Tasha 0:00

In 1916, a cluster of shark attacks shook the New Jersey coastline, driving frightened sea bathers off the beaches at the height of the summer heat. In nineteen seventy-four, the release of a book by first-time author Peter Benchley emptied beaches and filled bookstores. Then, in June 1975, young director Steven Spielberg redefined filmmaking and the summer blockbuster when a little film with a big star started the summer of the shark, sending shockwaves of fear through beachgoers again. This time, they ran straight from the water and into theaters. I'm Tasha.

SPEAKER_02 0:34

And I'm Matt.

Tasha 0:35

And today on Real Twisty, we're gonna explore the real life terror that inspired what is largely regarded today as one of the best films of all time's Jaws. Welcome to Real Twisty, setting stories straight, and our first film of our October horror fest. Jaws.

SPEAKER_02 0:58

But it wasn't really the first film. Our last week's actually posted on October.

Tasha 1:02

But this is the first official film that we counted as October horror.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Yes.

Tasha 1:07

Yes. And I'm very excited. We're starting with more of a reacher thriller than a straight-out scary movie.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

Yes. Um we were gonna go with like giant spiders. Yeah, I think one of the Arquette diblings was in.

Tasha 1:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:20

Maybe.

Tasha 1:20

David Arquette.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Yes. I couldn't remember his first name. Dibblings sounded generic.

Tasha 1:25

Then we remembered that we do movies based on true stories.

SPEAKER_02 1:28

Yes. I mean, unless there's a movie about Australia. Which we totally could find.

Tasha 1:33

Spiders that you can hear running down the hallway. Oh.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Or crawling on your walls that are the size of a torso.

Tasha 1:38

Nope. Hard pass. Hard pass. I'll take the sharks. And we came prepared today.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

Yes.

Tasha 1:43

So, first of all, I'm prepared for scary with my morbid weirdo coffee cup, which has seen better days. All the paint is chipping off of it.

SPEAKER_02 1:50

That's it's fine. It's still showing it, though. It's still showing it. It's gone and it shows it's silver.

Tasha 1:54

Whereas other cups of ours, the paint chips off and it's gone. Yes, yes. And then um we gave I gave money to the uh Jaws Universal Studios fund for sharks. Not really, but this is my new extra Sharks Research Laboratory. I wish they would donate some, you know. So this is my my new Jaws hoodie that I'm super excited about. And uh it came with this tag that I don't want to get rid of because it's got the movie poster on it. So that's gonna go on the refrigerator or something. The book cover, yes, which I was gonna talk about later, but I'll you know, you'll just hear it twice. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 2:28

Well I'm sorry.

Tasha 2:29

No, they can hear it.

SPEAKER_02 2:30

I spoil things a lot.

Tasha 2:31

It's all good.

SPEAKER_02 2:31

FYI, we traveled yesterday for uh like six hours to get to our next campsite. We did, and then we decided to hit Universal Studios after we set up, and then we saw all the Jaws stuff, and so we had to grab some.

Tasha 2:44

You should show them your stuff.

SPEAKER_02 2:46

So then here's here's one of ours.

Tasha 2:48

Um we'd like to introduce you to our friend the shark.

SPEAKER_02 2:51

Our friend the shark who can attack my shoulder.

Tasha 2:53

So he's gonna, we've got a special guest.

SPEAKER_02 2:55

Yes, uh, the Jaw Shark is Bruce and Bruce Jr.

Tasha 2:58

Yes. Gotta adjust it.

SPEAKER_02 3:00

There's something weird going on. So yes, he's attacked my right shoulder, which is my riding arm, so that's gonna be interesting.

Tasha 3:06

Yes, yes, it is.

SPEAKER_02 3:07

And then and then if you have seen Jaws, which hopefully most of you have, if you haven't, you know how he dies in the movie. I don't know how he dies.

Tasha 3:15

I don't know how he He does not die the same in the book.

SPEAKER_02 3:17

I don't know why. Don't give anything. This thing's been around since before we were bored. If no one just seen this, spoilers okay.

Tasha 3:23

His potential death find so our favorite find.

SPEAKER_02 3:26

This is a Jaws with a uh water um drinkable container that's in the shape of an air compressor that they used at the movie.

Tasha 3:35

I love it. I was like, And this was cheap.

SPEAKER_02 3:37

This was cheaper than we thought it was gonna be.

Tasha 3:39

It's cheaper than like everything else that we got.

SPEAKER_02 3:40

And it comes with a straw that goes in this top area.

Tasha 3:43

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 3:43

Uh, but we took it out because visually it looks better like this because in the movie it did not have a straw coming out of the container.

Tasha 3:50

Correct.

SPEAKER_02 3:51

I'm gonna stick it up.

Tasha 3:52

And also, we're like never gonna use it as an actual drinking apparatus. It's just going to be Jaws decor. I feel like it needs turned that everybody can see his glassy doll-like eyes.

SPEAKER_02 4:02

I have the way I zoomed in my camera. You can't see him a little bit.

Tasha 4:05

Poor Bruce. Well, Jaws, super excited. We've got I've also got the little canister up there that's got little, I think they said strawberry flavored, bloody looking bites. Not bites.

SPEAKER_02 4:17

We have not opened this yet, and it's taped, so I'm not gonna show. I'm not gonna try and open it.

Tasha 4:21

Can you read it?

SPEAKER_02 4:21

It's like the head, the tail the head, the tail, the whole damn thing. I love it. Jaws. And it's you know, the movie poster as well.

Tasha 4:27

I love it.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

The thing that I thought was interesting, it's Amni Amni Amnity Island Sours.

Tasha 4:33

There's no end.

SPEAKER_02 4:34

You've you've heard how I say uh ambulance. So but the thing that I found interesting when we were in the checkout was it's curved. Yes. And I asked, is this bent? And the guy's all yeah, he doesn't know. And then we checked the shelf, and they're all bent like that.

Tasha 4:48

All like that.

SPEAKER_02 4:49

It's like, so it must be how it was made.

Tasha 4:51

Maybe it's made that way so it'll like you can put it in your back pocket and it'll curve around your butt cheek.

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Yeah, so it's like groping you.

Tasha 4:58

I doubt that's what they were thinking when they made this, but that's that's what I think.

SPEAKER_02 5:01

It's a love touch. It's it's a love touch. Bruce is falling.

Tasha 5:05

Bruce isn't falling, you're moving.

SPEAKER_02 5:07

Oh, my shirt adjusts with the shape of my body.

Tasha 5:09

It looks fine. He looks like he's just going to town on your shoulder.

SPEAKER_02 5:13

Like I finished, I finished this meat off. Let's move further.

Tasha 5:16

He's like, I'm here, I'm here. Okay, all right. Well, Jaws.

SPEAKER_02 5:19

Totally take it serious now.

Tasha 5:20

Yes, directed by the great Steven Spielberg. I'm gonna go way off topic again, but we just saw Disclosure Day for the first time. Yes, but I loved it. I loved it.

SPEAKER_02 5:28

One of the documentaries you saw on Jaws, I was like, why is it Emily Blint talking out here? And then I forgot she's on Disclosure Day.

Tasha 5:34

Yes, she's fantastic. So yeah, highly recommend. But you know, I don't think that there's anything that I've seen of Steven Spielberg that I've been like, meh, you know. So, but this one, Jaws, was adapted from the 1974 book of the same name written by Peter Benchley. The movie stars Roy Scheider, a little guy named Richard Dreyfus, and Robert Shaw. And music was written by the widely unknown John Williams.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

You know, who is that guy?

Tasha 6:01

Who is that guy? It was a commercial and critical success and broke box office records, earning three Oscars and a Best Picture nomination on top of that. It lost to uh one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

SPEAKER_02 6:14

Yes, which is understandable.

Tasha 6:16

But it inspired the career paths of both artists in the film industry and scientists in oceanography alike, which is really cool.

SPEAKER_02 6:24

And it caused controversy, which you'll get into.

Tasha 6:26

Yes. So let's talk about the movie very briefly in a nutshell, because we've got so much to cover. We've got the movie, we got the book, we got the what happened next of it all. So if you've not seen 1975 Jaws, go watch it.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

There's also not a remake, so that's the only Jaws that sounds like no, that's not the only Jaws. Well, I mean, I'm talking about like it's the only original. There's no there's like part two, three, whatever. There's four. But there's no like remake of Jaws, like how they did Friday the 13th and nightmares.

Tasha 6:51

Thank God. I mean, not that I have anything against y'all, but and you do better than Robert England.

SPEAKER_02 6:55

I think there might be a few directors that might be able to, but that'd be a far stretch. Well, that and it wouldn't be as good because the technology back then was amazing for its time. It was, and now we could just CGI a bunch of stuff.

Tasha 7:06

Which would make it worse. It would make it it would destroy it. So the movie in a nutshell. It's a New England beach town's summer tourist season, fourth of July weekend, and tourists are threatened by a hungry, vengeful, great white shark in its waters. And after the shark kills multiple people, three men head out to stop the killing, save the summer, and jump kick Steven Spielberg's career. That's you know, basically what happens. So our three heroes are Roy Scheider. He plays Chief Martin Brody, and Martin Brody is a transplant with his family from New York City, and he is ironically afraid of water, beaches, and boats.

SPEAKER_02 7:41

And this is his first summer as chief.

Tasha 7:43

Yes. And so I'm like, why did you move to an island if you're afraid of water, beaches, and boats? But you know, our next guy is Richard Dreyfus' character, Matt Hooper.

SPEAKER_02 7:52

Which I could totally put in my pocket.

Tasha 7:54

The nerdy yet charming oceanographer with boyish good looks who 100% feels like he was the mold for the character Jack Hodgins on bones.

SPEAKER_02 8:03

Oh my gosh, yes.

Tasha 8:04

Right? And then our third hero Come to the hair and the beard. Our third hero is played by Robert Shaw. He's a British actor. And he plays Quint, the salty, shark-obsessed fisherman with a haunting past and the curmudgeon spirit of our late cat Edward. In fact, I would love to see Edward mocked up as Quint fighting the shark from the Orca. That's what I want for Christmas.

SPEAKER_02 8:28

We can find someone to maybe figure that out.

Tasha 8:30

If our child is listening, hey Mar, hey Mouse, uh, that's what I want for Christmas.

SPEAKER_02 8:33

You mean our first commenter that we talked about last year?

Tasha 8:35

So the movie poster read the terrifying motion picture from the terrifying number one best seller. And the teaser, the tagline in the teaser was, it was as if God created the devil and gave him jaws. See it before you go swimming. I don't know that I would go swimming after that, but you know, I guess that's the point. I guess that's the point. You got nothing? Right. You you started over here.

SPEAKER_02 8:56

I was gonna say it's kind of like a documentary series. Kind of not series, but movie.

Tasha 8:59

So Roger Ebert called it one of the most effective thrillers ever made. And Quentin Tarantino has called it one of the very few perfect movies ever made, which is really funny whenever you hear all the things that they went through to make this. It's not what anybody would have thought was going to be the reviews at the time. But before we get into the movie and how it was made, we're gonna go back to the real life summer that started it all. Are you ready for this?

SPEAKER_02 9:22

I'm ready.

Tasha 9:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 9:25

That's gonna be the song every time you say that.

Tasha 9:27

So this is summer 1916. It's July 1916 on the Jersey Shore. World War I is raging in Europe. The Battle of Summer's underway, but the United States is officially neutral. We have not entered the war. President Woodrow Wilson is spending his summer at the Jersey Shore in a vacation house. Oh wow. His re-election slogan was that he was the man who kept us out of war. A slogan that I think I heard from a sitting president recently. Though the US would end up entering the war anyway before too long. Oh, how history repeats itself. The Jersey Shore was like an Edwardian playground. And the BBC says that the they said the power elite strolled the boardwalk. So it was like, you know, where all the rich people went, but also the people in power to summer. Yeah. Leisure time was new for a lot of Americans. The Industrial Revolution had made work more mechanized, and people coming out of the Victorian era suddenly had time and money for vacations. During the Victorian era, sea baiting was mostly done for health reasons. But by 1916, ocean swimming was this like relatively new form of entertainment, and waiting at the beach was the favorite summer activity now. Most people would do an activity called fanny dunking. Say that again. Fanny dunking, where they would literally walk up to the water, stick their asses in it, and stand back up. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 10:49

I do that. Well then I'm just reliving history.

Tasha 10:52

You are, you are.

SPEAKER_02 10:53

Unintentionally.

Tasha 10:54

Um, and but the braver ones actually went out and did some swimming. You know, they learned how to swim and did it. There was another reason the beaches were packed that summer, sadly. And that was polio. A polio epidemic was spreading through New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and New York City was hit the hardest. And polio, I was like, what does that have to do with anything? But polio is spread through fecal matter and water, and they were not using chlorine to sanitize pool water yet. So public spaces for swimming were closing. So if people wanted to cool off in the hot summer heat, they had to go to the ocean instead. Yeah. And that's what they did. At the time in 1916, scientists knew very little about how sharks moved, where they lived in the ocean, or how they behaved. And real shark research really didn't take off for several more decades. The public mostly knew sharks from what they heard from fishermen. Many scientists believed that sharks were harmless to people. They even believed that sharks didn't have the jaw strength to bite through a human bone. They're like, it's not even physically possible for them to hurt you. Sharks, shark attacks in America were dismissed as like fishermen's tales, just you know, these wild tales that weren't really true. And in 1891, this was so much the belief that there was a wealthy man in New York. He would throw parties and bet his guests that he could swim amongst the sharks and not get bit. And he would literally jump into water with sharks to prove it. And he did this so often, and it was so well known that scientists at the American Museum of Natural History actually cited his swimming with sharks as scientific evidence that man-eating sharks didn't exist. So this is thought for, you know, everyone except for the fishermen who have seen some sharks.

SPEAKER_02 12:32

But I mean, do you think like back then that's what their hypothesis would have been and that's how they would have tested it? Is scientists would have jumped in with sharks to test the theory? I mean, because that would have been a test, right? Or throw in chunks of meat and see what they go after.

Tasha 12:43

I guess so. Yeah. That's what uh Mark Robert did. He threw chunks of meat out there during Shark Week. That was a good show. I liked it. On August 2nd, 1915, it was during shark week. That would have been kismet. I know. Well, August, well, we've still got some kismet dates in here. Like some it happened all over again. Like it just keeps going. But August 2nd, 1915, so a year before the shark attacks, less than a year, the New York Times ran an editorial called Let Us Do Justice to the Sharks. So it read that sharks can properly be called dangerous in this part of the world is apparently untrue. And when I put that quote in my notes, I was like, I'm gonna struggle with this. And I was like, no, it's okay. I've read it enough. I know what it said. No, I still struggled with it. Literally, they were, it was like a whole editorial about how sharks were not dangerous and any claims to the contrary was false. And it was an article saying we should do right by them. We should, you know, treat the ocean with respect, that kind of thing. But that belief was about to be shattered by what happened during 12 days of terror in July 1916. So between it started July 1st and it went all the way through July 12th. Over 12 days, five people were attacked along about 70 miles of New Jersey coastline where the president was vacationing, remember. So this is, you know, like a pressing thing for President Wilson as well. And it stretched from near Atlantic City all the way to a farm town that was on an inland creek that fed New York Harbor. Four out of the five people who were attacked died from these bites. The first one was July 1st, like I said, Charles Van Zant at Beachhaven. Charles was 25 years old. He was a University of Pennsylvania graduate from a well-to-do Philadelphia family, and he was vacationing in the resort town of Beachhaven. Around twilight on July 1st, he went for an evening swim. He went past the other bathers and out beyond the breakers. People on the boardwalk said that they saw a large dark triangular fin moving toward him. He was facing the shore when the shark came up behind him and bit his upper thigh. It then came back around and clamped down on his inner thigh. His leg was just virtually gone at that point. Out. Yeah. The idea that someone could be attacked while swimming like that was so foreign to the public that the people who heard him screaming at first thought he was joking, which is really sad.

SPEAKER_05 14:56

That is sad.

Tasha 14:56

A lifeguard pulled him to shore and he was carried to the desk of the beachfront hotel's manager where he bled to death at about 6 45 p.m. So it went relatively quickly. This is often cited as the first recorded fatal shark attack in the United States. The first attack was kept relatively quiet, though, so that it wouldn't disrupt the 4th of July tourist season.

SPEAKER_02 15:18

Was that like burned on by government influence?

