Original subtitles

Marker.

Stand by. Background action. Yeah.

Action.

Action!

Okay, hang on.

The shark is networking.

We're having a little problem with the shark here.

Bob, we need you.

The shark is not working.

Roy?

Has anybody seen Roy?

The shark is not working. Repeat, the shark is not working.

Can't get it to work at all.

AH right, let's try this again.

Okay, rolling. Action!

The shark is working again.

Joe here, the boat is sinking.

Three decades after the release

of what many consider to be the original summer blockbuster,

stories of the hardships experienced during the filming of Jaws

are the stuff of Hollywood legend.

It filled me up with stories that I could dine out on for 35 years.

If I wanted to, I could just hold back any but the stories from Jaws.

Through accounts like Carl Gottlieb's The Jaws Log

and numerous television documentaries, multitudes of movie buffs

are familiar with those famous tales of the shark not working.

We were all groping in the dark for a way to tell the story,

because the shark wasn't working. It kept breaking down.

It is as if God created the devil

and gave him jaws.

Jaws, one of Hollywood's little movies that couldn't,

emerged as a record-shattering box office juggernaut,

then an Oscar contender.

And today, stands as a critically-acclaimed enduring classic

that after all this time shows no sign of losing its bite.

What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine.

Michael, did you hear your father? Out of the water now!

Opening the beaches on the Fourth of July is like ringing the dinner bell.

This shark, swallow you whole.

My heart was beating so fast.

I didn't know, as an adult, I could get that soared anymore.

One thing, it's a real thing, not a monster from outer space.

Sharks are real.

The film sparked a pop cultural obsession with sharks

and heightened public awareness of real life shark attacks.

And though numerous copycat pictures have come and gone,

Jaws still remains that singular cinematic experience

that keeps bathers close to the shore.

The movie itself is what first put the terror into me.

Every time you felt a bit of seaweed brush your foot,

you would have been thinking about it.

I still get a little nervous in water, being like, "Is there a shark in here?"

Not only did it impact the way movies are made and marketed,

but it maintains a legacy kept alive by legions of fans,

artists and even successful filmmakers,

who cite this picture as a defining life experience,

helping to make them who they are today.

Anyone who's around my age, who is in this movie business,

always cites Jaws as the first movie

that made them want to get into movies.

It's therefore no wonder that after 30 years,

the shark is indeed still working.

When I was writing Jaws, I knew that it could not be a success.

It couldn't be a success as a novel

because, first of all, it's a first novel and nobody reads first novels.

It was a first novel about a fish, so give me a break, who cares?

I knew they couldn't make a movie about it

because the technology was nowhere near good enough

to make a great white shark, and I knew you couldn't catch and train one.

So I had no sense that this was going to be a success

beyond just being published, until the movie had been open for a while

and the paperback was selling millions of copies.

And even then, who would've guessed

that down the road it would have had any currency?

I wouldn't have.

Making Jaws, still looking back 30 years ago,

was the toughest film making production

experience I've ever encountered.

Nothing's ever come close to the production difficulties

of shooting an actual special effects movie,

not a digital effects movie, that was many, many years later,

but a mechanical effects movie,

not in a tank somewhere in Malta

or some safe tank somewhere in Florida,

but in the actual Atlantic Ocean.

We must've been complete idiots

to have even expected to have an easy ride

in the middle of the ocean making a movie.

The in gathering

of all the mystical tribes

and shamans and crazy experts that floated in

under the banner of Universal to make this movie

had overlooked that it was the first film ever really shot on the ocean.

They hadn't really known that before.

The approach that Spielberg had then,

remember that he was fresh then,

he was new and young,

and he insisted that this movie be shot on the ocean,

and that alone was an innovation,

because Universal at the time

would normally have gone to a back lake and shot on the lot,

and he wouldn't let them.

We all gained a tremendous respect for the sea, for nature,

for currents and tides, for waves,

for rain and sun and overexposure to both.

We started shooting on the first of May,

and we were supposed to shoot until June 28th.

If you're really quiet, you could hear someone laughing.

The movie went on for a total of seven months,

something like that, almost a year.

If you figured when the first crew got there

and the first special effects people,

then the actors came and then it just went on and on and on.

And we thought we were gonna be there for the rest of our lives.

It's not the time it takes to take the take that takes the time,

it's the time it takes between the takes

that takes the time that takes the take.

If you see, conditions have been so impossible

that it's really hurt our schedule and

put a general somber note behind the scenes

on the production, 'cause we've been here 105 shooting days

and we were only scheduled for something like 65 or 70.

And they started the shoot

without a cast, without a script and without a shark.

And that was after May 1st.

And we're going and we're shooting.

What are we shooting? I don't know, what are we doing?

I know because he'll be so energetic,

and he'll be screaming and yelling,

"It's a great white, it's a great white. I knew it all along."

And it's only…

It's hard to imagine a world

where Steven Spielberg isn't a household name.

But in 1974, it was viewed by some as a roll of the dice

to put the weight of such a mammoth project on the shoulders

of a 27-year-old relative newcomer.

A director, who had only just completed work

on his first theatrical release,

The Sugar land Express.

I remember a reporter one time asking me,

"Mr. Zanuck, are you trying to enhance this young director's career?"

And I said, "No, just the opposite.

"I'm trying to enhance my career."

Probably nobody else in the world knew at that time

better than I, who was every day on The Sugar land Express,

how good this guy was and how he could tell a story.

Steven Spielberg story boarded the actual scenes

and then shot them.

And the studio production department

wanted to know every storyboard there was.

They didn't know every storyboard there was.

We had a bunch of 'em that we never told 'em about

that we would sneak and shoot.

It was a guerrilla movie.

I like to think of it as a big independent movie

masquerading as a big studio movie.

It was the film's title monster, a 12-ton hydraulic shark,

that would become affectionately known as Bruce,

that plagued Spielberg and the Jaws production team

with their most daunting set of complications.

Once the idea was set that we're gonna build it,

then we had to determine the size,

and I was working off of a scale model

of my research of a shark that was about 12 and a half feet,

and so I just doubled it

because I felt that as the sharks got bigger,

they got girthier, and they weren't so attractive.

So, I figured a 25-foot shark would be the proper size.

Don Chandler was a studio sculptor.

He started on the outside,

a big clay model, we were gonna make a mold.

And so we were making the skeleton out of Permali tubing,

both things at once,

and hoping that they would fit together perfectly, which they did.

My part that they gave me, mostly, was the cosmetics of the thing

and the skin and the looks of it and all that,

and when something mechanical would break in the shark,

the shark's head would turn over, and of course it would rip

and then they would bring it back to me and say, "Fix it."

Then we'd have to patch the whole shark.

Veteran effects supervisor, Bob Mattey,

who had created the famous squid

from Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,

was mastermind of the shark's mechanical workings.

You got the men down there with the camera

over by the end down by the fin. I'm not sure.

Bob Mattey, my mentor, was the greatest guy in the world.

He loved… I mean, he loved what he did.

I just fell in right behind Bob. He was like my hero.

There was never ever a down day.

I mean, he was pretty much tireless.

And he always looked at the up side.

It was a good thing, too, as Mattey and his team promptly discovered

that Jaws would produce technical challenges

unlike any movie previously attempted by Hollywood.

The condition of the shark was the ultimate story,

that if the shark didn't work, what do you do?

When your lead actor, which is this 12 ton marvel, is recalcitrant.

Well, like any recalcitrant actor, you shoot around him or her.

Not that a recalcitrant shark

was always to blame for setbacks during the shoot.

For a Hollywood film crew with little or no maritime experience,

finding their sea legs didn't always come easily.

It didn't take long for one thing to become perfectly clear.

Making Jaws, whether by land or sea or foam,

would be no day at the beach.

We were starting to shoot all of the land scenes

and running out of them very quickly.

And Carl Gottlieb and Roy, David and Dick, producers,

Steven, myself and Verna Fields and her son,

would meet every day at Steven's bungalow

and try to make sense of the next day's work or the days after.

With no shark to shoot and an ever inflating budget,

they made the very most of these meetings.

The logistical setbacks allowed Spielberg and his actors

to become a little repertory company, free to invent and improvise.

The thing I remember most is, Steven, obviously,

allowing the actors to ad lib, because a lot of this was ad lib.

The, "You wanna get drunk and fool around?" The "coffee."

I mean, all these… "Dead doll's eyes," that's my favorite.

I think that's one of the things that was so extraordinary.

The scene with the little boy at the table,

after Roy's had a particularly hard day,

we were in between shots

and I was like this at the table,

and then that little kid was like this.

