BEFORE: If you know "Jaws" then you understand my motivation for landing this doc on July 3 - the mayor of that small fictional town threatened by the great white shark was concerned about the effect a shark attack would have on the upcoming July 4 holiday, all that tourist traffic. So yeah, talk about perfect timing - I had just two priorities when setting up this chain, I wanted the MOST American film to land on July 4, and THIS film to land on July 3. Umm, mission accomplished?
I could not believe my luck when I learned that the Earth, Wind & Fire documentary used footage from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" - the part at the end where the flying saucer lands and the benevolent, non-world destroying and non-human eating aliens come out. So Richard Dreyfuss carries over from yesterday's movie with a title that's way too long to re-type.
Today's Semi-Quintencentennial "Get to Know a State" segment #3 is all about the Great Commonwealth of Massachusetts - here are some fun facts, figures and things I made up:
Date admitted to the U.S. February 6, 1788 (the 6th state)
Claim to fame: "Jaws" was filmed there, in Martha's Vineyard and Falmouth. Other movies filmed in Massachusetts include "The Town", "Gone Baby Gone", "The Departed", "Black Mass" and "Mystic River". Spot the theme?
Nickname: The Goddamn Frickin' Bay State
Prevalent language: Bostonian
State Motto: "All Hail to Massachusetts"
State Flower: The mayflower
State Fish: The cod (because it sounds funny in a Boston accent)
State Fish: The cod (because it sounds funny in a Boston accent)
State Reptile: The garter snake (because it sounds funny in a Boston accent)
State Bird: Wild Turkey
State Drink: also Wild Turkey (JK, it's cranberry juice)
State Insect: Ladybug (again?)
State Dog: Boston Terrier
State Tree: American Elm
State Dance: Square dance (again?)
Notable Sports Teams: Umm, all of them? It was all Celtics and Bruins when I was a kid, then the Patriots and the Red Sox started winning and took over when I was an adult.
Fun Facts: The Massachusetts Colony was founded by Puritans, people who were so uptight and overly religious that ENGLAND kicked them out, and that's saying something. But because they sailed to America on the Mayflower, that led to Thanksgiving, the greatest eating holiday of the year, even better than Super Bowl Sunday. Prove me wrong. Massachusetts was meant to be an "ideal" colony, where there would be no religious or political conflict and colonists would live in harmony with the indigenous Native Americas. What the HELL went wrong? Maybe everything was fine until the Irish and Italians showed up.
Massachusetts is the home of Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Tufts, Wellesley College, Northeastern, and the prestigious Berklee College of Music. Still, 75% of my high school's graduating class probably ended up at U.Mass. That's right, I grew up there until I was 17 and could split for film school in NYC, leaving all those massholes behind. What can you say about a state whose greatest contributions to the world are the toll house cookie and the boston cream pie?
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Spielberg" (Movie #3,958) & "Music by John Williams" (Movie #5,105)
THE PLOT: A tribute of "Jaws" (1975), the movie that sparked a lasting fascination with the ocean's most misunderstood predator.
AFTER: There's no doubt that "Jaws" was one of the most influential, successful movies of all time. We didn't even know what to call a super-successful film until they invented the term "blockbuster" to describe it. DAMN, and then it ushered in the era of "Star Wars", "Close Encounters", "Indiana Jones" and so on. It was also the start of Hollywood putting a focus on work driven by special effects, the first film that succeeded in making the impossible look possible (even though it was technically still impossible) and then in the era of Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese and a hundred other directors, every type of story could then be told, they just had to use special effects to do it.
