Jaws
The huge, genetically engineered dinosaur which goes on a man-eating rampage in Jurassic World, this summer’s blockbuster movie, owes her very existence to a smaller but equally scary beast, casually — almost affectionately — nicknamed Bruce by the men who created it.
This was the rogue Great White shark in Jaws, the film which premiered 40 years ago this week — and in doing so, launched the modern trend for action-packed summer mega-movies.
The symmetry of the two openings is irresistible. Jurassic World, which arrived in cinemas here last Friday, has Steven Spielberg, 68, as executive producer. He was just 27 when he directed Jaws.
It was the movie that made his name through its originality, storytelling and sheer fear factor — which has probably never left anyone who has seen it.
The film is set in the fictional New England beach resort of Amity Island. When a vast shark starts attacking swimmers, the local police chief, played by Roy Scheider, leads the quest to kill it, with the help of a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a grizzled local shark-hunter (Robert Shaw).
Aged 14, I was gripped by all this, sitting in the Palace Cinema, Southport, both exhilarated and horrified. The celebrated scene in which a decapitated head suddenly appears through a hole in the bottom of a submerged boat remains the only time I have seen an entire audience jump out of their seats.
As with several other aspects of the film, though, there was an entertainingly low-tech secret behind that moment.
Spielberg was unhappy with the original filming, and when the footage was being edited in California by Verna Shields, who would win an Academy Award for her efforts (the director wasn’t nominated), he wanted the scene re-shot.
But there was no money left, and besides the main shoot had finished over in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts on the east coast. So Fields, who was editing the movie at home in her garage, offered the use of her swimming pool.
A boat was sunk below the water, a tarpaulin was hauled over the pool to make it gloomy, and half a gallon of milk chucked in to make it more eerily photogenic. That’s what you’re seeing in the famous underwater scene that scared the living daylights out of everyone.
After the film came out, Spielberg and Carl Gottlieb, the co-writer, would drop into an LA cinema, night after night, when they knew that moment was imminent. ‘We would stand at the back and watch 1,000 heads jump simultaneously, then we’d laugh and nudge each other and go out for the evening,’ Gottlieb later recalled.
There was plenty of other trickery. When we see Dreyfuss’s character, Matt Hooper, underwater in a reinforced cage, it’s actually a midget actor in a diving-suit designed to make the shark — in this scene it was a real one, filmed off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef — look bigger. But of course the shark we know best was the mechanical version used throughout the film, named after Spielberg’s rapacious showbiz lawyer, Bruce Ramer.
The horror its sheer size instilled was a large factor in the film’s success. The infamous Jaws poster, showing a vast shark swimming up under a dwarfed naked girl in the ocean, sends tingles down the spine even today because it taps into one of our most primeval fears.
Indeed, few films had such a great influence on audiences and film-makers alike. Yet Jaws nearly foundered before it got anywhere near the water. Its independent producers, David Brown and Richard Zanuck, envisaged it as a small picture, which is doubtless why they offered Peter Benchley, author of the source novel, a generous ten per cent of the net profits.
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