Jaws Island, Part 3: The Test of Time

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This is part three of Jaws Island. If you haven't heard parts one and two yet, go back and I'll meet you back here. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Welcome everyone to Martha's Vineyard. For some of you that's Amity Island. I'm sitting in a sea of 700 people on a ridiculously beautiful summer night at the Winnetou Resort.

We've gathered here for a once-in-a-lifetime event organized by the Martha's Vineyard Chamber of Commerce. Executive Director Erica Ashton told me it took a year to plan, but it's been 50 years in the making. If it wasn't for all of the fans and our island locals, this event would not be happening. So thank you so much. We're all here about to do something we've done on our own many times before. 50 times. 100 times. 500 times or more. Amazing.

But this time, we're doing it as a community, outdoors, with a live orchestra on the vineyard. Yes, we're here to watch Jaws. For a lot of fans, this is the pinnacle of their anniversary celebration. Watching it here, where the movie magic was made, is like Woodstock for fanatics. A culmination of everything they've told me this weekend about why they love Jaws so much.

To me, it's the greatest movie ever as far as directing and acting. Roy Schreiter, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Murray Hamilton, Lorraine Gary. It's really the relationship between the three characters. And a big shark. It's a great story, American tale about the everyman. Thriller, horror, adventure, comedy, drama. And how he overcomes his fears to save the day. As well as the music. There's nothing else like it. 50 years later, look at us. You know, what movies down the test of time is this?

What movies stand the test of time as this? Well, as I and 700 other fans here can fullheartedly attest, yeah, Jaws still bites. It still scares, delights, enthralls, and resonates. But why? What keeps Jaws so alive in cinema, pop culture, and our imaginations? and what will keep it swimming for the next 50 years. From WBUR, I'm Andrea Shea, and welcome one last time to Jaws Island. Part three, the test of time.

Speaking of time, in the last episode, we heard about how long it took to film Jaws on the vineyard. Turns out time and timing have played huge roles in making Steven Spielberg's shark movie mythic. Unpredictable weather, shifting tides, shooting on beaches, and the Atlantic Ocean stretch the shoot from 55 days to 159. And let us not forget the malfunctioning mechanical shark, which we will get to, I promise. Just finishing the movie was very, very difficult.

Hollywood production designer Joe Alves, who's 89 now, oversaw every visual element we see in Jaws, including the shark. He worked on the notoriously challenging movie from its conception through the final day of filming on location in the fall of 1974 and beyond. And when we got back from the vineyard, we were not heroes. Over budget, over schedule. Studio really didn't want to make this movie. Over budget.

As in two to three times what Universal Studios was expecting, in part because Spielberg insisted Jaws be filmed on the Atlantic Ocean. The creative team was exhausted, but the artists kept pushing forward, really hoping they had a hit on the horizon. The studio was really hoping so too, more than hoping. They were banking on it.

Before the summer of 1975, Hollywood studios didn't usually advertise on television because it was too expensive. But leading up to the release of Jaws, Universal saturated the airwaves with 30-second ads. Just the promise of a monstrous man-eater fueled Jaws mania before the film even hit theaters. Jaws. See it before you go swimming. Joe was at an early screening in L.A. He remembers being nervous about how the audience, which included studio execs, would react.

I was more afraid they were going to laugh than scream. And they didn't laugh. They screamed and screamed. The way Jaws was unleashed to the public also played a part. They released it in June, and they released it in like 480 theaters. Which might not sound unusual in the age of Marvel and Barbenheimer, but at the time... It was the first big opening, summer opening, of any film. Yes, Jaws marks the birth of the summer blockbuster.

Joe says in the 70s, studios would release a new film in maybe a dozen theaters, usually in the fall, leading up to the Academy Award nominations. Back then, summer was a dead zone for movies. Some critics even took the summer off. But Jaws broke the mold and the opening weekend box office record. It would go on to become the first movie to break $100 million. This shot will swallow you whole. Shaking, tenderizing, down you go.

Lines of people stretched down the street under marquees around the country in June of 75. Even though, as Tom Dunlap of the Vineyard Gazette says, everybody knew the movie's monster was a machine. I'm not sure they're going to be able to convince me that this machine is actually a shark and is actually a terrifying and very realistic predator. And yet, from the first minutes of the film...