Just started with our hands underneath our chin.

Then he'd do this and I'd do that.

Then I went… And he went…

And he made a monster face and I kind of went like that…

And I went out to the kitchen in the house and I said to Steven,

"Come here. Come here. Watch this."

And I went through all the motions

and the little guy copied right after me.

He said, "Okay," and he brought the camera in and we did that scene.

Hello? Get out of here.

With the summer season fully upon them,

frustration began to mount amidst the already exhausted crew

as discouraging reports of the film's malfunctioning antagonist

continued to spread across the island.

It's not the first movie with the radio mics,

it was the first one that I was aware of

that had all these radio mics all over the island.

So every day, you could hear this.

The shark is not working.

Repeat. The shark is not working.

Repeat. The shark… Not working.

And that was the constant refrain,

because every time they tried to test the shark,

it would come up like…

Or its eye would fall out.

I have a saying in films that

film companies import their problems,

they don't find them where they go.

And in our case, we imported our problem and that was the shark,

and we didn't have enough testing time on Bob Mattey's behalf.

If we'd given him the 15 weeks that it took

to work the bugs out of the shark,

it would've worked on cue.

We were pioneers. That's the best word I can think of,

because nobody had ever taken on

the Atlantic Ocean in small boats.

No one had ever worked with a mechanical shark

of the sophistication of ours.

We struggled like mad, but the end justified the means.

Then one day, you heard this…

The shark is working. Repeat, the shark is working.

Repeat, the shark…

What you see in the finished picture

is practically every frame of usable footage of the shark.

And down.

Suits and all.

One more time. Shark comes up,

bites at the masts,

snaps two, three times, shaking their head,

but always working its way into the masts.

Okay, start it. Okay, Roy? Action.

Bring it in. Bring it in.

And the last shot, before we all went back

to Long Beach for another month of shooting in California,

was going to be the shot of the shark blowing up.

We were rigging the shark to blow up and blow scrib

and all kinds of stuff up into the air, and they were loading it.

And finally, the sun went down and I'm shooting high speed

and I said, "Steven, they're not ready and I can't shoot high speed."

Steven said, "You shoot it in the morning."

Steven went to the airport, got onto the airplane,

he was already packed, and left the island. He was ready to go.

I said, "Goodbye! I'm going back to L.A."

And I got into a motorboat, sped back to the mainland.

Steven and I were on a flight back to L-A.

And I said, "So, who's… How was the last shot?"

You know, they blow up the…

He saw, "They're doing it right now."

I said, "They're doing it right now, why aren't you there?"

He goes…

And I said, "Steven?"

He said something like… He got word,

he knew that they were gonna throw him in.

So, he decided to just skip out and not do the last shot.

Not do the last blowing up shot, yeah, not do that one,

which became, by the way, a tradition of Steven's.

He never would do the last shot of his movies,

because he thought the crew was always gonna do something.

And he probably was right.

Had I been on his crew, I would've.

But it's become a tradition that Steven never shoots his last shot.

One day, I'm gonna use this information.

With the production of the film completed

and Benchley's book already a raging success,

the makers of Jaws braced themselves,

hoping the fruit of their labor

would live up to the reputation of the novel that inspired it.

Little did they realize that their fish story

was about to change the face of Hollywood.

I couldn't really see beyond

all of the screw ups that were apparent to me

and were more apparent than anything else.

And so in my ignorance, which is pure ignorance,

I was saying, "This is gonna be a disaster."

And then we made this movie that

crashed into people like a speeding truck.

The book had become a best seller

while we were shooting the picture.

But still, no one had any thought or even dared to think

that it would become what it became.

Part of it is that, it was over-ambitious for the budget.

The technology was not there, that they had to use parts of their brain

that you don't normally have to

unless you're in desperate mode,

and when an artist is pushed like that,

amazing, one-of-a-kind things happen,

and that's what happened in Jaws.

It was just an extraordinary, perfect creative storm.

Who knew? Who knew?

But you know, it's like all of these phenomenons,

they just happen.

If you planned it, it would never be a phenomenon.

The film's groundbreaking ad campaign

was highly instrumental in its initial box office success.

I think Jaws affected film making in a lot of ways.

That's when they first started using television

to really advertise movies.

So, it made this huge opening, and everybody went out to see it.

The anticipation was unbelievable. Unbelievable.

No one had ever anticipated a movie

much like that that I remember.

I mean, it really did create the sensation around the planet of,

"All right, here it comes."

There is a creature alive today

who has survived millions of years of evolution…

Underscoring the TV spots and theatrical trailers for Jaws

was the familiar, but ominous voice talent

of character actor and voice artist, Percy Rodrigues.

They had an idea of doing a very high, horrifying delivery,

which I disagreed with.

And we discussed it.

And finally, they came around to the idea that I had in mind,

that we would do it at a more level, devastating presentation,

rather than trying to ride over

this terrifying visual that they had.

I felt that I should go underneath it and let the visual sell.

It is as if God created the devil

and gave him jaws.

The level of advertising was very high-pitched,

and afterwards, they had people afraid to go in the water for years.

And I like to think that I contributed to that fear.

See it before you go swimming.

Everyone who grew up around that period knows the voice.

He was the gateway for a lot of people into the Jaws universe.

He was like the weed to what would become the crack of Jaws.

It's just like you had to get through Percy and Percy's dulcet tones

that drew you into that movie and then got you hooked in a big, bad way.

Once Jaws premiered,

it demonstrated just how hooked moviegoers were

and marked a decisive turning point at the box office.

The buzz generated by advanced screenings

demanded that it become the first movie ever

to be released in over 400 theaters.

And it could've been even more.

When the screening in Long Beach, California took place,

Lew Wasserman, the chairman of the board of Universal,

asked Hy Martin, who was the head of distribution,

to cut back on the number of theaters.

Hy said, "We've set a record. We've got 600 theaters.

"Ever since the Dallas preview,

"I cannot stop the phone from ringing."

And Lew said,

"Cut it in half."

And everybody was kind of stunned, "Cut it in half? Why?"

He said, "I want people in Palm Springs, California

"to have to come to Los Angeles to see the movie."

I don't think we thought that we were releasing

an "event movie."

We thought we had this very successful movie,

we thought they should be waiting to see it.

My colleague, Lew Wasserman, always thought that the best advertising

was people standing in line.

Lew said, "I wanted this to be something that you couldn't get into."

He wasn't interested in just taking the weekend.

He wanted to take the summer, and we took the summer.

When you opened in 400 theaters, it was different.

You could play all summer, and if you looked at the grosses,

the grosses were constant.

Smoking lounge is sold out, seats downstairs in the first seven rows only.

When the movie was out for weeks and months,

I would still be going to the movies.

Not to see a new movie, but to see Jaws again.

And, "One for Jaws, " and he'd look at me like, "Again?"

It's like, "Dude, just give me the ticket."

They began to see that the film could become an event

and a marketing phenomenon.

Of course, nowadays, the marketing of a film

is more important than the film itself.

And I think we can attribute a lot of that to the success of Jaws.

It happened to work on a very mainstream level

and a mass audience level,

but the movie itself

was so incredibly solid and beyond solid,

just exceptional from end to end,

that when people throw together their summer movies

and the eye candy stuff, they just tend to forget that

that movie was a lot more than just eye candy.

Although it is credited with having started

the syndrome of summer blockbusters,

and mindless movies and all that stuff,

the fact is that Jaws, and I think many critics will agree,

was a fine movie of that genre, which was very rare.

Given its monstrous success and critical acclaim,

Jaws was roundly expected to receive

the lion's share of Oscar nominations for that year,

including Best Director for Steven Spielberg.

But unfortunately, those high expectations came up short.

Oh, I didn't get it. I didn't get it.

I wasn't nominated. I got beaten out by Fellini.

Jaws did get the nomination for Best Picture.

Jaws.

Well, it's about time.

But it was in light of this

that some in the industry thought it scandalous

that Steven would be overlooked for Best Director.

Who made the picture? Somebody's mother?

The director.

This man made Jaws.

Are you kidding? Who's kidding who around here?

It's the biggest disappointment for me, the whole Oscars.

I thought Steven did a brilliant job directing Jaws,

and I have no idea what happened.

It's the one thing that I cannot comprehend yet

in my head, how a best picture can be nominated,

and yet the director, who is basically responsible for it,

does not get the nomination.

But for the 27-year-old wunderkind director,

there was no choice but to take his lumps.

I'm suffering enough. All right.