Tasha 15:20

And uh definitely was. Yes. It sounds a little familiar to our movie when we learn about Mayor Vaughan. The second attack was five days later, at about 45 miles north in Spring Lake, New Jersey. Charles Bruder was 27 or 28. We don't know what his exact birth date was. We know that he was born in 1980 or 1888. He was a stocky Swiss bellhop at the Essex and Sussex Hotel. And he went swimming almost every afternoon in the ocean. This was like a daily thing for him. A woman who was sitting on a balcony at the hotel was watching through her field glasses, like to just gaze upon what was happening at the beach. And she watched as a shark fin darted towards him, turned around, went back, and did this multiple times before the attack.

SPEAKER_03 16:04

Oh, really?

Tasha 16:04

Yes. Bruder shouted, A shark bit me, bit my legs off. He was pulled into a boat, but he died of shock within minutes. His legs were gone. It was just, it was too violent, too public, too many people saw it. This one could not be kept quiet. It actually made the front page of the New York Times, among other national papers. The shark was described as a devil, a sea monster, and a sea wolf, which I was like, that's very interesting to me. A sea wolf. But the the main focus, no matter what they called it, was that it could not be controlled. It was feared to cause havoc. Like, I don't know if that word is. It was an anomaly. So I'm gonna say cause, cause havoc. So the Philadelphia Evening Ledger, their headline the next morning on Friday, July 7th was man-eating shark, a variety which infests Atlantic. So we're already seeing two universal patterns with these headlines that we've seen we're familiar with from other stories, like the black dahlia that we just covered. First, they're using very emotional language. They're, you know, it's man-eating, it infests the Atlantic. It's not just there is a shark. Yes. And second, the shark, which is definitely ID'd as the villain here, is the being that is in the wrong. It's infesting human space, not the human encroaching on the shark's domain. Even after two deaths, many refuse to believe that it was a shark, though. So people said, we don't have sharks here. It must have been a sea turtle. Your face.

SPEAKER_02 17:26

Sea turtles attack.

Tasha 17:27

Yes. One theory blames sea turtles that a school of turtles had come in and just started biting people. So, first of all, sea turtles don't travel in schools, and second of all, they don't bite humans.

SPEAKER_02 17:35

So third of all, their mouths aren't big enough to take off both legs of a guy.

Tasha 17:39

Right. So a killer whale theory also ran in the papers. John Treadwell Nichols, an assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, examined Bruder's body when they brought him in. He concluded that it must have been an orca that killed him because he didn't believe that a shark could kill a human, which is really interesting to me because thanks to free willy for most of my life, I thought that orcas were like these friendly little, yeah, you know, beautiful creatures. So it's wild to me to think that I grew up going, sharks are man-eaters, or orcas are nice. Are nice.

SPEAKER_02 18:10

They're as nice as dolphins.

Tasha 18:11

And then you you look at 1916, and it was complete opposite. Sharks don't hurt people at all. And orcas are violent and hateful and they will take your legs off.

SPEAKER_02 18:22

I wonder what the history of that. Well, they are I wonder if it's through uh my only thinking would be through like previous expeditions or whatever of maybe like they saw orca in the wild with seals because they are really terrible when they get with seals. They toss them around and all that stuff, and that is pretty visual.

Tasha 18:38

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:39

So I wonder if that is part of why that perception. I mean, the fishermen obviously saw something. They're I mean they're bullies, they're all bullies.

Tasha 18:44

Yeah, even dolphins are too, and that makes my heart very sad because Flipper was my hero when I was a kid.

SPEAKER_02 18:51

What about zipper?

Tasha 18:52

Uh no, zipper surly.

SPEAKER_02 18:53

Um Brian Regan.

Tasha 18:57

But above all of that, despite like them saying this is what's happening, despite it being in nationally relevant newspapers, there were still some people who believed it was all a rumor. They're like, Yeah, this is false. None of this happened. They're fake newsing it. So that was on the seventh, no, on the sixth, on the seventh, on this, on the seventh, sixth.

SPEAKER_03 19:15

One of those days.

Tasha 19:15

It was on the sixth because the newspaper ran on the seventh. So we've got six days later from that second attack. Attacks three, four, and five all happened on the same day, July 12th. Oh, wow. Yes, it's 30 miles north of Spring Lake, and this time it's not at a beach at all. It is at Mattawan Creek. Mattawong Creek was a narrow, brackish creek that was no more than 40 feet wide and 20 feet deep. And it was like a mile and a half upstream from Raritan Bay, but it was 11 miles from the open ocean.

SPEAKER_02 19:45

So is that freshwater though? That's so weird.

Tasha 19:48

Yes. So no sharks had ever been reported in the creek before this in 1916. A young boy, 11-year-old Lester Stilwell, he and his friends went skinny dipping and they're playing in the creek. And there are published accounts that say Lester said, Watch me float, fellas. And then a large fish grabbed his arm, flung him, and dragged him deeper into the creek. His friends, who are still naked, they ran down Main Street screaming, a shark got Lester. Wow. So Lester actually had epilepsy. And so a lot of the townspeople didn't believe the kids. They were like, Oh, you know, we believe that something happened to him, but we think that he just drowned because he had an epileptic seizure while he was swimming. Until Watson Stanley Fisher, who was 24, he was a tall, athletic local tailor. He was like, I'm going to go in and find Lester's body and bring him to shore. So he dove into the creek to look for Lester. He found his body. He started pulling Lester's body out. And when he did, the shark bit Fisher's leg and tore away about 10 pounds of flesh.

SPEAKER_03 20:48

Ouch.

Tasha 20:49

He it said reports said that he grabbed his right leg and said, Oh my God. And then bystanders rushed him onto a train, and the train took him to the nearest hospital in Long Branch, New Jersey, where he ended up dying of blood loss a few hours later. So that's three and four. Now we're at five. Joseph Dunn was 14 and he was swimming about three quarters of a mile downstream from where Lester and Stanley Fisher had been, or Watson Stanley Fisher had been. Joseph, it's half an hour later. I don't know. Like to me, I'm reading all of these and I'm like, I would not have gone back in the water, but maybe he was three quarters of a mile downstream. Maybe he didn't hear him, you know? So he's swimming and a shark bites his leg and pulls him under. His brother and a local sea captain bought off the shark and pulled Joseph to safety. And Joseph ended up surviving because of the fast work of his brother and the sea captain. The shark from here became called, became known as the Madawan man eater. And headlines read Man eating shark in Matawan Creek. Five attacks, four deaths, 12 days. That's that's a lot of sharks. That's a lot of sharks for New Jersey. It's a lot of sharks for anywhere. Um, Madawan historian Al Savilang told the New York Times uh that. The shark had traveled north along the coast, hungry and confused. But then he says it was like a serial killer. He was going after food. And I feel like those two statements contradict and confuse the story here. And that's like a more recent. Yeah. That's not, he's not the historian from long ago. He's a historian recent. But he says he was like a serial killer, but also he was looking for food. Well, looking for food to stay alive and killing for the thrill of it are very two very different, very far off theories, you know. Even today, you see some of that emotional language used. Mr. Savalane has a book that he wrote that is linked in our bookshop list. Or no, his is not sold in the bookshop. You've got to go to a different website to get it, but I've linked his book in our show notes.

SPEAKER_02 22:42

So do they know if those attacks were made by the same shark?

Tasha 22:45

Well, that that is something that they're not sure of exactly. Um, they know that two of them were the same shark. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:51

And the two in the same area. Yes.

Tasha 22:53

So at first, like we said, town mayors denied that anything was happening because they were afraid of what it would cost them in tourism. Eventually, resorts closed. Politicians brought in scientists to try and figure out what was going on. The night of the Matowan attacks, locals threw sticks of dynamite into the creek to try and get the shark. But I'm like, what else did you kill in that? So on the day Lester's body was found, President Wilson called a cabinet meeting. And according to a July 14th, 1960 Philadelphia Inquirer article, the White House gave federal aid to drive away all the ferocious man-eating sharks which have been making prey of bathers. So what followed was one of the largest concentrated animal hunts in history. Men went after the shark with rifles and even pitchforks, which, like, that is hilarious to me because all I can think of are like the movies where you see pee like on Frankenstein. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 23:42

But I mean, they didn't know the anatomy of a shark, really. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't really public knowledge.

Tasha 23:46

So yeah. So the coastal communities also built fences around their beaches to try and keep people out of the water. Some towns advertised cash rewards for every shark head. So you would get a reward from the town if you caught a shark and brought the head to them. So fishermen just went out to the water and droves. It became so popular that a newspaper ended up declaring shark fishing a new sport. So not just, hey, we're going out to try and catch the shark. We've got this new fangled great sport, it's called shark fishing. There is a shark expert, George Burgess. He is genius, and we're gonna quote him a lot. He described it, and this is my favorite, as a collective testosterone rush where every guy wanted his picture taken with his foot on the head of a shark and a shark jaw hanging up in his house. And all I could think of when I read this quote was Hemingway's Old Man in the Sea. And then all of those pictures that we saw when we were in the keys at like Mouse and I saw them in Hemingway's home, but you and I saw more of them in the distillery for the best rum ever PL's rum. Mm-mm-mm. That is great. PLR's. But there are there are all of these fishing photos of Hemingway catching these big ass fish. I mean, not just fish, but like, I mean, they're all fish, but you know, there's like sharks. There's Marlin. Yeah, it's it's there, it was like the bigger the fish, the better, which is still very true today. Theories of why the sharks were biting got wild. Commercial fishermen started complaining that there was low fish numbers. They said that the fish were also smaller that year. Neither of these claims were ever proven. But one man wrote to the New York Times in their opinion editorial column, and he claimed that the sharks were following German U-boats across the Atlantic in a planned plot against the United States. So they had pulled the sharks from Germany. That was his theory, that Germany sent the sharks. Multiple sharks were caught, obviously.

SPEAKER_02 25:30

And I'm sorry, I feel like that theory would be like something that would come up today as well for some random stuff.

Tasha 25:35

Absolutely would.

SPEAKER_02 25:36

Random stuff.

Tasha 25:36

I know.

SPEAKER_02 25:37

From mammal news, whatever you want to call it. I know Fox News.

Tasha 25:40

Mammal news. Well, they paraded in the press that July all of the sharks that were caught. July 15th, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran the headline: huge shark of the man-eating species caught at Belford, New Jersey, with photos of the fisherman that caught the shark. The shark was a female. She was nine and a quarter feet long, which is not that big whenever you hear about some of the other sharks that we're gonna encounter in our episode. But she was 215 pounds. They caught her in a net after what they described as a terrible battle. When they cut her open, she was carrying 12 baby sharks, and each was about 18 inches long in her belly, which is very sad to me. They killed a mama shark. What was that? Oh no. Okay. The ghosts are upset about the baby sharks too. They're like, no.

SPEAKER_02 26:26

Well, mama was pretty much trying to defend where her kids swim.

Tasha 26:28

No, the they were growing in her belly.

SPEAKER_02 26:30

So she was in a defensive mood.

Tasha 26:32

Yes. Pretty much. She was defensive.

SPEAKER_02 26:34

And then man decided to take over and be like, oh, you're just an angry female.

Tasha 26:37

Yes. Oh, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

That was just a good setup. It was really good. History repeats itself, even in cross species.

Tasha 26:44

Cross species. Well, the catch that was tied to the attacks was a young, roughly eight-foot great white pulled from New Jersey waters. The newspapers reported that when they cut the shark open, they found remains from two of the Matwong Creek victims in its stomach. The shark was displayed in a this is just ridiculous to me. And it it makes me think of like the old like sideshow oddity things where people would pay to go in and see like jars of weird things. They took the shark and they hung it up in a New York shop and people paid to go see it. The shark was killed by a quote unquote hero, and he said that the shark reportedly attacked his boat. So the baby shark was attacking his boat, and he was like, nope, that's not okay. But how can we be sure? So Burgess questions the identification of the shark because he says, first of all, there aren't good enough photos to confirm the species. No. And then second of all, if they really pulled body parts out, there was never in any of the coroner's report for any of the individuals that were killed, there was no confirmation of recovered human remains. So literally all we have are press reports and what the newspaper said at the time.

SPEAKER_02 27:49

But that's only where facts are found.

Tasha 27:51

Exactly. Exactly. Scientists of the day, John Treadwell and Robert Cushman Murphy of the American Museum of Natural History that we've talked about. And then also Charles Haskins Townsend, who was the director of the New York Aquarium, they sorted through like all of the species of sharks that lived offshore, which wandered near shore and then which weren't known to attack people, which would have been all of them. So that's a really weird thing to say. But one of because at that point they were like, none of the sharks attack people. Anyway, um, they one of them suggested that the great white was most likely the culprit. And an American Museum of Natural History specialist identified it as the legendary man-eater. And I'm gonna try and say the scientific name here of the great white, and I'm gonna fail. Uh Catcharodin Cartarius. Listen, if you want to know how to say the word, watch Jaws.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

Richard Dreyfus probably says it.

Tasha 28:38

He says it and he says it very well and very scooth-like. Yes, like he's been saying it his whole life. But this was when the legend of the killer great white shark was was really born. Burgess lists the 1916 attacker as a young great white, but there are other scientists that believe it was a bull shark, um, which is notable because bull sharks are known to swim into brackish and fresh water. So that would be more likely at the Matawan Creek than in the ocean. Um, and it may not have been one shark at all, to your point. There are some accounts that say an unknown number of sharks swam into the creek in 1916. Burgess called it um the most unique set of shark attacks that have ever occurred. It's one of the rare cases where it appears that a single shark has killed multiple people. He suggests that the shark may have been injured or had a deformity. He he talks about um and refers to like injured lions or elephants. If they are injured or like have bad teeth, they are in pain and they'll attack. They're more aggressive. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:35

Like if I have a headache, I attack your mind. I snap, I snap at you all.

Tasha 29:39

Well, since the 1920s, there has not been a fatal shark attack off New Jersey. The last serious attack there was in 1960 when a body surfer lost his leg. But other than that, the last fatal shark attack off New Jersey was in the 1920s. Matowan, where the creek is, it's home to fewer than 9,000 people. They have a yearly commemoration of the attacks that brings in way more people than what their town can hold, and it boosts their tourism, which is really funny because you think about like at the time, they were like, don't tell anyone we need the tourism to thrive. And now it's like, tell everyone we need the tourism. Um, but you know, I guess everything comes back around eventually.

SPEAKER_02 30:18

Close to anywhere we stayed up there?

Tasha 30:19

I don't know. It's in New Jersey. We've not stayed in New Jersey, we've just driven through New Jersey quite often.

SPEAKER_02 30:24

Well, I mean, we stayed in a place that was like an hour and a half away from New York City and we were in Pennsylvania.

Tasha 30:28

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 30:29

That's where we went through New Jersey again. So maybe it was if we stayed there again, we could probably go. Yeah, we've paid tolls through New Jersey.

Tasha 30:34

So this uh commemoration includes a memorial service and a wreath lane at Lester and Stanley's graves. They do a hero walk retracing Stanley's route to the creek. They do trolley tours and then they have a shark exhibit. In 2016, it was, you know, the hundredth anniversary. So they put up a monument that was unveiled in a local park. Stanley's, I love this so much. So Stanley and Lester were buried in the same cemetery, and Lester's grave is down, and then Stanley's is up on a hill from Leicester's. So literally, Savalane said it's almost like Stanley's still overlooking Lester in death, which is kind of cool. There's a gentleman named John S. Nichols. His Stanley Fisher was his great uncle. And he said that before Jaws came out, he would tell people, Oh, yes, my great uncle died from a shark attack, and nobody believed them. They thought the family was lying. They were like, that doesn't happen here, like that's just not real. But after Jaws, now his family gets international attention. And he said that when shark week is on, he'll be in the grocery store and people will come up to him that he doesn't know to offer their condolences. Really? Wow. So uh, you know, that's crazy. It's kind of wild, but we're gonna talk about the move from 1916 to 1974 because that is a that is it's you know about 50 years, and the public went from believing that sharks were harmless to believing they were murderers, but like, but there's like a few key moments in US history that really locked that in for them. In 1945, we've got the USS Indianapolis sinking.

SPEAKER_03 32:08

Oh, yeah.