People were thrilled and horrified, and they got people to buy into it. And we still buy into it every time we watch it. Now, that isn't to say the shark alone is what makes Jaws, Jaws. You know, the shark is cool and all. Bruce is cool, but it's really not, to me, what the essential love of it is. The essential love for fan Amy Zattel from the Jersey Shore? It's really the relationship between the three characters.

Cooper and Quint and Brody. It's them that make it. And Ellen. Ellen always gets left out. And I love Ellen Brody. Michael! Did you hear your father out of the water now? Now! She's, like, amazing. But... You know, they had this adventure story and them dealing with this monster, for lack of a better word. It is a monster movie, but it's really about three guys, three different people.

Meet another fan, Toby Kyrton, a filmmaker and fanatic who traveled to the vineyard all the way from the U.K. The everyman, the educated man, and the working man. all come together and they're so different that's what makes that third act of that film i think the best part of the film but also what it why i think is appealing to so many so many people is the idea of these three very different men

have to join and work together to defeat the obstacle. You got city hands, Mr. Hooper. You've been counting money all your life. All right, all right, hey, I don't need this. I don't need this working-class hero crap. The three characters are so real and multidimensional, with their own obstacles to face, as Michael Smith, co-creator of Let's Talk Jaws Live and a film critic, points out. Chief Brody hates water.

He's got to go on the boat. Richard Dreyfuss, his character Hooper, loves sharks, but now he's got to go hunt one. Quint hates sharks. We find out later why in the film.

But now he's got to go stare down one. And each one has their strengths. Each one has their weaknesses. And that's what makes it, you know, a great piece of acting. Ah, yes, the acting and writing. from spontaneous dialogue, including arguably the movie's most famous line that was coined on set by Roy Scheider. You're gonna need a bigger boat. to the many scenes written with the actors as the film was shooting, like Quint's story about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis.

where he watched hundreds of his crewmates get killed by sharks, the source of the hatred Michael Smith was just talking about. Shakespearean actor and playwright Robert Shaw reworked the monologue himself. Oh, then you hear that terrible high-pitched screaming. The ocean turns red. In spite of all the pounding and the hollering, they all come in and they rip you to pieces.

As Shaw delivers those lines, Hooper and Brody, Dreyfus and Scheider, are just staring, mouths agape at times. Michael says... They're not acting. When he's doing that, they are in awe of this amazing performance that this man is giving. So 1,100 men went into war. 360 men come out. The sharks took the rest. June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb. A lot of fans point to Quint's monologue as an element that elevates Jaws into a classic.

a film that takes you by surprise with how artfully it's executed and keeps you guessing at what direction it will take next. Just in this Indianapolis scene, The three men have gone from drunkenly joking around to dead serious, to singing, show me the way to go home, to the shock of the shark ramming into their boat. And just like that, you're back, smack dab in the middle of a horror movie. An action movie? Something else? We'll find out in a minute.

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None of man's fantasies of evil can compare with the reality of Jaws. It only takes a few seconds of the trailer to realize Jaws was billed as a horror movie. but its genre is actually really hard to pin down. What is this? Is this a horror film? Is it an adventure film? I take issue with people who say, oh, it's a horror movie. It's not a horror movie. But it seems to cross genres. Thriller, horror, adventure, comedy, drama. It's all mixed into one. Bye.

That was Deputy Hendrix actor Jeffrey Kramer and Canadian fanatic collector Jamie Saunders. He points out something that makes Jaws the kind of film he wants to watch over and over again. There's so many scenes where one minute it's funny and then the next minute it's scary or vice versa. And then it turns into an adventure film. As soon as Quint shoots the shark with the first barrel, and as soon as the barrel hits the water, it turns into an adventure film. It's like a pirate film.

For a moment, you could forget there's a 25-foot hungry predator beneath the surface. Until... Of course, it's the score that carries us on these waves of emotion. And of course, John Williams' music came. You throw in the music. The music. And of course, the music. You know, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. Here it comes. Instantly recognizable. Iconic. You can play it anywhere. Everybody knows what it is. Just the two notes is all it would take. It became...

what Psycho, the shower scene in Psycho was. It touched that. subconscious, that fear of the primordial ooze, the depths of the unknown. It's scary. I don't swim like I used to.