We're suffering with you. I'm suffering.

We're suffering with you. Cancel my day.

Right, we're getting to it…

Although Jaws did not receive the Oscar for Best Picture,

it did bring home awards for its remaining three nominations.

Best Sound, Best Editing and Best Musical Score.

Throughout the rest of the year,

Jaws continued to reel in numerous other industry awards,

even as the record books were being re-written.

In hindsight, one wonders if the Academy would rethink

overlooking Spielberg's masterful work on Jaws,

if they knew then what they certainly know now.

Of course, a much decorated career still lay ahead for Steven.

A now legendary career that encompasses, perhaps,

the most popular and diverse body of work

ever created by an individual director,

making Steven Spielberg one of the most influential figures

in the entire film industry.

And it was all jump-started by Jaws.

Audience fascination with Jaws was by no means limited to the U. S.

Shortly after its domestic release,

Jaws swam its way into theaters across the globe.

And moviegoers couldn't get enough.

The biggest thing I remember about Jaws

is traveling around the world, promoting it.

And whether it was in South Africa or Australia or Latin America,

every culture in the world embraced Jaws.

Peter Benchley's book, which was the start of it all,

was a sensation.

Somehow the idea of this creature attacking mankind

caught on everywhere.

I've been to many places in the world,

and Jaws has reached almost every place I've ever been.

At first, I thought maybe it'll do okay in cities

near great bodies of water.

But it turned out some of our best business

were in tremendous desert countries.

I think the reason it went around the world so quickly was that

you don't even need dialogue.

I mean, you just see the situation there,

and your own primal fear about something you can't see into

is enough to hold your interest in that movie.

It's a universal movie.

Not just Universal Studios, but it really has a global impact.

I really think it works like a silent movie.

You're responding to the visuals

instinctively and in a visceral way.

The coincidence of that, plus Steven's innate talent as a filmmaker,

made a film that will live.

It has to live.

It's not going away anywhere.

There's no culture on Earth that does not have that film and show it.

It was shown in 40 countries in 17 different languages.

If you forgot what terror is like, the original Jaws is back.

And then there was the merchandising blitz.

Almost overnight, Jaws became a cottage industry.

And suddenly sharks meant big business.

When we realized what we had, Merchandising was licking their lips,

and it just was such an easy one to merchandise.

It started obviously with what everybody does with the T-shirts,

but it went from there.

Everything kind of mushroomed with the release of the picture.

I even had a toilet seat,

that when you open it up, it was a big shark facing you.

So, everything, lunch pails to barbeque sets…

It was incredible,

and one of the first big merchandising events

to take place in connection with the movie.

Though three decades have come and gone

since the Jaws merchandising frenzy,

for some voracious collectors, the summer of the shark never ends.

In recent years,

the picture's enduring popularity has seen

a resurgence of Jaws-related paraphernalia,

from children's toys, to high-end collectibles,

to video games.

Another milestone in the evolution of entertainment

was the commercialization of the making of Jaws.

Though commonplace today,

capitalizing on a picture's behind-the-scenes accounts

was rarely, if ever, seen in the mid-'70s.

I'd always been interested in movies

as something more than just sitting there and passively observing them.

The Jaws Log, by Carl Gottlieb, and Edith Blake's book

called The Making of the Movie Jaws.

Both of those were inspiration for making me interested in films.

Jaws as a film to me

is first of all, my favorite film. I watch it once a year.

And when you examine the film in its finished state,

and you look at the process of making the film,

and you read Carl Gottlieb's Jaws Log,

or you just read the other histories,

or as I remember reading about it even as a kid,

it's almost like film school in a movie.

I remember in film school reading

an interview with Steven Soderbergh,

who said that he was Jaws-obsessed,

and that his favorite book was The Jaws Log

and that he carried it with him everywhere.

And I thought, "Okay, I'm on the right track."

That book became my Bible, and I read that book over and over and over.

In the beginning, when the book was first conceived,

it was kind of a hasty afterthought to the marketing plan.

The original intent was for there to be a three-parter.

The book would be written

from Steven Spielberg's point of view, he would contribute a third,

from Peter Benchley's view, he would contribute a third,

and Zanuck and Brown would contribute a third as producers.

And as we got closer and closer to the release date,

it became evident that nobody was gonna be able to write their third.

I had already agreed with Steven

to kind of ghostwrite or author his third of it from what I knew,

'cause we had shared a house and I knew

what Steven's perspective on the movie was.

So then nobody was available.

Steven was immersed in post-production.

Zanuck and Brown were onto something else.

So they said to me at the end of March,

"Can you do a book by the end of May?" And with the folly of youth,

I said, "Yeah, I can write a book that quickly."

So I wrote the book in a very short time.

Probably less than a month.

And the original paperback got favorable reviews.

And the word of mouth was terrific,

and the book went through 17 printings

and sold a couple of million copies.

And then of course, many years later,

Laurent Bouzereau did his behind-the scenes documentary

on the same subject matter.

Universal came out with what they called the Signature series

back in the LaserDisc days.

And the Jaws box set that included the Laurent Bouzereau documentary

was something that every Jaws fan just had to have.

They went out and bought LaserDisc players

just so they could have that documentary.

When I got to the Jaws documentary for the LaserDisc,

I felt that I'm gonna try to do a Bible or some kind of a reference

to that particular movie. Because how many times

do we get to sit across Steven Spielberg or Peter Benchley

and the cast members, but you want to get

all of their different perspectives.

And I think for the true fans,

you're just looking at those people

as if they were talking to you.

I had seen all those pictures of Brody's son in the arms of the stuntman,

and I always wondered like, "That's not even in the movie."

And yet that picture was used to promote the picture.

And I was always wondering, "What is that sequence? What is that scene?"

And finding the footage of that was amazing.

Seeing that when the shark comes into the estuary, it's just a fin.

I thought that was pretty amazing.

Finding that footage of the building of the shark,

doing all the tests, dry,

and then getting the big surprise that it doesn't work in water,

I mean, it was just amazing.

I felt like I was doing what I had been sent on Earth to do.

To discover all that stuff and to make sure it was preserved.

Because a lot of it, I think that

if there had not been DVDs today,

I think a lot of that stuff would be totally lost.

Always an important step in advancing public awareness of a movie,

both during and after its theatrical run, is the film's poster design.

And in the case of Jaws,

few images have become more emblazoned on pop culture than this one.

That image is iconic and was responsible

for getting a lot of people into the theaters to see Jaws.

What kid wouldn't wanna go see that movie?

It's almost like a bullet before it hits somebody.

And the fact that it leaves it all to your imagination

is why the poster of Jaws did so well.

It conveyed all the emotion that is aroused by the fear.

And you just got it. The minute you look at that image, you got it.

Jaws' poster is the Bible of how to do it.

That's all you need to know.

You don't need to know about the main characters and their arcs

or anything like that.

Big shark, pretty girl, bad situation.

One of the things that happens when you do an iconic film

is it becomes a touchstone for other artists and other comments.

The Jaws artwork became an element

of political cartoons for years.

In fact, the shark and swimmer

were used to represent virtually

every issue in the political spectrum.

And it wasn't just politics getting in on the action.

Over the years, even up to this day,

the Jaws motif has served as fodder

for a variety of more off-beat applications.

But what today has become a pop culture icon,

actually had very humble beginnings.

The art of the swimmer swimming above the great white shark

originated on the cover of the paperback

edition of Peter Benchley's novel, Jaws,

published by Bantam Books,

and Oscar Dystel, who was the chairman of the company,

always regretted that he didn't put… He didn't sell it to us.

He could've sold us the artwork.

But he gave it to us as a publicity thing.

So I kid him about it to this day.

One name that is not as well known in the annals of Jaws history

is Roger Kastel, the artist who created the legendary image.

Kastel was a seasoned paperback

and magazine illustrator working in New York

whose skills were increasingly in demand at the time.

And the assignment was simply one among many.

Oscar Dystel said, "Have I got a great book for you!

"You'll love it. You can read it over the weekend."

They felt the hardcover version

wouldn't work on the paperback.

I did a very rough sketch and they said, "That's great.

"Just make the shark realistic and bigger. Make him very much bigger."

I had gone to the Museum of Natural History, and I had my camera with me

and I said, "Do you have a shark exhibit in the building?"

And she said, "Yes, they do." But it was all down and they were refurbishing.

They were cleaning them.

All the sharks were laying on easels.

They were plaster. And so, I had my camera with me.

Well, I knew what position I wanted the shark in,

and this is the great white that they had laying on a easel being…

I guess they were dusting it. And that's what I worked from.

