality was so much worse than they'd feared. We were very scared, said one onlooker, Richard Zannock. The shark came arching out of the water. Only it rose tail first, as if mooning Zanak and his crew. This animatronic prop would have been funny,

had so much money and so many reputations not been in serious jeopardy. Jesus Christ, said movie producer Zannock. We're making a picture called Jaws, and we don't have the fucking shark. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to another cautionary tale, marking 50 years of Jaws. The fiasco of the flopping and flailing mechanical shark was many months in the future when Hollywood producers Richard Zannock and David Brown sat down to a sumptuous lunch with the author of Jaws.

Peter Benchley, a jobbing journalist, had only recently completed his story of an Atlantic resort town terrorized by a giant shark devouring locals and vacationers alike. Being an unknown, Benchler's advance on the hardback had been modest. In fact, he'd been down to the last $600 in his checking account when a bidding war erupted over the paperback rights to his still unpublished novel. This, in turn, excited the interest of the movie, movie studios. At least one film company had sniffed at jaws and concluded that it would

be biting off more than it could chew. It seemed like an impossible tale to bring to the screen, requiring an absurd budget and pushing the bounds of any special effects then available. But Zannock and Brown fell hook, line and sinker for jaws. They weren't any richer than the other movie execs bidding for the rights, but they were confident that they could woo Peter Benchley into signing with them. They'd just promised to make Jaws a better film than their rival suitors. But over lunch, things were off to a shaky start. The producers, aware that this would be a tricky film to handle, had hired a well-regarded, well-established director to take the helm. This lunch was an opportunity to introduce him to Benchley. The director seemed enthusiastic enough

and explained his big plans for filming the whale. The whale? Benchley winced. The director plowed on opining more about the whale. It was on the third mention of a whale that Richard Zannock exploded. For God's sake, this is a fucking shark. The director was duly fired. For his replacement, Zanak and Brown were excited about a precocious young talent that recently worked with, but did he have the maturity and authority to keep such a movie from careering off into disaster? The kid can bring visual excitement to it, said Zanak,

and will give him the support he needs. The Kid was Steven Spielberg. If we had read Jaws twice, said Richard Zannock, we might never have made the movie. To make a picture called Jaws, you definitely need a shark. The titular Great White is the heart of the story, and the power of the novel is in the realistic portrayal of its deadly attacks on humans. Reading the book, 27-year-old Stephen Spielberg, have been left terrified. I felt like I'd been attacked.

he admitted. In turn, he wanted audiences jumping out of their cinema seats, as if they'd been hit with an electric cattle prod, and that wasn't going to happen with some scale model shark and actors on a soundstage in front of a blue screen. Jaws the movie would get laughed out of town. Spielberg insisted they film on the actual ocean and that the shark be as believed incredibly scary as possible. He had no idea what he was demanding. An early suggestion from the producers

was to use a real shark. Hollywood had a long history of hiring animal wranglers. They'd coaxed performances from Lassie the Collie, flipper the dolphin and cheater the chimpanzee. The producers had innocently assumed they could get a shark trainer, said screenwriter Carl Gottlieb in his behind. the scene's book, The Jaws Log.

With enough money, Gottlieb wrote, that trainer could get a Great White to perform a few simple stunts on cue. No Great White has ever been successfully held in captivity, and wild ones show scant interest in doing anything but swim and eat and make little sharks. And even had a wild fish been enticed into, performing on cue, Stephen Spielberg had no intention of getting into the water to film the creature. He was wise. A second unit had been sent to Australia, where 15-foot Great Whites were

common. They were to film underwater sequences with the diminutive actor standing in for one of the movie's principal stars. Less than five feet tall, this former jockey would make the real sharks looked much bigger. The pint-sized stuntman was protected from harm by a steel cage, but as he prepared to enter it, an excited Great White lunged for the boat and became tangled in the lines lowering the cage into the water. The frenzied thrashing and rolling of the one-ton shark crushed the cage like a beer can. The actor then, reportedly locked himself away in a cabin, refusing to come out until they were safely tied up at the dock. The footage was great, but this was clearly no way to make a whole film. As Carl Gottlieb

wryly observed, you couldn't work with a star who, when you shouted action, instead heard lunchtime. Guys, we can't shoot right now, hold on. Spielberg, a film buff since childhood, had the answer. Disney. The giant squid in Disney's 20,000 leagues under the sea had been terrifyingly realistic. They'd just hire the guy who made that to create their giant mechanical shark. So 64-year-old Bob Matty was brought out of retirement

