WHAT WENT WRONG - Jaws (1975)

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

It’s shark week! We got broken sharks, decaying sharks, Bruce the shark, and horse jockeys getting attacked by real sharks. Regarded by many as the original blockbuster, Jaws garnered grade-A respectability for B-movies and, in the process, established inexperienced, 26-year-old filmmaker Steven Spielberg as a director for the history books.Guest-hosted by our friends at the CineNation Podcast!Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here with your other host. Chris Winterbauer. We are very excited because for the second time, we are going to be inviting some special guests on the show. Very special indeed. Today we're thrilled to welcome Brandon Sparks and Thomas Horton of the Sinanation podcast, where they talk about film genre in notoriously long-winded fashion. that is what they told me right before we started recording. Thomas is coming to us from Atlanta, where he is working on an undisclosed film production. Atlanta. Is that what the kids still call it?

No, they don't. Be careful. You will be ostracized if you call it that. It's Yollywood, Thomas. Remember it's Yollywood? No one calls it that either. And Brandon is just a couple miles away in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, where it is over 100 degrees right now.

Yeah. It's very great. Thank you guys so much for joining us. Please tell us about the movie that we are talking about today. So today we're talking about Jaws, 1975 blockbuster film Jaws. I'm a big Spielberg fan. I'm a big Jaws fan. Thomas, you are.

Yeah, I mean, it's the blockbuster. It's the OG. It's a classic. It's a great summer movie, especially for right now, with it being over 100 degrees where you guys are. But it's one of those movies I come back to every 4th of July. So it's burned into my brain from years of exposure. It's also weirdly still relevant in a way with some of the politics of it all.

I won't go to even that right now, but later. But Lizzie, what you're saying? Sorry. I'm just going to say, for anyone that doesn't know, because I was actually shocked to find out from a close friend of mine last night that she had never seen Jaws. So for anyone that does not know, Jaws is about Roy Shire. A police chief from New York City, I think, moves to the fictional town of Amity in New York,

sort of like a Marcus Vineyard. I think it was shot on Marcus Vineyard. I'm sure he'll get into that. And with his family, basically, as soon as he gets there, people start getting at by a big old shark. And then it comes down to him, Richard Dreyfus, and my personal favorite, Robert Shaw, as Quint to hunt down and destroy Jaws. My wife and I watched it last night, Carmela, who Thomas and Brandon know, and she's like, I don't think I've ever seen this movie. And then by the end of the movie, she had both hands on her face like this every time the shark would come into frame.

David had seen it and he was screaming by the kid. My mom saw this in theaters when it first came out. And I asked her, I was like, so what was it like? She was like, it was terrifying. And I was like, oh, there's a reason why we're not beach people. Like, I never went to the beach growing up. And I think I know why, because she was 14 when she saw it. this.

Yep. My parents were, my parents were scared to show it to me because I was a big Spielberg fan. I loved E.T. as a very young kid. And I wanted to, at some point I heard about Jaws.

I was like, I want to see Jaws. And we were, I was from the beach. Like, we were beach people. We live there. And my mom was like, I can't show him this. He'll never go in the water.

Yeah. And it did, it did not phase me. It really, this one, a lot of, a lot of movies that shouldn't have scared me did. Yeah. But for some reason, this one didn't. Yeah, I didn't,

I didn't see the beach until I was 17 years old. That's like literally what like how bad it affected. That Jaws and the Exorcist were two films. My mom were like terrified of when she saw way too young and we're not Catholic either. So I guess that's why. I don't know. But yeah, so we've talked about like the synopsis of Jaws and how it was kind of the OG blockbuster. In Hollywood like the term blockbuster was used very sparingly before this film.

It was a rarity that it was talked about as a blockbuster and this kind of defined that. But it was a constant battle with countless script rewrites, upset locals, and Marquisites. Arthur's Vineyard. They filmed on the ocean. It was the first studio to do so. And of course, that damn great white shark that became the huge battle the entire time. The history's crazy. And it's adapted from a book. Usually a successful book has a built and following, which is why many producers seek them out. And that's what happened when two producers, Richard D. Zanick and Brown did when they came to Jaws. Zanick and Brown had been the business of movie making since the early 1950s, working for fame Daryl Zanick, who was Richard's father and co-founder of 20th century Fox.

Yeah, we actually just talked about Dick Zanick in Dr. Doolittle. Yes, I was about to bring that. Daryl, he fired Richard at Fox because of a studio shakeup to save his job. And some of the reasoning was kind of because of Dr. Doolittle. So, but yeah, so after they left, like Zanick and Brown were wanting to produce movies and say, once Universal Pictures. And their first big success was the Oscar-winning film, the sting. They were executive producers, but it was like the first time in a while that Universal

had won an Oscar, and they were involved in that. And so they had started making a few like B movies. Thomas, can you talk about Blake what a B movie is compared to like an A movie? Yeah, so a B movie is generally, I mean, the idea comes from back when you used to do double features, especially at a drive-in. You would have your A movie, which you showed first, and then you would have your B movie, which was second, and it usually showed later, and it was the late night movie. And so a lot of people would just leave after the A. Yeah. And so a B movie is what we generally think of now is like very schlocky, like a monster movie or an adventure film. And so a lot of like action movies at this point are what we would describe as like action or thriller were thought of as as

B movies. They weren't really prestige films. They weren't big audience getters. They were for the people that stayed up late and they stayed through the whole double feature. Yeah. Like you had people who were turning out these B movies around this time. And they were these like schlocky horror films. One of them was the original Little Shop of Horrors and I think the early 60s. And so that's what Zanick and Brown were kind of making it universal. And they wandered upon this book. And they caught wind of this massive paperback deal for unpublished novel Jaws written by a first time author Peter Benchley. And Benchley, who was like near broke, made a deal for the pairback rights of his book that was worth $575,000, which is about $3.3 million today.