The girl was photographed in the studio in New York.

She was a great model. I used her for a Good Housekeeping painting

and asked if she would stay another half hour

and just swim for this paperback. I told her it was Jaws.

I don't think anyone knew what Jaws was then.

But she was swimming on a stool.

Last summer, I was painting in the studio

and my grandson, Luke, came in.

And he says, "Grandpa, did you ever do a Mona Lisa?"And he's seven.

And that really threw me. And I thought and I said,

"I don't think I've done the Mona Lisa, Luke."

And he said, "Well, the shark will just have to be your Mona Lisa."

I can't…

Did I say it right?

The theme song of Jaws.

That's the first impression that comes to my mind.

And it just sticks in there. You know what I mean?

I think Jaws was the first film that I did

where I was really crazy about the film.

I thought it was a marvelous film.

I remember the first day I played,

Steven said, "What do we do for the shark?"

And I just played an octave E on the piano,

and then E and an F and repeated them

and accelerated them and so on.

And he said something like, "You think that'll work."

"You gotta be kidding. It's so simple."

All he did was…

And Steven said, "That's all?"

And John said, "Yeah, that's it."

Well, I think, John, who's prescient

about all the movies he scores,

he sees deeper than we do about our own work.

And I think he saw something deeply primal about Jaws,

and he decided that it needed a primal response.

It needed a primal sound. Something that was atavistic.

Something that was extremely basic.

And something that was unforgettable

and would be almost a kind of a siren

to warn you that something was coming to get you.

When you associate the image of that shark coming in for the kill,

and you hear that John Williams score,

It's that perfect storm again.

It's the right image for the right music.

It doesn't happen all the time.

But, boy, when it does, you never forget it for generations, obviously.

The Jaws theme was so provocative and symbolic of the shark

that he saved us, really, because

the many times that we didn't have the shark,

all we had to do was point the camera out to sea and play his score

and everybody screamed.

And for half the film you don't see the shark. You don't have to.

You hear that theme and it puts it,

"Oh, my God, he's out there somewhere

"and he's gonna get somebody."

I just think it was the most brilliant couple of notes

that he's ever written, because it's lived beyond the movie.

And it's become the thing

that kids do with each other when they're playing in the pool.

You can always creep up on somebody and go…

And in the post-Jaws world, it means something.

In Australia, they use the shark theme

as a warning sound on the beaches.

I love that in the loudspeakers.

"I'm outta here!" No one would stay in the water listening to that music.

Every movie after that, whenever you saw any kind of a monster beast,

especially sea stuff like a shark, octopus, whatever,

it was like the pounding…

Don't!

Don't!

That song gives me the creeps.

What do you mean, it's our theme song.

It's very flattering. You think, "Oh, great, whatever I've written

"has made it to that level." That's one reaction that I think is natural.

I'm always pleased about it.

The fact that it gets up off the paper into the orchestra's hands,

out through the microphone and around the world,

back into my own living room, which is my own studio,

where I'll be working sometimes years later,

it's quite a miraculous electronic trip

that composers in preceding centuries

would never have had the pleasure of experiencing,

so we're lucky that film and recorded music

and so on has the reach that it does.

While the digital effects revolution,

which took hold in the early '90s,

promised to offer filmmakers tremendous creative freedom,

the legacy of Jaws reminds us that

being unable to show everything you want

really can be a blessing in disguise.

We've complained about the shark not being able to perform.

Because it couldn't. It was never ready.

That was what saved us. That was the artistry of the film.

If Jaws never existed, except in the year 2005,

I would have had the digital tools

to have much more of the shark in the movie.

Therefore, I would have ruined much more of the movie.

Had we been able to computerize the shark,

a lot of the wonderful elements of the picture, like the barrels,

would never have been thought of.

That was an idea that came during the production

and out of frustration of not having the shark,

we didn't have anything else to shoot.

In the very first scene, with the girl being pulled back and forth,

the shark was supposed to be there in the picture that time.

We only showed it later, because we didn't have it earlier.

They began Jaws in the opening scene by not seeing the shark.

And I think it was more terrifying.

Not seeing something, I really believe, is more terrifying

'cause visually, you're all right with it.

But if your imagination runs wild,

then it can be anything.

Oh, God, help!

I did that because the shark kept breaking down.

And today, a visual shark would not break down.

There'd be some nice interactive water explosions

to marry the digital shark with the actual water.

That's all it would be. There would not have been a full-size shark.

Or probably even any segment of the shark in a 2005 Jaws today.

And therefore, the film would have been only half as effective.

So I was saved by the breakdown in technology 30 years ago.

I think if I'm correct about this,

it was 55 minutes into the movie

before you actually saw the shark.

One of the things that makes the picture more believable

is that you can't do many things with that shark.

You have one shark that goes right,

one that goes left, and one that goes straight ahead.

Almost made it more believable.

Because you couldn't do any fancy stuff with it.

And I can't help but think that filmmakers today

would wanna do a lot more with that shark.

In today's movies, everybody's trying to top themselves,

and they're trying to top others

and they're just trying to do it bigger and better,

and sometimes, bigger isn't better necessarily.

Sometimes, bigger is too much.

It's hard to create something new that surprises people.

In this day and age, they've seen so much already.

There's so many movies now.

What's great about that, I think,

the expectations for what a movie

could be weren't what they are today.

So when a great movie like that came out back then, it just floored people.

I cannot tell you how many people have come to me and said,

"Because of Jaws, I will not go in the water to this day."

It is staggering.

Come on in the water!

Take it easy.

I mean, Jaws essentially did for swimming

what the movie Psycho did for showering in motel rooms.

The shower scene in Psycho,

where women especially weren't taking showers,

I didn't go in the ocean after Jaws.

I was at the beach one day and a woman came over to me,

and she had her little child in hand.

He was about five years old, and he was crying.

And she said, "Are you Steven Spielberg?"

And I said, "Yes, I am."

And she began screaming at me with a very thick New York accent.

"You tell him, you tell him it's safe to go out there.

"You tell him it's safe to go out there.

"Look at him, look what you've done to him."

And this kid was crying his eyes out. And I said, "What happened?"

She said, "My husband showed him Jaws

"and now look, he won't go into the water.

"You tell him it's okay. You tell him it's all make-believe."

And she gave me such a piece of her mind, I sat the boy down,

I looked him in the eye, and I couldn't lie to him,

it is dangerous out there.

I couldn't just say to him, "Yes, go out there, go out beyond the waves."

It's all psychological.

You yell, "Barracuda!" and everybody says, "Huh? What?"

You yell, "Shark!"

We've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.

The structure of Jaws is just so perfect.

It just breaks up into these beautiful acts.

And it's like problem, finding the answer,

and then the third act of, "We're gonna go get the shark."

It's such a beautiful, mythological structure.

Is this monster about things in them?

Ain't got no spit.

As all great storytelling is that the characters

learn something about themselves,

their phobias, the things that they're lacking.

Why are they chasing this thing, the white whale?

It's Melville, it's Hemingway,

it's the ancient prophet, Jonah.

These are the mythological parallels

that bubble up from below the surface in Jaws

that make it a timeless classic,

that make it last long after the technological aspects of the film

are old hat.

It's a very classic, hero's journey kind of a story.

If you subscribe to the mythmaking nature of screenwriting,

it has all the ingredients that are not

culturally specific to a generation's views.

It's not Depression-America, it's not Vietnam-America.

It's a little timeless island with only the human values of fear, jealousy,

or heroism or shark obsession.

Part of what succeeds about Jaws

is the simplicity of the way the story was told.

And the fact that it's just three men and a boat,

when you come right down to it,

three survivors who all have problems with each other.

You got city hands, Mr. Hooper.

You been counting money all your life.

I don't need this. I don't need this working-class-hero crap.

They have huge, personal issues with each other.

But those are all cast aside as they have to become partners

in order to help each other live

and get through the experience.

And the shark becomes less important than those three characters.

And I have to give Peter Benchley total credit for that.

That was in the book.

The characters in Jaws are composites. All of them are.

I, in Jaws, am two people.

I am Hooper from the environmental point of view,

I am the guy who says,

"He doesn't wanna hurt you, he just wants to eat you."

On the other hand, I'm also the character of Brody,

in that every book I've written has been an everyman kind of book,

of what would happen if a normal Joe gets himself into a position

that is way beyond his capacity to handle.

And here's Brody who doesn't swim,

who's never been in the ocean in his life,

who's a retired New York City policeman,

who's out in the boondocks and suddenly,

he's cast into having to be a seaman.