and in a Californian shed he began work on three fake sharks. $175,000 had been done. budgeted for each of these three automotons at a time when a luxury Cadillac Coupe de Ville could be yours for under 8,000. Jules were slated for release in time for Christmas 1974, less than a year hence, so time was incredibly short. The fake fish would need to be working and in the waters off Martha's Vineyard in May, so principal photography could wrap before pesky tourists flocked to the resort come July. As Spielberg began storyboarding his film,

with a rearing, snapping shark in scene after scene, the mechanical creatures took shape. Bob Matty was indeed a special effects wizard. His models could swim and flap their tails, their jaws would chomp and their eyes would roll. It was all quite magnificent. The film crew headed east to start work, confident that the shark team would follow close behind. Spielberg playfully nicknamed the shark's Bruce, after Bruce Raymer, one of his lawyers.

Each Bruce was a marvel and by far the most ambitious practical movie effects ever created. If only someone had tested them in seawater. Cautionary tales will return in a moment. I'm always in denial when summer is coming to an end. The temperature is getting cooler, crisper, but I am stubbornly wearing shorts until I can't anymore. And then I pull on my jeans, and it's a weird experience. I mean, it's only been like four months since I've worn them, but it feels like I'm putting on clothes from high school.

They feel baggy, they look outdated. I need new jeans. But then I go online and I see jeans that are on these models and I think, all right, that looks good on that guy, but I don't look like that guy. That's where the perfect gene comes in. They have an incredible array of options from the thickness of the material to a wide range of colors and washes. The pair that I got looks form-fitting and stylish,

but it also feels loose and comfortable. They even offer Denkakis, which are a hybrid of denim and khakis, which is perfect for early fall. It's time to stop buying uncomfortable genes by going to theperfectgene.n.comyc. Our listeners get 15% off your first order plus free shipping, free returns, and free exchanges when you use the code imaginary 15 at checkout. That's 15% off for new customers at the perfect gene. using the promo code Imaginary 15. After your purchase, he'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you.

Stephen Spielberg and his exasperated crew soon had new nicknames for the malfunctioning model sharks. Jaws was replaced by flaws. The special effects team were rechristened special defects. When things got really bad, Spielberg called his mechanical actors Great White Tirds. Each bruce had performed well in freshwater tests, but on the rough ocean and in corrosive salt water,

everything began to fail. The lifelike neoprene shark skins soaked up water, adding vast weight to the model. This seawater also degraded the same. special paint coating, requiring new pigment to be flown out from California every day at great expense. The sharks were bolted to intricate platforms attached to the seabed, which became gummed up with barnacles and kelp. The hydraulic hoses that made each Bruce waggle began to fray, and worst of all, the electric switches that controlled their complex movements shorted out.

The first time a Bruce was towed out to sea and placed in the water, it sank. Bob Matty, like Victor Frankenstein, defended his monstrous creation from the angry film crew and promised things would soon improve. But it was clear Stephen Spielberg's plans were in tatters. The script was filled with shark, he lamented. Shark here, shark there, shark everywhere. The young director filmed what he could. Interior scenes, scenes on the docks, scenes on the beach, street scenes, all the time,

hoping Bob Matty would perform a miracle. But deep down, fearing that his burgeoning directorial career was about to sink without trace. The producers had budgeted for a tight 55-day location shoot that when the last of those days rolled around, June the 26th, not a single frame of mechanical shark footage had been captured. The opening scene of Jaws, both the book and film, is the savage death of lone swimmer Chrissy Watkins. Chrissy, oblivious to the killer shark cruising nearby, takes a leisurely moonlight skinny dip.

The awfulness of Chriss's death, with the shark toying with her as she cries for help, sets the tenor for the rest of the story. Spielberg thought that having Bruce burst from the water, jaws agape, would have been a spectacular opening for the film. That just wasn't going to happen. In Peter Benchley's novel, poor Chrissy never sees the beast that attacks her in the dark. And Spielberg followed suit. Using a specially designed waterproof box, he put his camera at water level to show Chrissy being tossed and mauled by an assailant just beneath the surface.

The actor playing Chrissy was strapped into a harness with ropes leading to two teams of stagehands on the beach. On cue, they'd whip her to and throw in the sea, though the instructions became confused, and the woman was pulled both ways at once, dragging her under. It's this take, where the actor's terror is possibly real, that made the final film. But she wasn't the only person on set struggling to keep her head, above water. Spielberg's bosses back in Hollywood started to suggest that the film be shut down. The young director was losing confidence in the project too, fearing it would be a turkey. His demands for realism were coming back to haunt him.

