| Collector's Corner May 2006
 JawsStarring: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw,
Richard Dreyfuss, Murray Hamilton
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Theatrical release: 1975
DVD release: 2005
Video: Widescreen
Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1, Dolby
Digital 2.0
Released by: Universal
What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an
eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and
eat and make little sharks, and that’s all.
-- Matt Hooper
Just in case you’ve forgotten the story, a shark is
killing people off Amity Island -- a huge, great white shark 25’ long: three tons of
sheer terror. Amity’s mayor (Murray Hamilton) is afraid it will ruin the summer
tourist season, and wants to pretend there’s no problem. But the police chief, Martin
Brody (Roy Scheider), demands some action, and enlists marine biologist Matt Hooper
(Richard Dreyfuss) and old salt Quint (Robert Shaw) to help kill the shark. It turns out
to be a little more difficult than any of them guessed.
I wanted to remind you of the film since summer is coming
up and we all need to remember how scary it is to swim in the ocean. Before June 20, 1975,
folks outside of Australia seldom worried about shark attacks. That all changed on that
date, when 28-year-old Steven Spielberg’s second feature film hit theaters with the
power of his creation’s 80-tooth chomps. Since that day, the beach has never looked
quite so inviting. As of June 19 of that year, no film had ever grossed $100 million. By
the weekend after Labor Day, 1975, Jaws had grossed $438 million. People in the US
had bought 67 million tickets -- enough for almost half the adult population.
What caught the American zeitgeist was a canny combination
of sticking it to unscrupulous politicians (Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace only a
year before), a portrayal of characters we actually cared about played by really good
actors, and a story that scared the peewaddy out of us. Shake all this together with a
great editor (Verna Fields) and a blossoming film-score genius (John Williams), and all
director Spielberg had to do was not screw it up. But what makes Jaws a classic is
that it contains some of Spielberg’s best work.
Producers David Zanuck and Richard Brown already had made a
picture with Spielberg in 1974: The Sugarland Express. While it’s a
good film in the Roger Corman Drive-in Theater style of the era, it gave little hint of
the Spielberg of Jaws. For that, you have to go back to 1971 and Duel, a
made-for-TV ABC film about a faceless, predatory truck driver preying on a common
man (Dennis Weaver). The networks were beginning to run out of feature films to show on
their evening showcases, and had just begun to dip their toes in the waters of TV movies.
But because the networks’ sponsors would not have allowed sex, drugs, or violence,
they needed directors who could present powerful visual stories, and there Spielberg found
his niche. When Zanuck and Brown came up with a script about a faceless, predatory fish
preying on common folks, they knew they had their director.
The production was fraught with problems. None of
Spielberg’s first casting picks came through. He’d wanted Charlton Heston to
play Chief Brody, while Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms were preferred for Hooper; and
first Sterling Hayden, then Lee Marvin, turned down the role of Quint. Once filming
started, the self-important Dreyfuss and the hard-drinking Shaw constantly sparred. Jaws
was scheduled to be shot in two months but took eight. The resulting delay of the
film’s release date was one of two serendipitous accidents that propelled Jaws
into film history.
Because of the delay, Jaws wasn’t released
until the summer. In 1975, most people got their entertainment from TV, and summer meant
boring reruns. Also, in 1975, many US homes still lacked air-conditioning -- and Jaws
itself is set in the summertime. So Universal decided to try something that had never been
done before. They mounted a huge TV advertising campaign to get people out of their hot
houses and mind-numbing network reruns and into air-conditioned theaters. There had never
before been a TV ad campaign of this size for a movie, and no studio had ever contemplated
releasing a major film in the summer. If these sound like current practices, now you know
from whence they came.