I feel a little better knowing Jeffrey Kramer, who was already a grown man when he played Deputy Hendrix in Jaws and Jaws 2, also finds it scary. But again... I was just a kid when I saw it the first time. I'm pretty sure my dad didn't think Jaws would scare the willies out of me when he took me to see it in 1975. Most parents didn't probably, because the movie was only rated PG.

Parental guidance. The same rating given to the bad news bears in Greece. They were going to rate Jaws R. Film critic Michael Smith again. And David Brown went to the ratings board and said, no, no, no, this is not somebody dressed up as a shark killing people. This is what sharks do. David Brown was one of the film's producers, and he did have a point. The shark wasn't a possessed, vomiting tween like in 1973's The Exorcist, which was rated R.

This was also back in the days before PG-13 even existed. David Brown did appease the rating board, though, by agreeing to add warnings to the movie's posters and trailers. Maybe too intense for younger children. That PG rating spawned lifelong fans and a new generation of filmmakers. Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez and M. Night Shyamalan and Bryan Singer. Steven Soderbergh and a lot of these guys.

became and wanted to become directors because of this film. You know, Quentin Tarantino calls Jaws one of the few perfect films. Quentin Tarantino says it's the greatest movie ever made, which really is kind of very cool. After Jeffrey Kramer again and Michael Smith, who broke down more of the directorial brilliance of Jaws for me, including something called the Dolly Zoom, where the camera zooms in for a surreal dramatic effect.

effect. You can see it in all of its glory in the scene where Brody is sitting on a crowded beach, scanning the ocean for a shark fin. Then his nightmare comes true, and the camera closes in to the horror on him. It's studied in film schools now. It was something that Hitchcock used to do, but Spielberg made it more mainstream, and now everybody tries to... to imitate it in films. Toby Kyrton is a filmmaker in the UK.

and, like me, was technically in the too intense for young children category when he first watched Jaws. As an adult, he carries its lessons with him. Jaws is my film that I cite and watch before I go and make a movie to remind myself the... quality of that craft that film has and not only the craft of the film the performances the location the production design the art direction the wardrobe everything really just came together so beautifully

How it came together became an obsession for Greg Nicotero, who was 13 years old when he saw Jaws opening weekend. It was one of the first movies that I watched that when it was over, I needed to know everything that I could know about it. how the movie was made. And this was before the internet. So you had to really work for it. This was also way before CGI, by the way. And Greg was astonished by the convincing human-generated effects in Jaws. He would go on to make some of his own.

Greg is now a very busy special effects makeup artist in Hollywood. He's also the primary director of The Walking Dead, that zombie show. He knows how movie magic is made. Which is to say he knows it isn't magic. It's passion, artistry, collaboration, taking risks, and not giving up. Even when your mechanical shark won't swim.

Okay, now about that shark. A huge part of the Jaws mythology that fans love to talk about is the girthy, gray, rubber shark problem, along with all the behind-the-scenes drama. It was named Bruce, after Spielberg's lawyer. From the get-go, the director had requirements. He said, if we do this, it should be like a 25-foot shark in the real ocean.

It became production designer Joe Alves' job to get the Leviathan made. As you can see in the book, Joe Alves Designing Jaws, he started with pencil sketches in the fall of 1973. Joe knew nothing about sharks, so he consulted with scientists and special effects gurus. They concluded a giant animatronic shark was needed, one that could work in the ocean.

It took a small army to figure out how to engineer such a beast, including Bob Maddy, the master who created the giant squid in 20,000 leagues under the sea. Joe says the shark project needed to stay secret, so they found a big warehouse off-lot and got to work. They knew it would take more than a year to fabricate and test the shark.

But Universal Studios was determined to release their shark movie like now, so it would ride the wave of attention they knew Peter Benchley's novel Jaws would get when it was published in February of 1974. wait a minute, where's my year, year and a half? And Stephen pushed it another month, but basically they didn't care. You know, we've got to start shooting, but I won't have a shark.

