The accepted wisdom, and how to avoid it

It has become an article of faith among those who make a living at such things, that Jaws and Star Wars were the two-pronged assault that killed that brief, shining moment of the personal mass-market movie in the United States. Further, that the blame for the sorry mess that is the American movie industry today falls squarely on the shoulders of those two, seemingly mild-mannered demons, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

Pap, twaddle, and—may I say?—bullshit.

First, let's understand something basic. The time of the mogul is dead, long dead—that much-maligned yet sorely-missed period (roughly 1920-1960) during which the likes of Sam Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Darryl Zanuck, the Brothers Warner—even the idiot savant of Poverty Row Harry Cohn—ruled the Dream Factory in this country. The rag merchants kept one eye on the grosses and the other on the entertainment quotient of their movies; whatever their feudal ways and despotic means, the old dinosaurs truly loved movies.

The replacement of the lover with the Suit and the MBA was something of a creeping cancer; no one quite realized what had happened until the damage was done. That the complete imbedding of corporate mentality in the movie industry happened to consolidate just as Spielberg and Lucas delivered those monster hits Jaws and Star Wars is basically just a joke of history. Further, as illustrative of William Goldman's ostentatiously quoted maxim "No one knows anything," no one expected anything of Lucas' space epic, and not much more of Stevie's little fish story. When both went on to top the previously elusive $100-million mark within two years of each other, the oil magnates and stereo components producers now running the studios took notice. It is in their laps that the mania for the instant mega-hit must be laid.

Have Lucas and Spileberg, separately and together, had a doleful effect on American movies? Absolutely. Until comparatively recently, it seemed that Spielberg was intent on claiming the mantle, often bestown upon him by the idiots who make up the entertainment press corps, of the Modern Disney. Not the Disney who made Pinocchio the greatest and most artlessly artistic of all animated movies but the Disney of Bon Voyage and The Sword in the Stone—trash for trash's sake, "popular" movie-making in the worst possible sense: thus, The Goonies. Spielberg's '80s output as a producer is wretched, Poltergeist, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and (maybe) Gremlins aside, and many began to despair that the man whose passion for fantastic visions produced art in the marketplace (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.— and Jaws) had been subsumed by the businessman-as-creative-force, accent on the word "business."

Lucas too sprayed the walls of the growing cineplexes with the detritus of a largely bankrupt imagination: Willow and—god help us—Howard the Duck (which, had it been made in the mode of Roger Rabbit, as a hip admixture of live-action and animation, might have honored its source, the bizarre, humane and altogether sui generis Steve Gerber comic of the late '70s/early '80s.) Even the Indiana Jones series, which started off so exhilaratingly with Raiders of the Lost Ark, quickly succumbed to gore, racist stereotypes ("Short Round," anyone?) and sado-masochistic sexism of jaw-dropping proportions. (Where the hell is Karen Allen when you need her?)

Garbage, goop, hucksterism and mendacity—the perfect embodiment of what has become known as Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is shit.

Who foresaw the staggering cultural impact of those early entries in the blockbuster game? No one. Oh, sure—Peter Benchley's novel was a roaring success, and the movie adaptation probably would have made money if it had been directed by Herschel Gordon Lewis. But not even the producers of Jaws, the estimable Richard Zanuck and David Brown, expected anything like what happened, especially after the prolonged and much-reported agonies of the movie's production, gleefully reported in the press. As for the space opera, its initial—and rather mysterious—emergence as the movie you had to see caught everyone off-guard: Lucas, 20th Century-Fox, Variety and those few, hardy, battered-but-valiant Fox stockholders who would soon be buried in dividends beyond their most fetid imaginings.

The lesson? These things are not planned. They can't be.

Altogether now, Class:

No. One. Knows. Anything.

What killed the popular personal movie—the wild, unfettered artistic meanderings of the Scorseses, Coppolas, Altmans and Malicks whose early-to-mid 1970s exercises stand as perhaps the last gasp of the Artist who Made Good (i.e., saw profit)—was the lust to replicate these ungovernable blips on the cultural graph. Hence the unrelenting push, each and every Memorial Day, to force down our throats some mass-produced piece of plastic crap destined to be forgotten at year's end by everyone but the money-men ... who are, more often than not, to be found floating in an ever-expanding sea of drek and red ink.

At the center of this appalling phenomenon is a truth so simple it eludes nearly everyone:

Movies are not automobiles.

Or stereo equipment. Or oil refineries. Or even cable television. Commodities, yes, but unreproducable in a way the high-tech gonifs at Sony simply cannot fathom. If we make a CD player the same way a million times, and every single unit of that million-run sells, their reasoning runs, why can't we do the same with movies?

Because, you idiots, a movie is not a CD player.

Added to which, each potential $100-million-buster must be sold overseas, to a growing market of functional and actual illiterates in far-flung Eastern counties: an audience that cannot, or will not, follow a moderately complex plot; that cares not one whit for characters whose human qualities rise above the occasional smart-ass, sour joke that passes for wit among arrested adolescents; that does not in some way represent a fairy tale vision of life on this planet; that does not involve at least a half-dozen strategically-placed explosions and a pair of ubiquitous fireballs; and that does not end with Villainy Vanquished and the Good Guy standing, however badly mauled and in need of transfusion.