Holy shit. And like, so when he turned in the book, he was like, I think he had like $600 in his bank account is what it was. And so Zanick and Brown caught wind of it. They read it when it was still like in like manuscript form. It hadn't been published yet. And they said it was the most exciting thing they'd ever read. And they read it like one night. And they purchased the film rights for $175,000, which is a.

about a million today. And in the contract, they agreed to let Peter Benchley write the first few drafts of the script. Uh-oh. Is that not going back to haunt them? Somewhat, yes. The director who comes in definitely wants to change the script. After they purchased the rights of the book, Anakin Brown were on the search for a director to helm this aquatic horror film that never really been done on this large of a scale.

And they initially wanted to find an older, like, experience. director from the old Hollywood system in some way. And they thought about hiring this director, John Sturgis, who directed such films as The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen and The Magnificent Seven, the Western from the era. I think Universal said no. And so they wanted to go with a younger director then. And this younger director had just released his directorial debut. And that was a man by the name of Dick Richards, not Stephen Spielberg.

He had just directed his directorial debut. It just came out. they met with them. I think they might have offered it to him. There's been conflicting reports of what actually happened. But I know the reason why they fired him or decided not to go with them is he kept referring to the shark as a whale in all their meetings. And they're like, it's a shark. Please like refer to it as a shark. And they're just like, you know, we can't go with this guy. So in Walk Steven Spielberg. And now Steven Spielberg was not the person we know him as today. At this point, he was a 26-year-old director who was seen by many as an inexperienced filmmaker.

And Spielberg, like many of his directing peers, was a part of this new Hollywood movement that was kind of sweeping the film industry. Yeah, so this is the generation that is most commonly known as the film brats. It was a group of, it was really the first class of filmmakers to be making movies who were raised on movies. You know, everyone beforehand was just kind of of making it up as they went. But in the 70s, you started getting people like Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, Scorsese, all these directors who had grown up on movies. They loved, like, classical Hollywood studio films.

And they, almost all of them went to film school to be filmmakers. Most of them all went to very prestigious film schools, either that or they made the film schools prestigious by going there and graduating from there. And Spielberg was really the only one to not go to one of the, like, you know, the big four, I guess, UCLA, NYU, USC. But yeah, Spielberg was the reject from all of those. Yeah, he got rejected from USC, I think twice is what it was. And so he was attending California State University at Long Beach.

And while at school, he received an internship at Universal Studios in the editing department. And there's a weird, there's kind of a whole interesting history with Spielberg of how when he was a young kid and visiting his family is like, I think, aunt and uncle in L.A., he snuck onto the Universal Studios lot, kind of like found a empty office and pretended that he actually worked there. He had like a three-day pass and then just kept coming back and no one told him to leave. So he spent the entire summer, like going to the egg department,

taking meetings, like just weird stuff when he was like a young kid. Hitchcock was shooting a film at Universal and he snuck on and they kicked him off within 10 minutes. Like, who the hell is this kid? Why is he here? The kid had guts. So he was at Universal's internship. He directed a short film called Amblin, which layer became the title of his company.

and that gained the attention of Sid Scheinberg, who was the vice president of Universal Studios. And Scheinberg liked Spielberg and signed him to a seven-year directing contract at the age of 21. He would then drop out of school and begin directing several television shows, including his first one was the pilot episode for a night gallery, which was like a kind of a horror anthology series. And that's with Joan Crawford, isn't it? Yes, it was exactly. He did it with Joan Crawford. Yeah, man, that's a rough first. first go probably.

What do you, 21 years old directing Joan Crawford sounds just like a nightmare. Absolutely terrifying. Yeah, just terrifying. She apparently really liked him is what it was. She thought, and he also really liked her. Interesting.

That she thought he was young, but like he had a lot of knowledge with filmmaking. And he was met with pushback on set because a lot of the people that were working on set were like guys in their 50s and 60s who were still wearing suits to be a gaffer on a TV show. And Spielberg's coming. looking like a hippie with long hair.

And Spielberg was like the least hippie person I would put in that category. But to them, he was this young rebel kid. So after the success of that, he started directing Made for TV movies. The first being a movie called Duel. And it ended up getting a theatrical release overseas, but not in the U.S. But it gained him a lot of traction. And that's when he got his first theatrical feature called the Shiglin Express, which is a couple on the run movie starring Goldie Hahn, and it was for Universal.

