We're Gonna Need a Bigger 50th Anniversary Cinematic Special
Jaws
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss
Released June 20, 1975
1976 Academy Awards for Best Sound; Best Film Editing; and Best Music, Original Dramatic Score (John Williams); nominee for Best Picture
Wiki said:
Jaws is a 1975 American thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg. Based on the 1974 novel by Peter Benchley, it stars Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, who, with the help of a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a professional shark hunter (Robert Shaw), hunts a man-eating great white shark that attacks beachgoers at a summer resort town. Murray Hamilton plays the mayor, and Lorraine Gary portrays Brody's wife. The screenplay is credited to Benchley, who wrote the first drafts, and actor-writer Carl Gottlieb, who rewrote the script during principal photography.
I definitely recall the presence of this film looming large at the time of its release, though I only got around to watching the whole thing relatively recently, probably during an early hiatus season from 50th Anniversary Viewing. The version currently featured on Peacock is labeled
Jaws 50 and includes a relatively brief intro by Spielberg in which he emphasizes the troubled production of the film and his uncertainty at the time that it would be a success.
Shot mostly on location at Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts from May to October 1974, Jaws was the first major motion picture to be shot on the ocean and consequently had a troubled production, going over budget and schedule. As the art department's mechanical sharks often malfunctioned, Spielberg decided to mostly suggest the shark's presence, employing an ominous and minimalist theme created by composer John Williams to indicate its impending appearances. Spielberg and others have compared this suggestive approach to that of director Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Pictures released the film to over 450 screens, an exceptionally wide release for a major studio picture at the time, accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign with heavy emphasis on television spots and tie-in merchandise.
I'm dubious of the claim about it being the first to be shot on the ocean, but I read it in multiple places, and being shot on the ocean, in a practical version of the
Orca boat that was so overloaded with crew and equipment that it was barely seaworthy, did reportedly contribute to the difficulties.
In the New England beach town of Amity Island, a young woman [Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie)] goes for a late-night ocean swim. An unseen force attacks and pulls her underwater.
Apparently it was an all-night party, and the iconic first shark attack--shot day-for-night--was meant to happen close to sunup. Chrissie's not-so-valiant suitor is Cassidy (Jonathan Filley). To his credit, he reports her as having possibly drowned before...
Her partial remains are found washed up on the beach the next morning.
By Chief Brody's deputy, Hendricks (Jeffrey C. Kramer), who's disturbed by the mostly off-camera gore, which is being swarmed by crabs. Along the way we meet Brody's wife, Ellen (Gary), and his young sons, Michael (Chris Rebello) and Sean (Jay Mello). Brody's established to be overworked with sundry matters in his first summer at Amity after relocating there from New York. We also eventually learn that despite his current locale, he has a lifelong fear of the water.
After the coroner concludes it was a shark attack, Amity police chief Martin Brody closes the beaches; Mayor Larry Vaughn [Hamilton] persuades him to reconsider, fearing the town's summer economy will suffer. The coroner [Dr. Robert Nevin], apparently under pressure, now concurs with the mayor's theory that it was a boating accident.
Vaughn's accomplice/sidekick in the effort to downplay the issue for tourism's sake is
Amity Gazette editor Harry Meadows (screenplay co-writer Carl Gottlieb).
Brody reluctantly accepts their conclusion until young Alex Kintner [Jeffrey Voorhees] is killed at a crowded beach.
Mrs. Kintner is played by Lee Fierro. Note the implied offscreen devouring of Tippet, a black lab whose owner had been tossing a stick for him out into the water prior to where that clip begins.
A $3,000 bounty is placed on the shark, causing an amateur shark-hunting frenzy.
The bounty is placed by Mrs. Kintner, with the mayor and Meadows attempting to downplay/bury it.
Quint [Shaw], an eccentric local shark hunter, offers his services for $10,000.
Be sure to turn the volume up really loud for Quint's dramatic intro--earbuds are recommended!
The Head, the Tail, the Whole Damn Thing
A pair of amateur shark-hunters attempt to catch the beast by night with a roast tied to a tire connected to a dock with a chain. One of them has a close call swimming back after the end of the dock is ripped away. The town is flooded with more amateurs out for the bounty, largely from out of town, as Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss) arrives from the Oceanographic Institute at Brody's request.
Hooper examines the girl's remains, confirming she was killed by an unusually large shark.