This is ridiculous.

After watching a stumblebum like Brody

save his neck by just doing

what almost anybody would do in that situation,

you get a gun, you get out of the boat,

you try to save yourself, you get up on the mast,

you shoot the thing. You do what you have to do.

So much so that you feel like you have done it.

Everybody sitting in the audience did it,

because I certainly did not show

any courageous aspect of myself up till that point.

And the characters drive you so forward

that by the time the shark is flapping its mouth,

jumping onto the boat,

all you can think of is, "Quint,

"get your feet away from its mouth.

"Just kick it. Get it away. Stab it, get it away.

"Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Ah! Shit!"

You've got the family unit in the first half of the film,

where Brody has a very, very personable family that you just,

right away you love them when they wake up in the morning,

and you're there with them.

They're in the "yard," not too "far" from the "car."

How's that?

Like you're from New York.

I always said that the characters in the movie reminded me of relatives.

That's how… I felt I knew them.

He had such a great handle

on depicting suburban, middle class, everyday American life.

And what he put up there was almost documentary-like.

I mean, it was just so real.

One of the things that Jaws did

that I wish movies still did more of

is invade a community and use actual locals in the movie.

It brings the movie to life in such a real way.

Islander, Lee Fierro, who portrayed

the grieving mother of doomed Alex Kintner,

still lives on the Vineyard today.

Her now infamous confrontation scene with Chief Martin Brody

has become a favorite sequence among Jaws fans.

Chief Brody?

Yes?

It's been accurately recorded that

she had to slap the chief many, many times

in order to get just the right take.

Little did she know then that her slapping days had just begun.

How many times have I been asked to slap somebody?

I've never counted them and so I can't tell you.

But it happens a lot and it is mostly young men.

I do it to please the fans, but last year, I decided that is it.

I've slapped my last slap.

Meeting Steve Spielberg was a wonderful memory.

He asked me if I could improvise and I said, "Yes, I can."

And so we did… Shari Rhodes, the casting director, and I

improvised the beach scene, but I had simply been told

keep my son out of the water, so that's what I was doing.

And Steve stopped me and said, "Lee,

"you gotta let him go in the water or we don't have a movie."

They had a raft that was cut in half, and they take my raft away

and they put this half a raft over this.

It was like that round that they filled up with blood

and all this stuff. He goes,

"Now, lie on the half a raft on top of this,

"it's gonna blow up. When it blows up, go underwater

"and stay under there as long as you can."

So you're 12 years old, lying on this and they're saying,

"It's full of blood." They're saying, "It's gonna blow up."

And it's like I'm lying there and all of a sudden…

This thing blows up, and there's blood

going up all over the place in your face

and I just went under water and I hear,

"Cut. Okay, your leg was out of the water," and they had to…

It took over an hour for all the blood to clear out of the water

before they could do it again.

I'd get to go inside one of these warm little dressing rooms.

My friends were all freezing cold outside, but I screwed up

so I get to go stay warm.

And after about four times of doing this, they finally said, "No.

"We're gonna try this a different way."

And if you noticed in the movie,

I go up and down 'cause these guys in the wet suits started…

They grabbed me and they were pulling me under, lifting me up,

and then they pulled me under and gave me their air.

And that's how they finally did it.

They gave up on a 12-year-old kid trying to do it on his own.

For the insert shot needed of Bruce biting down on little Alex,

the dangers of interacting with a multi-ton mechanical shark

required that Jeffrey be replaced with a stunt double.

In this case, a common store mannequin. And a female one at that.

It was to be one of the very last shots done on the Vineyard.

Steven Spielberg had already departed the island.

And filming was left in the capable hands

of Joe Alves in the second unit.

In true Jaws fashion, the scene proved extremely difficult to coordinate.

But in the end, the shot would provide audiences

with the now famous frightening first glimpse of Bruce.

Your folks were born here, right?

Yeah, I'm an Islander.

Vineyard native, Jonathan Filley,

who played Tom Cassidy in the film,

parleyed his one and only acting job

into a solid career in the motion picture industry.

I had done a lot of acting in high school

and really thought that I wanted to pursue an acting career,

and there I was on the Vineyard

and saw an ad in the paper that they wanted extras for Jaws.

So I sent in a snapshot of me at the beach

the summer before with some friends,

and I think I circled that, "That's me," and they cast me.

There was so much stuff that they didn't need that was shot.

I was in and out of the production

and around it quite a bit. There's a piece in the picture

where this guy is complaining to the chief that,

"Chief, the kids are karate-chopping my fences,"

but, yeah, of course, they didn't need the actual coverage

of the kids karate-chopping fences.

And what I really cherish about this movie,

having grown up on Chappaquiddick,

is that wonderful scene where they come over

on the Chappaquiddick ferry

and the guy running the ferry is this old fellow, Dick Huard,

who passed away 15 years, 20 years ago.

And Dick was an integral part of my childhood.

And just seeing Dick, it brings back so many memories.

For some fans, no pilgrimage to Amity

is complete without looking up some

of the many un-credited Vineyard residents

who make appearances in the film,

regardless of how miniscule their parts.

Richard Dreyfuss yells at me, "Ahoy, sloop, you got a paddle?"

And I say, "Yeah, I got a paddle."

You got a paddle on the boat?

I got a paddle.

And that was my one big line.

I quit, Mr. Quint. I quit.

My part was Quint's mate. There was a boat named Skip Bucket

that had all the camera crew who were coming home.

Spielberg says, "Will you do me a favor?" And I said, "I'll try to."

And he says, "Will you take up a speaking part with the dog?"

And I said, "Yes."

So, I went to get cleaned up a little bit,

and they told me I had to get dirty again,

so I couldn't shave anymore.

I'm Henry Carreiro,

I was one of the two guys

that claim we caught this tiger shark,

which was shot right on this spot.

And, of course, it turned out to be the wrong shark.

Right in this area, we had a shark here hanging by the tail,

which was a real one that we were told cost $10,000,

to have it caught off Florida and flown up here special in a box.

And they called him Oscar.

They got a lot of use out of that thing.

But the smell!

That tiger shark really got ripe.

I didn't know who, Dick, my partner was, till I met him that morning.

We hit it off very well.

He's funny, he's a character in his own right.

I immediately just clicked with this guy,

and we started cracking each other up and making jokes.

Henry is a very, very quick fellow. And he ad libs very well.

We played very well off of one another.

Gentlemen, the officer asked me to tell you

that you're overloading that boat!

Go on, get out of here.

Dreyfuss, he said, "Where's a good restaurant around here?"

Whatever his line was.

And I turned around and I said, "Go straight ahead."

Big laugh, right. Yeah. Yeah.

And he left it in.

Can you tell me if there's a good restaurant or hotel on the island?

Yeah, you walk straight ahead.

They're all going to die.

Spielberg said, "Just say what comes into your head."

You stuff your frigging head in there, man,

and find out if it's a man-eater.

We had this guy who did an article

in the local paper on Cape Cod.

And he talked to Shari Rhodes and he said,

"Boy, you must have an Abbott and Costello going here."

She says, "No, I just have two Costellos."

It's got a deep throat, Frank.

Yeah, but what kind? What kind of shark?

Tiger shark.

A what?

There's one guy that pesters the hell out of me,

every time he sees me, he walks up behind me and says, "A what?"

That's probably going to be

the most famous thing I've ever said in my life.

A what?

Mum, I got cut. I got hit by a vampire.

Then 12-year-old Chris Rebello,

who played Chief Brody's elder son, Michael,

remained on the Vineyard

until his untimely passing from a heart attack in the year 2000.

Chris was a friend. We grew up together on the island.

Working with Chris in the movie,

he was a brother, another brother to my family.

On set, we used to fool around and play,

sometimes Steven would say, "Okay, that's enough.

"It's time to get back to work. Let's do our thing."

And after the movie was done, he didn't do any more acting.

He went on to work for the Steamship Authority

with my brother, Tommy.

And that's where he worked until his passing.

We really miss him. We really miss him.

Perhaps no islander gained more notoriety for his involvement in Jaws

than the late Craig Kings bury.

Craig's gruff and blustery demeanor

had made him a local legend in his own right.

And his portrayal of fisherman Ben Gardner, a favorite among Jaws fans.

They advertised for some person who was a fisherman, a local,

who could help Robert Shaw with his accent.

Robert was a refined British actor until he met my father,

and then my father told him stories about

this island and the people that live here,

and, unfortunately, I think Robert Shaw believed them.