Tasha 32:08

Near the end of World War II, the Navy cruiser was sunk by a Japanese submarine. Survivors floated in the water for four days before they were rescued. As many as 600 sailors died, and a number of them were reported to be attacked by sharks. This is the story that Quint tells in his famous monologue in Jaws from like when they're down in the bottom of the boat. The disaster, though, it's terrible. It also brought new funding to professional shark research because they just wanted to know like what happened. And when that happens in a military sense, you know, the military, the government's going to put money behind that. The 1950s and 60s saw the beach boom, you know, because you've got like beach boys singing their songs, and then you've got movies like Beach Blanket Bingo hitting the theater. And it really built up the beach culture as we know it today. Um, and it put more people in the water than ever before. So that's very important to note that the number of beachgoers just blew up in the 50s and 60s. In 1957 and 58, outside of the US in South Africa, there were a series of highly publicized shark attacks that led the South African government to send out ships to bomb the waters. Like they were like just go. In 1958, around the same time in Hawaii, a young boy named Billy Weaver was pulled off of an air mattress and killed by a shark. So remember that one because it shows up in Joss. Also in 1958, we had the rogue shark theory arrive. Australian Dr. Victor Copelson proposed that attacks in an area off Australia were the work of a single murderous shark hunting alone that he called a rogue. That idea became the backbone of JAWS. And we'll come back to whether or not that theory holds up. In 1959, so this is like all just very, very close, right? Yeah, yeah. But of course it is because we've got so many people in the water now. So 1959, San Francisco, a shark attacked 18-year-old Albert Kogler, his friend Shirley O'Neill pulled him to the beach. And when she realized that he was dying and he wasn't gonna make him make it, she baptized him in the water before she completely pulled him to the beach.

SPEAKER_03 34:05

Wow.

Tasha 34:05

Yes, the story was huge. He died on the sand. The shark was cast as a demon that she had faced down in the papers. She was awarded the Young American Medal for Bravery by President John F. Kennedy. In 1964, in Montauk, on June 6th, fisherman Frank Mundus harpooned a roughly 17.5 foot, 4,500 pound great white off Montauk Long Island. Yes, that is the appropriate response. 17 and a half feet, 4,500 pounds, big ass shark. That's huge. Mundus was fishing from his 42-foot boat. So the shark's almost half the length of his boat. The boat was called the Cricut II, and it was outfooted with harpoons that were attached to barrels, and he had what he called a fighting chair. He mundus is actually the person who coined the term monster fishing in the 1950s.

SPEAKER_03 34:53

Oh, really?

Tasha 34:54

To represent shark fishing. Mundus is rumored to be one of the inspirations for Quint. And you really see that like with his fighting chair and all the harpoons on the barrels and that kind of thing. Peter Benchley read about this huge catch. At the time, it was the largest shark anybody had ever caught. He read about it in the daily news. And his wife Wendy says that when he started thinking about the shark attack, that's when, or the shark that was caught, that's when he started thinking about a shark terrorizing a summer resort town. And that's how he started really getting ready to write his novel because he was like, this is a ginormous shock or shark and shock. What kind of ravaging would it be possible of doing? Australians Ron and Valerie Taylor began filming great white sharks underwater in the mid-1960s. They were the first people to do that. It never been done anywhere in the world. Ron had been diving since the 1950s. He got a 16 millimeter camera and he had been filming underwater for TV. And he was getting so many requests because people wanted to see sharks. They wanted to see great whites. They wanted to see how they swam and hunted and all of that. So the Taylors, they actually worked on a documentary in 1971 called Blue Water White Death by Peter Gimbal and James Lipscomb. And that featured a ton of underwater footage of sharks. Writer Peter Matheson chronicled the making of that film in his 1972 book, Blue Meridian. Blue Water White Death was one of the influences on Benchley's book. And the Taylors would later work, they'd go on to work on the film adaptation of his book, which is really cool.

SPEAKER_03 36:22

That's pretty cool.

Tasha 36:22

Let's talk about Peter Benchley and who he was. He was born in New York in 1940. Benchley spent his summers growing up on Nantucket Island. He would go body surfing and fishing with his father. They'd go out fishing for swordfish, but occasionally they caught sharks just accidentally. Wendy Benchley, his wife, says that's where his interest in sharks began as a child. He studied sharks as a kid and he had a lifelong interest in shark attacks. So growing up and summering in Nantucket, he understood island life. He knew what it meant to be born an islander versus being a summer person or someone who moved to the island. He was a former Newsweek editor and he worked as a freelance journalist, including for National Geographic. He'd been kicking the idea around since that 1964 catch by Mungus in Montauk. So Benchley's pitch to Doubleday, his publisher, he said that the novel would explore the reactions of a community that's suddenly struck by a peculiar natural disaster, not an earthquake or a flood, but a continuing mysterious devastation that as time goes on loses its natural neutrality and begins to smack of evil. So his, like, hey, I'm gonna do this, didn't even say shark. It was just like natural disaster, gonna be evil. Wendy describes his book this way. She says, the shark is the catalyst for the actions of all the other characters, but the novel is primarily a description of how a community and individuals cope with a menace that they can't control. Kind of funny. He rented office space in a furniture factory in New Jersey to write the book, to like go away and write the book. So I think it's interesting that he was in New Jersey where the 1916 attacks happened to write the book, probably helped with research. He went through ages of endless possible titles for months for this book. Really? Some of them included the stillness in the water, the leviathan, the grinning fish.

SPEAKER_02 38:04

The grinning fish.

Tasha 38:05

Just the question, why? question mark. That was my favorite. The scourge of amity, phosphorescence, which I don't understand.

SPEAKER_02 38:15

Phosphorescence.

Tasha 38:16

Phosphorescence. A dreadful silence. Ripple, Pisces Redux.

SPEAKER_02 38:20

I like ripple.

Tasha 38:21

Pisces Redux and Squam. Squam. He did not settle on Jaws until the day that the book was due to double day. Wow. Yes. He made the shark 25 feet long, which is interesting because at the time, the known average length for a great white shark was about 19 feet. So he was like, shh, we can do better than that.

SPEAKER_02 38:40

That's more of a monster.

Tasha 38:41

So when you look at the events of 1916 and the book, you lay the book, like lay the novel next to 1916. The parallels are hard to miss. Like you just can't get around it. The shark kills four people, including a victim in an estuary. So we've got the Greek kind of thing happening. Yeah. A man tries to fight the shark and he dies. So we've got a representation of Stanley. The mayor denies that anything's happening to protect tourism and until it gets so bad that he has to call in a scientist. So and I hate these words. Ickelog. What does it mean? Fish scientist, shark scientist, ichthyologist is what we're gonna say from the New York aquarium at Coney Island identifies the shark as a great white and warns it happened before in 1916. So eventually just like straight calls out the New Jersey attacks directly in his book. It happened before in 1916 and it can happen again. Local men in the book organize a shark hunt, and the shark is finally killed by a hero as it attacks the boat. So, you know, it's it's very, very much in line with the 1916 attacks. Benschley moved the story to a fictional Long Island resort town of Amity. But here's the twist. Benchley told two different stories on how his book came to be. In a later introduction to Jaws, he wrote, Did sharks stay in one area killing and killing again? Darn right, remember the shark that went up a New Jersey River in 1916 and killed four people? Time and again, I confidently assured interviewers that every single incident described in Jaws actually happened. So that was in his own introduction to the book. But in 2001, the New York Times printed a correction to a previous article that they had ran because Benchley was pissed that they had connected his book in the 1916 attacks, and he wanted them to run a correction, saying that, like disputing that there was any connection between the two. Other real incidents show up in the book too. In the book, Alex Kintner is pulled off of an air mattress by the shark, which is just like Billy Weaver in Hawaii in 1958. And then Chrissy Watkins' attack, which is the first kill that we see in the movie. Her attack is similar to the attack on Albert Kogler off of San Francisco. Eventually sold the film rights before the book was even published. Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown gave the book to her husband, who was a producer. His name was David Brown, and he and his partner, Richard Sanick, bought it. The book came out in February 1974, Double Day and Universal, because by this point they knew they were gonna make it into a movie. They partnered to promote both the book and the movie, giving it kind of extra marketing muscle. The book spent 44 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. 44 weeks. That's like a Taylor Swift album. Like, that's you know what I mean? Like I'm trying to imagine what would be what would be on the charts.

SPEAKER_02 41:23

I mean, I don't doubt that, but yeah.

Tasha 41:25

You know, um, it's pretty sold, it's pretty good. It sold more than five and a half million copies by the following summer. Today it has sold more than 20 million copies.

SPEAKER_02 41:33

I wonder if it was like one of those I would love to see like the beaches at that time and see like all these people reading that book while they're like at the beach.

Tasha 41:41

It's like and your kids are in the water, it's like it's like watching airport while you're flying in a plane.

SPEAKER_02 41:46

Yes.

Tasha 41:47

Well, the paperback copy or version was released January 22nd of 1975. So almost a year later, it alone was a multi-million dollar bestseller just by itself. Yeah, the cover painting. By the time we get to the paperback, I find this so interesting. By the time we get to the paperback, they've already changed the dust cover on the hardback twice. Yeah, the paperback gets a completely different painting done of it or for it. And that cover painting by artist Roger Castell, the book's third cover, became the iconic movie poster.

SPEAKER_02 42:15

That's a great picture.

Tasha 42:17

Yes. This is the one that won. I think I've got it so that it's not. You can see like there's the shark, and up above, right on top of the water. I can't do it. Is it far away? It's not, it's my face.

SPEAKER_02 42:27

I mean, I can't.

Tasha 42:27

Up above the water, we're good. Up above the water, you see the girl swimming. Yes. That was the book cover, it was the movie poster. Readers saw all kinds of metaphor in the book. Some said that it was about Nixon and Watergate because that was happening at the time. Fidel Castro read the book. It was titled Tiburon.

SPEAKER_02 42:44

It is actually physically sharp or literally sharp.

Tasha 42:47

And he said when they asked him, Why are you reading a commercial American thriller? He said, This is not a commercial American thriller at all. It's a metaphor for the corruption of capitalism. I know. Benthley said that that review from Fidel Castro was his favorite review of the book ever. Oh, really? It was never actually written. It was just something that he told a reporter when the reporter was talking to him. He tried to get Doubleday to use it as like a quote on a poster or on a book, you know, cover or something. And they were like, no, we're not putting Fidel Castro on.

SPEAKER_02 43:17

We're capitalism.

Tasha 43:19

The book versus the movie, the book was much grittier and much darker.

SPEAKER_02 43:23

I want to read it now.

Tasha 43:24

You might not when we get done. The book is more of a human versus human story where the movie is very human versus nature. And the human versus nature part of the book is like the subplot. So it's like a secondary thing that's happening, which is really funny because it's named after the shark. But the book has like a strong undercurrent of corruption and greed, and the characters are really hard to root for. Spielberg said after, like when he was filming, he said after he read the book, he was like, All of these characters are incredibly unlikable, and I can't make a movie with them.

SPEAKER_03 43:57

Oh, really?

Tasha 43:58

Yeah. NPR's Lizzie Skernick said. She prefers the book to the movie because she said the movie's like an updated Moby Dick, but she said the novel is more like Peyton Place by the sea. Everyone swears like a sailor, and the hunt for the shark comes a very distant second to a bunch of hot summer trists. So you know, you gotta decide. Do you want the shark tack? Do you want the summer trysts?

SPEAKER_02 44:19

That was interesting. That was a good analogy, the Moby Dick.

Tasha 44:21

I went to, yeah. I went back to my good reads, which is how I keep track of every book that I ever read, um, to see what I rated Jaws, because I've I've read the book. It's I funnily enough, I read it during COVID. So I I didn't want to read it again because I had this memory of not enjoying the book. And I was like, well, what did I rate it? I gave it three out of five stars when I read it. So um, you know, take that how you will. It's a book for some people and not a book for others. And I remember when I rated it that I was like, I feel like I'm being generous. Not that the writing wasn't good, not that the quality of skill in his writing was not good, but that the story itself, I was just like, oh, I can't take anymore. Where's the shark?

SPEAKER_03 44:58

Oh, yeah. That's sad.

Tasha 44:59

So there's two major subplots of the book that were cut for the movie. The first one is an affair between Ellen Brody, which is Chief Brody's wife, and Hooper. Oh gosh. Yes. So that is removed from the movie. And then I'm glad. I am too. I am too.

SPEAKER_02 45:14

But I could see how that could have been put into the because she was like kind of like interested, like in their conversation. She's very engaged with their conversation.

Tasha 45:20

She was engaged, but the difference is that when you meet Ellen and the Chief in the book, they are in a very bad place in their marriage.

SPEAKER_02 45:28

But they're not doing that.

Tasha 45:28

No, and I feel like it would have had such a different change in how we respected the characters and rooted for them. I think Spielberg needed people to root for the people and not the big fish. If they had been horrible people on that boat, people would have been like, oh my god, just let the fish eat them already.

SPEAKER_02 45:45

You know what I mean? You gotta, I got you gotta love the main characters because the heroes are always in every good plot, they have always got a weakness. Yes. And his weakness was water. And it was cool to see him like overcome. Yeah. Like, I mean, that last that scene, like it's like I feel like that scene like drug on forever compared to compared to like how fast that thing was sinking and him trying to shoot that rifle. I was just like, man, this is that's intense. Like, once you get in the water, that rifle is screwed.

Tasha 46:09

Right, exactly. Well, so that's the first subplot. The second one had to do with the mayor. He had a much larger part in the book. Um, and he was tied to the mafia, and the mafia was like the mob was pulling the strings in town. And so when he was like trying to cover up what was happening on the beach and was trying to convince everybody it was safe, it was because the mob was like, Look, if you affect our bottom line, there's gonna be some death happening and it's not gonna be in the water. And so that was like a huge part of the book. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 46:38

That makes sense to that NPR reporter that said it might have been more water gate.

Tasha 46:42

No, she said Peyton place.

SPEAKER_02 46:44

Oh, yeah, yeah, you're right.

Tasha 46:45

So then, like we talked about, Spielberg had the characters change from the book to the movie. So Brody in the book, he's a longtime amity local, like we talked about, but he's very morose and despondent, and he's really distracted by his wife's infidelity. His job as being a chief comes like second to him dealing with all of his personal drama. But in the movie, he's heroic, he's a devoted father, he's a passionate husband, he's a very hard worker. Everybody on the island relies on him. There they came to him at the beginning of this, and I was like, shouldn't you be going to like the mayor or something? And they're coming to him for everything. And he's a New York transplant who is scared of the water. Hooper in the book, he's very self-important. He sleeps with Brody's wife, like we said, but then you get him in the movie, and he's nerdy and he's charming, and he's Hodges. Like it's everything that you love about Hodges with a shark instead of bones.

SPEAKER_02 47:36

Or no, not both have it. Slime and bugs.

Tasha 47:38

Yeah, slime and bugs. And then there's Quint. So in the book, Quint is kind of like a secondary, smaller part. In the movie, he's given a backstory. He he doesn't show up in the book really until they need his boat, essentially. But in the movie, he has such a bigger role. He gets the the great monologue about the USS Indianapolis, which was not.

SPEAKER_02 47:59

But in the movie, though, he goes up a little bit later and then doesn't show up again until like he's not in a bulk of the movie, though. Yes, but he's a huge character. Yes, and his personality in that movie makes him look like he is a main character, but he's not in as much as the other two are. Yep, which is really crazy.

Tasha 48:15

And to that effect, Ellen Brody, her character is in the book way more than in the movie. In the movie, she's just like a little support to you know to build this backstory for the chief. And then the newspaper reporter Harry Meadows, he also plays a larger role in the book because they're constantly going to him about what he's reporting and things like that. But instead of characters constantly disagreeing about what to do, the other thing that that Spielberg really wanted to happen in this is he made them more, a more united front. So when you see the three men, and that's really funny to say because when you see the three men on the boat, like you see them arguing all the time about what to do. Quince, like, you know, making snide remarks about Hooper being a little rich boy who like doesn't know how to really hunt the shark, but they still come together and like get shit done. But in the book, that is that is not their relationship, like they um disagree to to like to a fault. Like it's just there is no, you know, friendly ribbing. It's like they hate each other. The ending changed both how the shark is defeated and who dies between the book and the movie. And in case you want to read the book, I'm not gonna tell you who dies in the book or how the shark is killed. But Spielberg said he confirmed that the film has about 27 scenes that are not in the novel at all. So it's it's a lot.