And the producers for that film were Richard Zanick and David Brown. After working together, Spielberg was in the offices of Zanick and Brown, and he saw the manuscript for Jaws, the novel. And he loved the book. They loved working together. And they offered him the job. After he accepted, he had second thoughts because he was worried about being typecast as quote unquote, truck and shark director is what it was. Because of this B movie, schlocky stuff. Yeah, like the unseen monster.

chasing character throughout the movie. Because that's, he saw it as like, oh, like, either it's like it's couples in a car going across the country or it's this guy on the highway being chased by a truck or this every man being traced by a shark. He just like, I don't want to do that. So he wanted to jump ship and go over to 20th Century Fox to direct this movie called Lucky Lady that starred Gene Hackman, Bert Reynolds, and Liza Minnelly. And Universe, it's like a prohibition era dramedy.

I think they actually also shot on the water and it went terribly, but it was a a good movie. Oh, that was made? It was made. I've never even heard of that. Okay. I rented it. I was thinking I was going to watch it beforehand.

I decided not to because I wanted to rewatch Jaws instead. So Universal vetoed his departure and David Brown was like, after Jaws, you can make all the films you want. It's going to be a big hit. Spielberg signs on and now are starting to do the script. From 1973 to 74, there were two things that were possibly going to happen that could mess up the production of Jaws. Two labor strikes were on the Hurststress.

were on the horizon. A writer's guild strike and a screen actor's guild strike. Principal photography was scheduled for May 1974 for a total of 55 days with a budget of 3.5 million. The plan was to be done shooting

by the end of June to kind of bypass that possible actor strike. No studio wanted to be in production on a big film during that time. Oh my God, that's so short. That seems like an insanely short amount of time to shoot jaws.

Exactly. It's like, so the plan was 35, days on land, 20 days on the water. Spielberg, at later said he was very naive of like, I really thought we could do it. And I realized we probably should have shot on a tank. Which you guys talked about on water world. That was his big thing of like, do not shoot on the water. Don't shoot on the water. To Kevin Costner, don't shoot on the water, no matter what. And we'll go into it, but everyone goes crazy, basically. So Spielberg began working with Peter Benchley on the first drafts of the script. And before working on the script, Spielberg had told Zanick and Brown that his favorite part of the book was the third act on the water.

And he hated everything else. And he wanted to change the entire first two acts and do like an original screenplay. So they worked together, Benchley wrote the first three drafts the script. In the end, he said the only things that were mine were the storyline, the basic plot, and the ocean stuff. So everything Spielberg said he wanted to keep. He kept. He didn't like a lot of the subplots that were in the novel. one of them dealt with the mayor of the town having ties with the mafia.

They cut that out completely. Yeah, don't need it. Exactly. Another was the big thing they cut. It was a love affair between Chief Brody's wife, Ellen, and Matt Hooper, who is Richard Dreyfus' character. What? Really don't need it. So they cut, he was like, we don't need it, cut it out, simplify it.

Roy Scheider is way too much, like, so much sexier than Richard Dreyfus. Yeah. Yeah. But no one would have ever believed. They'd have been like, what are you talking about? I mean, I've never read the book, but there had to have been some sort of, some sort of character to Hooper other than just being obsessed with sharks. Yeah. Because he's, I mean, he's rich.

He's not attracting Roy Shider's wife with his just constant shark talking. All he cares about is sharks. Sharks are the best. Apparently, when Dreyfus was later cast, Spielberg said, don't read the book. We're not doing anything like the same with that character. It's all going to be different. Spielberg was wanting to make Hooper like Spielberg's alter ego on film. So like if you're one's like what's closest to Spielberg, just like Matt Hooper and just

switch out sharks with film probably and that's pretty much probably 26 year old Spielberg. So they wanted to do a rewrite eventually scripts. Many of their writers turned them down, I assume because they probably didn't want to work on a shark movie. Had there really even been a shark movie before Jaws? Not to this, not to this caliber. Yeah, it seems like there have been some sharks in movies. But not a shark movie.

Exactly. That's the thing with this movie is to all these people in the industry on paper, this just looks like another late night monster flick. Exactly. And it's hard to emphasize, no, we're throwing a lot more money at this. And this guy Spielberg has got a different vision. Yeah, he's a young and experienced director. So they ended up getting one guy, Howard Sackler,

who was like a Tony Pulitzer Prize winning author who did an uncredited rewrite on it. He later co-wrote Jaws 2. But they did bring on, which I believe you guys talked about in Apocalypse Now, they brought on John Millius to an uncredited rewrite on the script. Yep. Because Spielberg and him were friends. As they were nearing in production, Spielberg wanted to add some humor to the film. So he contacted his friend Carl Gottlieb, a writer and actor that was working on the CBS sitcom, The Odd Couple.

He asked him for his thoughts and asked him if there was a role that he wanted to play. and Gottlieb sent him three pages full of notes, and he said he wanted to play the role of Meadows, who is the editor of the local newspaper. Gottlieb was hired as an actor and then offered to do a one-week dialogue polish. He would eventually become the primary screenwriter because he was constantly making changes on set the night before.