(And lest you now assume your humble scribe a closet racist, be aware that the studios not are only aware of this, they count on it the way in the 1930s they counted so on European revenues they cravenly snipped out each and every reference in their movies to the growing Nazi menace. Further, let me say in my own defense that the above paragraph could just as easily be applied to a modern American movie audience as to one in India or Pakistan.)

The result: American movies are no longer made for Americans.

Do you understand this??

So don't blame Lucas, or Spielberg, or whatever convenient whipping boy you've had in mind as The Source of All That is Rotten in American Film. Blame Sony. Blame Michael Eisner. Blame Michael Bay.

Here endeth the lesson.

Coming Soon:
A few more stray thoughts on Jaws, its whereins and whereats, and why Steven Spielberg is, on the basis of this one movie, and regardless of anything else he's done since, one of this most gifted men who ever picked up a movie camera. Are you all-a-tingle?

In which Your Humble Correspondent resists the temptation to call this entry "You're gonna need a bigger boat"

Purchased the new, two-disc Jaws (Widescreen Anniversary Collector's Edition) this weekend and watched the extras (which do not, for reasons that escape my ability to fathom such things, include the original theatrical trailer—which was on the previous, single-disc DVD.) Couldn't help wishing, despite the plethora of goodies, that Universal had gotten the rights to that National Geographic special of a few years back in which Peter Benchley tagged along on an expedition to the Great Barrier Reef, during which the N.G. photographer caught a jaw-dropping photo of a Great White shark breaching the water some twenty feet or more.

It's more than a little sobering to note the 30th anniversary of a movie you vividly recall seeing when it was first released. (Christ—as if I don't feel old enough already.) And just try explaining to a new generation how staggering the impact of this movie was at the time: how there had never been anything like it before; how it was the very first example of what we now take for granted as the "Summer Blockbuster"; how one movie could so influence an entire society that the previously rather thoughtless practice of seasonal swimming became a test of nerve ("Do I go in the water or not?") the same way that Psycho made millions of Americans reconsider stepping into a motel shower stall.

Herewith a few stray observations occasioned by Laurent Bouzereau's Making of Jaws documentary, beginning with a few choice bits from the people involved:

Steven Spielberg says he wanted to introduce the audience to the character of Quint (Robert Shaw) by showing him in a public theatre watching the 1956 John Huston/Ray Bradbury adaptation of Moby Dick and roaring his head off. The people around him begin to leave until the theatre is empty save Quint; the camera goes out in the street with the fleeing patrons, followed by his bellows of laughter. Good joke. (Spielberg actually did shoot an ultimately unused introduction to Quint, seen in a music shop tormenting poor little Paul Goulart as he tries to bleat out Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" on a clarinet.)

Another of the Maestro's unfilmed set-pieces involved the Amity Island Harbormaster watching Don't Go Near the Water on a portable teevee as the camera fixes on a line of sailboat masts; one after the other, they bob up and tilt over in the swell as the shark glides beneath the keels. The Harbormaster leans out over the side of his boat to rinse his coffeepot out and ... (This scene was in its turn the genesis for the sequence, not in Benchley's novel, of those two dopey yeggs trying to lure the Great White in with a side of ham. Carl Gottlieb, the movie's Boswell and co-scenarist—Benchley got credit for his original, largely unusable, script and Howard Sackler asked to have his own name removed—notes that one of the idiots was originally to lose a leg, but that the later sequence of the lifeguard's limb falling to the ocean floor was "one leg too many—or too few.")

Susan Backlinie, the stunt woman whose intensely-felt work in the movie's opening sequence primed us all for the terror to come, says Spielberg asked her to intone the Lord's Prayer as the shark hauled her to hell and gone by the leg. Herself a born Catholic, neither she nor any of the other Catholics on the crew could remember how it went. Richard Dreyfuss also recalls walking in to a dubbing session and seeing Spielberg pouring water down Backlinie's throat to produced the desired effect in her voice. The fact that the young director noticed the need for such aural realism is a testament to his sense of craft, evident even at the relatively tender age of 26; it recalls Orson Welles' demand that James G. Stewart re-dub the entire horseless carriage sequence in The Magnificent Ambersons because he got no sense of the automobile's motion in the voices.

Spielberg was so enamored of Martha's Vineyardite Craig Kingsbury that he not only gave him the role of the ill-fated Ben Gardner, but also allowed him to improvise the garrulous character's many memorable bons mot. My favorite Kingsbury moment is the memorable pause he places between phrases on greeting Dreyfuss at the Amity pier: "Hello there ... young fella." That gap gives the line a natural feel, as thought it had been made up on the spot, conversationally. (I'm reminded now of a story a friend told me about a bus-tour he attended during a visit to the Vineyard. The guide was a local who, in common with any number of others, had a small role in the movie. He augmented this boast by adding, "And some of us had speakin' paahts.")

Roy Scheider's endlessly quoted line "You're gonna need a bigger boat" was an on-set ad lib.

John Williams suggested to Spielberg that the music should be composed as though for a pirate movie. That pretty much explains the score's heavy (and, to these ears, delicious) reliance on sea shanties and New England hornpipes as recurring motifs. Williams also cites a tongue-in-cheek hommage to Erich Wolfgang Korngold in the "Barell Chase" sequence—his own favorite moment in the score, and that of many of its fans, including this one.

Forthcoming in the Next Thrilling Installment:
Further of Your Faithful Servant's keen and wizardly observations on this most culturally significant (some would say "calamitous") of movies.