Jaws, Part II
The Continuing Adventures of the Most Important-to-Hollywood Movie Ever
“I was, I was looking out for the town’s best interests . . .”
Even if you were here for Part I, it’s been a while, so, to get everyone up to speed:
Previously, on The Film Lit Pitch: Jaws, Part I.
So, here’s why you should probably have parallel feelings about Mayor Larry Vaughn and the executives who green-lit all the indisputably and increasingly awful Jaws sequels:
Let’s just say that when presented with the dilemma about how to handle the shark, Mayor Vaughn does the right, moral, safe thing: he closes the beaches, and keeps them closed until they are shark-safe.
Then what happens? He gets run out of office but quick, through some combination of public outrage and city council mutiny. And he gets replaced with someone who will most assuredly keep those beaches open.
Now, imagine you’re a studio executive. You know the very idea of a sequel is absurd on its face: there’s nowhere for the story to go. Brody completed his arc, dropped an iconic closing line, and blew the shark to bits. So let’s just say that when presented with the pitch for a sequel, you do the right, artistically genuine, legacy-preserving thing: you pass.
Then what happens? You get fired but quick. Because, say it out loud: the original is the highest-grossing film ever; more people saw it than saw any other film; and these people very well could make the follow-up the biggest sequel of all time. Put another way: you are telling the company that though it is your job to make money for the company, you don’t want to make money for the company. And then the studio replaces you with someone who will most assuredly greenlight as many sequels as can plausibly turn a profit.
The point in bringing up this parallel—I call it a meta-analogy in class—is not to demonize either Vaughn or the studio executives. It’s simply to remind them, in the words of my teacher James Dalessandro, “Don’t count on Hollywood to change the world.” As much as film is an art form, it’s also one that, like politics, exists in a world where financially driven pragmatism forces many decisions.
[Editor’s Note: One last political note here: If you haven’t seen Jaws since the COVID pandemic, you should. Before March 2020, I had never taken a serious eye toward Jaws as a political allegory. But after March 2020, it’s almost impossible not to. And, not to put too fine a point on it, its real-life connections to the handling of COVID in 2020 make it even scarier, and sadder.]
“Anti-shark cage? You go inside the cage? Cage goes in the water? You go in the water? Shark’s in the water. Our shark. Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish Ladies . . .”
For a parallel, but less cynical, example of financial pragmatism’s role in the production of the film, let’s turn to a change to the novel’s ending that I alluded to in Part I of this Pitch: Hooper’s fate.
You might be tempted to chalk Hooper’s ultimate survival in the film (despite his death in the novel) up to some classic Spielberg sentimentality, an example of Spielberg pandering to the young and sensitive in his audience. And, to be sure, that assumption would not be baseless. (We’ll cover this point a bit more when we get to the soon-forthcoming Pitch for Jurassic Park.)
In this instance, though, Spielberg was as ready as Benchley to kill off Hooper. It was just that, in his view, he couldn’t. And why couldn’t he? It all started with a shark that couldn’t swim.
The production of Jaws was and remains the stuff of infamous Hollywood legend. Without getting too deep into the weeds here, there were delays, acrimonious cast feuds, severe budget concerns, and an urgent need to finish production before an actors’ strike.
The one thing Spielberg thought he had going for him was a giant shark model affectionately named Bruce. (Finding Nemo’s Great White Shark was named Bruce as an homage to this model.) Bruce was huge and scary and monstrous. There was only one problem with Bruce: he couldn’t swim.
Bruce’s inability to stay afloat or function in any useful way forced Spielberg to re-imagine the film, and, indeed, was a mother of invention. Facing a hard deadline, and an unworking shark, Spielberg had to come up with new and different ways to put the shark in scenes when we did not see the shark. That’s why there are so many shots from the shark’s point of view, and of the shark pulling items like the dock and the barrels.
Through his incompetence, Bruce helped Spielberg prove two film truisms: sometimes the best shot is the one you don’t show; and if you let the audience use their imaginations, they can scare themselves more than anything you could show them can.
The shark never did work as originally envisioned, but it did eventually work well enough to be included in a few scenes. And Spielberg still knew and felt: the less Bruce the audience sees, the better.
And that brings us to one of Spielberg’s non-negotiables. Wholly independent of anything Bruce-related, Spielberg knew that he absolutely needed footage of a real, live shark to work into the film.
So he took a crew to Australia—then and still home to the most dangerous animals per square inch of any continent in the world—eager to get in, quickly get footage of a giant shark, and get home. There was only one problem with this plan: the real-life sharks in Australia were not nearly big enough.
Undeterred, Spielberg and his crew came up with a plan to make the sharks grow: build a smaller version of the infamously useless-on-screen “anti-shark cage,” and put a smaller-than Richard Dreyfus mannequin into the cage, and then film the sharks swimming past the cage. The resulting footage, would, as a matter of visual geometry, scale up the sharks. QED, as they say.
