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Factoids of the Living Dead: JAWS


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Kind of redundant at this point, but yep, this is another one of my faves. But then again that's probably true for most people.

 

 

- That line was improvised. Of course it was. Also improvised: the little scene where Brody goofs off with his son at the dinner table. The child actor just randomly started mimicking Roy Scheider, and they thought it was cute.

 

- Everyone calls the shark Jaws, but the cast and crew took to calling the mechanical shark "Bruce" (

), while Steven Spielberg just took to calling it "the Great White Turd".

 

- It's possibly the most widely know piece of film trivia ever, but you can't talk about Jaws without talking about the utter hell that was the making of Jaws. Filming began without a completed script, cast, and shark, making a movie at sea proved to be a difficult shoot, with most of everybody getting debilitating sea-sickness, the production went over budget and over schedule, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss did not get along very well, and of course, the shark didn't work at all, hence the "Great White Turd" thing. And, as anyone and their mothers will be able to tell ya, because they had to cut down on the screentime of the shark (the scene where the young boy dies, for example, was meant to be much more graphic), it actually added to the suspense and made the film more effective.

 

Jaws_ohshit.gif.CROP.original-original.gif

 

- All the extras were people who lived in the town where the movie was shot, while the original novel's author Peter Benchley cameos as a TV reporter.

- Beat out The Exorcist for the highest grossing movie at that time.

 

- Spielberg never got to meet his idol, Alfred Hitchcock, mostly due to Hitchcock refusing to the guy who made "the fish movie", his rationale being that it made him feel like a whore because he did a voice for the Jaws ride.

 

- Steven Spielberg once invited friends, including George Lucas, to the set. While checking out the robot shark, Lucas jokingly stuck his head in its mouth, which then unexpectedly malfunctioned (and by that, I mean Spielberg snuck away to the controls and tried to scare him) and clamped down on his head. This incident may have very well have been what broke the shark. And yes, there is an alternate universe where a shitty roboshark killed George Lucas.

 

- The Indianapolis speech, which probably should have won Robert Shaw an Oscar (jus seyin'), was written by Shaw himself after no on else could get it right.

 

- The audio in the opening scene got a bit mucked up, so the actress had to rerecord her lines. To make it sound like she was drowning, she had water poured into her mouth while she screamed in terror. Richard Dreyfuss remembers walking into this recording session by accident. It was awkward.

 

- Spielberg laughed the first time he heard John Williams's score.

 

- The Ben Gardner boat scene, arguably the scariest jump scare of all time, wasn't in the script. It was added at the last minute when the filmmakers realized the movie had gone on too long without a good fright. It made the first test audiences scream, but Spielberg decided to refilm it in editor Verna Field's pool and made it even scarier.

 

- Okay, spoiler time:

 

It was decided that the underwater shots during the shark cage scene should use a real shark, so the the job of getting footage of a Great White attacking a cage to a diving team in Australia. To make the shark look, bigger, a small person and a small cage were used. Unfortanatley, none of the sharks in the area would take the bait and attack the cage. Suddenly, late in the day, a shark got caught in the cage and tore it apart in a fight to escape. Thankfully, it got away unharmed, and the footage of it thrashing about and destroying the cage looked great. But, of course, neither the actor or the dummy double were in the cage at the time, they couldn't afford another go at it, and Hooper's character (both in the novel and the screenplay) was suppose to die. So, running out of time, they said "screw it" and just changed the movie so Hooper lived.

 

 

- At one point, The Orca started to sink with the actors and filming equipment on board, because why not.

 

- At the end of the movie, the sound the shark's remains make as they sink to the bottom of the ocean is the same dinosaur-esque sound the villainous truck in Speilberg's earlier movie Duel makes as it drives off of a cliff to its "death".

 

- Production got so frustrating for the entire crew that a pact was made to team up and throw Spielberg into the water when production was done. Spielberg caught wind of this and was legitimately terrified. Special precautions had to be taken. How dramatic this was varies on who tells the story, but on the last day of filming, Spielberg got to the production location early, set up everything, made sure it was all shipshape, and then promptly got his ass off the island before anyone knew he was gone. To this day, he never works on the last day of shooting, for good luck.

 

- Peter Benchley was inspired to become an activist for the protection of sharks after seeing the fear of the lovable things the movie instilled in people.

 

- My sisters hate Jaws. Can't imagine why.

 

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  • Brohoof 1

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awww you already said it... I came here just so I could tell ya that we'll need a bigger boat.

  • Brohoof 1
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Again-like so many of these, I was around when it first came out. Shaw's Indianapolis speech really added a dose of realism to the film-as did the unintended 'Theater of the mind' flavor of the earlier parts, as you said.

 

I did some of my growing up on the Isle Of Wight-surrounded by water. I didn't go back in the sea for at least a year after seeing Jaws.

  • Brohoof 1
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