Also, really the first franchise film, except for "Planet of the Apes" and "The Pink Panther" - and James Bond, I suppose. But notoriously each installment in a franchise would be of diminishing quality, and really, "Jaws" was no exception there. OK, fine, watch "Jaws 2" if you have to but if you stick around for "Jaws 3-D" or "Jaws: The Revenge" you really need to get a life, and I saw this as someone who watched both of those. The "Jaws" franchise, however, is still the most successful one started by a director who was never officially hired by Hollywood to do anything. Remember that Spielberg just walked into the Universal Studios office one day and picked out an office, after sneaking in as part of the studio tour. So everything he did after that, from "Jaws" to "Saving Private Ryan" to "Schindler's List" and the recent "Disclosure Day" is 100% NOT deserved. I can't just become a heart surgeon by walking into a hospital and starting to operate on patients, can I? No, because there's a process doctors have to go through, and it's for everyone's protection. The same should hold true for filmmakers.
Nothing succeeds in Hollywood like money, of course, and the $500 million that "Jaws" took in, considering the film's budget was only $9 million, well, that kind of makes everything OK then, doesn't it? What a return on the investment that Universal Pictures laid out - also remember that the shoot for "Jaws" went 100 days over, any other director would have had the plug pulled after 30 days, let alone 50 or 100. It literally would have been faster to raise a baby great white shark from infancy and train it to not eat humans than to build the mechanical shark that they did and get it to work properly. I'm pretty sure that even I could build a mechanical shark that doesn't do what it's supposed to - the hard part is building the shark and then making sure that it works as intended once the cameras start rolling.
The shark was so problematic that crew members called the movie "Flaws" when they talked among themselves. On average every 12-hour day on the shoot really included only four hours of actual filming. There was bad weather, there were boats that would not stay afloat, one actor (Robert Shaw) was problematic because he was either drunk or spending the day in Canada due to tax liabilities and legal reasons. All those times that you DON'T see the shark represent times that the mechanical shark wasn't working right, and then after the fact they tried to make up for it by saying that NOT showing the shark was a technique used to build up suspense, which is a complete load of B.S. Alfred Hitchcock was the one who developed the idea that the less you see, the more you get in terms of building up suspense, but you know Spielberg would have done it a different way if he could have.
There is some actual shark footage seen in "Jaws" - what happened was Spielberg sent two shark experts down to Australia to shoot whatever they wanted, and that footage ended up being cut into the real film, and the planned sequences in "Jaws" were altered around whatever the real Great White in Australia did. There Spielberg goes, cheating again... film directors have turned out to be very untrustworthy people, for the most part. Finally when Spielberg was back in California, they shot more footage of stuntmen in swimming in a giant tank, to replace the footage that they did NOT get of Richard Dreyfuss's shark expert character in that cage.
How did I NOT know that this film was shot in Massachusetts? It's so obvious to me now, because they hired local actors and non-actors to appear in the movie, especially for the crowd scenes and the one where the concerned citizens are having a town meeting. They all say they're worried about the "SHAAK", their accents are very strong - but I was probably a teenager when I first watched "Jaws", which meant I lived in suburban Mass. and that's just the way people talked, so it probably just seemed very "naah-mal" to me then.
Of course, the main stars were imported from Los Angeles, eight actors total, and they all sound different from the local talent. Roy Scheider's supposed to be the police chief, but he's got no Masshole accent, that's a bit unusual. They never SAY Massachusetts in the movie, but come on - the book suggests New York, like Long Island maybe. The film made a bunch of changes from the book, though - 27 scenes or so in the film that were not in the best-selling novel. I should probably watch it again at some point, it's been a minute. The book mentions that Brody's wife used to date Hooper's older brother, and someone in this doc mentioned that the film kind of suggests they changed it to having dated Hooper, and as a kid I probably missed the potential love triangle aspect completely.
Wouldn't you know it, just yesterday there was news here in New York of a shark attack on a local beach - so really, my timing could NOT have been better, like across the board here. We've got a heat wave going on right now, so thousands of people are probably heading to local beaches to try to beat the heat by swimming in the ocean, and come on, guys, terrible idea. The crowd in the ocean at Coney Island or Jones Beach probably looks like an all-you-can-eat buffet to a shark.