The other accident had to do with Bruce. That’s what
the film crew named the animatronic shark. The trouble was, Bruce seldom worked. On the
very first day of filming, he sank straight to the bottom of the ocean and had to be
rescued by scuba divers. It seems the designers had neglected to test the mechanical shark
in the water. As Bruce continued to malfunction, Spielberg began to call the shark
"The Great White Turd." He had to come up with a different way of creating
tension, and so began to shoot scenes from the shark’s point of view, a decision that
now looks like brilliance. Shooting with the camera lens half in and half out of water
gives the shaky impression of a shark about to pounce. When problems occur, necessity
sometimes helps spark genius. Cinema was never the same.
There were no accidents when it came to the three human
protagonists. Probably the most fun of the film is watching the race between Dreyfuss,
Shaw, and Bruce to see who can chew the most scenery. Shaw was always a ham, rolling his
words around on his tongue like a ripe chunk of plum, shooting glances with his fiery blue
eyes, flashing his malevolent grin. Here, it all works, down to his comeuppance ending.
Dreyfuss was fresh from his first starring role, in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
(1974), another film in which he plays a young putz who must learn the hard way at the
feet of a master. As a semi-spoiled rich kid with a love of marine biology, he seems
almost typecast. Watch the scene in chapter 15 in which he and Shaw try to out-macho each
other with knots and scars. It’s a wonderful piece of acting for both.
Scheider’s role is less showy, but important. His wide-eyed amazement at all
that’s happening around him helps him serve as an everyman observer who draws the
viewer deeper into the story.
When all the actors do such a wonderful job, you can
usually thank the director, and in 1975, Steven Spielberg was at the top of his game.
It’s a shame to say that about a 28-year-old when he’s still making films at 60,
but 30 years ago, Spielberg cared more about his audience than his artistic legacy. In the
ten years starting with Jaws, he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941
(hubris embodied, but still fun), Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. The
Extraterrestrial, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Then he
decided that his work should be important, became arrogant and pompous, and films lost
interest. Even his recent attempts at reconnecting with the audience, such as Minority
Report and War of the Worlds, feel fake -- as if working with us, the mere
working classes, was just slumming until he could get to his next important literary work
(next up: a filming of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Abraham Lincoln).
Nevertheless, in 1975, Spielberg was a master at getting to
the audience. His pacing, from the slow burn of getting to know our heroes and the
seemingly infinite amount of time that goes by before we ever see the shark (Brody’s
famous line: "You’re gonna need a bigger boat"), gives us the opportunity
to settle in with the community and its characters and to raise a Hitchcockian amount of
hair long before the action starts. Many of Hollywood’s finest thought the honor for
that pacing should have gone to editor Verna Fields. Spielberg, wanting to quash that
rumor, never worked with Fields again -- a draconian move on his part, but it’s since
become clear that he was in control, and capably handled two difficult actors and a
recalcitrant robot.
Jaws has been a standby on DVD since the advent of
the medium, and we’ve already had 25th and 30th Anniversary editions. The 25th
Anniversary Edition came in Dolby Digital 5.1 (full or widescreen) or DTS 5.1
(widescreen); the 30th comes with both soundtracks on one disc (fullscreen or widescreen).
Both editions have the same featurette that accompanied the $130 (!) laserdisc edition of
1996. The 30th also has a nice booklet.
I’m tired of getting new editions every five years
with nothing of note added, and no way to figure that out by looking at the box. The 30th
Anniversary Edition of Jaws is advertised as including a
"never-before-available interview with Steven Spielberg," but it’s short
and pointless. There’s also a picture booklet with some interesting stills. Such nice
little divertissements do not make it worth buying this film yet again. The 35th
Anniversary Edition, of course, will be in high definition, and should be worth buying for
that alone. But what will they do for the 40th? or the 50th? We’ll just have to wait
and see. Maybe Universal will find something interesting to add by then.
In the meantime, the important thing is the film itself. Jaws
is a masterpiece of slow-burning suspense punctuated by a few jolts of real
terror. Watch it before the summer swimming season, then remember Brody and Hooper’s
dinner conversation:
Brody: "Isn’t it true that most people are
attacked by sharks in three feet of water and about ten feet from the beach?"
Hooper: "Yes, that’s true."
Swim safe.
...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