We were a bunch of upstarts who thought we could take on the ocean, said Spielberg. and you can't take on the ocean. Filming one scene, again using cinematic sleight of hand to make up for the lack of a working bruce, a boat was being tugged and towed to simulate an unseen shark that was ramming it. The motion proved too violent, and the boat sprang a leak and began to list.

She's going over! Went up the cry as a rescue craft raced to save her. the actors. This concern for the talent annoyed both the camera crew, who were about to lose a thousand feet of precious film to the sea, and the 70-year-old sound band who held his $50,000 tape recorder over his head and bellowed, fuck the actors, save the sound department. Such incidents didn't exactly endear Spielberg to his crew. They viewed him as a sort of Captain Bly, and mutiny was only ever a whisker away. They didn't have scurvy or anything, said Spielberg, explaining their anger,

but I wouldn't let them go home. Screenwriter Carl Gottlie thought the filmmakers were falling apart before his eyes. Cold, bored, missing home and missing out on other work, he worried that mental exhaustion and alcoholism was on the horizon. Sensibly, a beer ban was introduced at sea. Shooting a movie on location is a laborious business, but on water, progress proved glacial. Even without the misbehaving bruises,

the tides dragged boats off their marks, unexpected storms brewed, and actors fell overboard, causing more delay as dry costumes and fresh makeup were sent for. The script also called for a horizon clear of other craft, since when the film's hero set off to kill jaws, they're supposed to be far from help of any kind. But as the summer of 1974 progressed,

Martha's Vineyard became its usual magnet for yachts and pleasure boaters. Each time a boat came into frame, the camera stopped and the crew moodily waited for it to pass. Every hour of filming at sea was costing $2,000 and back on land, the budget for food and accommodation was rocketing as the island's economy switched to summer pricing. No one has ever taken a film 100 days over schedule, fretted Spielberg.

I'll never work again. Jaws should never have been made. It's a piece of shit. Actor Robert Shaw, himself an accomplished novelist, was no fan of Peter Benchley's story. The 48-year-old British star was a late addition to the cast, signing on just days before production started. Despite his reservations about the source novel,

the experience Shakespearean reluctantly agreed to play Quint, a grizzled and fiery shark fisherman. Shaw was a masterful actor, but he had a flaw. They do tend to drink when totally bored, he admitted, and with the constant delays on set, Shaw got bored, totally bored. A production assistant was charged with keeping the actor off the booze, but the second Spielberg's boat chugged out of the harbour,

Shaw would nod his head towards the nearest bar. Let's go, kid. Another of Robert Shaw's predilections proved even more disruptive than his drunkenness. Shaw developed a deep antipathy for one of his co-stars, and as they spent hour after hour at sea together, Shaw made his dislike for the man all too clear. He could be vicious, said Richard Dreyfuss, the young actor playing a cocky marine biologist

to Shaw's weather-beaten seafarer. Shaw didn't appreciate Dreyfus's approach to acting, nor his lack of stage credits. He'd even whisper criticisms of his co-star's performance seconds before a scene, Justice Spielberg was shouting, Action! The older star began calling Dreyfus,

fat and sloppy and complained that Dreyfus never stopped talking. It got ugly, said Spielberg. A particular low came when a scene required Dreyfus to be showered with sea spray, so sure, off-camera, grabbed the fire hose supplying the water and directed it straight into his co-star's face. The cycle of humiliation was repeated day after day. Shaw's frustration and boredom prompted him to drink, and the drink awakened in Shaw what Dreyfus described as an evil troll.

Shaw's a perfect gentleman whenever he's sober, said an observer, all he needed was one drink, and then he turned into a son of a bitch. Perhaps weary of attacking Dreyfus over his acting, Shaw began to set his co-star outlandish challenging, asking Dreyfus to perform press-ups and sit-ups to prove himself. Finally, Shaw proposed a wager. For $100, would Dreyfus climb to the top of the tall mast on their boat and jump off into the ocean?

He had my number, said Dreyfus, who found himself unable to just ignore Shaw's bullying. Jaws was now weeks behind schedule and millions. over budget. The crew were rebelling, the locals were increasingly resentful of their presence, and Bruce, the mechanical shark, was still not working. Could things get any worse? Perhaps if one of the movie's lead actors took a high dive off a mast and into the brooding ocean, cautionary tales will be back. Men value different things about their parents, but if you're a guy who really cares about your hair and it's slowly going away, you might be feeling discouraged. When you look at the mirror,

you might see Lex Luthor when you'd really rather be looking at Superman. Hymns offers convenient access to a range of prescription hair loss treatments with ingredients that work. Hems brings expert care straight to you with 100% online access to personalized treatments that put your goals first. No hidden fees, no surprise costs, just real personalized care on your schedule. You could see results in as little as three to six months. For simple online access to personalized and affordable care for hair loss, ed, weight loss, and more, visit hymns.com slash imaginary. That's hymns.com slash imaginary for your free online visit.