So they just used him since he was already on set doing the acting. Basically. And they're just like, go ahead and just do rewrites as we're doing it. What happened was, as he kept writing the movie, he kept writing himself out of the movie. because he realized how unimportant his part was. Damn, that's a good writer. Gottlieb, Spielberg, Richard Dreyfus,

and a couple other crew members were all living in a house together on Martha's Vineyard where they shot at. The plan was to be done before summer and Fourth of July happened. So now they have a location, they have a script, they have a director, now they're having to cast this thing. And they don't really nail the leads down until like a few weeks before shooting happens.

Richard Zanek and David Brown wanted Spielberg to cast known actors, and he agreed, but he didn't agree to casting big movie stars because he didn't want a big personality to pull the audience attention away from what was happening on screen. In his words, the superstar was going to be the shark. And the big challenges were the three leads. And for the lead of Chief Martin Brody, they offered it to Robert Deval. Deval was like, no, I only want to play Quint. And they're just like, thank you, but no. And then Charlton Heston wanted to play the role of Chief Brody

And Spielberg was like, Heston's too big On an actor So Heston had just finished doing Two Big Disaster Films, Airport 75 and Earthquake And Spielberg didn't think audiences would be scared If he was dealing with a shark In some small island town Because he just took on these huge big movies

Yeah, it's like a bad example But it would be like if you wanted to Someone was trying to make Jaws now And they cast The Rock Exactly Like that's what that sort of feels like The Rock's gonna go fist fight the shark is what's going to happen. Like, that's the thing. That's when Roy Scheider

hears about this project. He's at a party and he hears Spielberg talking about the movie to a screenwriter at the party. And Spielberg was initially hesitant to Cash Shider because he was mostly known for playing tough guy roles like the French connection and another movie, a cop movie called The Seven Ups. And I just want to give a shout because Thomas and I've talked about him on our podcast before. Roy Shider, to me, is one of the most underrated actors of the 1970s. Oh, he's amazing. From French Connection to Jaws to, and then we talked about all that jazz,

like he has so much range in all the movies he's in, and he kind of gets forgotten. Yeah. He's like a great character actor that takes lead roles. To me, he reminds me of Sam Rockwell. Now Sam Rockwell's known, and he gets his doom, but for a while he didn't. You know what I mean? Every project I've heard, Shider had to fight to get the role for it.

That's nuts. There's also like I can't, his role out of everybody in the movie in terms of Jaws is probably the most difficult one to carry because like he does it with such sort of there's such a level of like innocence there that you do believe and he does seem like a good person. But like one moment I remember that I didn't really notice before but watching it this time is when they think they've caught the right shark. And the way that he plays that that he's so excited. Yes. And like so happy that it's done. I was like, this is so good. Like, that's such a good choice to make there versus having any doubt.

Yeah, it's funny you bring that because I thought the same thing where he's like taking the pictures with like the fishermen and like so happy. He had something about him that isn't as talked about nowadays. So he gets cast. And then for the role of Matt Hooper, Spielberg initially wanted John Voight to play the role. He's going with a lot of like right wing guys. Yeah. And so then they, they were looking at people like Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bucer. Bottoms, who was in Pierre Bogdanovich's last picture show, which Thomas and I both love

and have talked about. They never officially offered it to them. And that's when George Lucas stepped and was like, hey, you should look at my guy Richard Dreyfus who did American Graffiti with me. And Dreyfus initially passed on the film because he didn't do one to do a shark movie. But after seeing a pre-release screening of his new movie called The Apprenticeship of Dutty Kravitz, he feared that no one would ever hire him again after seeing his performance. So he like, immediately accepted the role. He was like, I can't. I know who's going to hire me after this movie. Also, I think it's shocking because I told Thomas this, how in the hell Richard Dreyfus is 26 years old in this movie? He looks like he's 42. He's 45.

When they were trying to cast Bridges, I was like, well, Bridges was pretty young then. Like, I mean, Dreyfus is old. And I'm like, wait, he was 26. That's the difference of beard makes. Yeah. They also, like, they lived a little harder back then. They did. Which she apparently did on Martha's venue. during shooting because all the women apparently recognized him from American graffiti. And so once summer season started, he was going out every night. The hardest part to cast was the role of Shark Hunter Quint. And they initially wanted actor Sterling Hayden, who was in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and The Killing.

So I think he was like, I think he legit like grew up at sea or something. There was something in his background where he was like actually. He was a sailor and a Marine Corps officer. Thank you. He wanted to do it. everyone at Studio wanted to do it. The only person who didn't want him to do it was the U.S. government. Sterling Hayden was living in Paris at the time because he apparently had a little bit of a tax problem.

He could make money as a writer in America, but he could not be paid for his work as an actor because the money would go straight to the IRS. So it's nine days before production and the role of Quint has not been cast. That's when Englishman Robert Shaw steps in. And Shaw had recently worked with Zanagan Brown on The Sting, and they suggested him to Spielberg, and he was just finishing a run on Broadway for a play, so he was free. Only issue was that he lived in Ireland, and if he overstayed his work visa, he would owe the IRS money for the roles he took. So he put it in the contract that if they went over schedule,

the studio would pay for any fees that he owed the U.S. government. And Shaw was officially cast three days before principal photography began. Wow. Shaw, who's so hard to understand that when he talks about the Indianapolis, at the end of the movie, he's talking about how all of his, all of her friends got to eat by sharks or whatever he's saying, Carmela turns to me after the whole speech,

and she goes, I didn't understand a single word, he just said. And we had to rewind and turn on the subtitles that we can answer again. That's the only speech I could understand parts of. It's the parts earlier in the movie where he's like, I got a button in our fresh and part of the old Spanish.