SPEAKER_02 49:25

It's different.

Tasha 49:26

Yeah, the movie was made to be lighter, more hopeful, and heroic feeling, and it focused on the hunt instead of on the character's flaws. And doing that really gave it a universal appeal so that people who were watching the movie could see themselves in those decisions. They could say, This is absolutely something that I would be doing if I was the everyday man in charge of handling this. So let's talk about the making of the movie now that we're here.

SPEAKER_02 49:48

So I want to say something about the three characters real fast. And I know you're getting into the movie, but I like how both three leads or whatever, the three heroes are like characters are very different, but I feel like in their roles together, they don't really compromise their characters, like their character, their integrity, and all their ethics. And they each individually have their own ethics that are right. They're just different in how their perception is. Yeah. But also that uh that then they somehow complement each other. Yeah. And you see all the bickering and all that stuff, especially between Hooper and Quint, but like they still, like when something needs to happen, like they still follow each other's leads. Like they each like lead in different times. And um, I like that. Like they're both, they're all three, not both, all three are like leads at some point in this fight. Yeah. Uh, and it's crazy to see that. Whereas most movies usually have like a hero. Right. Uh and I love how this kind of and like I feel like people that watch it somehow find themselves in at least one of the characters that they can relate to. Yeah.

Tasha 50:40

And I I think you're able to because each one of them comes from not just a different background, so they don't, they each have different driving forces behind why they are there, but also they have different backgrounds that got them there. Right. Right. So, like Hooper, if you're an educated, scientific-minded, or if you come from upper class, you're gonna see yourself in Hooper. That's gonna be easy for you. If you're like kind of middle class, grew up in the city, you know, you feel like a fish out of water yourself, like you're going to relate to the chief. Chief Brody's your guy. And if you're like salt of the earth, you know, blue-collar worker, you are really going to relate to Quint. Quint. And I think that that was just really brilliant to give three heroes that really hit just major moments, but also, or like moments in in life, different demographics, but also their ages. You know, you've got Quint's the older guy who fought in the war, and then you've got Brody who, you know, he's a little bit older than Hooper. I think the only thing that we're missing here is any sort of diversity in color.

SPEAKER_03 51:42

Thanks.

Tasha 51:42

Yeah, like Ellen is the only real female character that we get a backstory or get any, you know, we get Alex Kintner's mom and the lady who goes to the town hall to argue like what to do about the sharks. But there's, you know, there's not a lot of females and there's not a lot of diversity in color. But I I do have to say, given the time frame, this definitely was a time where like the man was expected to save the day. Right, you know?

SPEAKER_02 52:07

And also the people that were vacationing the moor were mothers and children.

Tasha 52:10

You got women and children on that beach, but also men have got to save.

SPEAKER_02 52:13

But also Caucasians. Yes, you know, were the ones that were to make money, you know, doing vacations at beach resorts and stuff like that.

Tasha 52:18

Yeah. Well, let's talk about this movie a little bit and explain why crew members referred to it as flaws instead of Jaws. Let's start with our young director, Steven Spielberg. He made his first full-length film, Firelight, and this is one of those kismet date numbers that I'm gonna get to. He made Firelight for the first time. It was a movie about aliens. So his very first movie was about aliens. Nice. He made it in March 1964, which is literally like a month after Mungus caught the Montauk shark that inspired Benchley to write the book.

SPEAKER_03 52:51

Okay.

Tasha 52:51

So that's really cool to me. But what's also really cool to me is that when he released Firelight, he was a junior in high school.

SPEAKER_02 52:57

Oh, really? Yes, in high school.

Tasha 52:59

He made it all himself for under $600 and it played one night at a local cinema and he made a profit of $1. Yeah. So that to me is really, really cool.

SPEAKER_02 53:08

Oh, he made $600 and one dollar.

Tasha 53:10

Yes. Exactly. At the age of 20, he released his short film Amblin, which later becomes the name of his production company. He signed from Amblin, he got a seven-year contract with Universal Studios. Wow. Yeah. And he was directing professionally by the age of 21, including in 1969, a project with Joan Crawford.

SPEAKER_03 53:32

Oh wow.

Tasha 53:32

Yeah. Now, what's also really fun about that is that Joan Crawford was in all about baby. No, what is that called?

SPEAKER_02 53:39

Um about baby Jane, something like that.

Tasha 53:41

Yes. She was in the Baby Jane movie with Betty White or Betty White's Betty Davis. Betty Davis. And while I was researching this, I actually found some things that because we're gonna see like how temperamental the shark was during filming. I saw people actually refer to the shark as being the Betty Davis of sea animals. And so I was like, he's worked with Joan Crawford and Betty Davis.

SPEAKER_02 54:04

FYI. If Betty White was in that movie, that would have been a way different movie. It would have been more comedy than anything.

Tasha 54:09

What is that? Is it something about Baby Jane? What is the title? That's gonna make me crazy. I'm sorry, people. I gotta look it up because I have David.

SPEAKER_02 54:16

You might pause here.

Tasha 54:16

I'm just gonna Google Baby Jane.

SPEAKER_02 54:18

Something about Baby Jane.

Tasha 54:20

Whatever happened to Baby Jane.

SPEAKER_02 54:21

Oh, whatever happened to Baby Jane.

Tasha 54:22

Oh, such a great movie. I wish that I could go back and experience whatever happened to Baby Jane for the first time, like re-see it from the show.

SPEAKER_02 54:29

I know you've shown me that once, but I don't remember it.

Tasha 54:31

Oh, it's so good. It's so good. Yeah. I I had a friend when I was young, her name was Erica, and her mom, Angie, who went to high school with the mom from ET. Wow. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 54:41

Which is another Spielberg.

Tasha 54:43

Right? Angie introduced me to these amazing movies that I never would have seen in my own home because it's just not anything that my parents were watching. My dad was very much into John Wayne, and my mom, I don't know, but she was watching a lot of Bible things and a lot of Mel Gibson and a lot of Patrick Swayze in my house. So I would not have encountered these. But uh Angie showed me Sunset Boulevard, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, West Side Story, which coincidentally was later remade by Spielberg. There's a lot of Spielberg in my life. And then Mommy Dearest, which is a story of Joan Crawford as a mother. So I would not have, I don't think I would have the love for movies that I have if she had not introduced me to that as a young kid.

SPEAKER_02 55:18

Is the whatever happened to Baby Jane the one where like that, is it like a reporter or investigator?

Tasha 55:23

No, that's Sunset Boulevard.

SPEAKER_02 55:24

Okay.

Tasha 55:25

Yep. Um, where he goes to Norma Desmonds and she's like, I'm ready to be aged out. Yes, actress. Aged out, silent film actress. She really's a terrible term, but well, she got edged out of the industry whenever sound was brought in. Yes. And so it was a big thing. She was a purist and all that stuff, right? Yeah, it was a really different kind of movie making. But yeah, it's okay. So I got so whatever happened to Baby Jane is Betty Davis's character is Baby Jane. She was a child actress, and no one knows what has happened to her as an adult. Well, her paralytic sister, played by Joan Crawford, takes care of her in this home, and Baby Jane is off her rocker. And it's it's a thriller and it's very good.

SPEAKER_02 56:04

Maybe I have not seen that. I don't know.

Tasha 56:05

We will watch it. That will go in our Halloween movie. Halloween. Yes, because it is she's scary. When you see her, you're like, oh, did you inspire Pennywise? Look at that makeup.

SPEAKER_02 56:15

Bruce is Bruce's by decision, me.

Tasha 56:17

Well, okay, so let's get back to Spielberg. So he directed a movie called Duel. It was a made-for-TV thriller, and it was about an oil tanker truck that stalked a man in a Plymouth Valiant, which also reminds me of the movie Christine.

SPEAKER_02 56:28

Reminds me of the movie Jeepers Creepers. Which has the my favorite scene of ever.

Tasha 56:33

Yes. When he's yes.

SPEAKER_02 56:34

When they're driving past him while he dumps the body in the pipe. That was my favorite scene ever of any movie. That was the creepiest scene.

Tasha 56:40

Spielberg later compared Jaws to Duel because it they were both about this predator that was chasing something and was just like hellbent on catching its prey. But he was like, I've moved the predator from the highway to the ocean. Yeah. So his first theatrical feature, because Duel was his first full-length feature, but it was made for TV. Yeah. So his first theatrical feature was the Sugarland Express. Um, it had Scoldie Hahn in it. And the a reporter for The New Yorker, her name is Pauline Kale or Keel. She wrote that it was one of the most phenomenal film debuts in the history of movies, but it failed hard at the box office. Columbia then reaches out to him and is like, hey, we will finance the remake of your junior year film Firelight if you want to make it into a full-length film. Yeah. And we'll retitle it Watch the Skies. It eventually became Plose Encounters of a Third Kind.

SPEAKER_03 57:31

Ooh.

Tasha 57:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 57:32

Which is great.

Tasha 57:32

Yes. But while they were trying to get this movie started, there were all of these disagreements between Spielberg and his screenwriter about changes that needed to be made to the storyline as they were lengthening it for the movie.

SPEAKER_03 57:43

Yeah.

Tasha 57:43

And the project had stalled. Meanwhile, he's working on post-production for the Sugarland Express and he's in their office. And he, the producers of the Sugarland Express were Zanek and Brown, who had bought the movie rights to Jaws. So he's in their office and he sees the galleys for Jaws setting there. And he's like, What is this? Is it about dentistry? Like, you know, he's making all these jokes. He asks if he can read it. And he said that the last 110 pages fighting the shark frightened him so badly that he wanted to make the movie so that he could scare them right back. And he was like, Can I please make this movie? And they were like, Man, we'd really love for you to, but there's already a director attached to it.

SPEAKER_03 58:20

Oh, really?

Tasha 58:21

However, that guy kept calling the shark a whale. And they were like, This is not a whale, it is a shark. So eventually he was kicked out of the movie. They were like, sorry, no, we're getting Spielberg. Steven Spielberg gets tagged in and they're like, Here are the tanks, go film it. And he's like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I need to film it on site. It needs to be on the ocean.

SPEAKER_03 58:38

Yeah.

Tasha 58:39

So Spielberg tells Columbia, listen, I've been hired to shoot a shark film and it'll be done in six months, and I'll come back and we can finish Watch the Skies. Spoiler, that timeline did not hold. Jaws was Spielberg's second feature film. He was 27 while he was filming it. And because his first film had only come out the year before and it didn't really do that well at the movies, he wasn't well known as a director. And so when you watch the original trailer, his name is not even in the original trailer.

SPEAKER_03 59:06

Oh, really?

Tasha 59:07

Because they were like, this is not going to give us any clout at all. Yeah. That will never happen again in his life. Everything will be a Spielberg film. Like that is what people will go to school.

SPEAKER_02 59:15

But what was that film known for?

Tasha 59:17

Sugarland Express?

SPEAKER_02 59:18

Oh.

Tasha 59:18

Jaws?

SPEAKER_02 59:18

Yeah.

Tasha 59:19

Just the shark. The shark was the driving force.

SPEAKER_02 59:21

So like Richard Dreyfus wasn't like a big name back then.

Tasha 59:24

Nope. And we're gonna get into that, but he had only done or his biggest thing to date was American Graffiti, which he played like a, I want to say he played a secondary role, but um that main. Yeah, he that was like his biggest role to date. Because the book was selling so well, Universal wanted to push up the filming of that shark movie. And so they were like, hey, can we start this this next month in April? And Spielberg was like, excuse me. And they were like, oh yeah. And also the actors are going to potentially strike in late June. So we need to start it in April and also have the filming done before the actor strike starts. And he's like, Yeah, no, we don't have a shark yet. The script isn't finished. I don't have actors. So he was able to buy one more month from them so that they could finish the script, finish the shark, and start filming. So the filming started May 2nd, 1974. That meant that production designer Joe Alves, who thought he was gonna have a year to a year and a half to build this mechanical shark, he suddenly had about a month to do this. Yeah. The budget was about three and a half million dollars and it had a 55-day shooting schedule. Richard Dreyfus later said on Inside the Actors Studio that when they started filming, they didn't have a script or a complete cast or the shark. Oh wow. Eventually wrote the first three drafts of the screenplay. They were like, hey, you wrote the book. Why don't you try the screenplay? But he admitted that writing a screenplay, he said it was a different kind of fish than a novel, which makes me laugh because it's about a really big fish. So apparently I'm the only one who thinks that's funny, but I thought it was hilarious. Anyway, he wasn't having a good time with it. It wasn't coming out very well. So uncredited writer, uh Howard Sackler, he was given the next slice at it, right? He had written the screenplay for the great white hope. And so when they told Spielberg, hey, you know, this is who we've got, this is who we or when Spielberg came upon him or whatever, Spielberg was like, Great white hope, great white shark. Oh yeah, this can totally work. And so he was down with it. He didn't keep very much of what Sackler wrote either. He said that the structure that exists to this day of the script stayed, but he sent what Sackler had written to his friend Carl Gottlieb. And Carl Gottlieb was a writer for The Odd Couple, which was a TV show. Yeah. And he was like, Look, I need you to punch up the script. I need you to increase the comedy between the three leads. Like, this needs help. And Spielberg put a note on the cover that said, Dear Carl, eviscerate it. And eviscerate it was in all caps with two exclamation points, Steven. So Gottlieb was like, he read through it and he said, Look, if we do our jobs right, people will feel about going in the ocean the way that they felt about taking a shower after Psycho. Yeah. And that's kind of how it got started. He, with like getting to the heart of the story, he decided that the cover up would come from a mayor who uh bared a passing resemblance to Richard Nixon. So he was leaning on the emotions of the day. Yeah. And Spielberg was like, write yourself apart, like put yourself in this movie. So Gottlieb was like, I'm gonna be the newspaper editor, I'm gonna be Meadows. And he scripted all of these lines out for himself. And then he was like, I gotta take this crap out. It's pulling away from the shark. And so he wrote a ton of his stuff out. And so that character ended up being much shorter in the movie than in the in the book, but it's played by Carl Gottlieb, the screenwriter. So you see him in the film. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah. They said that they cut the love interest storylines to keep a straight line adventure film about the shark and the town and the hunt, with Brody as a reluctant hero tested by nature itself. So they were like, that's what we've got to focus on. We can't have all of these subplots. Like, we need to give the audience a straight line. So the ending blowing up the shark came from Spielberg's writers on the Sugarland Express. He was like showing them this stuff, and and they were the ones who sat down and said, Well, what if you do this? And he was like, Yeah, that's not realistic. And so they said, Okay, what if we use these pressurized tanks? And he was like, Oh, we could, we could actually accomplish that. So it was a group effort to get that script done. Spielberg wanted the shark to be the star. So he turned down big names. Charlton Heston, I will never be able to say Carl Carlton Heston. Yes, Carlton Heston wanted to be in the movie. And he asked to be in the movie, and Spielberg was like, No, you can't be in this because he didn't want audiences looking for a movie star savior. He wanted them to be able to identify with these regular people who were facing down an impossible situation. Roy Scheider at the time had been playing a supporting role in the French connection. That was what he was known for. So he wasn't even playing a lead. Robert Shaw, the British actor who played Quint, he had a supporting role in The Sting, which is an amazing movie. Then, like we said, Richard Dreyfus, what's what's fun about his is coming into the movie is that Spielberg actually wanted John Voigt to play.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:51

Oh, really?