Eventually, the team did have their 2,000-pound shark, three actually, clad in rubber skin and filled with pneumatic innards. Bruce looked great, better than great, terrifying. He sounded a little crazy. But the real issue they would learn was that ocean water was not Bruce's friend. It wasn't Bob's mechanics, it was the water. So we would test it and then the water did it and it would stop. It was just a nightmare.

A nightmare that caused a tsunami of delays. So Spielberg's team had to shoot the scenes without the mechanical shark first. But Joe says things still went pretty much according to the storyboards. We got the shark working. We finished the movie, and we got every shot of the shark that I had illustrated that Stephen wanted.

And this is where a big old barrel of a debate comes in. Throughout Jaws' final act on the open water, Quint shoots yellow barrels into the shark with a harpoon gun. I believe it's two barrels and he's going down again! I spoke with lots of fans who love a particular enduring legend about this scene, which is that Spielberg deployed those floating yellow barrels as a solution to his now functioning shark.

Instead of seeing the shark's surface, we just see the barrels pop up. They're up again! Now what? But Joe Alves says... That was nonsense. We did the barrels because it was like a Hitchcock thing, the mystery of what's down there. Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense. Again, Michael Smith, Jeffrey Kramer, and Tom Dunlop. You don't really see the shark in Jaws for the first hour. Stephen put on his Hitchcockian hat.

and made us fear it even more because we didn't see it. The rising tension of seeing more and more and more of it is, I think, at the heart of the brilliance of the film. You see it in your mind. And that, I think, is the great thing about cinema. What's truly great about cinema is that it can make us fear something that isn't real. But sharks are real.

They've been here since prehistoric time, and yet people didn't really think much about them until Jaws. And then, all of a sudden, we were all afraid. Afraid enough to go out and kill them. People wanted to be like Quint, which took a toll on the shark population, much to Steven Spielberg's regret, as he's lamented in interviews, like this one with the BBC.

that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975, which I truly and to this day regret. Whether or not the film can be blamed for decimating the shark population, it definitely kept a lot of people out of the water. But it inspired others to learn more about sharks. In some cases, to become marine biologists, conservationists. We have things like Shark Week now on the Discovery Channel. Without a fully functional tank.

Joan of Shark is virtually invisible.

Jaws has been swimming around in our cultural consciousness for decades, sometimes in some very funny ways. Michael Smith has an encyclopedic knowledge about the many, many Jaws parodies. with the land shark. Who is it? Telegram. Oh, Telegram. Just a moment. The Family Guy does a lot of Jaws parodies. Peter, we have a problem. Hey, hang on, Lois. I'm watching a movie. And now back to Jaws 5, Fire Island. The opening of Airplane with the...

playing in the clouds, the tail going through with the music. The candy bar scene in Caddyshack. And of course, Jaws gave birth to three sequels and a slew of horror movies like Deep Blue Sea, The Meg, and Sharknado. We're gonna need a bigger chopper. Jaws' memes, send-ups, and homages are still everywhere. And yet, as Michael also noted... It's like it's a new film. People are just discovering it. People like... You recording something? I'm recording people jumping off the bridge. Sweet.

18-year-old Shane Unger noticed my microphone and walked right up to me at the Jaws Bridge. Are you a filmmaker? I am an audio podcast reporter, radio reporter. Nice. Shane's a newly minted high school grad from Massachusetts and a newly minted Jaws fan. He says he watched it in a film studies class. We learned about the Dolly Zoom, that classic shot where he's in the chair, I think.

On the beach. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When it goes in. Yeah, the zoom in. Yeah, exactly, yeah. And, yeah, really interesting. I'm a filmmaker, too, so I love taking the class and learning about all this stuff, so a lot of fun. One more new filmmaker inspired by Jaws. All right, are you going to jump? I am now, yeah. Maybe I should do that too? Go, go, go, go! Yay! Nope, that's still not me.

I have other places to be. Just me and my 700 fellow Jaws fans, including Mark Schaefer from Buffalo. We're about to commune with the biggest star of the 50th anniversary weekend. the movie itself. This is going to be a really great event. Jaws in concert, on the big screen, on the vineyard. The orchestra is warming up and it won't be long before we hear those opening two notes.