There was only one problem: all of the mannequins they built were disastrously unbelievable. There’s incredible making-of footage of one especially buoyant mannequin, who spent his time in the cage floating face down, back against the roof of the cage. Tying his feet to the bottom of the cage did not improve his believability much.
Undeterred, and dedicated to the soundness of the scaled-down-cage-scaled-up-shark approach, Spielberg and his crew thought of a solution to the believability problem: instead of using a small mannequin, use a small person.
Most students assume, when I tell them that part of the plan, that Spielberg used children. But, no. In Spielberg’s view, jockeys were just the people to play Small Hooper in a small cage. So he went out to the track and hired a few, and they all went out on the water to finally get that footage. And, action!
But, for one last time in this story, there was only one problem: the jockeys were not trained or adept at SCUBA gear use, and, when one went down in the cage with actual sharks swimming by, he—understandably—freaked out and demanded to be let out of the cage and back on the boat.
For the first time in what must have seemed like a long time, Spielberg finally caught a break—a big one. While the jockey was on the deck arguing about whether he’d ever go back down in the cage of death, a Great White swam by, and got caught in the rope attached to the cage. The shark panicked, and thrashed about, trying to free itself and escape death. The thrashings were so frenetic and violent that it even, according to Spielberg, had a good portion of his tail hit the deck.
Here’s the break part: the cameras were rolling when the shark got caught up.
Spielberg saw the footage, and knew immediately that it was leaps and bounds better, more dramatic, than anything else they had. And so he immediately knew that that footage—which looked like an authentic shark attack of an empty cage—had to make it into the film. All he needed was a way to explain the shark was attacking an empty cage. At that point, the answer was simple: Hooper had to sneak out the bottom of the cage.
So Spielberg let Hooper live was only so that he could use the best few seconds of footage he spent weeks and thousands of dollars to get—footage that, in Spielberg’s mind, was absolutely essential to the film’s success.
I do love and love telling that story to classes. It puts into clear relief what a miracle of ingenuity Jaws is.
“Show me the way to go home . . .”
I’m not qualified musically to really explain how wonderful John Williams is. And I know it’s the most tired of takes to gush over John Williams and what his music means to his films. But there’s a new documentary coming to Disney+ in a few weeks about John Williams. And, there’s an especially cool story about Williams’ collaboration with Spielberg for Jaws—one that might not make it into that documentary—so we’ll get you out of here on this one.
As the famous story goes, the first time Williams played the main Jaws theme for Spielberg, Spielberg nearly had a panic attack. He thought Williams had lost his mind. Williams had to talk Spielberg down, and explain the logic behind the simple theme, and why it would work and work well.
But there’s another cool element that fewer people have heard about.
Apart from the musical design, Spielberg and Williams used storytelling design to get the most out of the score. Specifically, they applied the principles of classical conditioning to maximize the music’s impact on audience tension and fear.
This endeavor begins with a very simple implied contract: in the first Act, the main theme accompanies every shark appearance. And quickly the audience learns and accepts the deal the filmmakers have laid out: music equals shark. The audience accepts this deal, because while it heightens the anxiousness of anticipating the shark, at least the audience knows when it’s coming.
But then we get to arguably the scariest scene in the film: Ben Gardner’s boat. Now, it matters that on his way down, Hooper utters some iconic last lines: “Don’t worry,” “I’ll be back in two minutes.” When the audience hears those, in context, they just know Hooper’s in big trouble.
Once he’s down there, after a while, we hear the music again. Especially because the audience has been trained to know that music equals shark, the audience just knows what Hooper doesn’t: the shark is going to sneak up on and eat Hooper. Many viewers, no doubt, must suppress shouting some sort of futile warning to Hooper.
The audience is *gripping*. And then comes the most effective jump scare in the film: Ben Gardner’s head floats into view.
[I’ve seen Jaws with literally thousands of different people, and I’ve seen the film so many times that one of my traditions when this scene comes on is to not even watch the screen, but to watch the audience—watch them scare lean forward or cover their eyes, and then, sometimes, literally jump back when that head pops out. It’s so much fun.]
What makes the moment especially scary is that it breaks the deal that the audience accepted in Act I. Put another way: just as the audience had come to rely on the “music equals shark” equation, they get hit with a new one: sometimes, music equals no shark.
And that brings us to the iconic “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” scene. Part of what makes that scene scary is that the filmmakers have imposed an entirely new arrangement: sometimes, no music equals shark. The filmmakers have said, in essence, that there’s no longer a reliable causal link between the presence of music and the appearance of the shark. All bets are off.
As a result, the filmmakers have you right where they want you: unaware and afraid of what’s coming next. And it’s another example of Spielberg relying on his ingenuity, his uncanny storytelling instincts, and—of course—John Williams’ brilliance to pull off this miraculous enterprise.
See you next time!