This documentary was clearly funded by National Geographic, they've got interviews with marine biologists and shark experts talking about what the movie got right and what the movie got wrong. They also mention how there was a frenzy of people trying to kill sharks shortly after "Jaws" came out, but over time that turned into more of an interest and fascination for many people, which all means that before long, they'll be showing this dock-umentary during the annual "Shark Week" programming, if they haven't already been doing that. Fine, study sharks, go swimming with them, you do you, I'm still not leaving the house this weekend, not to go to the beach or to see fireworks or even to get some barbecue. Nope, it's too dangerous out there, there could be a shark in the Gowanus Canal and I might accidentally fall in. Or you never, know, one of those "Landsharks" seen on SNL could ring my doorbell. It's better to be safe than sorry.
Directed by Laurent Bouzereau (director of "Music by John Williams" and "Faye")
Also starring Steven Spielberg (last seen in "Music by John Williams"), J.J. Abrams (ditto), Joe Alves, Jim Beller, Clayton Benchley, Nat Benchley, Peter Benchley, Wendy Benchley, Emily Blunt, James Cameron (last seen in "Sigourney Weaver, the Most Iconic Action Heroine"), Philippe Cousteau Jr., Cameron Crowe (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Rene Ben David, Guillermo Del Toro (last seen in "Drew: The Man Behind the Poster"), Candace Fields, Jonathan Filley, Carol Fligor, Austin Gallagher, Lorraine Gary (last seen in "Jaws: the Revenge"), Carl Gottlieb (last seen in "Into the Night"), Jeffrey Kramer (last seen in "Jaws 2"), Gibbs Kuguru, George Lucas (also last seen in "Music by John Williams"), John Williams (ditto), John Mandelman, Janet Maslin, Greg Nicotero, Stephen Palumbi, Jordan Peele (last heard in "Wendell & Wild"), Todd Rebello, Ian Shaw, Sid Sheinberg, Brian Skerry, Greg Skomal, Steven Soderbergh (last seen in "Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did for Love"), Tracy Benchley Turner, Jeffrey Voorhees, Cynthia Wigren, Ross Williams, Robert Zemeckis (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"),
with archive footage of Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "Sigourney Weaver, the Most Iconic Action Heroine"), Susan Backlinie, Hal Barwood, John Belushi (last seen in "Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print"), Dick Cavett (ditto), Albert Brooks (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), David Brown, Helen Gurley Brown (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Fidel Castro (last seen in "Rather"), Chevy Chase (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Elliott Gould (ditto), Laraine Newman (ditto), Francis Ford Coppola (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), James Corden (last heard in "Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway"), Joan Crawford (last seen in "Martha"), Verna Fields, Ariana Grande (last seen in "Wicked: For Good"), Ted Grossman, Murray Hamilton (last seen in "Rock Hudson: ALl That Heaven Allowed"), Goldie Hawn (also last seen in "Music by John Williams"), Roy Scheider (ditto), Robert Shaw (ditto), Alfred Hitchcock (last seen in "Ali & Cavett: A Tale of the Tapes"), Jimmy Kimmel (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Craig Kingsbury, Conrad Krumm, Janet Leigh, Robert Mattey, John Milius, Richard Nixon (last seen in "Golda"), Richard Pryor (also carrying over from "Earth, Wind & Fire"), Chris Rebello, Matthew Robbins, Arnold Schwarzenegger (also last seen in "Sigourney Weaver, the Most Iconic Action Heroine"), Martin Scorsese (ditto), Joe Spinell, Quentin Tarantino (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Ron Taylor, Valerie Taylor, Dennis Weaver (last seen in "Spielberg"), Richard D. Zanuck,
RATING: 5 out of 10 sleepless nights caused by "Jaws" shoot PTSD (that's your GUILT talking, Mr. Spielberg, because deep down you know you cheated your way into the film business...)
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