Here's just swimming with bow neck and livin. Yeah. There's like one or two phrases. you can actually understand. And the rest of it, I feel like Richard Dreyfus' face is real when he's like, I don't know. I don't know what he's saying.

It's great because you can tell he's trying not to do an Irish accent, but whatever he lands on is just not any access. So apparently, for one, he based that voice on a local in town who had been like a fisherman for most of his life. And apparently at one point started recording his just him talking to himself. And Shaw would use that as inspiration for the voice of the character of Quint. and the guy is actually in the movie. He's the first one to talk to Dreyfus

when Dreyfus arrives on the island. He plays the guy they end up finding at night. Interesting. So, the Indianapolis speech to go on that because it's going to bring up that you couldn't understand him. Shaw was drunk most of the time on set, apparently. The worst day was when he did the Indianapolis speech where he was like, blackout drunk, had to carry him off set.

And the next day, he was like, you know what, I'm going to go stone cold sober and do the scene sober. So in the movie, they cut between his drunk scenes and his sober scenes. And that's how they made that scene work. It's a phenomenal scene. And because Shaw was a playwright is why they say he kind of wrote some of that part. So they go to shoot in Martha's Vineyard. Some of the locals weren't too keen of these Hollywood folks to come in and like shooting in their town.

And it was the first time it ever happened. And so the town was kind of equally divided on the film being there. Some of the locals tried to like steal stuff from set. some just try to like wreck havoc. My favorite story with the land scenes was it's the scene when they have the shark hanging up when they think they've caught it. They hired a bunch of local fishermen to capture a real shark like off Massachusetts, off Martha's Vanityard. I take it.

PETA was not on set for this shooting. Probably not. So they hire these local fishermen. They're like, hey, we can do it. We got it. Like we're great hunters. We're going to catch it. They keep calling and they're like, oh, we had bad weather the day.

We didn't get it. Oh, we'll do better tomorrow. Thursday it comes. They're like, hey, the shoots on Monday, where these guys out, we couldn't catch anything. They, in step two men, Teddy Grossman and Fred Zendar is his name. Grossman is a Hollywood stuntman who was working on the film, and he was a friend of the director of player personnel for the Miami Dolphins, and he calls him up and he's like, hey, do you guys have sharks down there?

They said they did. Zander is an old newsreel cameraman from the 1920s, and he's now serving as a Technical advisor for Jaws. His nickname, because he worked on hundreds of sea pictures, was named the ancient mariner, was what they nicknamed him because he was just this old dude who worked on all these, like, sea movies. He hung out with like Ernest Hemingway in Cuba. He was this real, just rough dude.

So Zander and Grossman had to fly down to Florida to find a shark. And they get when the Universal Executive calls up some friends who were sports fishermen down Sarasota, Florida as well. So they're going to stop by there too. They find themselves in an area in Sarasota, Florida. that's like deliverance, kind of swampy and just rednecking and all of stuff. I assume all of Florida is like deliverance. Except Orlando.

Yeah. So they hire these two men, we're going to call good old Florida always go catch a shark. It's Saturday morning. Shoots on Monday. This is insane, like a movie studio is relying on like four dudes in Florida to find a shark. Exactly. Because they're trying to find like a big enough, like a 13-foot tiger shark. Yeah, that's very specific.

Yeah. Saturday morning, that night, good old boys show up, 13 foot 750 pound tiger shark. The only issue is they now want more money. So Grossman haggles with them trying to make sure he doesn't give away his spending money for travel to fly back to Martha's Vineyard. They agree to, they agree to a price. The men agree to keep the shark overnight in a freezer and build a crate for a shark that can take on a plane. They're going to build the crate that's going to be full of rock salt and ice. And no commercial airline will take this 15.

foot casket on. Yeah. No, it's a shark box. That doesn't go on airplanes. Exactly. So the production executive hires a private jet because it's now Sunday and the shoots the next day. They get to the airport, but the forklift operator is not there.

And they now have to take this 1,200 pound crate and put it into the plane. And so you got the ancient mariner, the Hollywood stuntman, these good old boys and the pilot lifting this crate into this plane. The two guys can't fit in the plane. So one of them has to. fly with the shark while the other one takes a commercial flight out of Miami back to Martha's Vineyard. They get to the shark on Monday. And the thing about sharks are that they're all cartilage and not skeleton. So they decompose or ripe spoil quicker. So like by time they open the thing on

Monday by noon, the shark is ripe and smelling and they have to shoot this thing for like a few days. And like every day they're like putting on makeup to make it look like it's like not like decompose. Oh no. It just smells awful, I'm sure. Gotleap said that he had like always would go away from it to make sure that he wasn't smelling it. So now we get to the actual shark they build and they end up building three mechanical sharks for this movie. Zanick and Brown initially wanted to train a great white shark. Excuse me?