Hymns.com slash imaginary. Individual results may vary based on studies of topical and oral monoxide and finasteride. Prescription required. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. I don't care how much money he offers you. You're not jumping off the mast. Not in my movie. Stephen Spielberg had finally intervened in the battle between his stars.

Shaw's bet with Dreyfus was off. The director could stall the studio shutting him down over the malfunctioning sharks and the unreliable weather, but not if he let one of his stars drown on a dare. This excitement over, the more normal rhythm of the location shoot resumed. Delay, delay, delay. And still no working roofs. Have that belt go out and fully anchor.

We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make this movie sitting around for seven, eight hours waiting for the Sharp to work, said Spielberg. This all sounds infuriating, but maybe these delays made jaws not worse, but better. Do you do your best? work under a bit of time pressure, against a tight deadline, say. If your answer is yes, then you're not alone. It's certainly not uncommon to hear people say that creativity is spurred on by a ticking clock. In April 1970, an explosion wrecked the oxygen tanks inside Apollo 13.

Houston, we've had a problem. The three astronauts inside were headed for the moon, but now had to hunker down in the small lunar module designed to hold just two. If the men were to survive the trip home, they'd need to improvise a system to remove deadly carbon dioxide from the air in their craft, using only the items available inside,

from bits of cardboard to plastic bags. Okay. That's two lithium hydroxide canisters and one roll of that special grey tape. At Mission Control, engineers worked feverishly to bodge something together and compose a list of verbal instructions which would be clear enough for the cold, tired and oxygen-starved astronauts to follow. Okay, remove the inner bag from the outer bag, Cut the inner bag along the heat seal along one side.

The filter built in this way wasn't pretty, but it worked, and the men were saved. A win then for creativity under pressure and evidence that deadlines focused the mind. Well, the Harvard Business Review wasn't convinced. A 2002 paper, Creativity Under the Gun, examined examples. where, indeed, time pressure had produced impressive results, such as the Apollo 13 explosion. But the author's actual research findings were more surprising. Teresa Amarbelay, Constance Noonan Hadley, and Stephen Kramer,

collected 9,000 diary entries from 177 employees across seven US companies that asked those workers to note how time pressure they felt during the day, but also described something that stood out in their minds about each day. In a sad indictment of the modern workplace, most of the diarists felt they were operating under time pressure nearly every day. While some workers felt burned out by this, others did relish it,

writing that their teams were pulling together and making progress. But when the Harvard Business Review team dug a little deeper, they found that far from being spurred on, NASA's Apollo 13 engineers, workers under the gun were usually less creative. Working in a hurry often means firefighting and multitasking, scheduling meetings, replying to emails, attending meetings, replying to more emails, leaving precious little time to focus on the primary work task at hand. One comment that summed up most of the diaries was, the faster I run, the behinder I get.

And the first thing to get jettisoned when time was tight seemed to be creativity. Just 5% of the thousands and thousands of diary entries written on busy days reported that any playful and creative work had been produced. The Harvard Business Review authors argued that, of course, creativity was possible under a time crunch, but only in very specific circumstances. The Apollo 13 engineers were able to give the carbon dioxide problem their fullest attention,

no multitasking for them, and the imminent deaths of the astronauts gave them more than enough motivation to see their task through. But in most situations, the experts concluded that the cornerstones of creative work, exploration, idea generation, and experimentation, Just didn't happen when workers were scrambling against the deadline. Don't be fooled into thinking that time pressure will in itself spur creativity. The Harvard Business Review warned bosses, That's a powerful illusion, but an illusion nonetheless.

Jaws began as the ultimate tight deadline movie. The producers wanted the film to wrap. in just 55 days before high summer on Martha's Vineyard and ready for Christmas 1974, the traditional big release season, but also in time to benefit from the buzz around the novel. This was a mammoth task. First, Spielberg had to turn Peter Benchley's sprawling book with its endless side plots and incongruous sex scenes into a workable script.

Robert Shaw wasn't the only person to think that the novel was a piece of shit. Spielberg supposedly said the same, which got back to Peter Benchley. Spielberg knows flatly zero, retorted the novelist. He is B-movie literate. The row blew over, but Spielberg then had to find someone other than Benchley to crank out a screenplay, storyboard the resulting script, cast the roles, set Bob Matty to work on his sharks and establish a floating location shoot.