Tasha 1:03:52

And John Voigt turned him down. And so they're getting ready to film and they've got no hooper. And Gottlieb's like, let me call my old friend Ricky. And he reaches out to Richard Dreyfus, um, who'd made his start and got his name in, you know, his acting shops for American Graffiti. And Dreyfus was like, he reads the script and he told Spielberg and Gottlieb, I'd rather watch this movie than shoot it. And they were like, please meet us in Boston for dinner. And so they got Richard Dreyfus to fly to Boston and have dinner with Gottlieb and Spielberg. And after dinner, he was he was on. He was like, Okay, I'll sign on. It is three days before shooting is scheduled to begin when they get Richard Dreyfus. So they now have all three of their main characters set in stone. Joe Alves, who's the production art designer and was remarkably a former race car driver before he got into the film industry. He scouted the entire eastern seaboard or a location that could be transformed into amity, just ran up and down and could not find something that fit because this mechanical shark needed a sandy ocean floor, small tides, and an unbroken horizon to mount its 12 to 12, what 12 ton submersible platform and track. So they needed it to be like a very specific type of water, of beach. So he's like running all over trying to find this. And Spielberg was like, hey, check out Martha Vineyard. I heard that it's really nice. And so Alves is like, okay, I'll get on this boat and I'll go check out Martha's Vineyard and I'll check out Nantucket. But when he goes on January 17th, the boat is only running to Martha Vineyard that day. Martha's Vineyard that day. So he never got to go scout Nantucket to see if that would work. So that's how Martha's Vineyard won that out. But when he got there, he started asking around and they were like, yeah, it's like the the, you know, it's like a 25-foot depth water tides don't ever get higher than two feet. And he was like, This is perfect. And it's a real island. It's not like we have to go film off of a post and try and make it look like we're on an island. This is an island. We don't have to fake it. So that's how Martha's Vineyard got taken over. Before Jaws, the only movie that had ever been filled on filmed on Martha's Vineyard was from the silent film era. So, you know, it's in the 70s. Silent film was out the door in like the 20s. Yeah. So you're really, it's been over 50 years. It was a really quiet town. This is my favorite probably movie fact about this, I think. And I may have already said that um already, but haven't said this fact, which is fantastic. Only eight actors were brought in from Hollywood.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:18

Yeah, professional actors.

Tasha 1:06:19

Yep. Roy Scheider, Richard Gottlieb, or Richard Gottlieb, Richard Dreyfus, Robert Shaw, so our main three, Lorraine Gary, the wife, Murray Hamilton, Carl Gottlieb, Ted Grossman, and Susan Becklinney, is how you say her last name, who played Chrissy. Everybody else who was on screen was a Vineyard local, which is incredible. So the casting director, Sherry Rhodes, she went to Martha's Vineyard and she just spent time getting to know the islanders before they started auditions. And then they paid the locals to come in and be screaming extras.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:46

That's pretty cool.

Tasha 1:06:47

Um, and it filming it that way, it really gave it like a documentary film, like you were talking about earlier. There is a man, I love this so much. I know there's a man named Craig Kingsbury who was hired to play Fisherman Ben Gardner, which is the character whose boat they come upon. And he, you know, we've got that first, yeah. It's that first scare, jump scare of the movie, really, when Hooper is down. Is it Hooper that goes down? Yes, Hooper is and then you see him come out of the porthole, like his dead body, and it's like, oh my gosh. Anyway, he played Ben Gardner. He made up all of his own lines.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:20

Yeah, they didn't write anything. I love it. That's hilarious.

Tasha 1:07:22

That Spielberg was like, let's let this towny ad live. Yeah, that is so fantastic. But that helped so much with the authenticity because you were actually getting people who were, first of all, speaking in accents that were natural to them, and then second of all, speaking in language that was natural to Islanders. So it wasn't someone trying to recreate it, it was really happening for real on screen. The thing that they had to fake though was the height of the water. So the beach waiting scenes were filmed in waist deep water, and the locals had to pretend that the water was deep enough to go over their heads. So that was a little different. But um That's a good safety thing. Yes. When they started filming the panic scenes, though, they had to push them back. So originally they were gonna shoot those, get them out of the way. They couldn't do it though because none of the locals would go in the water. They were like, no, it is too damn cold. So they didn't film those until after the fourth of July, whenever the locals were finally like, okay, the water's warm enough, we'll go in. Yeah. Spielberg and Alves agreed that the movie needed a full-size monster shark that could swim, eat people, and survive filming in salt water. In 1975, they didn't have special effects in the way that we do now. They weren't built on computer screens, they were built in warehouses. So Universal's in-house effects team that had said, like, it'll take a year to a year and a half to be able to do this.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:39

Yeah.

Tasha 1:08:39

They're like one month, other effects companies had just straight out said that what they were asking for in a mechanical shark that could leap out of the ocean and bite the prey was completely impossible to create. So Alves is like, we're gonna need Robert A. Matty. Yeah, Bob had built the giant squid for Disney's 20,000 leagues under the sea. It is huge. Yeah. Yes. I've never seen that. A 1954 film, we'll have to watch it. Spielberg and Alves talked him out of retirement. Bob had already retired. He wasn't doing anything for movies, and they were like, please, we need you. So he comes out of retirement. Alves designed the mechanical sharks, and then Maddie and his magnificent crew of seven built the sharks off of the studio lot in a warehouse, in a in a like a big shed in the San Fernando Valley. Roy Arbagast developed the shark's skin. So he was like the one who was given the skit the job of making sure the skin looked realistic and that it could flex when the shark moved and all of that. But they were like, how big do we need to make this shark? So Alves drew three different true to scale models on paper, one at 18 feet, one at 26 feet, and one at 32 feet, and hung them on the walls so that the team could walk past all three of them to decide what was the correct size of shark. Yeah. So they decided that 18 feet was too small to be intimidating. 32 feet looked fake and would push the movie into like a fantasy sci-fi gig, but 26 feet was just right. So is like the best Goldilocks moment ever.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:03

Which I mean, you said in the book was 25 feet. Yeah. It's just a foot off.

Tasha 1:10:06

Exactly. They made three fiberglass sharks that ran on hydraulics, like the slide of our that's all I could think of. But it was, they were like giant puppets. One of them was made to move left to right, another one was made to move right to left, and then there was one that was on a big crane arm. Each one of these sharks weighed 2,000 pounds, and they were nicknamed Bruce after Spielberg's lawyer.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:31

After his lawyer. Yes. He's a shark.

Tasha 1:10:34

Fun fact, Bruce, the great white in Finding Nemo, is named after Bruce from the city.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:39

Oh my gosh.

Tasha 1:10:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:40

That's pretty cool.

Tasha 1:10:41

Yeah. So the part where Hooper and Quent are debating the shark's size, and they're like, 20. Well, he Hooper says 20, and then Quent's like, no, 25. Quint's Quent's right. It was 26 feet to be exact. The jaws of the shark, the jaws of the shark were five feet wide. That's ginormous.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:57

That is huge.

Tasha 1:10:58

That's almost the height of our oldest child. And then the head alone on these sharks weighed 400 pounds. So they had a moment in the warehouse where Spielberg took like George Lucas and writer-director John Milieu to see the sharks. And John stuck his head inside the shark and was like yelling, close the jaws. And Spielberg was like, Don't close the jaws. And he was like, John, get out of the shark. Yeah. So the sharks back in Cali were tested in these freshwater tanks before they shipped them to Martha's Vineyard, but they were built without the consideration of the salt in the ocean water. And in the ocean, the salt water and electrolysis immediately began to corrode the machinery. So on the very first test in the ocean, all of the studio executives are there at the vineyard. And there's like 20 boats of tourists watching the filming, trying to get a shot. The shark's on a 90-foot platform, 30 feet underwater. And with the press of a hydraulic button, it's supposed to come shooting out of the water head first, like looking like it's sleeping, right? But when they tested it for the first time, it came up tail first, flipped over, and then wouldn't work anymore. All of the studio execs are there. And they're like, oh dear God. Then one of the Bruces, on its very first day of filming, sank to the bottom of the Nantucket sound.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:12

Oh my goodness.

Tasha 1:12:12

Brian De Palma, Black Dahlia shout-out callback. He was friends with Steven Spielberg and he went to go visit him and was watching the sharks break down during the filming. He said that the emotions of the execs and the crew, he said it felt like he was at a wake because everybody was just so very deflated. Yeah. Yeah. Production executive Bill Gilmore gave an interview and he said every single day the shark was put in the water, something went wrong. A hose burst, there would be geysers that would go 100 feet in the air. The sea sledge shark ran aground. Spielberg said that about 80% of the time the shark didn't work. At one point, he called it a 26-foot turd. Like that's what it looked like because there was just the action of it was just not working correctly. Gryfus said there were like radios placed all over the island. And he said that you'd be walking through the island and you'd just constantly hear, the shark is not working. Repeat, the shark is not working. And he goes, and then one day it said, The shark is working, the shark is working, the boat is sinking.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:05

The boat is sinking.

Tasha 1:13:06

He was on the boat. So they, you know, the scene where like they shoot the harpoons into the shark, yeah, and Bruce goes swimming off. And then that is supposed to pull those barrels off the boat. Well, what was actually happening is that there was a motorboat connected to the end of those lines, and the motorboat would take off and it would pull the barrels off. But the motorboat went way too fast and it pulled the planking out of the orca's hull. Water rushed in, and it took about two minutes for the boat to sink.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:34

Oh my gosh.

Tasha 1:13:35

And this is with everyone on it. So there's people yelling, like, get the actors off the boat. And then found man John Carter, who actually won an Oscar for Best Sound for Jaws, he was like holding the equipment over his head and he was like, the actor, save the sound department. So, you know, Bruce is breaking all the time. It's constantly in repairs. Their shooting's going way over schedule. And so Spielberg's like, okay, we're gonna shoot everything that doesn't involve a shark. And then the sharks are still broken. And he's like, Okay, we're gonna shoot this scene without the shark. So he started writing the shark out of scenes. Yeah. And Gatleap was like, if we don't absolutely have to see the shark, why make trouble for ourselves? So Spielberg was like, I don't have a choice. I've got to tell this story without the shark. And he said, So I just went back to Alfred Hitchcock. What would Hitchcock do in a situation like this? Imagining an Alfred Hitchcock movie instead of a Godzilla movie, I suddenly got the idea. What's down there? Yeah. It's what we don't see that is truly frightening. And so he he later said that it was just his good fortune that the shark kept breaking because he had to completely rethink how to film this. And that has what has made that film stand the test of time because there is so much scare factor and anticipation and anxiety and seeing the ocean and seeing the danger. Yeah, seeing from the shark's eyes. There's so many shots where you are the shark.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:54

Yeah.

Tasha 1:14:54

And you're like, oh, look, a tasty paraplex.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:56

Yeah.

Tasha 1:14:57

Um, and you know what's coming, and you can't get out of it. You're locked in. You are the shark. And that you wouldn't have gotten that if Bruce had worked the way that he was supposed to work. So at the beginning of the film, that's why the film opens from the shark's point of view. You are for the first few frames, you're you're literally like swimming through the ocean floor, and you don't know from those shots, there's no way for you to know how big the fish is. And so Spielberg just kept revealing the size of Bruce more and more as the movie goes on. Cinematographer Bill Butler built a waterproof camera box to shoot from in order to shoot from the shark's eye view. And then he convinced Spielberg to let him shoot handheld at sea, which was like uncalled or not uncalled for, unknown. It was not done at the time. Um, but he was like, with the way that the boat's wobbling and stuff like that, I cannot cancel out the wobble unless I can shift my knees as it moves.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:49

Yeah.

Tasha 1:15:49

And so that's how they got all those shots and got them looking as as even as they did, which is really funny because I read this book called Oscar Wars, and it's linked on our bookshop page. When the movie wrapped, Butler got pulled in to help finish up one flew over the cuckoo's nest. And basically, the cinematographer that they had had, they weren't happy with the work that he was doing. So Bill Butler just like basically went in and filmed a majority of that film. And he won the Oscar for one fell over the cuckoo's nest. He was like, Are you kidding me? Because all I did was go in and like shoot through windows and do a few standard shots where with Jaws, I handcrafted these waterproof boxes for the cameras that had never existed before and had to like completely think outside of the box to get the shots that we got. And I didn't get it for Jaws. Like he was just dumbfounded that he got it for the one that he did the least amount of effort for the work than the other. Most of the water scenes in that era, like we talked about earlier, they would shoot them in studio tanks with like a projected backboard. And Spielberg was like, no, it's not real enough. So he he was afraid that if he did that, the shark would get laughed at. He said that the isolation of being out on the open ocean would add like a loneliness and make it feel more real to the audience. But by the time the crew was anchored and rigged for a water shot, they usually only had about two hours of usable sunlight. And so every time they moved the boat, they had to re-anchor and re-rig everything up before they could start shooting. So this time this wasn't had not really been done before. And so when they were figuring out this is the length of our schedule time, they didn't know that shooting on the water was going to slow their pace down significantly. Spielberg said that shooting on water was twice as slow as it is on land. There's an interview with James Cameron talking about this movie, and he was like, No, it's five times harder.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:33

Yeah.

Tasha 1:17:33

He was like, When you shoot on water, everything is out the door. Like anything that you thought you were getting is not, it's five times harder. Scheiter's famous line, it's not the time it takes. All right, here we go.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:44

Yes, I love this quote.

Tasha 1:17:45

Okay, so Scheider was being asked about shooting on water. For those of you who have not seen this, Matt and I watched this clip of him five times trying to make sure that we got it right. He said, 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 it takes to take. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:00

That's good. It's like you didn't even slow down there.

Tasha 1:18:03

It's like Sally sells seashells on the seashore. Yes. Except it's, you know, so it wasn't the actual time that the camera was running, it was the time in between setting up every tape that was making everything so much longer. So we've got Chrissy's opening attack. That was the first day of principal photography. And that, well, actually, not her attack, but the day that the deputy finds Chrissy on the beach. That was the first day of principal photography. And the the deputy was played by a local, which is really cool. But he finds Chrissy's hand in the sand. And that opening attack scene of Chrissy in the water is quite possibly the most violent scene of the entire film. But you never see the monster. Yeah. You just see the effects, you just see Chrissy getting crashed around. Benthley's original script showed the shark, but because Bruce was down for repairs, Spielberg had to rethink the whole plan. Yeah. And so he wrote the shark out of it. The actress who played Chrissy, Susan Baccalinny, she had a harness on, and we saw some footage of this. The harness went over her clothes, kind of like a pair of shorts, and then they had cords attached on either side. They had five crew members on one side and five on the other underneath the water, just playing tug of war with her, like just going back and forth while the camera stayed still in the water. So that's how you got that like insane thrashing sounds.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:22

Yeah, that was really that's pretty genius.

Tasha 1:19:24

It's so good. She says that when she thinks back on that scene, she always compared it to the psycho shower scene. She was like, there's this horrifying thing that comes out of nowhere. You don't know what's down there. You just know what's happening, but you can't see it. And MPR pointed out that by only showing Chrissy's hand in the sand, and then only Hooper's reaction, not her body, set the standard for like withholding the gore until the right moment. Yeah. So you really get this like, what are we seeing? I'm only seeing the tip of the iceberg kind of thing. So Alex Kintner's death was shot in May. And the little boy who played Alex Kintner, his name was Jeffrey Voorhees. He was 12 years old and he was a local.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:01

I'm sorry, Voorhees. That I know. It's Friday the 13th-ish.

Tasha 1:20:04

I know. It's so great. Jeffrey said he wasn't afraid of the shark or of any shark. He was afraid of freezing my 12-year-old ass off in that water.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:13

Yeah.

Tasha 1:20:13

He said it took seven to eight hours for the fake blood to clear before they could reshoot. And they kept shooting it, and his arm kept going up out of the water. And so they kept having to redo it because he he wasn't staying down long enough under the water. And so five days later, they've been shooting this scene for five days because it takes seven to eight hours for the blood to leave the water so that they can reshoot. They still didn't have a good shot. And so Spielberg was like, look, I'm gonna put these two guys underwater and they're gonna grab your legs and they're gonna pull you down a few times. And that's going to help you stay underwater. And so that finally worked. Like that was the take that worked.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:48

But that scene, you which they also had, I think what he says is they also had air to then give to him to breathe. Yeah. They got finally underwater.

Tasha 1:20:55

And what's great about that film or about that scene is that you know, we've seen things from the shark's view, and that moment on the beach, we're really watching from Brody's view. Yeah. So you get this anxiety level from what the hell is happening in the water. You get his fear of water. Like that is a really real visceral thing that you feel as the audience. It's so well done. And I'd like to point out that the first victims are a woman and a child. So we automatically have these vulnerable characters that are going to really upset the audience, get an emotional response from them. Quint's USS Indianapolis monologue. I'm just hitting some of like the high moments. Howard Sackler came up with this idea that Quint hates sharks because he survived the Indianapolis sync. Spielberg said he was like, I didn't even know about it until Hackler told me about it. It started as a three-quarter page speech. It's just a little like three-quarter page. Spielberg sent it to John Milieu and was like, Can you please beef this up? John turned it into a 10-page monologue. Wow. Robert Shaw, who played Quint, he was also a playwright. And he was like, This is so long. This is not okay. So he was like, please let me take this home and let me see what I can do with it. And so Spielberg's like, Great, go do it. So he took it home for a couple days, brought it back, and he had cut it down to five pages. And that is, word for word, the speech that Quint gives in the boat. So the day that they filmed Quint's monologue, Quent had contacted Spielberg. Yeah. And he was like, Look, I'm supposed to be drinking and a little tipsy when I start this. I have a great idea. Why don't I have a drink before we start filming? And he was like, It'll it'll make it feel more authentic. And Spielberg's like, okay, let's see it. Well, what he didn't take into account is that Shaw actually had a drinking problem. Yeah. Um, he fought alcoholism a large portion of his life. And so when he showed up to film this, he was so drunk that he didn't know what he was doing. He had to be helped onto set by crew members. He was just so out of it. And he thought he had finished the scene. And he was like, How'd I do? And Spielberg gave him a hug and he was like, You did great. And he sent him home because he was like, he needs to sleep it off.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:54

Yeah.