Yeah. They thought it would be possible. They actually shot footage in some of it's in the film where it's the Dreyfus character when he's in the cage. Yeah, the surreal shark above it. Yes. Yeah. So they hired a small actor who was 4'9, former horse jockey, and shot scenes with him in a real shark. And there's a scene when the shark bites through the cage and the guy's not in it.

Originally in the novel, Hooper's supposed to die. Because they get that footage of the cage being bitten into a no actor, Hooper has to live in the movie. Oh, interesting. So that's what changes Dreyfus's whole like trajectory as a character. Yeah, because he basically just was like, I'm going to go hide under these rocks until the end of the movie. So they get this guy, Bob Maddie, a former mechanic supervisor, to come out of retirement and build the shark. And they started building it and they start moving it to Martha's Vineyard from L.A. And the shark ends up gaining a nickname Bruce.

And I have a clip, we have a clip that we want to show of Spielberg talking about working with the shark. What do with your non-working shark problem? Did the shark's mechanical specialist have to rebuild the thing constantly? Well, the first mistake with the shark was they made a big mistake and they built it for fresh water. Now, they all knew we were going to the Atlantic Ocean, but for some reason they built it for fresh water. What's the difference? Well, electrolysis is a major problem when you get salt into all the machinery, into the electrical system. And so they tested the shark for the first time in the water, and we had at least 20 boats of tourists who had gathered around an area to watch the shark work.

And we had the shark on a huge 90-foot platform 30 feet underwater, and at the press of a hydraulic button and pulling a lever back, supposedly, the shark comes shooting out of the water head first. And this absolutely happened because David Brown, Dick Sannickson. where they're watching with me. The shark came up tail first. It just came up tail first, and it was like a 25-foot moon. And all of the tourists out there essentially went back, I guess we read Peter Bedford's book in hopes that the book would be more exciting in the movie.

But that was the first test of the shark. It was a total disaster. We never fixed the shark, but in the cutting room, I was able to use so little of it and imply so much more that when you find it, you find it, do see the shark, it's a little bit lethargic, and that's where it was where the story demanded that I show more than just the dorsal fin. That was the last few minutes of the movie. Interesting.

Yeah, a lot of times the shark didn't work. The saltwater got into it. The skin became eroded to where every day they had to repaint the shark. Their typical day for special effects team for the sharks was 1 a.m. to 6 a.m. shark was washed, repainted, and touched up. From 6.30 a.m., the shark was loaded onto a crate and towed out the location in the middle of the ocean. There are the miles off the shore where they had built a barge into the ground where they were going to shoot everything at. So the orca, which is the boat that Quentin all them were on, they had one that was a non-usable boat that just was staying out there and one that actually worked. The non-usible one was the one that was going to sink at the end of the movie. So 6.30 to 8 a.m., they would go out to the middle of the ocean.

When they got out there at 8 a.m., they had arrived, connect 30 control hoses that powered the shark because the shark was powered by compressed air. 9 a.m. They load the shark on this dolly platform and then perform like an operations test because the shark was just on a track in the water. And then they shoot until dark. After the shoot, they unplug hoses, take it off the platform and tow it back to Shark City, which is what they called their headquarters at Martha's Vineyard. They dry it off and then start repainting it for the next day. Oh my God. So it was this like 24 hour cycle dealing with this shark. First day they take it out there. There's a huge dent in the shark. that cost $50,000 to fix day one. Real quick on the barge that was out there, they kept all the equipment on the barge for all the film sets. And they had to hire security every night to stay out on the barge at night in the middle of the ocean. Yeah, so they didn't get, like, pirated in the middle of the night and, like, lose all their gear.

Because they were afraid that locals were going to come and steal it. One night, there was a huge storm, and the security guard was like, screw it, I'm leaving. I'm not going to be here for this. And so they had the next day tow all the equipment. back in from the ocean and back out and fix all that up. The orca that worked eventually sank because a hole broke into the bottom and water started pouring into the boat. So Roy Shider gets trapped, actually legit gets trapped in a cabin on the boat because that's where he was supposed to be. And like everyone's just jumping off the boat.

The cameras go to the bottom of the ocean floor and they have divers to go and get it. They ruin the camera. But Spielberg's assistant, who's also the editor's son, takes it, puts it in like freshwater bucket, It flies on an airplane with the film in a bucket full of water, gets it so they can actually develop it or to print it and nothing's wrong with it. Damn, that's amazing. It's like insane. And the last thing about the ocean, every day they had people like fairing them in back and forth from the shore. They had some local teenagers do that because it was summer and they needed jobs.

