Usually these "inside story" and "the making of" features and featurettes are full of bland boilerplate. If you've seen any of them, you have an idea of what they all tend to be like. "He was such a wonderful guy to work with." "I'm prouder of that performance than any other." "It was magic." This documentary, much of it shot during the actual shooting of "Jaws" on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, is refreshingly light on such baloney.
Spielberg claims, and I believe it, that the logistics of shooting at sea and the job of building the shark and getting it to work in salt water were so demanding that he was left with little time for creativity or art. This turned out to be a budget buster. The suits at Universal Studios, used to simple, cheap production, were in a frenzy.
The technology of the time not permitting digitalization, imagine taking half a day to set up the barge carrying the filming equipment and positioning it properly next to the fishing boat, the Orca. You're about to roll. Then a big sailboat from Hyannisport appears on the supposedly empty horizon. There is nothing to do but sit back, bite your nails, and wait an hour and a half until the sailboat slowly crosses the frame and finally disappears. Then another sailboat appears.
Most of the interviews are done at a sufficient time remove that there's no longer any compelling reason for the actors, crew, or producers to pimp the film. It made its fortune -- and more. If Spielberg ever had any intent of interpolating "art" into his film, the marketing quickly devolved into merchandising. I wonder what happened to all those "Jaws" T shirts. They were all over the place. A publisher asked me at the time what I thought the design of the dust jacket on my book about anthropology should look like. I suggested a shark's head rising vertically to eat a naked girl.
Fortunately, occasional mention is made of social abrasions. It relieves the heroic tone of the rest of the documentary. The movie people swept up the local groupies. Marriages dissolved. Robert Shaw was always dressing down Richard Dreyfus in public -- just a fat slob who can't do push ups and has no stage experience. Shaw, on the other hand, was sometimes so drunk he had to be carried onto the set. Half of his "Indianapolis" soliloquy was shot while he was plastered.
But at least Shaw got the job done, which Bruce the shark could not do, forcing Spielberg to shoot several scenes from the shark's point of view, so that the mechanical beast didn't have to be on screen. It made for a much better movie, as Alfred Hitchcock and Val Lewton had found out many years earlier. Had Bruce been compliant, we might have wound up with just another monster movie, with Bruce appearing in the first scenes and openly devouring everyone.
Spielberg claims, and I believe it, that the logistics of shooting at sea and the job of building the shark and getting it to work in salt water were so demanding that he was left with little time for creativity or art. This turned out to be a budget buster. The suits at Universal Studios, used to simple, cheap production, were in a frenzy.
The technology of the time not permitting digitalization, imagine taking half a day to set up the barge carrying the filming equipment and positioning it properly next to the fishing boat, the Orca. You're about to roll. Then a big sailboat from Hyannisport appears on the supposedly empty horizon. There is nothing to do but sit back, bite your nails, and wait an hour and a half until the sailboat slowly crosses the frame and finally disappears. Then another sailboat appears.
Most of the interviews are done at a sufficient time remove that there's no longer any compelling reason for the actors, crew, or producers to pimp the film. It made its fortune -- and more. If Spielberg ever had any intent of interpolating "art" into his film, the marketing quickly devolved into merchandising. I wonder what happened to all those "Jaws" T shirts. They were all over the place. A publisher asked me at the time what I thought the design of the dust jacket on my book about anthropology should look like. I suggested a shark's head rising vertically to eat a naked girl.
Fortunately, occasional mention is made of social abrasions. It relieves the heroic tone of the rest of the documentary. The movie people swept up the local groupies. Marriages dissolved. Robert Shaw was always dressing down Richard Dreyfus in public -- just a fat slob who can't do push ups and has no stage experience. Shaw, on the other hand, was sometimes so drunk he had to be carried onto the set. Half of his "Indianapolis" soliloquy was shot while he was plastered.
But at least Shaw got the job done, which Bruce the shark could not do, forcing Spielberg to shoot several scenes from the shark's point of view, so that the mechanical beast didn't have to be on screen. It made for a much better movie, as Alfred Hitchcock and Val Lewton had found out many years earlier. Had Bruce been compliant, we might have wound up with just another monster movie, with Bruce appearing in the first scenes and openly devouring everyone.