He fell hook, line and sinker, and he began to repeat them.

He was interviewed on the air,

telling these totally outrageous stories

about the local community.

…the rich people here.

There's a lot of skeletons in the cupboard here, you know.

There's more incest going on in Martha's Vineyard

than probably any state in the United States.

They were mostly lies, which is what my father was best at.

They'll wish their fathers hadn't met their mothers…

My mother, when I took her to see the movie in Boston,

we came out of the theater and she said,

"That Spielberg, he's a genius.

"Finally, somebody has found a use for your father's empty head."

Of course, Craig's most memorable scene did involve his head,

but not the rest of him.

In fact, it didn't even take place at the Vineyard.

Three thousand miles away in Van Nuys, California,

Spielberg resourcefully created that

most shocking moment as an insert shot,

and he used little more than a foam life-cast of Kings bury

and a swimming pool.

Steven had just come from the answer print with Verna

at Universal and had signed off on it,

and here we were on that very eve,

doing an extra shot that we were gonna try to get in the next day.

That scene had already been shot.

But it wasn't done to shock the audience,

and so I went to Verna Fields',

my film editor's swimming pool,

borrowed her pool, 'cause I didn't have one,

I didn't have enough money to have a swimming pool in those days,

because Jaws hadn't come out yet,

and I was a poor director then.

We had a small replica of a hull

that I put together in Joe Alves' driveway.

And I basically held my breath underwater

and put the head of Ben Gardner through that hull

when Frankie Sparks came up with the flashlight.

I remember, I timed it to get maximum shock effect.

This is the pool where Steven Spielberg

filmed the Ben Gardner sequence.

And that was done right here. Very famous.

Scary. Scary moment.

What was the most satisfying edit you did in Jaws?

The most satisfying edit, I have to say,

was the face coming out of the boat.

Because when I went to that preview,

and that audience just went six feet off their seats

and let out this incredible scream, that was really satisfying.

When we found this place, it was still full of her reels just sitting there,

but it was amazing treasure to find.

These are some footlockers that we found at the house.

These came back from Martha's Vineyard, from the shoot there,

and as you can see, "Verna Fields, editorial Jaws, "

on the cover of this one.

And inside, there are several film reels

of Verna's work still kept in these boxes here.

This is full of different films that she made.

Yeah, she had set up her editing facility here

and edited all of her films in this building right here.

It's kind of cool that this humble, simple room

is where one of the greatest movies ever was put together.

What are we looking for?

We're looking for a nice place to show

that Quint refuses to slow down the boat.

And here we have the Moviola that Verna Fields used to edit Jaws.

Every second of the Jaws film passed through this machine

by the hands of Verna Fields. That's special.

Doesn't look very pretty now, but maybe someday, it will again.

Verna and I worked in her pool house

shoulder to shoulder for a long time on that Moviola.

And Verna did a great job with her biorhythms.

Creating a biorhythm for Jaws that was just the right kind of tautness,

like a violin string to play a very, very high note.

It can't take that much pressure.

That's the spot, Steve.

My husband tells me you're in sharks.

Excuse me. Yes. I've never heard it quite put that way.

But yes, I am.

I love sharks.

Yeah, I love them.

I think the fascination with sharks comes from many things.

One, they are the last surviving predator

that poses a genuine threat to man

in an environment in which he chooses to go.

E. O. Wilson said, "We don't just fear our predators,

"we are transfixed by them."

Prone to weave stories and fables

because fascination breeds preparedness, and preparedness, survival.

In a deeply tribal sense, he said, "We love our monsters."

I believe that worldwide, young children, all male children at least,

have a fascination with either sharks or dinosaurs.

Very big shark.

And in my case, I was able to grow up around here

in Nantucket where sharks were in proliferation.

So I was able to fix my fascination on sharks.

One couple whose fixed fascination

led to their preeminence in the field of great white shark research

was husband and wife team Ron and Valerie Taylor of Australia.

Their combined experience throughout the '60s and '70s

documenting these elusive animals

made them the perfect fit for the Jaws creative team.

They were commissioned to shoot live shark footage

for the picture's climactic cage sequence.

The assignment would prove to be almost as harrowing

as anything in the film itself.

I told them that there's a problem,

because our sharks on average are only about 13 feet in length,

and yet your mechanical shark is 26 feet in length.

And they said, "Well, there's no problem.

"We'll send you a small man and small cages."

We built a scaled down cage, and we tried a dummy and that didn't work,

so we found a small person that said that they could scuba dive.

Carl wasn't an experienced diver.

So we gave him an introduction to diving just down on the waterfront

and took him out to Dangerous Reef.

And when he saw his first great white shark, he was terrified.

But to give him his credit, Carl actually did get into the cage

with these great, big, dangerous looking

great white sharks swimming around.

Dangerous looking because we had put a lot of bait in the water

to attract them to our cages.

Joe Alves came into my office one day

with his hand behind his back and he said, "Bill, we've screwed up."

And he held up the tanks that had been miniaturized.

He said, "That little guy only has eight minutes of air."

What we were not thinking

is that a small person still sucks up as much air as a large person,

and the tanks were very small.

So, immediately, when he sort of panicked,

he sucked up all the air out of the tank.

Carl was very reluctant. He was afraid. Very afraid.

The production manager was calling out to him to get in the cage,

and he was very slow about it, and just as he was about to climb in,

a large shark tried to swim over it

and got its head stuck in the bridle,

and of course, it was trapped and it went crazy.

And the tail went into the back part of the little boat

and tore out all the hydraulic cables

that took fuel and fluid to the motors.

And it started to run across the deck, and as it did that,

the tail flicked Carl's face.

And Carl just stood there, and he looked up and he said,

"Is that my blood?" And it was actually the hydraulic fluid.

And we never got him in the water again.

If Carl had been in that cage, he would have lost his life.

There wasn't much I could've done to get over there.

The shark was still tangled, and thrashing around

and tangled in the cage on the bottom.

Carl would have been in there and drowned.

So his reluctance saved his life.

1,100 men went into the water.

Vessel went down in 12 minutes.

Didn't see the first shark for about half an hour. Tiger…

A very little credited writer who made

the biggest breakthrough on Jaws,

which was a writer named Howard Sackler,

whose idea it was to give Quint the Indianapolis speech,

even though it was John Milius who wrote the speech,

I mean, Howard Sackler wrote like two paragraphs this big,

John Milius wrote a nine page monologue for Quint to say.

And then when Robert Shaw, who himself was a writer,

of The Man in the Glass Booth read Milius' 10 pages,

he says, "I can't go on for 10, 15 minutes

"just talking. Let me have a crack at it."

Shaw took the speech and himself edited it down to five pages.

And that was the whole evolution of how that speech was told,

but it did come from the mind of Howard Sackler,

who remembered the actual Indianapolis incident

and suggested that Quint…

That that become a Rosetta stone for Quint's entire character.

Steven said, "Oh, my God."

That's the whole impetus, that's the whole spine of Quint.

He's not really just crazy, but he has a case out for these sharks.

You know, by the end of that first dawn…

we lost 100 men.

I don't know how many sharks. Maybe 1,000.

I don't know how many men, they averaged six an hour.

The USS Indianapolis was top secret when Peter wrote the book.

So it wasn't in it. He would've used it, I think.

And then, before the making of the film,

it had been unclassified and Steven used it.

The world learned of the USS Indianapolis through Jaws

and it was a perfectly accurate depiction insofar as I know.

Peter's domestic housekeeper called in the day after the movie opened

and she said that she wasn't coming in to work the next day.

And when he said, "Why," she said,

"My son was on the USS Indianapolis,

"and I never knew how he died until now."

He'd been bitten in half, below the waist.

The U. S. naval cruiser which delivered

the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima

completed her mission,

but was then sunk by a Japanese submarine.

Out of her complement of 1,196 sailors and Marines,

an estimated 300 died upon impact.

And the rest spent five days in shark infested waters

before they were finally rescued.

Only 317 survived.

Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

Robert was a pretty Promethean character. Truly bigger than life.

A man who intimidated me, who scared me,

who exhilarated me, and I liked him and I hated him and…

He had my number. He could get me and he always did.

He really thought Dreyfuss needed a slapping down.

Young punk with no stage experience.

He made me doubt that I could do things I knew I could do,

like one day he said, "You couldn't dive off the top of the Orca."

"Yes, I can." "No, you couldn't."

"Can do." And I couldn't.

Shaw would say, "Look at you, Dreyfuss.

"You eat, you drink, you're fat and you're sloppy.

