Mr. Pugliese
Mass Media
Jaws - 1975
Journals #8 and #9 – Complete the packet.
Extra Credit #1
Jaws won Oscars for Best Original Score and Best Sound. Discuss how the score and sound used in this film added to the overall effectiveness of the film. Why was this film deserving of these honors? 100 words minimum.
Extra Credit #2
Discuss in detail how Jaws “taps into the most primal of human fears.” How does this film approach the fear of the “unknown,” and keep the audience in suspense throughout most of the film? 100 words minimum.
Jaws (1975) is a masterful, visceral and realistic science-fiction suspense/horror-disaster film that taps into the most primal of human fears - what unseen creature lurks below the dark surface of the water beyond the beach? The tagline for the tensely-paced film, "Don't go in the water," kept a lot of shark-hysterical ocean-swimmers and 1975 summer beachgoers wary (similar to the effect that Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) had on shower-taking).
The screenplay, mostly written by young, 27 year-old director Spielberg himself and Carl Gottlieb, was provided in part by Peter Benchley who wrote a trashy action novel by the same name (but originally titled A Stillness in the Water) about the fictional New England coastal town of Amity, Long Island - a summer resort that is terrorized by a menacing Great White Shark (known as the genus/species Carcharodon carcharias). Both Benchley's best-selling book (released in the winter of 1973-74) and Spielberg's film borrowed from various sources:
· Herman Melville's 1851 Moby Dick, about a search for a monstrous sea creature (a great white whale) by a determined Captain Ahab
· Ibsen's 1882 classic play An Enemy of the People
· the exploits of diver Peter Gimbel's shark expedition recounted in the documentary film Blue Water, White Death (1971)
· Peter Matthiessen's 1971 non-fiction book Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark
· two great 50s horror films: The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) and The Monster That Challenged the World (1957)
· a real-life incident on the New Jersey shore in the summer of 1916 that claimed five lives over the course of two weeks
Benchley's next water-related book that was brought to the screen as another hit was The Deep (1977), with a reappearance by Robert Shaw and mostly remembered for Jacqueline Bisset's scuba-diving in a wet, revealing white T-shirt.
The three major characters who ultimately confront the film's major character - the shark (similar to the whale search in various Moby Dick sagas), include:
· the town's principled police Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) [Charlton Heston was considered]
· a bespectacled, bearded marine biologist Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) [Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms and Jan-Michael Vincent were other possible candidates]
· a grizzly, salty fisherman and WWII veteran named Quint (Robert Shaw), over-the-top and obsessed (as Captain Ahab was) to hunt and kill the great white, from a boat named Orca (named after the black and white predatory 'killer whale' - the shark's sole enemy besides man); [both Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden were considered for the role of Quint at one time]
The unheeding mayor (Murray Hamilton), a devious and dishonest authority figure who covers up the dangers of the underwater enemy in the community and restricts the local police chief, resonated with audiences in the mid-70s following the Watergate era and the earlier failure of the US military effort in Vietnam.
This was Steven Spielberg's second-directed feature film (following his poorly-received The Sugarland Express (1974)) with Goldie Hawn, but it was more similar in theme to his earlier Duel (1971) - a 73-minute ABC made-for-TV movie (and released theatrically in 1983) about a relentless, sinister and face-less driver in a demon gas tanker-truck in pursuit of a salesman's (Dennis Weaver) rented car. The same technique of delaying a glimpse of the dangerous force was employed in this film - a full view of the shark is not provided until over an hour into the film (although there are a few brief glimpses).
From four Academy Award nominations, it won three Oscars: Best Sound, Best Original Score (composer John Williams, his first Oscar of many awards in the category), and Best Film Editing (Verna Fields, her final editing assignment before her death in 1982). Its Best Picture nomination went unrewarded. [That year, freshman director Spielberg was the only director of a Best Picture nominee that didn't receive a Best Director nomination.] This was Spielberg's and Williams' second collaboration together, following their work on The Sugarland Express (1974), and they would go on to collaborate on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) - among others.
Spielberg's film was a huge summer box-office blockbuster in the mid-1970s, although the filming suffered technical problems (the film was dubbed "Flaws" by the crew), costly delays in the schedule on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts where the set was located (the on-location shoot escalated from 55 days to 159 days), and difficulties with malfunctioning, hydraulically-operated mechanical sharks (one was nicknamed 'Bruce' after the name of Spielberg's lawyer) after they were placed in the salt-water. Hollywood realized that it could increase its profits by advertising this new release on television and promoted the film with a massive, revolutionary TV marketing campaign (of $700,000) for the film.
The film was also booked into almost 500 theatres for its opening weekend - a record! The film's impact caused its celebration on the cover of Time Magazine (June 23, 1975). With a modest film budget of about $12 million, Jaws was the highest grossing film up to that time (unbroken until the release of George Lucas' Star Wars (1977)), and earned its 27 year-old director a place in Hollywood. It grossed $438 million in eleven weeks, and was also the first film to top the $100 million record in box-office rentals (cruising past previous pace-setters Gone With the Wind (1939) and The Sound of Music (1965)).
Its tremendous success spurred Hollywood studios to aggressively look for further blockbusting, 'big-event' films with expensive ad campaigns, and the film industry did so - with Star Wars (1977), Grease (1978), and Superman (1978), while overlooking or neglecting smaller films. Repeated attempts were made to duplicate the original film's success in three mostly-weak sequels, although there were two Oscar-winning actors in these inferior sequels: Lou Gossett, and Michael Caine:
Jaws 2 (1978) / Jeannot Szwarc (a replacement for original director John Hancock)
/ Four years later, on Amity Island; Roy Scheider - the only major returning star; also with Murray Hamilton (the mayor) and Lorraine Gary (Brody's wife)
Jaws 3-D (1983) (aka Jaws III) / Joe Alves / Originally released as 3-D; set in Florida at Sea World Park; with Dennis Quaid as one of the sons of Chief Brody, Bess Armstrong, Lea Thompson, and Louis Gossett, Jr.
Jaws: The Revenge (1987) / Joseph Sargent / Again set on Amity Island - and in the Bahamas; with Lorraine Gary as Brody's widow; also with Mario Van Peebles, Michael Caine, and Karen Young
There were other exploitative imitators, knock-offs, and rip-off 'terror in the water' films, including Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976), Tintorera...Bloody Waters (1977), Orca (1977), Tentacles (1977), Piranha (1978), Killer Fish (1979), Crocodile (1979), the Peter Benchley-scripted NBC mini-series The Beast (1999), the effectively scary Deep Blue Sea (1999) [with a number of 'in-joke' homages that paid honor to the original], and the chillingly-dramatic Open Water (2003) (a cross between Jaws and Dead Calm (1989)), based on a true story of two divers stranded in open waters.
It also inspired spoofs and parodies, including the opening of Airplane! (1980) in which a jet's rear tail (like a shark fin) sliced through the clouds, and an oft-played skit on Saturday Night Live in which a shark disguised itself as a pizza and candy-gram delivery person to enter an apartment. It was also parodied or referenced in Top Secret! (1984), Clerks (1994), Swingers (1996), and The Simpsons TV show - among others.