Tasha 1:22:54

He said, 3 a.m. that morning, his phone's ringing. Yeah. And Spielberg's and he's like, Okay, what is this? So he gets out of bed, he goes to the phone, and it's Shaw on the phone. And he is horrified because he does not remember the day at all. And he was so afraid that he had embarrassed Spielberg. He wasn't worried about himself. He was worried about what did I make Spielberg look like? Yeah. And he said, Let me reshoot it. Let's shoot it first thing in the morning. And I promise you, I will, I will do it. We'll get it done. Spielberg said he knocked it out of the ballpark. That the next day it was just chef's kiss. It was that was a great such great scene. One of the things that I noticed is that during that, when he's talking about like having the life jackets on and all of that, he says, I'll never put on a life jacket again. And when you watch later when the fight with Bruce is really getting heightened, he goes in and you see him stare down the life jackets. He's like looking at them. And then he comes back out onto the deck of the boat and he brings a life jacket for Hooper and for Brody, but he never takes one for himself.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:53

I did not know that.

Tasha 1:23:54

I think that it's because he was resigned to his fate. It was like I I lived through the Indianapolis shark attack. I'm not going to live through this. And I know that and I'm okay with it. Yeah. So on the 50th anniversary of Jaws in 2025, that was also the 80th anniversary of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, which is just really crazy. There's a lot of improvised lines, like we talked about Ben Gardner's whole script is improvised. But the line, you're gonna need a bigger boat, was not in the original script or any version of the script. They ad-lived it. Roy Scheider's It's only an island if you look at it from the water was also an improvised line that came in.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:31

Well, and the thing about the bigger boat, quote, like they talked about how he walked backwards, uh-huh. Uh, and he made it a point not to look at Quint and just keep looking at when he made that line and it added so much more depth to it. That to that line.

Tasha 1:24:43

There's so it's such because he's focused on the monster that he cannot see.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:47

And I was pretty cool.

Tasha 1:24:48

There, I saw one interview, and the guy was like, You're gonna need a bigger boat, is like the line that you you hope that every movie has a line, and that's that line, and it wasn't even something that was prepared for, right? It's just it's such a beautiful moment in that story. Not that the moment is beautiful, but like it's so it captures what they're experiencing, but it also this is like one of the first full shots that you see of the shark, like really see the shark. And so as an audience member, you're experiencing it with roadie. And that's I mean, that's really what people are gonna think. They're gonna be studying in the movie theaters and they're gonna be going, damn, that's a big fish, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:24

But it also like sinks in as like that line of you're gonna need a bigger boat, but you don't have time to go get a bigger boat. You have got what you thought gives the audience the weight of this might not work out because you guys are not prepared.

Tasha 1:25:35

Yeah, absolutely. And I love his line, it's only an island if you look at it from the water. That is just brilliant. I I love that line so much. We do have some real sharks in the filming. Okay. So this is where they brought Ron and Valerie Tyler in. They were like, hey, we want to get some real shots of great whites underneath the water. So they filmed these sharks off the Great Barrier Reef, but those sharks were only about 14 feet, which is way smaller than what Bruce was supposed to be. So they that scene where Hooper is inside the cage, they used a miniature shark cage in the water and they put a shorter actor in it to give a larger size for the cage and the real sharks that were swimming around.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:15

That's crazy.

Tasha 1:26:16

Yeah. They filmed it also from far away to make the proportions look correct. Spielberg then he did some rework in the film around the footage that he got because they're wild animals, and you know, you can't tell a shark what to do. So whatever the the tailors got for him, it was like, I will make this work in the in the food in the shooting. Ben Gardner's head, we've mentioned that is like the best first jump scare in the movie. So good. They did an early preview of the film in Texas, and Spielberg was there, and he was like, that could be scarier. So he reshot that scene in his film editor's swimming pool in California.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:50

Oh, really?

Tasha 1:26:51

Yes. To make the water look murky like the ocean, he poured a gallon of milk into her pool.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:56

Oh, wow.

Tasha 1:26:57

And he reshot it in the pool. He says that this is the one cheap jump scare in the film. A filmmaker must never manipulate the audience unless every single scene has a jack in the box kind of scare. That's manipulation. I did that a couple times in Poltergeist, and I certainly did it once in Jaws. And this is what he's talking about. He says, where the head comes out of the hole. That's okay. I confess that. So he kept Gardner's prosthetic head, which I love. When it was all done, he took it home. Nobody knew, but he had it in his house all those years. The shark attack on the cage, the close-up of the bullets shooting through the water and the air tank in the shark's mouth, those were all filmed in the MGM tank.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:32

Yeah.

Tasha 1:27:32

So when they got done at Martha's Vineyard and they went back, Spielberg had two more months of filming between reshooting Ben Gardner and then getting those shots of the close-up of the cage and the bullets.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:42

Well, his shooting in Martha's Vineyard overshot his full production schedule. And then he still had to shoot more.

Tasha 1:27:48

Yes. Exactly. This original 55-day shoot actually took 159 days. Wow. Yes. So he was more than 100 days over, and the budget went from three and a half to nine million. Dollars. Yes. The third act of the film alone took two and a half months and doubled the budget of the film. That's insane.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:06

That's crazy. If I did that in my workplace, I'd probably get fired.

Tasha 1:28:09

Well, and that's why they were calling the movie Flaws.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:11

Because there was just one I, you know, he mentions in that documentary about just being scared for really his career, but he had BTSD.

Tasha 1:28:18

Yep. And and we'll talk about that here in a minute. But Benchley, you see Benchley in the movie, he plays the TV reporter that's on the beach. Oh, really? A few weeks before he arrived on set, um, Spielberg was getting interviewed by Newsweek and he straight out said that Benchley had written these terribly unlikable characters in the book. And he he said, You were rooting for the shark to eat the people in alphabetical order. Like, and so when Benchley arrived, a reporter went to him and said, Spielberg trashed your book. Like he said your book is trash. What do you think? And Benchley shot back, he knows flatly zero. He's a 26-year-old who grew up with movies, he has no knowledge of reality but what he saw in the movies. Wait and see. Spielberg will one day be known as the greatest second unit director in America. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So all that drama was going down at the beach. Dreyfus and Shaw didn't get along.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:06

Yeah.

Tasha 1:29:06

Their love-hate dynamic comes through on screen. At one point, Richard Dreyfus threw a beer can that Shaw was drinking out of out the porthole of the boat. Like they got into it and he just picked up his can and threw it out into the water. Dreyfus said, as an actor, it's been an exercise and futility of working with Shaw. He got on set and they were like, Well, now that you know, once you got on set, how did you feel about making the decision? And he was like, I felt like I made a mistake. Like I shouldn't have done this film. The locals were hired as boat jockeys to ferry equipment and they went on strike because it was taking so long, which sabotaged the filming, including filling the orcas, like not just that, but to further sabotage it, they filled the orca's gas tanks with water. Yeah. They were pissed. The other thing is that when they started filming, none of the universal people knew what to do with the ocean. Like they didn't know how to handle it. Yeah. So they hired Edgar Towns, which is a nearby town. They hired their his their former harbor master to come out and kind of oversee all of the boat shots. He said that he worked 20 to 22 hours a day overseeing those 20 boats.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:12

Oh my gosh.

Tasha 1:30:12

And this is a direct quote from him. These people knew nothing about the water, absolutely nothing. They didn't know about currents or tides. Every day, somebody would wreck a boat or sink a boat. They didn't have a clue. That's terrible. And Spielberg was like, We're not sailors. We were filmmakers and we were way out of our elements. There's when you look at it, it's so funny though, because there's a shot that they were showing of the recording or the filming, and there's a sign in the water that's been put up and it says universal takes you where the others can't go. Like, and it, I think it was used to like mark this is where we're filming every day.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:42

Oh yeah.

Tasha 1:30:43

It was just so funny. That tension between the crew at one point boiled over. And they were in what's now the Bettini restaurant at Martha's Vineyard, and it's at the Harbor View Hotel. And the tension got so heightened that it's it turned into a food fight. Oh gosh. And so the crew had a flat out food fight. And they say that that like broke the tension. That kind of like made everybody, it gave them a way to get that stress out that day. But it's now part of the hotel's lore. So if you go, like they'll be like, this is where the famous food fight with the Jaws crew happened. Hollywood, while they're filming this, Hollywood is reporting the production as a complete disaster. So every time Spielberg opens the paper, gets a phone call from somebody, he is hearing and reading rumors that he will never work again. Specifically, that no one had ever taken a film 100 days over schedule, let alone a director whose first picture had failed at the box office. So he said one of the actors, so you're talking one of the eight Hollywood actors, um, even told him to his face that he would never get another job. 60 days into the shoot, they were already 20 days behind schedule. And Spielberg was, he said he was totally demoralized. He said, I never felt I wanted to quit, but I was terrified I was going to be fired. The head of the studio ends up flying in and he sets Spielberg down and he's like, I'm not sure that this film can be made. Like, I I literally don't think that you can finish this film. And if you want to call it, we will cut our losses. Like, we'll be done. And Spielberg had a moment where he could decide, do I want to stop or do I want to try this? And Spielberg told him, I want to keep going. I want to finish this movie. I can finish this movie. Yeah. The crew members were coming up to him and they were like, dude, we've got wife, families, we're supporting our parents. We have, you know, kids that are in school. When are we going home?

SPEAKER_03 1:32:26

Yeah.

Tasha 1:32:26

And Spielberg was like, I don't know. I can't tell you because this is, you know, out of my hands. He said there was nothing fun about making Jaws. 80% of the time the shark didn't work. He called it a traumatizing experience for me that was mostly about survival. And for years after he woke up from nightmares sweating through his clothes, I was still on the movie and the film was never ending. He said it left him with PTSD. And that is just crazy. John Williams, talk about happy things. He first saw Jaws alone in a projection room at Universal. And he said, I'd been working for nearly 25 years in Hollywood, but I had never had an opportunity to do a film that was absolutely brilliant. But Jaws just lord me. Oh. Yes. Williams first played the two-note theme for Spielberg, and Spielberg laughed at him. Not in a joyful laugh.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:12

This is like what you came up with?

Tasha 1:33:13

This is not, this is not okay kind of laugh. Williams spent two months. Eventually he convinced him. He was like, listen, I'm telling you this is gonna work. He spent two months writing 50 minutes of music and recorded it with a 73-piece orchestra in March of 1975. The music was made to characterize the shark itself and its relentless drive. And it's one of the most iconic. Yes, it's and it's beautiful. It's gorgeous. That whole score is wonderful. There's one part in the film where you see the high school band go in a parade and they're playing the song. And Williams was like, I was screwed because all I had were professional musicians and I needed them to sound like a high school band. Yeah. And so he was like, it's really hard to get professional musicians to play badly. So he's telling Spielberg this, and Spielberg's like, hey, I played the clarinet in high school. And so that day, Spielberg sat in with the orchestra.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:04

Oh, really?

Tasha 1:34:04

And Williams said that he added just the right amount of amateur quality to what the musicians were doing. And that is in the film.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:11

That's hilarious.

Tasha 1:34:12

Spielberg compared the Jaws score to Bernard Herman's score for Hitchcock's Psycho. He said, I think the score was clearly responsible for half of the success of that movie.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:20

Yeah.

Tasha 1:34:20

The score won Williams his second Academy Award, plus a Golden Globe, a Grammy, and a BAFTA. The American Film Institute ranks it among the top 10 film scores ever. And it sparked a comeback for big symphonic film scores. At the time, they weren't really using them anymore. And this is this was like, oh no, there is a place for this cool in these big blockbuster films. And speaking of blockbusters, Jaws was the birth of how we understand the summer blockbuster today. The first sneak preview, like I said, was in Texas. It was it was in Dallas in March of 1975. And Spielberg was there and he was freaking out. He was like, This, you know, makes or breaks me at this point.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:54

Yeah, correct.

Tasha 1:34:55

He said, people started screaming. During one scene, there was a man that ran out and he thought, Oh my God, it's so bad that this guy is leaving the theater. And he watched him, and the guy ran to the bathroom to throw up because he was so bothered by what was happening. And he was like, That's when I knew this is gonna work. Word reached Wall Street of the success of this film before it's even filming anywhere. These are just sneak previews. And the next morning, Universal stock was up several points. Wow. Yes. Two days after the Dallas screening, they did a preview in Long Beach, and it went so well that Spielberg thought that they had paid people to sit in the audience as fake audience members to like get the rest of the audience to respond that they wanted to. But one comment card said, This is a great film. Now don't fuck it up by trying to make it better. He took that and he went back into the studio and started his post-production again. And that's when he reshot the Ben Gardner body scene. Before Jaws, respectable films opened only in like a handful of big city theaters, and then it would slowly trickle out into the suburbs. And the the whole mindset of that was we want a few people in these big cities with these national newspapers to see the film, promote it, promote it with their reviews, and get people to then spend the money in the theater. At the time when they would do these big wide releases of films, that was for movies that didn't screen well and be movies. They were movies that the studios knew were going to flop. And as soon as people started talking about them, people were gonna stop watching them in the theater. They would release, like mass release them so that they could get as much money back in. Yeah, they try and break the before the money stopped coming out. Jaws was the first film where a studio expected it to be a hit and intentionally released it in a wide release manner. It was booked into 900 theaters, which is an unheard of number. And then the universal execs were like, okay, no, let's trim it, trim the number by a few hundred so that people have to drive to see it. Right because they were like, we want this movie to stay in theaters all summer. And so if people have to drive to go see this, it's gonna take them longer to get to the theaters, and we may be able to have like a long-running movie. It opened June 20th, 1975, in 465 theaters in cities and suburbs at once so that everyone could experience the same terror at the same time, according to Ron Simon of the Paley Center for Media. Um, Universal spent $1.8 million on advertising. It was the most that had ever been spent on a movie in its history. And more than half of that went to uh TV and radio ads the two weeks before the release. Spielberg was in New York on release day and he went with Albert Brooks and Janet Maslin. She's a film critic now. I don't know if she was then, but the three of them went to go see like what's the turnout opening day at the theaters, and they went and the line was like wrapped around the block from the rival uh theater. So Jaws earned back that budget of $9 million where it was supposed to have 3.5. It earned back its budget in 14 days. Only took 14 days to make that back. And it dominated the box office. It was at the top of the box office for 14 weeks.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:55

Wow. Yes. But it made it through the summer.

Tasha 1:37:56

Oh, yeah, it did. It was the first movie to pass $100 million gross. It beat The Sting, The Exorcist, The Godfather, Sound of Music. By September 5th, it had passed The Godfather as the highest grossing film ever in its time. And it held that place until the release of Star Wars. Star Wars set a new standard in 1977. And then five years later, Spielberg took the title back when he released ET.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:20

Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yes. But him and John were and they were friends.

Tasha 1:38:23

But um at one point, uh John was at the he was at the I'm sorry, George. Not John, George. George uh was at the the filming. Like he would go with him. And then Scorsese would also go to like watch the filming. And he Scorsese was like, he was so worried about Spielberg because he said I kept seeing everything that was running in the papers, and I would talk to him and he would just be so down. He was like, I didn't know if he was going to make it through the filming, but he did. Suburban malls had become like these teen hangouts. And so talking to friends and that word of mouth spread had become part of the experience of the movies. And Jaws really played into that and it created this template for how we now think about summer blockbuster films. The Atlantic David Sims said if there's anything you love or hate about the big budget studio action movie, it can probably be traced back to Jaws because it just set the bar. Yeah. Spielberg wanted the studio to sell chocolate sharks filled with red cherry juice. They said no. They did sell a ton of merch for this movie. They had t-shirts, beach towels, toys, a Jaws discotheque opened up in the Hamptons.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:26

Wow.

