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.