But before it begins, a special guest ambles onto the stage. It's Hooper, also known as Richard Dreyfuss, the last surviving actor from the trifecta of main characters in Jaws. The 77-year-old has been busy signing autographs all weekend. I've been wondering how fans feel about him after he went on a sexist, transphobic tirade at a screening of Jaws in Massachusetts last year.

But judging from the response, they're thrilled Hooper is here. For a moment, he's just that, the artist who brought one of their favorite characters to life. until he approaches the mic to say one thing. Everyone else is dead or irrelevant. Nonsense. This is one of the finest actors in the most significant period. in the history of American cinema. And this movie, it wouldn't be Jaws without Richard Dreyfuss. Anyone else is dead or irrelevant. Yeah, pretty weird.

But the crowd sinks into the movie's opening bonfire scene, waiting for Chrissy to be thrashed, then dragged beneath the waves. The fans applaud as each character appears on screen. They laugh when Quint crushes his empty can of Narragansett. and Hooper follows suit by crushing his Styrofoam coffee cup. And, of course, they gush over all the iconic lines, like... You're gonna need a bigger boat. A few seats away, one guy silently mouths every single word of Quint's Indianapolis monologue.

And, spoiler alert, everyone cheers when Brody blows up the shark at the end. Bliss washes over us as bloody pieces of the monster sink to the bottom of the ocean. And in my ecstatic state, I forget to write down my ecstatic neighbor Michael's last name. He says what a lot of us are feeling. It's like watching your favorite team win the Super Bowl almost or the World Series or the Stanley Cup. This is amazing.

As we walk down the resort's long, dark driveway back to our cars, I meet a fan who captures the vibe. It was as close to a religious experience as I may ever get. Joshua Waters is yet another person who says he's become a filmmaker because of Jaws. He drove up to Massachusetts from Kentucky. brought it home to me that, you know, I'm part of this community, it's an enduring thing, and it can transcend just, you know, like, sentiment and impact so many people. So that really touched me deeply.

Nothing endures without people. And Jaws fans have been introducing other people to the film, making their own films, creating their own websites, podcasts, Facebook groups, and discussion shows. It's just like Michael Smith of Let's Talk Jaws told me when I first got here for the anniversary weekend. It's the fans that have kept the film alive for 50 years, and it's the fans you're going to keep it alive for another 50 years. If I'm a small part of that, then...

I feel good. The fanatics are elated and sad as the end of their historic weekend nears. They've made new friends and memories with their Jaws community on Jaws Island. And some of them don't want it to end. When I leave tomorrow and go back to the real world, it's going to be, you know, hey, buddy, get out of my way. I can't stand these slow drivers. You're a jerk. And it's like, I want to go back. Take me back to Jaws. But 50 years, we'll do it again. That was fan and collector Eric Augustine.

And this... I'll ask the boys if they want to go. ...is my brother Timmy again, who I first saw Jaws with 50 years ago, and who might go see it again when it's re-released in theaters for the big anniversary. Well, I have a feeling Dad might want to go. Oh, I'm sure he will. And maybe my nephews? If Dad goes, they'll go. I should probably come home for that. Three generations. Absolutely.

Jaws Island is a production of WBUR Boston's NPR. It was written and reported by me, Andrea Shea. It makes me... It was produced by Amory Sievertson and edited by Tanya Raleigh, Ben Brock Johnson, and Amory Sievertson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski and Paul Vykus. Samata Joshi is our managing producer. WBUR's director of digital audio is Ben Brock Johnson. I think if I could finally meet Spielberg, I would just die. That would be it.

After he signed my stuff. And thank you to all the Islanders and Jaws fanatics who spoke to me. And an extra shout out to Mark and Sheila from Buffalo for driving me around the island. And to Sam Fleming and his Islander wife, Emily. for taking in this weekend wash ashore. Where's your orca? In the bathtub, probably floating about like six inches long, but anyway.

Thank you to my brother Timmy and my dad for ignoring the warnings and taking me to see Jaws 50 years ago. And thank you for coming with me to Jaws Island. If you, like me, can't get enough of Jaws, there are archival... photos from the 70s and photos from my anniversary trip at wbur.org slash Jaws Island. What a topping to the cake to be able to be a part of something that will last. Beyond you. Jaws forever!