Tasha 1:39:27

A discotheque completely themed around the movie. They had ice cream flavors that released on beaches sharcolate instead of chocolate. Yeah. And jawberry. Which is probably red. Strawberry. Shark tooth sales went up. So even if you weren't selling on behalf of Universal, you were still making money. And false sart false shark sightings also went wild at the beaches, which unfortunately caused scuba lessons to tank. Unintended. Unintended. Um, Ron Simon said summers used to be associated with fun movies, teens, dancing on the beach, but Jaws brought terror and dread to the summer. Ever since Jaws, blockbusters have been associated more with apocalypse than fun. Anxiety has become as important as a suntan in American summers. I love that quote. Crazy. So early reviews called it a like the your usual popcorn summer movie. But as ticket sales kept rolling in and there were reports of people going back again and again, the critics went back and watched it again, and they were changing their tune. They were reprinting reviews, like rewriting reviews, and they called it a masterpiece of terror.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:24

Wow.

Tasha 1:40:24

It made the covers of Time and Mad Magazine. Saturday Night Live debuted at the same time, like that summer. Yeah. And not like the same date, but it Saturday Night Live started the same summer. And Spielberg was in the audience and they did a skit that was the land shark sketch, which is totally a riff off of Jaws. Um, political cartoonists recast Bruce, the shark, as inflation. Yeah. And the timing was perfect. Nixon resigned on August 8th, 1974, while Jaws was filming about a corrupt mayor covering up secrets to make money. So America was really feeling this theme. Between 64 and 74, Americans' trust in the government dropped from 64 to 36%. Yes. Jordan Peel says the shark isn't even the greatest monster in the film. The fact that the money and the bottom line is working under the surface as being more valuable than the lives at stake is something that is always true to a certain extent in the capitalist society. So that it just was a resounding call for what America was going through. At the Oscars, like I mentioned, they won three awards sound, original score, and film editing. Spielberg did not get nominated for best director. And then Best Picture went to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which I think I said the title wrong earlier, but the movie is one flew over the cuckoo's nest. As Michael Schulman, he wrote the book Oscar Wars, he was talking about the nominees for Best Picture, and he said one would gobble up all the others, and it wasn't the one that won every major Oscar of the night because Cuckoo's Nest swept the Oscars. But Jaws did way better than that did. In the box of the box office. The franchise got three sequels, none were as well received. Bentley did not write the novelization for those books. Um, they were written by someone else. And the fourth movie, all of a sudden, Bruce can roar.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:06

Did Stephen direct those others? Okay.

Tasha 1:42:08

So let's look at shark fact versus fiction. Okay. In the movie, the shark stays in its territory and it's just picking off people one by one. There's this idea that a rogue shark stalks one beach until it runs out of people. But in reality, there's no evidence that the same shark has been involved in multiple attacks on people over time. Like they're just we don't have firm research for that. Researchers don't think rogue sharks exist at all. Even though today people still think that they do. They swim in in schools. Cobbleston's 1950s theory has fallen apart and attacks are now considered one-of-a-kind events. Great whites, they have to constantly be on the move in the water because they are warm-bodied. And to keep they they typically swim quite low where the waters are much colder. And to keep their bodies warmer than the water, they have to continuously be swimming so that they get their body heat up. Shark biologist Chris Lowe says that unlike mountain lions, which will track a single prey, white sharks are unlikely to stalk one target. They travel 40 to 50 miles a day. Um, a 2005 study tracked one swimming more than 12,000 miles from South Africa to Australia and back in nine months. So if a shark is moving that much, it's not just staying in one little cove attacking people. Off California, they're mostly seen in the fall hunting elephant seals, but they're coastal for only one to three months out of the entire year. The rest of the year, they're living out in the middle of the ocean. A four to five thousand pound white shark can leap six to eight feet out of the water and dive three thousand feet deep where water's just above freezing.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:36

I'm just saying, like they could definitely take out a boat if they wanted to. Yes. That's crazy.

Tasha 1:43:40

Yes. In 40 years of cataloging attacks, Burgess saw only one case that seemed like a rogue shark. It was off Egypt in 2010. A ship was carrying sheep from New Zealand. And as the sheep were dying, they were just throwing the sheep into the water. And it looks like the shark started following the boat for the sheep. And it followed it all the way to shore. And then five swimmers got attacked. Of those five, only one died. The rest of them were like a bite and release. They said that that shark was not a great white. So this idea of great whites doing this is just really unheard of in real life. Real world cluster attacks happen for practical reasons. So whether that's people bait fishing or tossing food scraps into the water, that's really dangerous. If you are in a boat and you're eating and you're like, oh, I'm done with this sandwich, but what am I going to do with it? Don't throw it in the water because that draws sharks into the coves and the bays. They smell the food. The other thing is you'll see a lot of fishermen fishing and then just like dealing with the fish on the boat, scaling them, throwing the guts into the water. And that too. That's just like throwing some in the water. Yes. Boats also give sharks cover. Murky water from sediment runoff makes it hard to hunt. So a confused shark may take a test bite to see, is this actually food? You know, like that shot where you see Chrissy's feet from underneath, they're like, is that my food? I don't know. So they'll do a test fight. She had like the initial pull down. Yeah, the they'll do a test bite to see, is this my food? And then they'll release and leave it alone if it's not their food. In Australia, white sharks follow whale migration routes up the western coast, and climate change might be shifting those routes closer to people. So as warmer temperatures are bringing more people to the beach, it's also bringing sharks to the beach because they're following that whale migration. Benchley himself said in 2002 the theory that sharks target humans, that they are man-eaters. Nothing could be further from the truth. By nature, sharks will stay away from people. He added that when you see people on TV surrounded by sharks, there's a 99% chance that the sharks were baited there. Most sharks aren't interested in mammal blood. And you can see this in the Mark Robert tests on Shark Week. I I think everybody should watch that. It's such a cool show. Not Shark Week and whole that Mark Robert special was so cool.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:44

Because he's very scientific in what he's trying to do.

Tasha 1:45:46

Yes, they are interested in fish blood. Their diets include seals, fish, plankton, and crustaceans, and they're not often hungry. It doesn't take a lot of eating. So it's not like a shark is just gonna hunt everything that jumps in the water around them. They have to be actually hungry before they will start biting things. Sharks can hit 30 miles per hour, but only in short bursts. Usually they're cruising at about five miles per hour with their mouths open, and people thought, oh, their mouths are open because they're looking to bite something. It's not so that they can catch food, it's because the water pushes out through their gills while their mouths are open and they need that to happen. 80% of sharks never grow longer than five feet. Of roughly 440 species, only 32 have ever been known to be involved in an attack on a human. So that's really low numbers. Shark attacks are classified scientifically either as provoked or unprovoked. So provoked, the person started it. They were touching or they were hunting the shark. Unprovoked attacks, 85% of people never saw the shark before the bite, and over 80% were bitten without flesh being removed because the shark literally bit and was like, nope, not my, you know, mistaken identity. This is not what I thought it was. The shark takes a taste, realizes you're not food, and let's go. Benthley in 2006 said sharks rarely take more than one bite out of people because we're so lean and unappetizing to them. Shark researcher Heather Bulby says that white sharks are cautious and curious because their senses are concentrated around their mouths and they don't have hands. They investigate by biting. She said, We're in the way, not on the menu, which I love that. Sharks also have extra senses, which is really cool. They have so they've got all of the same senses that we do, but then they also have pressure sensitive pores that run along their head and their body to detect the slightest movement in the waters around them. And then they have electroreceptors that pick up electrical fields of living things. So when people are like, Everybody's got an aura, we do. It's our electrical thing. Yeah, our electrical field. And so they have these sensors on their body that can actually pick up the electrical fields that are around living creatures. Yeah. Even ones that are buried in the sand, which is so cool. Because their senses are so advanced, some uh researchers doubt the accidental bite theory. They think that sharks see humans as fellow predators, not that it's an accidental is this food, but it's more of an aggressive warning to get out of their hunting crown.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:55

So when you're talking about like the rogue shark, like staying around in an area to keep like the theory of that they were gonna keep killing until the food's gone or whatever.

Tasha 1:48:02

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:02

I wonder if our definition of that was because of maybe like experience with land animals. Like I think of bears. Yeah. So if bears get the taste of human flesh, human blood, or whatever, then that bear is looking for that a lot because now it's got this taste of it. Right. And so it'll kill humans more often. Um, is maybe why we then associate with, well, maybe sea animals have the same thing of, well, they've tasted human, now they're gonna stick around and try and eat all the humans. And maybe that's where that theory comes from.

Tasha 1:48:29

Where uh not to question you, but where have you heard that once a bear gets a taste for human blood?

SPEAKER_02 1:48:35

That's just what I've heard. I don't have any scientific fact behind that. That's what I hear is like like if like predators like land predators have attacked humans because we encroach on their stuff, or uh we're threatening their cubs, or they've come to us because our food is out and we're startled and they attack us. I mean, that I I mean, I think that's still a theory. I don't know if that's true, because I don't I've just heard it. Right. But maybe, but usually like that is usually like like an echo of something that other people have said is maybe that's where that theory of a rogue shark when you said that, like I was like thinking of bears, is like they've got that taste of human. Maybe that's why we think it all the sharks in that area, if there's more attacks, is because it's the same shark.

Tasha 1:49:11

I don't know about I don't know if that's true.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:13

That was just a thing that popped in my head when you were talking about that.

Tasha 1:49:15

Was I wonder if we came up with that theory because of that theory is the scientist who came up with that theory was specifically an ocean scientist. Um, but with bears, the thing that I've heard with them is not that they are hunting humans, but that when we leave trash and food, they come in, and now that is a place where they expect to find food. And so they become volatile in those spaces because they think that they have to fight for their food.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:41

Right.

Tasha 1:49:41

So I don't know. I don't know. But what I do know is that the international shark attack file at the Florida Museum of Natural History, where Burgess works, is the world's only scientifically documented database of all known shark attacks.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:54

Oh, wow.

Tasha 1:49:55

Yes. They started in 1958 and it covers more than 6,800 investigations. Going back all the way to the early 1500s. Wow. How do you investigate stuff from that far back? People's documentation. That's crazy. This is what the fisherman said. Your lifetime odds are very important to know. Let me help everybody quelch that fear. Um, your lifetime odds of dying in a shark attack in the United States are about one in 4.3 million. In the United States, there is approximately one fatality a year. Compare that to heart disease, which you have a one in five chance of getting, dying in a car accident, you have a one in 84 chance of dying. You have a one in 79,746 chance of dying from a lightning strike, and um a one in 340,733 chance of dying from mishandling fireworks. You are more likely to die the 4th of July screwing around with bottle rockets than you are from a shark. Okay. From 1959 to 2010, lightning killed nearly 2,000 people in the coastal US states, and 26 people died from a shark bite. And that's from 1959 to 2010. So 2026. Um, from 1900 to 2009, there were 84 brown bear fatalities, 78 black bear fatalities, and 37 shark fatalities. From 2009 to 2018, dogs killed 349 people, sharks killed 65. So your like concern should not be about the sharks.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:21

Five dogs to one shark. So on this other shoulder, I should have five dogs by one shoulder.

Tasha 1:51:25

You absolutely should. You could also put a toilet there because this is my favorite of all of them. In 1996, toilets caused 43,687 injuries in the United States, and there were 13 shark injuries and/or deaths. Okay. Worldwide, sharks kill roughly nine to 12 people a year. Worldwide, deli fish kill more than 100 people a year, and fishing accidents kill around 200,000 people a year. The problem is not the sharks, it's the people.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:56

It is, it's ourselves.

Tasha 1:51:58

Meanwhile, so keep that in mind, nine to twelve people a year lose their lives in a shark attack worldwide. Humans in a year do much greater damage to sharks. Humans kill 11,417 sharks every hour, which equals around 100 million sharks a year. That's great. Because of that, the sharks are they're becoming closer to becoming extinct. In Southern California, researchers found that sharks and people swim together 97% of the time at two popular beaches, sometimes even as close as like 50 yards from where the waves break. Wow. And people rarely get bitten in these beaches. 2001 was the another summer of the shark. Time magazine's July 30th cover was like filled with images of sharks with these razor sharp teeth because there was an eight-year-old that was attacked off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. It was the fourth of July weekend. There were a ton of people in the water. It's sad that it happened, but that was what started it. If it had been an adult, it probably would not have gained the traction that it did. But because it was an eight-year-old boy, it really took off in the media. Then there were a couple of attacks in the Bahamas. Six surfers were bitten over a mid-August weekend at New Smyrna Beach, Florida. And then there was a fatal attack on the Outer Banks over Labor Day. And I think that the eight-year-old boy, I think that he lived. I think that he just, I think he lived. Don't quote me on that though. In New Jersey, there was a four and a half foot blue shark that swam in the shallows for about an hour on July 3rd. It's 85 years after the 1916 attacks in New Jersey. The local news like played the heck out of it. They also put the Jaws theme over it while they were reporting. Wow. Yes. Global attacks were actually down that year, though. The shark populations were at an all-time low. Some of the species were down 80% from overfishing over the last 25 years. Burgess said the so-called summer of the shark is really more the summer of the frenzied media. He added that Mother Nature cooperated very nicely with the press this summer, and about every two-week intervals, there was some new incident to keep the fire stoked. Thousands of people die every year in their cars going to the beach. This mathematician who his name's John Alan Paulos, he wrote Innumeracy. He said vivid television images overpowered small statistics to produce a false nightmare. Burgess said that sharks don't infest waters, they live in them, which is a very important distinction. So here's what Jaws got right. Couple things. Dr. Austin Gallagher says that the jar shock is truly authentic in size and how much it looks like a great white, that Bruce still looks just as good today, almost better than anything coming out via CGI or in other films. The shark turning on its side after it would like bite something or attack something is realistic great white behavior. Um, and for Hooper, he was like a real hero. And for a lot of the audience, it was the first time they realized that studying sharks was even an actual job. So a lot of people at the time didn't even know that that was something they could do.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:45

Well, marine biologists probably like started coming into the picture more.

Tasha 1:54:49

Yep. The Jars effect, though, or Jaws effect, not Jars effect. The Jaws effect, though, created a nation that was afraid of the water.

SPEAKER_04 1:54:56

Yeah.

Tasha 1:54:57

Beach attendance dropped after the movie came out. George Burgess says that Jaws created a new phobia. People were, they just refused to go in the water at all. The fear of sharks is called galliophobia. Phobia specialist Christopher Paul Jones says that many of his patients cite Jaws for why they don't go in the water, even though they've never actually seen a shark in the wild. He said, You can't see below water, and the music creates a sense of fear. Movies are very good at hitting every sense, visual and sound, and can be impactful on how we feel. Some of his clients come in with a fear of swimming or water in general. And when you look at how it starts, he says that it almost always can be linked back to Joss. Kind of like arachnophobia, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:33

I was totally thinking that. So I used to work in heating and air conditioning, like installing in crawl spaces and attics and all that stuff. Yeah.

Tasha 1:55:39

He's telling you that story.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:40

I already know that he's uh there is one house we went to, and I was the newer kid. And so when you looked under the house, it was you could not see two foot under the house. It was so full of webs and all that stuff. And I was for the first half of the day, I had to clear out all of the spider webs. And then while we were putting in stuff, so I had already seen arachnophobia, but to keep my job, I had to overcome that fear. When we were putting in uh our ductwork and all that stuff, there was I noticed there was like a ton of brown recluse all over. I was like, I cannot believe I did not get bit, but uh arachnophobia, like I still have that fear of so these people have galleophobia, and you and I have arachnophobia. Yeah.

Tasha 1:56:18

Two films at the root of all fears. Oh gosh. Well, there's a study, it was a three-year study that was published in Poetics Today. They reviewed 530 student papers about frightening media. The four most cited works were Jaws, Poltergeist, The Blair Witch Project, and Scream. So literally two of the four are Spielberg's fault. Because he did Jaws and he did poltergeist.

SPEAKER_02 1:56:39

I'm surprised that uh the exorcist was not on there because that was a huge huge deal.

