Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - S11E13 - My Best Mistake "Bonus" Pod to celebrate Canada Reads on CBC

Episode Date: April 4, 2022

To celebrate Canada Reads on CBC this week, here is the first chapter of Terry's latest book, "My Best Mistake". Enjoy! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,

who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please, do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan, you just have to love storytelling.

Subscribe now, and don't miss a single beat. This is an apostrophe podcast production. You're so king in it. Your teeth look whiter than noon, noon, noon You're not you when you're hungry You're a good half with all the teeth You're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly. Today's CBC show was an encore broadcast of one of our favorite episodes in celebration of Canada Reads.

It's an episode all about books, titled Bookmarks. Because this episode already resides in our archives, Season 4, Episode 21, we didn't want to send it out to our listeners twice. So we thought we would send you something a little different. Here is the first chapter from my latest book, titled My Best Mistake. It's a book about people who made catastrophic career decisions, but it ended up being the best thing that ever happened to them. Here's Chapter 1. It's all about the movie Jaws and the huge mistake Steven Spielberg made.

Chapter 1. Jaws. You're going to need a better shark. When Steven Spielberg was given the green light to bring Peter Benchley's novel Jaws to the big screen, he was just 28 years old. He had made only one movie so far, titled The Sugarland Express. Prior to that, he had directed a few television shows like Night Gallery and Columbo and had done a few made-for-TV movies. One of those TV movies, Duel, was the dry run that would eventually land him Jaws. It was a story of a man being pursued by a mysterious and menacing

18-wheel tanker truck for no apparent reason. When Spielberg put himself up for the directing job for Jaws, he told the producers to watch Duel because it, too, was a story of someone being hunted by a powerful and mysterious force. Duel imparted other lessons to the young director. For instance, it contained a scene where Spielberg is mistakenly reflected in the glass of a phone booth. As he later said in an interview on Inside the Actor's Studio, when Duel was shown in Europe, there were in fact 18 different instances when Spielberg was visible because of the change in aspect ratio for the theatrical release.

Live and Learn When planning Jaws, Spielberg rejected the idea of using miniatures and shooting in Hollywood water tanks. With youthful bravado, he insisted on creating a full-scale mechanical shark and shooting in the ocean. He wanted realism. He asked his production designer, Joe Alves, to design a fully operational animatronic shark.

He explicitly wanted a full-scale 25-foot beast that could move and swim and attack like a real shark. He wanted the eyes to roll back, the gill slits to breathe, and the jaws to work. The request was unprecedented, even by Hollywood standards.

Alvis began with sketches of the shark based on Benchley's descriptions in the book. Then he sketched different actions the shark would have to perform in the storyline. Next, Alvis drew a schematic cross-section of the shark, showing the mechanics and pneumatic hoses required to manipulate the mass of creation. When he approached special effects experts with his plan,

they all said it couldn't be done. All except for one. His name was Robert Maddy. And he was convinced he could build it. As it turned out, Maddy couldn't build one shark to achieve everything Spielberg wanted, so he had to build three sharks. Each one had a steel skeleton, hydraulics to open and close its mouth, and air-powered mechanisms to make the various body parts move. One shark moved left to right with its hidden left side

exposing the vast array of hoses, wiring, and mechanics. One moved right to left with an open right side, and one fully skinned shark was attached to an adjustable arm on a 12-ton, 60-foot-long submersible steel trolley that moved back and forth on rails mounted on the seafloor. To achieve the realistic motion of a shark, the main model would require a barge and 14 operators to control all the moving parts via a set of 300-foot pneumatic hoses. It also required scuba divers to manipulate the other end of the shark, additional frogmen filming from underwater, and a second

barge for the camera and crew, all of which floated alongside Quint's hero boat, the Orca, named after the only natural enemy of the great white shark. Tests done in a freshwater tank at Universal Studios were tricky, but successful. Spielberg was optimistic. He nicknamed the 1.2 ton shark Bruce, after his lawyer, Bruce Raymer. But unbeknownst to them all, they had already made a corrosive mistake. Don't go away.

We'll be right back. Martha's Vineyard was chosen as the filming location because even 12 miles out to sea, the average depth of the water is only 35 feet. When Bruce was first lowered into the ocean off the vineyard, it sunk straight to the bottom.