They're getting paid $90 a day. They got upset when they found the Teamsters were making more than them. And so they went on like a strike for a few. few days. So the teenagers are striking? Because they want to make more money? Who are making $90 a day? Sit down, Rich Martha's Vineyard Teenagers. They only had one guy. It's the actor who's in the opening scene. He was the only one that stayed on. He was a scab. So I talked a little bit about Robert Shaw. Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfus did not get along on set. And boy, can you tell in the movie that that is not acting.

there's rumors that it was like Shaw went method basically because he's like oh we're supposed to hate each other I'm be a dick to Dreyfus the entire time but Dreyfus was also apparently kind of rude and cocky on set because the apprenticeship for Dutty Kravitz came out and he was getting good reviews and he was like he was like kind of like flaunting it and Shaw's like man screw this guy there was hostility on set Dreyfus would say that he was not bad offset but when they got to set that's when Shaw just started to start. started to be quint is what it was. The shoot was 55 days originally. It ended up going for 159 days. Whoa. Because they go in through peak season and all the prices are high with, they have to pay all the peak season for the hotels and all that stuff. Boats are coming in to the frame and they're just like, we have to stop and wait for

for the boats to get out of frame because all these people are just sailing. They finish in September. They still have three weeks of shooting to do in L.A. and water tanks. When he gets home, Spielberg has nightmares for three months about still being on the water, shooting the film. And then he realizes he'd probably change his waterbed to a real bed. Ew. You know what? You had a water bed?

This is the first thing you said to do so respect to Stephen Spielberg. Greatest director of all time was still a garbage person and it was 26. He was like, maybe I should not do that. But as they were shooting, the book was released and became this huge success. bestseller for 44 weeks, and this shark move became a hot commodity. They start editing it. One, the big editor they had was Verna Fields, who had started early on with German director, Fritz Lang. She had worked with Spielberg beforehand on Stirling Express.

Her nickname was Mothercutter, and she was very integral into doing what Spielberg talked about with kind of the Hitchcockian approach of not showing the shark, but just seeing his perspective. and she was always kind of the person who was like, hey, it looks fake now, let's cut here. She always knew where to cut. And then after this, she was hired on at Universal would be like their head of editing department because she was so good.

But yeah, she had to make sense of the editing because once they got on the ocean, all the slate numbers and all the slate scenes became out of order, and no one knew like what they were actually shooting because Spielberg was just making it up as he went along. That's so interesting too, because I heard that the shark didn't work

and I assumed that Spielberg have made that fix, like on set, not that it happened in the editing room. I think it's a little bit of both because they had to wait so long for the shark to come out. He just like, let's figure out ways to do it. So that's when they add the yellow barrels to where you don't have to see the shark, but just see like the idea of a shark. That was the reason why they added that. Because what was happening is that they didn't know if the shark was going to work. They shot all the land stuff before they went out to the ocean.

And then it just became the waiting game of when the shark will work. Will the weather hold up? That's the other thing. It's like the shark could work, but the weather doesn't, then nothing would happen. Well, there's so many moments where they used really clever indicators for the shark. Like the barrels is one. The other one is the dock when it comes off the beach and you see the dock turn back around and start heading towards them. It's so much better than if that had been a real shark. Thomas, you want to take care of the big release of Jaws? Yeah. For all the troubles it went through in production, I think we all know that it was a gigantic success. when it came out and it has pretty much changed the film industry forever. The second ever movie to be released and wide release, that was not a practice at the time. You usually started in like some big cities and then moved around.

And so it could be months after a movie came out somewhere else before you saw it in your small town. Yeah. The first movie. The road show style release was like how movies were released. This was a B picture and this completely changed what a blockbuster was. It was this idea that this is big. It's a summer movie. It's an action movie.

The whole family can go see it. It's got something for everyone. It's not really trying to be specifically aimed at one audience. And the idea that film reviews don't really matter. I'm going to go see this movie. It's a spectacle. I have to see it no matter what the critics tell me. And the legacy of Jaws is everything from Star Horse to the Marvel cinematic universe.

It's pretty much everything that dominates the film industry today. comes from Jaws. So you're saying Jaws is responsible for the fact that I have to deal with all these stupid fucking superhero movies every son. Yeah, 100%. I think it merits saying, though, like that, you know, you've been talking a lot about Jaws being like a B movie or people sort of picturing it as a B movie. One of the things I think it changed is like the quality of a quote unquote B movie.

And that that kind of brought forth the idea of a blockbuster that you can have an all-out action slash horror movie that is just genuinely a masterpiece in terms of cinema. I don't think that had really been touched before. Yeah, I think Thomas said once before, Jaws became a prestige picture in a way. Like, they became prestige pictures. And that became Spielberg and Lucas. That became their bread and butter was delivering these huge crowd-pleasing pictures, but putting the work into it of somebody who has a deep love for film and for prestige movies.

And this is when you started seeing studios focus heavily on big budget movies. Where it's like, oh, we can make how much money with the movie? And this is when you start seeing like people like Coca-Cola get involved in like purchasing a studio and corporations coming in. And the idea of like Auteur Cinema of the new Hollywood movement was essentially Jaws killed it in a way. It was the beginning of the end for this young filmmaker-driven stories and more of these bigger spectacle. That's the thing. And it's like Thomas said, lays the groundwork for Star Wars. and other films like that.

It's kind of a return to the movies that Spielberg had grown up on in a sense. Where it's like we left that for like the 60s and early 70s basically and now all of a sudden we're going to be like Jaws, E.T., aliens, Terminator, you know, and like we just have all of these huge movies going all the way through the 90s.