"At your age, it's criminal.

"You couldn't even do 10 good push-ups."

He'd say, "I can do 20."

And Shaw would say, "You can do 20 good push-ups?"

He'd say, "Okay, Roy, you're the referee.

"Tomorrow morning, we're gonna see if Dreyfuss can do 20…"

As soon as Shaw left, I said,

"Dreyfuss, you know how many people can do 20 good push-ups?

"You are not one of them."

Couldn't do it. He psyched me

and because he psyched me, I was always like on guard.

But I also really worshipped him as Robert Shaw.

He was a grand artist as an actor, he was a wonderful writer.

I think, in those years, I was very much appreciative of those things.

And had circumstances been different,

we might have worked together again.

Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies

Farewell and adieu, you ladies of Spain

On August 28th, 1978, at the age of 51,

Robert Shaw died from a heart attack. But his legacy lives on.

His now mythic portrayal of Quint

continues to be remembered by celebrities…

Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies

…and fans alike.

Ho open you idiot, starboard! Ain't you watching it!

Bad fish.

Not like going down to the pond

and chasing bluegills or Tommy cods.

This shark, swallow you whole.

Mr. Mayor, Chief,

ladies and gentlemen.

Commemorations of the film's central characters and scenes

show up in the fine arts, as well.

Exquisite depictions from sculptors, painters, craftsmen,

all fans from around the globe,

reflect the creative excellence of the film itself.

I have a tremendous appreciation for fans of Jaws

that understand it even better than I do.

That have spent more time with it.

Having sites out there like Jawsmovie.com,

it confirms your identity to a generation

that doesn't believe anything is real if it's not on the net.

I love and appreciate the fact that the fans get it,

and not only get it as a cultural phenomenon,

but they get the ingredients, and how the ingredients were mixed

and how they were combined to fashion this entertainment.

And I really love the fans for being so insightful.

At this time, I'd like to present the key to the town of Amity

to Mr. Peter Benchley.

It was amazing to me to discover what JAWSFEST became.

When I first heard about it, I thought it was gonna be

some rinky-dink gimmick by the Chamber of Commerce of Martha's Vineyard,

and they did it so well,

it brought, I guess, 2,000, 3,000 people from all over the world.

I was enormously impressed.

This is the first time

we've all been standing together,

and that includes the making of the movie 30 years ago.

There was no wrap party.

We never were all in the same place at the same time, until now.

So this is a more historic moment than you can imagine,

and we thank you for it.

So much interest in this movie,

I had no idea that it had this national and international attention,

and this is the Star Trek convention

for people who love the movie Jaws.

Is that $3,000 bounty on the shark in cash or check?

You yell, "Shark!"

We've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.

Chief, Polly sent me to find you.

There's a bunch of Boy Scouts out in Avril Bay

doing the mile swim for their merit badges.

People come from all over the world,

who are from Dublin and Edinburgh and New Zealand and Australia,

and it's just stunning.

I think that to me really shows the bones

and the fan base of the movie.

I mean, 30 years on, it's an achievement to have us all together.

Yeah, I saw that. I've got one at home.

Much larger version of it.

Much larger of course.

Came to see the big shark. Take some pictures.

You can literally sit in there.

He will literally swallow you whole.

Do you know the Muffin Man? Well, say hello.

Being called the Muffin Man, I haven't been called that for years.

Ladies and gentlemen, the cast of Jaws.

This is the first time I saw Jaws on a wide screen in 26 years.

The audience, of course, was so into it.

What a great way to set up watching the film.

You've got the ferry going by behind the screen,

salt air is filling your lungs.

To see about 3,000 people sitting there watching the giant screen,

it was the Jaws version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Smile, you son of a bitch!

Jaws is really unique in the way

that it was filmed in this specific place.

Other movies are filmed in all kinds of obscure locations.

Most people don't have a clue where they were filmed.

Jaws was right here all over this island.

And you can't really get away from it, even if you wanted to.

Coming up on the left,

you'll see the house that was used for the Brody residence in the film.

If you wanted to go see a film location,

things change, houses get painted,

and most of the time, they're even on a sound stage.

With Jaws, you can take a ferry ride,

and you'll step off the ferry and you are in Amity.

It has really not changed in 30 years.

I do know that people come here on a regular basis.

Jaws questions are probably some of the top questions we get

in our visitor information centers.

They ask us quite often

if they can still see some of the locations

where scenes from the movie were filmed.

The answer is yes.

Some of the scenes include South Beach,

where the opening bonfire was done.

Amity Town Hall, which is actually Edgar town Town Hall,

right on Main Street in Edgar town.

Also the Chappaquiddick ferry.

It is a very small ferry that takes you between

Edgar town and its island, which is Chappaquiddick.

At the Grange Hall in West Tisbury,

the JAWSFEST Behind The Screams exhibit

is drawing hundreds of islanders and fans.

Contributed by private collectors,

these artifacts of Jaws have returned to the island

for the first time in decades.

Prop collecting has become a really big business in recent years,

thanks to the Internet.

It's easy for people to find props

from recent films all over the place.

It's very difficult to find props from classic films,

especially a film like Jaws.

I got into Jaws when I was about five years old.

One of the first props I ever had was a harpoon gun.

And if you're five years old and you have the harpoon gun,

of course, you need the barrels and the tank and the list goes on and on.

I spent 30 years of my life tracking this stuff down.

And I think I did a pretty good job, considering I found out

that I probably have one of the largest collections in the world.

And whatever happened to the ultimate Jaws prop?

Quint's trusty fishing boat, the Orca,

which served as a floating set for nearly four months of shooting at sea.

Well, I had a good souvenir. I had the Orca for a while.

I had the Orca shipped back to Universal Studios.

We put it on the tour, in the back lot.

And every once in a while, |'cl go up in my little electric cart,

and I'd visit the Orca, by myself.

I'd look around and make sure no tourists are around,

and nobody can see me.

And I would just sit inside the pilot house,

or I would sit in one of the cabins, right.

Walk down those few steps to where all the life jackets were

just hanging, dripping, when the boat began to sink.

And I would just kind of reminisce and kind of give thanks that

that movie sort of launched my career,

but I would go there alone, and spend time on it

and didn't tell anybody.

Then one day, about six months later,

I went for another journey back in time, down memory lane.

The boat was gone.

And I called up the head of the back lot,

and I said, "What happened to the Orca?"

He said, "Well, it was just rotting there.

"So, we took an ax and took a couple of chainsaws,

"and we cut it up for timber. We shipped it out."

And I went nuts. I went nuts.

I feel very bad about all the things I said

to that poor man who took my phone call.

But I was just beside myself. They had destroyed this.

This piece of wood, originally called the Warlock, by the way.

It was a real boat called the Warlock,

and we painted that over it, a weird omen,

and called it the Orca.

And the fact that the boat was no longer in existence,

it had died, you know?

And it was just the strangest feeling for me,

but in a way it was good for me,

because it cut the umbilical cord

that was joining me to some of my worst memories

about filming that movie.

And it kind of freed me when they broke the boat into many pieces.

But I did recover both twin screws,

I got the propeller blades back,

and I got the pilot wheel.

The Orca is a cast member.

And what a lot of people don't realize is that

Joe Alves built an exact replica on pontoons,

which was affectionately called the Orca II.

The Orca II, a fiberglass stunt double,

that was designed to sink and re-emerge on command,

has remained on the Vineyard.

Islander and Jaws boat wrangler,

Lynn Murphy, has kept her on a shoreline in Menemsha

since filming completed.

When they clean up after a movie,

they gotta pick up their junk and clear it out.

They said, "Well, we gotta get rid of this stuff."

So, I bought the Orca.

I looked it over and there was lumber

and things in the special effects barge,

and I wasn't sure just exactly how

I was gonna use it at the time,

but I wasn't gonna let it go to the dump.

Yeah, you can see the mechanism that was under the Orca.

You see all that? That was never a boat.

There was never a bottom.

The Orca ||'s resting site has served

as sort of a holy grail destination

for fans who've made pilgrimages

to the Vineyard throughout the years.

Unfortunately, three decades of weather, tide and souvenir hunters

have stripped the boat down to little more than its fiberglass hull.

People started to realize what all this stuff was,

and over the years, there'd be a porthole missing.

We had several of the balsa wood stems and they'd disappear,

and then the flying bridge came off, and so on and so forth.

As if the sand wasn't bad enough, guys, I got pricker bushes now.

I'm a real fan, huh?

Trespassing is forbidden,

and the marshy terrain surrounding it is quite hazardous.