Tasha 1:56:44

Yeah, nope, it's not the one that sticks with them. 46% of the students said that it affected their sleep. 75% said it affected their waking life. For Jaws, it meant they couldn't swim anywhere, including pools. Over a third still had those reactions at the time of the study, even knowing that their fear was irrational. They just would not water.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:00

That's crazy.

Tasha 1:57:01

Christopher Peppa Neff of the University of Sydney found the Jaws effects rest on three ideas after a real attack. The first is that the shark meant to do it, the attacks were fatal, and the shark must be killed. Those were like the lasting ideas after a real attack. Yeah. Um, he argued that Jaws weaponized was weaponized to support like a controversial shark culling policy in Western Australia. He said that once people felt that sharks could intentionally come after them, fear of sharks skyrocketed in a way never seen before. When fiction is someone's first exposure to a creature with a real life counterpoint, the prejudice can transfer to reality.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:37

So to that point, then I think it was mentioned in that documentary, and I don't know if you're playing this, but uh after the movie came out, then like the sports fishing of sharks was just kind of boosted.

Tasha 1:57:47

Yep. After 1916, and then again after the book and the movie came out, there was a surge of shark fishing tournaments. Monster shark tournaments took off on the East Coast in the mid-1980s, and it decimated nearly every shark species. Wendy, Benchley's wife, she said, it horrified Peter and me that some people's first reaction was to kill sharks. I'm like, what did he think that it was going to do? That's what they did in the book. Yeah. Like you had to know that that was coming, but whatever. Jaws 2's marketing made it worse. They, under the guise of a public service announcement, they made a poster. They added shark facts to their posters. And it it was billed as a public service by the producers of Jaws 2. It claimed the seas off our shores are a prowl with many killers, said that you were not safe even in freshwater, that brushing against a shark could injure you, and that sharks could sink boats. Jacques Cousteau publicly criticized this, criticized the novel shark inaccuracies, saying, I'm afraid the movie will compound all the errors in the novel. From the mid-1970s through the 80s, white sharks in the Northwest Atlantic declined, um, anywhere up to uh 27 to 86 percent, depending on where you are in the Atlantic. From 86 to 2000 in the Northwest Atlantic, hammerheads dropped 89%, whites dropped 79%, and tiger sharks dropped 65%. Humans killed hundreds of millions of sharks in the decades after Jaws. Right whites have been listed as vulnerable, which is one step away from endangered since 1996. And part of this is because of the shark fin trade. Finning means cutting off the fin and dumping the often still living shark back into the ocean where it suffocates and bleeds to death. There is about a hundred million sharks killed every year, which is a six to eight percent loss annually, but shark population only grows five percent a year, so it's not growing back fast enough to restock the ocean, if you will. Sharks are especially vulnerable because they reproduce slowly. Great whites can live over 70 years, but females don't start reproducing until they're about 15. And then they have about five peps every other year. As of January 2024, only three or four baby white sharks had ever been seen in the wild at all. Spielberg told BBC Radio 4 in 2022, one of the things I still fear not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975. I truly and to this day regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film. I really, truly regret that. In 2006, he told the London Daily Express, sharks don't target human beings and they certainly don't hold grudges. There's no such thing as a rogue, man-eater shark with a taste for human flesh. He even said that what was known in 2004 was enough that he could never demonize, like just demonize a shark in a book ever again. Um he spent the second half of his life on ocean conservation. He wrote for National Geographic, he championed marine protected areas. There was even an award given in his name that was 83 grants to ocean conservationists. His later book shared what he'd learned during that time of conservation, and he criticized how the media sensationalized shark attacks. He said, I see the uh I see the sea today from a new perspective, not as an antagonist, but as an ally, rife less with menace than with mystery and wonder. The sea is worthy more of respect and protection than of fear and exploitation. His wife Wendy, also an ocean conservationist, said sharks are too magnificent. An evolutionary marvel, 450 million years old and vital to ocean life, destroying them, is a recipe for long-term decline, not just for sharks, the entire ocean. Jaws tapped into the indelible power of good storytelling, compelling characters, and our primal need to make sense of things we fear. Jaws also sparked the shark and ocean conservation movement, which is a good thing. Um, and it increased research funding. Wendy said it jumpstarted research into sharks and their essential place in ocean ecology. Um, South Africa became the first country to protect white sharks in 1991, California followed in 1994, the US Atlantic in 97, and Australia in 99. Since 2013, the European Union has required sharks to be brought to port with fins attached. Hunting white sharks has been illegal in the US for decades. Shark sanctuaries, bans on finning and on selling um or shipping shark products and changes to fishing gear has helped too. And then there's been a demand for shark fin soup in Asia, which has really, really helped. It used to be served at like every wedding, every government official event, but China has now banned it at official functions and airlines now refuse to transport shark fins. And that has helped quite a bit. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:10

Yeah.

Tasha 2:02:11

One study showed that sharks are more, they're worth more alive than dead. Okay. And this is pretty cool. And Palau, E-A-L-A-U. I'm sorry if I pronounce something that you love incorrectly. A dead shark is worth $108. That's how much they can make on a dead shark. But a living one will bring in $1.9 million over its lifetime through tourism. Oh, wow. That is huge. More than 30% of the Maldives economy is based on shark ecotourism. So cage diving brings its own problems. Chumming and baiting change shark behavior and put both people and sharks at risk. So, you know, that's a bad idea. Sharks are older than dinosaurs. Big picture. Sharks and rays have survived at least five mass extinctions over 420 million years. Today, more than a third of our of all shark and ray species are threatened with extinction, making them the first major marine fish lineage where extinction is a risk for the entire group. Three species of sharks have possibly already become extinct. We have not seen one of these three species in the ocean for over 80 years. So scientists don't know if they just haven't seen it or if those three species are really extinct. So they're waiting to make a call until more studies have been can be done. About 75% of oceanic shark species face extinction. The most threatened sharks are in the Atlantic, especially off the Gulf of Mexico and the US East Coast, plus the Northeast Atlantic and the Mediterranean. And since 1970, the biggest threat to sharks has been humans and unsustainable overfishing. I think it's really important that people understand that sharks balance the food change. They're essential to marine ecosystems and coastal ecosystems. And that those ecosystems give billions of people food, jobs, and even recreation and culture. And so to put sharks at risk, puts humans at risk as well. Because, you know, if we want to talk about trickle down, this is one thing that really will trickle down. I don't know that other things will trickle down.

SPEAKER_02 2:04:02

Similar to like land predators. I mean, when we start shooting them because they we think they're a nuisance or whatever, because they're killing eight cows, blah, blah, blah. You know, we're actually taking away and then overpopulating another species.

Tasha 2:04:14

Paul Cox of the Shark Trust says that Jaws trapped the conversation into spending too much time talking about all the things that sharks aren't rather than all the great things sharks are. And he was very, he's a very big proponent of Spielberg speaking up. He thinks it's great that Spielberg's speaking against the hunting of sharks. Shark Week. We've mentioned that a few times, and I just uh want to talk about how problematic Shark Week is. Um, Dr. David Schiffman studied every episode of Shark Week from its airing in 1988 to 2020. From 1988 to 2020, across 32 years, he found fewer than 10 mentions of how viewers could help sharks. Oh, really? And tons of misinformation about the dangers of sharks to humans. Marine biologist Yannis Papastamausio, sorry, Yannis, uh, said Jaws is a monster film in the same way that other films may feature killer spiders, birds, or rabbits. It wasn't meant to be scientifically accurate. I do think today that if if Jaws were made, it would have a conservation campaign to make clear that it's a work of fiction. Christopher Peppineff said Jaws' legacy is one of tragedy for sharks and treasure for shark research. So there really is like a push and pull there where, you know, if it had just been the shark research that had improved, that would be great. But it's also got this tragedy of near extinction for sharks as a result. And it's so sad. So we want to talk about how you can help. There is a group called the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and it has a shark specialist group. It's a great place to learn about shark conservation. They have ways that you can get involved. They've got links to other shark and ocean conservation groups that you can help if you want to give money to their research. And that link to the International Union for Conservation of Nature will be in our show notes. For those of you who want to know what happened to Bruce, I got that story. Okay. Um, okay, after the filming, uh, Universal thought that it was gonna be a bust. And they just threw the three original Bruces out on a Universal backlot and left them there to rot. Um, by the time the movie premiered, the three Bruces were beyond repair from the damage from the salt water and then just not being taken care of once they got back to California. The studio kept the mold for the sharks, though. And so when the movie became a huge hit, they built a fourth Bruce to hang by its tail at Universal Studios, where it stayed from 1975 to about 1990. 12-year-old Greg Nicotero, whom we love, yes, he saw it in 1976 and posed with it for a photo. Around 1990, after the fourth Jaws movie, the shark was taken down from Universal and it was shipped to a junkyard with a pile of wrecked stunt cars. Junkyard owner Sam Adlin saw it and was like, this is the coolest thing, and he mounted it between palm trees on his junkyard lot. Nice. And it stayed there and guarded the junkyard for decades. In 2010, NPR reporter Corey Turner, God bless this man, he went looking for Bruce. And the first person he tried to reach out to was Spielberg. And Spielberg's spokesman said, Listen, I'm sorry, they've all been destroyed. No one, not even Spielberg, knew that Bruce was guarding the junkyard.

SPEAKER_02 2:07:12

That's so crazy.

Tasha 2:07:13

Turner tracked it down anyway. He he found it through like Facebook pages and just trying to figure out where it was. Um, and when he found it, the skin was cracked, the wooden teeth were rotting, the gills were chipped from decades in the San Fernando Valley sun, like you know, it just had a lot of damage. He brought Joe Alves and Roy Arbagast to the shark to make sure it was real. And they checked it out and they were like, this is absolutely the fourth shark. When the junkyard closed in 2016, Sam's son Nathan turned down offers to buy the shark and he donated Bruce to the future Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Future at the time this museum now stands. On February 10th, 2016, the 26-foot-long, 12 and a half foot wide, eight-foot-tall shark left the junkyard by crane and truck. And then the restoration was done by Greg Nikotero and his team, which I love. The same kid whose mother covered his eyes at the showing of Jaws in the theater when Quint dies because she did not want him to be scared, who got into special effects because Jaws influenced him so much and is now one of the most renowned special effects and makeup artists in the business. He led a team of nine for six months on restoring Bruce. They taped photos of the original Bruces on the walls and they started by peeling off just layers of paint. And when I read this, I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense because I've worked at an amusement park. And when something like chipped, it wasn't a let's strip the paint off and repaint it. It was just put more paint on top of it. He said that there were layers and layers of them just like patch painting over the decades. And so he had to pull all of that universal era paint off. Then there were stress fractures that they found underneath the paint. Um, so they had to patch those, they had to sculpt new gums and a gullet, and then they cast new teeth from the original molds and they placed them exactly how they appear in the film. They like really investigated those pictures to make sure they got the teeth in the exact same spot. Bruce now hangs in the Academy Museum and he went on display for its opening in 2021. Spielberg spoke to him and he said, Thank you for a robust, robust career. Jaws gave me the chance to make anything I wanted to make. It kicked my ass for nine months, but it gave me a lifetime career, which is just kind of great. The Orca met a Satter and um Universal brought the boat back to its LA backlot for tourists. And Spielberg said that when he was dealing with his PTSD, he would sneak onto it and sit in the cabin in that like leather seat to work through his memories. And he said he would like have a good cry. And he said, I would get back in my golf cart and go back to my office. And then one day it was gone because an inspector found it riddled with termites, so they had to destroy it. But Spielberg kept the steering wheel, though he still has that. Jaws at 50, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles ran Jaws the exhibition from September 14th, 2025 to July 26th. Somebody's birthday, 2026.

SPEAKER_02 2:09:59

You're just giving them more personal information.

Tasha 2:10:01

You've already given that information. We have already talked about your birthday being July 26th. The museum's first exhibition of its size devoted to a single film and the largest Jaws exhibition ever. It featured more than 200 items with props, costumes, um, recreated sets, annotated scripts. There, the broken shark cage was there. They had engineering schematics, illustrations by Joe Alves, and then they did a replica of Orca's deck. And Spielberg put Ben Gardner's head in it. Oh, really? Because he had saved it.

SPEAKER_03 2:10:29

Yeah.

Tasha 2:10:29

There was even somebody had saved a buoy prop from the movie and had kept it. And he goes, Spielberg was like, why anyone would know to take the buoy home and sit on it for 50 years and then loan it to the academy? How did they know? I didn't know. I thought my career was virtually over halfway through production on Jaws. Yeah. So also the greatness of this movie has inspired two plays. The Shark is Broken, opened on Broadway at the Golden Theater on August 10th, 2023. Robert Shaw, who played Quint, his own son, Ian, co-wrote the play uh using interviews from his dad, and he was um asked to play his father in the play. And the play puts the three leads back on the orca in the middle of the of the playroom to relive their arguments, their real life arguments.

SPEAKER_03 2:11:11

Oh, that's funny.

Tasha 2:11:12

Ian Shaw said it was a grueling, difficult shoot, and there was a clash of personalities, particularly between my father and Richard Dreyfus, but it's complicated because they were friends as well at times. The play is about the crew of a movie about a boat turned mutinous, which is funny because the crew of the movie turned mutinous, and then the, you know, like you hear about mutinies on boats. Anyway, the second play is called Bruce, and it was based on Carl Gottlieb's books, The Jaw Logs, and that played at the Seattle rep in 2022. It was an hour and 40 minutes straight about the making of Jaws with musical numbers to break up the tension. Nice. Martha's Vineyard went from a really quiet New England island to a star-studded hotspot with fans coming from all over the world to see where Jaws was filmed. The premiere of the movie was held at the island theater on the vineyard, and the Benchleys brought a group of divers, and at the end, all the shark and water savvy people stood and applauded because they were so happy with how it came out. In terms of like filmmakers, you see a lot of these in the um documentary that we watched, and that documentary is linked in the show notes. But Steven Soderberg saw it 31 times in theaters at the age of 12, and that made him want to start making movies. Jordan Peel said that it made him there was uh afraid that there was a shark in the water of his bathtub. Um, and Guillermo del Turo sums up horror itself. It's about things that shouldn't be but are. You know, Jaws spawn monster movie tropes that continue today. Even people who have never seen it know the shark movie formula and know the theme song because filmmakers copy its music, its story, and its cinematography all the time. Spielberg went on to direct E.T. next, The Extra Terrestrial. The, you know, he's also done Jurassic Park, he did Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, he did the Fablemans about his own life. He says the movie he thought would end his career was the one that began it. His final word was this was the ultimate example that when you work as a team, you can actually get the ball across the finish line. I'm very proud of the movie. The film certainly cost me a pound of flesh, but gave me a ton of career. So, you know, a shark or shark sharks, I don't know why my R's keep disappearing. Like I'm from the New Eastern Shoreboard. Um, but sharks or sharks uh really did kill four people and injure a fifth along the Jersey shore over 12 days in 1916, including in a creek far from the ocean. Officials really did downplay it to protect tourism. Scientists really were called in to try and figure out what the heck was going on, and people really did launch a massive shark hunt. The shark was said to contain human remains. It was caught and it was put on display. What's twisted in this movie? Well, it wasn't Benchley moved it from New Jersey to Long Island. And then, you know, in the movie, it became Amity, a store, a place that doesn't exist. He borrowed from other real attacks, Billy Weaver, um, Albert Kogler, among them. And then he leaned on the now debunked rogue shark theory about a vengeful shark just sticking around the coast to hunt people. Spielberg softened the characters and he cut the affair and the mafia and he gave Quint his Indianapolis backstory and then he blew up the shark. The story told people that sharks were monsters, and that unfortunately, because of that, real sharks paid for it. Both the author and the director spent years regretting that. One National Geographic interviewee put it that it's the story of a man slaying the beast, not just on screen, but in how the movies got made. It was a complete mess that put together became a symphony. So that is Jaws by Steven Spielberg. You're on Real Twisty. And I feel like following it from the beginning to the end was Real Twisty.

SPEAKER_02 2:14:33

Yeah.

Tasha 2:14:34

So if you liked this, please press like.

SPEAKER_02 2:14:37

Like, subscribe, share.

Tasha 2:14:38

Please share it with a friend. If you know anybody who loves Jaws or just loves scary movies, and please come back next time for our next movie, um, which I'm keeping a secret. But we can't wait to see you next time. So, from those of us at Real Twisty, which is myself, Matt, and our son David, thank you so much, and we will see you next time.

SPEAKER_02 2:14:57

Bye now,