It was like the rise of the high concept movie is what it was. And then 80s, 80s it just blows open like you're saying with Terminator and all these other films. Yeah, you look at like the movies from the 60s that like Coppola is doing and you try to think of the log line of like the rain people and it's like there's some people driving

in cars I don't really know what's happening there is no log line there's an existential journey happening for characters and it's like shark is what it is exactly but yeah I know Thomas has one thing he wants to talk about with Jaws I guess before we

this will be our final quota for the legacy of things going wrong on Jaws in July 26th 1974 a nine year old girl walking her dog in Provincetown, Massachusetts, finds the nude body of a woman lying face down in the dunes at the beach. Her hands have been cut off and her teeth have been removed so she cannot be identified. But she has been laid face down on a folded up pair of Wrangler jeans and a blue bandana.

And she has never identified. People think it might be a mafia hit one serial killer admits to the murder, but it is not ever, it's never been linked conclusively, and he was also not a very reliable witness. Then in 2015, Joe Hill, the son of Stephen King, is reading a book about this murder, known as the Lady of the Dunes murder, and also happens to be watching Jaws as he's reading the book and realizes that an extra in a scene is wearing the exact clothing and has a face match to the sketches of the victim. Jaws would have been being shot at the exact same time that this body was found. So there is an open investigation into whether or not this extra from Jaws was somehow

murdered 100 miles away and left dead on a beach. So there continue to be things that we find out that might have gone wrong with this movie. Yeah, I feel like that was a Reddit thing too. Like I know Joe Hill was was kind of the beginning of that, but then there's been so much, I'm a big true crime fan as well. And there's been so much discussion online about her and about whether or not that is her in Jaws. But yeah, keep an eye out for the woman with, what is it, Wrangler jeans and a red bandana, a blue bandana? A blue bandana. No one has come forward to say like, oh, no, that was my, you know, that was my aunt in that Jaws video. Right. She's fine. No one, no one said anything yet. So crazy. We'll never know. Awesome, guys. Uh, box office wise,

how did Jaws do you? I know you said it was super successful. I don't know about re-releases, but ended up making 472 million worldwide. And wasn't it? for a moment, the most successful film? Yes, until Star Wars came out two years later. It was the highest grossing film of all time. And on a $9 million budget was the final budget tally. So three times what they wanted to spend roughly. Exactly.

And a hundred more days and expected. Well, as is always the case, we love to end things on a positive note, although Jaws was obviously a very successful film. Yeah. So let's not end on the viciously murdered woman that was found in the Sand Dune, Instead, with the little segment that we like to call what went right, and obviously there's lots to choose from this week. Yeah, yeah.

We'll allow our guests to go first, Brandon or Thomas, whoever wants to speak. Tell us what went right. Well, something that we didn't bring up because it went so right from the start was Steven Spielberg was introduced to a composer named John Williams, who did the score for this film, and I think we know that the rest of his career is history. Yeah, what went right? Yeah, I mean, it launches Spielberg's career is the thing. Like, Spielberg takes a movie that could be a, again, as we said,

a B-movie, Shlocky horror film and makes it a well-crafted, I would say masterpiece of how he handles the cinematography, the way he blocks scenes. Like, he, when watching it today before this podcast, just seeing how well it still holds up as just a straight, like, I would say drama and not really just a bloody horror film. It's a masterful work of technique is how I see it. Yeah.

For me, I think its timeliness is ever-present and evergreen. Obviously, the just ridiculous parallel of not wanting to shut the beaches down, which you are. coronavirus response today. Just instantly, Carmell and I were laughing. And it's when I was younger, I thought that mayor character

is the most unrealistic part of this movie. So outlandish. So outlandish. And now watching it, I think, I actually think he never would have shut down the beaches nowadays if he was in certain areas. And so I think that the small town politics element of it are

unwillingness to make certain sacrifices in the face of danger to protect lives. Like it's all very accurate from a psychological perspective. And I, yeah, it just, it just, that really rang true. I'm done. Okay. All right. So my what went right is actually something that went wrong on set. And I think this is a very common theme that people talk about with jaws, but the fact that

the shark didn't work. Like if the movie had been relying so heavily on the actual monster set piece, I do not think it would be the classic that it is today. And this holds true with so many excellent horror movies that we've seen since. For the most part, at least in my personal opinion, I always prefer to not see the monster for as long as possible and to have it be a more clever treatment. As soon as you see it, like The Conjuring comes to mind, it's excellent.

It's still a great movie. but as soon as you see the monster, I was like, eh, it's a lady in a mask. But Jaws is so good. And I think they benefited so much from not being able to use the shark. So that is my what went right in terms of showing what you can do in a horror movie without having to really show the monster. I agree. Thomas, Brandon, anything that we can plug for you at the end of this podcast?

Any episodes coming up that people should be looking for? Well, I know for this month of September, the month of September, we've been doing sequel movies is what we've been studying. Every month we kind of study a different genre. We're going a little bit off the genre path and just talking about what makes up a movie sequel and the tropes and stories within them. Very good. Well, guys, check out the Cinnonation podcast. Please give them all of the love that you've given us. Brandon Thomas, thank you guys so much for joining us on this week's episode and educating us on Jaws and it's.

endless legacy and all of the superhero bastard children that it has spawned. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. Please subscribe. Leave us a rating and a review, 5 stars, 5 stars. And we will talk to you on next week's episode of What Went Wrong. Bye. Bye.

What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Uthano Uos.