But that wasn't the biggest issue. Almost immediately, the mechanics inside Bruce started to corrode. Leaks sprang everywhere, and soon the pneumatic hoses were compromised. Although an animatronic shark was difficult to work at the best of times, Bruce became increasingly unresponsive. Then the team slowly realized their mistake. No one had tested Bruce in salt water. This was an expensive mistake.

The three Bruce's already had a combined cost close to $250,000, a big bite out of the $3.5 million total production budget. An everyday Bruce malfunctioned, delayed the shooting schedule, and increased overages. As the problems kept mounting, the crew began quietly referring to the film as flaws. Spielberg was filming a movie about a great white shark that made an appearance on a majority of the script pages.

He didn't have years of experience to fall back on, but he knew it would easily take another month to rebuild a saline- proof shark, and his budget only allowed for 55 principal shooting days. He had two immediate thoughts. First, he needed a solution, and he needed one fast. Second, he feared his career as a filmmaker was over. But obstacles often generate astonishing waves of creativity. Spielberg, faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, sat in his hotel room one night and asked himself,

how would Hitchcock handle the situation? Then it came to him. What we can't see is the most frightening thing of all. So Spielberg began rewriting the script to employ invisible terror. It's astounding to think that, at this point, Spielberg is on location with no working script and no shark. He decided to shoot many of the scenes from a shark's eye view and had his director of photography

devise a platform that lowered the camera to water level. Skimming a giant dorsal fin and tail through the water would easily suggest the awe-inspiring length of the shark, and when he added the scene with the yellow barrels, they could imply the speed and power of the shark, and when he added the scene with the yellow barrels, they could imply the speed and power of the terrifying beast. The piece de resistance would come

in the post-production stage, compliments of composer John Williams. His simple yet terrifying two-note motif would become the shark, intense in volume and tempo when the shark was approaching, diminishing as the shark swam away. Williams has described it as, quote,

grinding away at you just as a shark would do, instinctual, relentless, unstoppable, unquote. It was an astonishing feat of sound and silence, with a heroic French horn counter melody, possibly representing the Ahab-like quest of Quint, Hooper, and Brody set against the menacing two-note assault, with hints of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring so intricately folded in, then severing stillness. The only shark in many of the most memorable attack scenes was William's two-note masterpiece.

Maybe the best example is the opening skinny-dipping scene, when Chrissie is thrashed back and forth in a terrifying attack. The actor wore a harness attached to two different cables run through submerged 300-pound weights. One cable was pulled by eight men on the beach and the other was manned

by Spielberg. The very first shark bite jerk down was done by Spielberg and the subsequent sudden moves were the result of back and forth pulling from both ends. According to the sound technician on the film, there was a miscalculation when both cables were yanked at the same time.

The sudden cross-tension broke some of the actress's ribs. She screamed, and when she did, she went underwater. According to the sound man, she started saying, Please God, dear God. The water was rolling in her mouth and the word God would come out sporadically. She was in agonizing pain. That moment, that very scream, is the scene that is in the film. Another toe-curling scene showed two fishermen trying to catch the shark to collect the bounty money

when the dog they are standing on breaks away. Then it slowly turns to surge back toward them as they flail their way to shore. We never see the shark in either scene. No teeth, no fins, no lifeless black eyes.

Yet, the predator is absolutely vivid in our imaginations, all due to William's visceral score. It's hard to believe in hindsight, but the great white shark doesn't make a full appearance in the two-hour film

until the one-hour and 21-minute mark. And get a load of this. It only had 4 minutes of actual screen time. Yet, moviegoers saw the shark in their minds for 2 full hours and probably for quite a few days after they got home. Many of us still see it in our minds 46 years later whenever we're near the ocean. Even though it took 159

days to complete filming instead of the original 55, and the budget ballooned 100% to $7 million, Jaws was the first film in history to break $100 million at the box office. It became

the highest-grossing film of all time after just 78 days in theaters. It delivered a domestic gross of $260,798,300 and a worldwide haul of $470,653,000. The movie heralded the arrival of the summer blockbuster. It won three Academy Awards, including one for John Williams' original score. Jaws put the young Steven Spielberg

on the map. It is on the American Film Institute's list of best films of all time. And the saltwater mistake is easily forgivable. Spielberg has said the failure of Bruce the Shark contributed at least $175 million to the box office take. That was Chapter 1 of my latest book, My Best Mistake.

Hope you enjoyed it. You can find it at your favorite bookstore, or you can download the audiobook from Audible. See you next week.