Dreyfuss is quite good in this, delivering lots of funny bits of business. His character is established as being a rich kid who got into his field after a adolescent experience in which a baby thresher shark devoured his fishing boat.
I actually don't like Richard Dreyfuss very much. It prevents me from really getting into Close Encounters.
You know, I never liked Richard Dreyfuss. Completely random, he just rubs me the wrong way somehow.
Wiki said:
When local fishermen catch a tiger shark,
I think it was actually a group of the amateurs.
Vaughn declares the beaches safe. A skeptical Hooper dissects the shark and, finding no human remains inside its stomach, concludes the killer shark is still out there.
Hooper's skeptical because the bite radius doesn't match Watkins's remains. The mayor says no to an autopsy, but a hard-drinking Brody takes Hooper to the shark by night after a dramatic confrontation with Mrs. Kintner, who holds him responsible for the beaches still being open after Watkins was found. Hooper, who'd been planning to leave town because of the mayor's lack of cooperation, does find a Louisiana license plate, indicating that the tiger shark came from the Gulf; and persuades a reluctant Brody to come with him on an excursion to prove that the big fish is still out there.
While searching the night waters in Hooper's boat, Hooper and Brody find the half-sunken boat of Ben Gardner, a local fisherman.
Craig Kingsbury, who played Gardner as being disdainful of the flotilla of amateurs in an earlier sequence, really was a local Martha's Vineyard fisherman, and influenced Shaw's portrayal of Quint.
Hooper dons a scuba suit and goes underwater to check the boat's hull; finds a large shark tooth embedded into it. He drops the tooth after encountering Gardner's severed head.
The most startling moment in the film for me on this revisit.
Vaughn dismisses Brody and Hooper's assertions that a great white shark caused the deaths and refuses to close the beaches, allowing only increased safety precautions. On the Fourth of July weekend, tourists pack the beaches. The shark enters a nearby lagoon, killing a boater and nearly killing Brody's son, Michael [Chris Rebello], who is hospitalized with shock.
Terror at the Beach Reopening
The TV reporter is played by the novel's author and screenplay's co-author, Peter Benchley. The estuary victim is Ted Grossman.
Brody then convinces a guilt-ridden Vaughn to hire Quint.
At least one shark attack later than the mayor should have been sold on the magnitude of the situation and done the right thing for everybody. Reportedly the novel had a discarded subplot about Vaughn being pressured by mob investors to keep the town open.
Despite initial tension between Quint and Hooper, and Brody's fear of the ocean, the three head out to sea on Quint's boat, the Orca, to hunt for the shark.
Quinn's initially dismissive of Hooper, considering him to be a soft city boy; but reluctantly agrees to bring him along as "ballast".
Hooper: I don't need this "working class hero" crap!
As they're loading the boat and leaving the harbor, some doubt is cast by Quint's behavior, singing shanties and reciting lewd limericks. One of Dreyfuss's funniest bits of business comes as the voyage is underway, when Hooper watches Quint down a beer and crush the can, and then tries to match him by doing the same with a Styrofoam cup. Following this, we're conspicuously introduced to Chekhov's Compressed Air Tank. There's an early encounter with the unseen shark when Quint apparently hooks him and it breaks his line.
As Brody lays down a chum line, the shark suddenly appears behind the boat. Quint, estimating it is 25 feet long and weighs 3 tons, harpoons it with a line attached to a flotation barrel, but the shark pulls it underwater and disappears.
At nightfall, Quint and Hooper drunkenly exchange stories about their assorted body scars.
Scars Scene
This is an important bonding scene, after Hooper has earned Quint's respect with his seamanship and performance under pressure.
One of Quint's is a removed tattoo; he reveals that during World War II, he survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, during which sharks killed many U.S. sailors.
This is a true story, though the wrong date is given. According to Gottlieb, the final version of this scene was mostly written by Shaw himself, who was a playwright.
The shark returns, ramming the boat's hull and disabling the power. The men work through the night, repairing the engine. In the morning, Brody attempts to call the Coast Guard, but Quint, obsessed with killing the shark without outside assistance, smashes the radio. After a long chase, Quint harpoons the shark with another barrel. The line is tied to the stern cleats, but the shark drags the boat backward, swamping the deck and flooding the engine compartment. As Quint is about to sever the line to save the boat's transom, the cleats break off. The barrels stay attached to the shark. To Brody's relief, Quint speeds the Orca toward shore to draw the shark into shallower waters, but the damaged engine fails.