But none of that has deterred the more tenacious and adventurous fans

from seeking to get an up close look.

I've watched this boat sink more times than I could tell you.

It's kind of nice to see it, but we gotta get out of here.

This is private property.

Explain what we're doing here.

I am one of three complete idiots.

Out here freezing in the middle of the night looking for the Orca II.

This is it. Look at this thing.

Today virtually nothing remains of the Orca II.

This is the end of the Orca.

And this is the only thing that we have left of her.

We decided we'd take her home before she was all gone.

They were selling her for $100 a six-inch square on eBay.

Finally, whatever became of Bruce, himself?

AH of the mechanical sharks used for Jaws

were returned to the back lot of Universal Studios in Hollywood,

where they were stored and eventually succumbed to the elements.

Throughout the span of the Jaws franchise,

there have been four distinct incarnations

of the mechanical shark.

Each one aiming to improve on looks

and functionality over its predecessor.

But for the truest fans, it is the original

with its trademark jowls that remains

the only true embodiment of Jaws.

What happened is that we needed a hinge,

so you got this jowl kind of thing that happens,

which I sort of hated, but I guess Jaws fans love it.

I guess the shark had a character that people got familiar with.

Though he's been replaced by a dissimilar shark in recent years,

Universal Studios, Hollywood, once showcased this casting

from the original Bruce mold as a photo op for visitors to the park.

Today, he remains the last copy from that mold,

but has since been relegated to a junkyard in San Fernando Valley.

Universal Studios, with locations in Hollywood,

Orlando and Osaka, Japan,

has kept their attractions up to date throughout the years.

How many of you saw the film Jaws?

But the lasting popularity of Hollywood's model blockbuster

has assured it an enduring place

in all three theme parks to this day.

Our shark, which has been here since the mid-'70s,

works a heck of a lot better than the shark in the movie ever worked.

But the reason I think it rates so highly still to this day

is because Steven was so good at using the camera as the shark.

So, 40 minutes into the movie when you finally see the shark,

you're so terrified of it.

And I think that's still in people's minds

when they come here and ride this attraction,

they're terrified of the shark before they ever see it.

So, we don't have to do a whole lot to make people scream.

So, it's great.

The back lot shark itself has even made cameos

in other Universal productions throughout the years,

usually being played for laughs.

But whether for humor or for screams,

one thing is certain, at Universal Studios,

even after 30 years, the shark is definitely still working.

For a brief moment in time, life seemed to imitate art.

As the waters of Martha's Vineyard

once again hosted the presence of a great white.

Only this time, the shark wasn't constructed from rubber and steel.

September 21 st, I'll never forget that date, 2004.

The big why is, is why that shark swam not only in shallow waters,

but way up into a very tight, shallow estuarine system.

What motivated that shark to get in there, we'll never know.

Shark! A shark!

When the great white surfaced in Jaws,

Amity Island had to call in Richard Dreyfuss, as ichthyologist Matt Hooper.

Matt Hooper. I'm from the Oceanographic Institute.

But the Vineyard has its own resident shark expert

in Greg Skomal of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.

So many differences between 1975 and 2004.

And that's the fact that instead of all the townspeople going out

and trying to kill it with dynamite explosives and shotguns,

spear guns, you name it, the public kind of embraced this animal.

And the cry I got, that far outweighed the negative,

was this positive, "Quit messing around and save that shark."

That we can learn to be concerned for this animal that Jaws taught us to dread

and get past that mythology, to look behind the Jaws

and look at this wild animal that's in need of help,

and draw on our humanity to rescue it,

I think is a step in the right direction.

And that step is no small one.

Despite infrequent, but highly publicized shark attacks in recent years,

the general public's attitude towards sharks

has indeed come a long way since the '70s.

One of the problems of creating a perfect villain,

a machine that kills and eats and makes little sharks,

is that the public quickly subscribes

to that easy view of the shark as dreadful enemies.

Jaws and the sequels, unfortunately, made them easy to dislike.

It made people very conscious of sharks,

and we then realized that we had to put the facts right,

to really convince people that sharks are to be respected,

and we must learn to live with them in the ocean.

The great white shark, for instance,

has been protected for several years now,

and the numbers are slowly coming back.

Over the last 30 years, the science has evolved,

so we understand that sharks have a place in the ocean,

and it's an important place.

Environmental groups like Environmental Defense,

the New England Aquarium and others with whom I work,

have found that the association with Jaws

draws people to at least listen to what I have to say.

So, it has given me the opportunity to have a third career,

in the sense of being a spokesman

for the environment and for the oceans.

Look at that animal, will you, please?

He is just magnificent.

One of the great freedoms that Jaws gave me was to

learn about the ocean that I had written about,

so that for the past 30 years,

Wendy and the kids and I have been able to go around the world,

diving with all of these animals of different kinds,

learning the problems that they face, the truth about them,

having to do with sharks, for instance.

If we can harness all the interest in Jaws,

and from the fans of Jaws, to the enthusiasts of Jaws,

to the people who see it and who learn from it and who are liking it,

into a protection movement for the oceans,

we'd have a massive force going.

The gilt-edged bite of Jaws on so many of today's pop culture artisans

speaks powerfully to the stamina of this single film.

Its extraordinary shelf life has allowed it to function

as sort of a creative well

from which filmmakers may draw inspiration and innovation.

A well that never seems to run dry.

Anyone who's around my age, who's in this movie business,

always kind of cites Jaws as the first movie they remember seeing,

or the movie that made them want to get into movies,

or started their love affair with movies.

I still remember the first time

that I saw Jaws in the theater and how it affected me.

I walked away thinking,

"I wanna learn how to do that when I get older."

And it absolutely changed the direction of my life in one night.

I'm always really grateful

when anybody, especially a young director, comes over to me and tells me

that they were in some way strangely influenced by Jaws,

and I say, "Oh, great. You're part of our club, then.

"You got it."

I aggressively pursued Jaws as a way to learn from the master.

I saw the light, I saw Jaws and I saw

that's the promised land up there.

That's what you have to aim for.

It affected me in film making

in just wanting to make movies that were larger than life.

Certainly, I think it was one of those big films of my life

that inspired me eventually to wanna go on to be a filmmaker.

I think that anyone that wants to make

big Hollywood blockbuster movies is certainly inspired by Jaws.

Probably every film I make, I'm always evoking Jaws, one way or another.

It's like one of the basic films that drives me as a filmmaker.

I've worked with Steven on three projects,

and I still stand next to him and every time I look at him, I go,

"That's the guy that did Jaws.

"That's the reason why I'm here."

I hope the picture has inspired a lot of filmmakers.

I mean, that's another added benefit to this whole miraculous event.

The hardest thing in the film business

is not so much to do something that's usually successful.

Harder than that is to create something that has longevity.

There've been a lot of great pictures made.

But one of the tests is the test of time.

The fact that that film and the music that went with it

lingers in people's minds

is a lot of things. It's a great compliment to me,

and to Steven Spielberg, and the people who wrote it and acted it and all of that.

It's quite an amazing thing for an actor,

who was really an insignificant player in the scheme of things,

to have a lifelong tale, of a fishtail behind me.

Those first instincts that David and I had

when we read the manuscript by Peter Benchley proved correct.

And it feels good to know that it has lasted all this time.

Almost every week or month,

somebody who knows that I was connected with the production

will tell me where they were.

It's like the beginning of World War II, the death of Kennedy.

The emotional experience provided by Jaws

will go on and on and on and on forever.

I mean, who doesn't like Bambi?

Bambi goes on forever. Snow White goes on forever.

Jaws goes on forever.

I certainly think that all of us went through a survival adventure together,

the entire crew and cast and myself.

And I have very good memories in many respects to the making of Jaws,

but I have many more bad memories.

Memories that still haunt my nightmares, still wake me up sweating,

but the bottom line is I'm grateful.

Because I went through a kind of baptism of water.

And I came out of it, not only alive, which was my main goal,

and getting through Jaws was to come out of it in one piece,

but I came out of it with a career.

And I will forever be grateful,

no matter what I tell you about those nightmares,

to the fact that the dream from the nightmare was

that I got a chance to make any movie I wanted to make.

And that has continued to this day.

Time will only tell when Jaws will fade from the collective memory.

But I think as long as there are sharks in the sea,

and as long as there are oceans and bodies of water,

as long as there are kids with imagination

who like to torture and scare each other,

Jaws is going to be probably around for a long time.

The shark is working. Repeat. The shark is still working.

Repeat. The shark is still working.