All this in a matter of weeks. Talk about multitasking. Much as Peter Benchley was wrong to insult Spielberg's storytelling skills, the director himself admits that in all the hurry, he was in danger of making a fairly standard monster flick. one where the shark might be seen in the very first scene but the constant delays

gave him room to reconsider it was good fortune that the shark kept breaking says Spielberg because I had to be resourceful figuring out how to create suspense and terror without seeing the shark itself the script went through several iterations

but what made it to the screen was the version Spielberg hammered out at night in the house he shared with Carl Gottlieb on Martha's Vineyard. This fits with another finding of the Harvard Business Review. Creativity comes with collaboration, but most especially when just two Confederates work together. The paper argued that having a single focal point to bounce new ideas off might help people stay oriented toward the work.

The other thing that Spielberg had spare time for, thanks to the delays, was working with his actors. The director had found the characters in Benchley's novel too flat and unlikable. But he hit on a way to make them more appealing and relatable. He encouraged his cast to improvise. Shaw, Dreyfus and the rest would belly ache about sitting around, waiting for the shark to work, but they also had time to really think about their performances. One of the film's greatest lines, when Jaws surfaces right beside Robert Shaw's fishing vessel, the orca,

and he's told, you've got to need a pick of your coach. Was pure improvisation, and never in the script. Likewise, a monologue delivered by Shaw. In it, his character explains that his deep hatred for sharks stems from a grisily wartime experience being shipwrecked in waters infested with them. No distress signal had been sent. This speech had already passed through the hands of several script doctors,

but Shaw edited the lines and took them to Spielberg and Gottlieb after dinner one evening. I think I have a version that will work, he told them. It was a showstopper, said Richard Dreyfus, whose character sits by, Besides Shore, as he tells the grim tale of his shipmates getting eaten one by one. You know the thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When he comes at you, it doesn't seem to be living until he bites you. And those black eyes roll over white and then, oh, then you hear that terrible high-pitched screaming. The ocean turns red, and in spite of all the pounding and the hollering, they all come in, they rip you to pieces.

Dreyfus and Shaw had been at loggerheads throughout production. Sitting together hour after hour in boredom had sparked a bitter conflict. But more canny observers saw some method to Shaw's mad baiting of his co-star. I think it was absolutely planned, said one of the crew. Shaw knew the plot called for antagonism between his salty old mariner and the cocky upstart marine biologist. If Shaw could get Dreyfus to hate him in real life,

then further acting wouldn't be required. The malfunctioning Bruce's just gave Shaw the time he needed for his plan to play out. and interestingly Shaw's show-stopping monologue marks a pivot in the script by showing his vulnerability and humanity the fisherman wins over the marine biologist

and a friendship blossoms in real life Shaw's baiting of Dreyfus also stopped the second Spielberg called cut on the scene On August the 18th, 1974, weeks and weeks behind schedule, Bob Mattis Sharks began to work as planned. Filming wrapped on September the 18th,

though the director hadn't stuck around for the final shots, he'd caught wind of a crew plot to throw him in the water the second the camera stopped rolling. He wisely fled back to L.A. to avoid their disgruntlement. The endless delays had taken their toll. Spielberg began having nightmares regularly for the next three months. There were still pickups to shoot, including a scene completed in the warm tranquility of an L.A. swimming pool and editing.

Jaws, now wildly over budget, would miss its lucrative Christmas release window. But the film was good, excellent even. Test audiences loved it, and the critics were bowled over. A problem-plagued film turned out beautifully, wrote Variety. The critics were especially impressed by Spielberg's restraint in not showing the shark for the first 82 minutes of the film, making the unseen beast all the more terrifying, for its invisibility.

The lack of explicit carnage also had the added bonus of making Jaws a PG movie, meaning whole families could go see it and widening its box office potential. Summer was, until then, a dead zone for new releases, but Jaws upended that.

It turned a profit just two weeks after opening in June 1975, and by Labor Day, it was the most successful motion picture in history. The age of the summer blockbuster had dawned, and Hollywood was transformed. And this runaway success of Jaws was in no small part down to the delays

caused by Bob Matty and his mooning fish. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Pushkin Industries. Cautionary Tales is available wherever you get your podcasts. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon.

Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. If you support the show on Patreon, at different levels, you get either free, World stickers, a mug, or a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. Another way to support the show is to recommend it to a friend, post about it on social media, or leave a nice review wherever you get your podcasts. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at Imaginaryworldspodcast.org.