This is where things go into full-on monster movie / slasher flick territory as you have to suspend your disbelief about not only how much punishment this shark can take, but how much damage it can inflict while coming back for more, both overpowering and gradually destroying the boat--none of which reflects the behavior or known capabilities of actual great white sharks.
As the boat takes on water, the trio attempt a riskier approach. Hooper suits up and enters a shark-proof cage, intending to lethally inject the shark with strychnine via a hypodermic spear. The shark attacks the cage, causing Hooper to drop the spear. While the shark destroys the cage, Hooper escapes to the ocean bottom.
Hooper in the Cage
The shark leaps onto the boat's stern, subsequently devouring Quint.
Quint Is Devoured
Trapped on the sinking vessel, Brody thrusts a scuba tank into the shark's mouth and, climbing onto the crow's nest, shoots the tank with a rifle. The resulting explosion kills the shark.
Hooper resurfaces and he and Brody paddle back to shore, clinging to the remaining barrels.
Sharing laughter of hysterical joy/relief even as Brody reports Quint's death.
Regarded as a watershed moment in motion picture history, Jaws was the prototypical summer blockbuster and won several awards for its music and editing. It was the highest-grossing film of all time until the release of Star Wars two years later; both films were pivotal in establishing the modern Hollywood business model, which pursues high box-office returns from action and adventure films with simple high-concept premises, released during the summer in thousands of theaters and advertised heavily. Jaws was followed by three sequels (none of which involved Spielberg or Benchley) and many imitative thrillers. In 2001, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
While I don't have much of a preexisting attachment to the film, it was a perfectly enjoyable watch, holding my attention and moving along at a good pace during my initial pleasure/absorption viewing. (The follow-up note-taking viewing always takes longer.) It's definitely a film that would have appealed to air-conditioned audiences on hot summer days, especially after their initial viewing, when going into the water was no longer an option.
Alas, the hysteria following the film reportedly led to an uptick in shark hunting and even one instance when a beached whale mistaken for a shark was beaten to death.
True. I was just thinking that about JFK recently. Boggles the mind.
And John Lennon for me.
It used to get a lot of play on BCN, along with "That Smell" and "Gimme Three Steps."
The latter of which appeared alongside "Free Bird" on their 1973 album
(Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd), and has been recent 50th anniversary playlist business as the album's second chart run recently ended.
Well, that's Barry Manilow. He always reminds me of my old junior high school girlfriend, who loved him-- and she, I saw on Facebook, unexpectedly passed away within the past couple of months. That was kind of a gut punch.
My condolences.
Yeah, right. They should have pushed everything way far away into the 21st century. Instead of a Mars mission, it could have been the Jupiter III.
Just a few more years would have been more convincing from a 1966 viewpoint. Why bother setting something in the future if it's going to barely be in the future? (Cue
Picard Season 2 again.)
Someone on my forum just posted that ChatGPT was beaten at chess by an old Atari unit. I wonder how it would do at Pong.
There's a telling story behind my joke about John Winston's TTT character being Kyle's ancestor. When I asked the Bing AI how many generations of grandfather 300 years would be, it did a calculation based on the routine number of 25 years/generation, which is debatable in practice, but I was willing to accept it for simplicity, coming up with 12. It then proceeded to describe the ancestor with twelve "greats" in front of "grandfather"--not taking into account the father and grandfather as two of the generations. It took me not one but two follow-up questions to get the AI to acknowledge the error.
That's definitely magical. Extrapolating on this concept, their hygiene must reset as well. And what about any food that they've eaten? And partially digested? Okay, I'm going to stop extrapolating.
I'd assume that once it's in the their bodies, it's good. They could potentially smuggle something small through time the hard way.
I see her in something similar to what Uhura was wearing in the Mirror Universe, only Navy blue. At first, she's wearing that crisp white lab coat over it, but all those sparks heat the place up so she has to take it off and throw it over the back of her chair. And then... but, no, I'll stop there.
"Your agonizer, please."
Actually, there's been a couple of times when I drank coffee.
I meant to slip in somewhere along the way that Diane Baker immediately went on to play Kimble's 12th-hour love interest in the famous
Fugitive finale.
Oh, I get it.
The Barney and Betty Hill thing goes back to 1960 or something, so they were definitely around.
The parents on the show were named Hank and Peggy.
Ah, right. It's strange how these aliens seem extraordinarily powerful and yet extraordinarily weak at the same time.
Their options are limited by the need to maintain secrecy.
