It's the iconic summer blockbuster, arguably the first ever. It has the cooperation of Richard Dreyfuss, Steven Spielberg, and almost everyone in between. I wasn't around during its initial run and I sometimes forget that Spielberg was a nobody who became a wunderkind overnight. The production was epic. The result was ground-breaking and it basically wrote a blank cheque for his next film, Close Encounters of Third Kind. It changed cinema period. This has most of the big stories and some of the interesting smaller stories. I know most of the stories but I'm not an expert so I don't know if this missed anything. It is interesting to see the first girl after all these years and Dreyfuss panning the movie before it was released. This is a perfect companion piece to the classic film.
3 Reviews
Very Good Documentary
Michael_Elliott22 October 2011
Jaws: The Inside Story (2010)
*** 1/2 (out of 4)
Like so many other classics, JAWS has had countless documentaries, news stories, magazine articles and just about everything else done to it. If you're interested in the film there's so much research material out there that by the time you got done with it all you'd think that you had been on the set during the entire production. This installment in "The Inside Story" series has Richard Dreyfuss, Steven Spielberg, Sid Sheinberg, John Milius, Richard Zanuck and many others involved with the film telling their stories about its production. We start off learning how another director was going to do the picture but when he said "whale" instead of "shark" they knew they had to go elsewhere and this is how Spielberg got on board. There's a lot of discussion about the variety of issues with the production including a bit where Spielberg was going to quit the film. The shark, who they named Bruce, is also talked about quite a lot and especially considering it never worked and gave its director non-stop nightmares. The hiring of the cast is well-documented and we get some pretty good stories about the late Robert Shaw. This includes the USS Indianapolis sequence, which apparently he tried to do one day dead drunk and it didn't turn out too well. Real soldiers who were aboard the Indianapolis also get to talk about what they thought after seeing the scene. On the whole, if you're one of those who already knows everything about JAWS then it's doubtful that you're going to learn anything new here. If you're unfamiliar with the film then this is a very well-produced documentary that does a very good job at explaining everything about the film.
*** 1/2 (out of 4)
Like so many other classics, JAWS has had countless documentaries, news stories, magazine articles and just about everything else done to it. If you're interested in the film there's so much research material out there that by the time you got done with it all you'd think that you had been on the set during the entire production. This installment in "The Inside Story" series has Richard Dreyfuss, Steven Spielberg, Sid Sheinberg, John Milius, Richard Zanuck and many others involved with the film telling their stories about its production. We start off learning how another director was going to do the picture but when he said "whale" instead of "shark" they knew they had to go elsewhere and this is how Spielberg got on board. There's a lot of discussion about the variety of issues with the production including a bit where Spielberg was going to quit the film. The shark, who they named Bruce, is also talked about quite a lot and especially considering it never worked and gave its director non-stop nightmares. The hiring of the cast is well-documented and we get some pretty good stories about the late Robert Shaw. This includes the USS Indianapolis sequence, which apparently he tried to do one day dead drunk and it didn't turn out too well. Real soldiers who were aboard the Indianapolis also get to talk about what they thought after seeing the scene. On the whole, if you're one of those who already knows everything about JAWS then it's doubtful that you're going to learn anything new here. If you're unfamiliar with the film then this is a very well-produced documentary that does a very good job at explaining everything about the film.
Relatively honest.
rmax30482321 February 2012
Warning: Spoilers
Usually these "inside story" and "the making of" features and featurettes are full of bland boilerplate. If you've seen any of them, you have an idea of what they all tend to be like. "He was such a wonderful guy to work with." "I'm prouder of that performance than any other." "It was magic." This documentary, much of it shot during the actual shooting of "Jaws" on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, is refreshingly light on such baloney.
Spielberg claims, and I believe it, that the logistics of shooting at sea and the job of building the shark and getting it to work in salt water were so demanding that he was left with little time for creativity or art. This turned out to be a budget buster. The suits at Universal Studios, used to simple, cheap production, were in a frenzy.
The technology of the time not permitting digitalization, imagine taking half a day to set up the barge carrying the filming equipment and positioning it properly next to the fishing boat, the Orca. You're about to roll. Then a big sailboat from Hyannisport appears on the supposedly empty horizon. There is nothing to do but sit back, bite your nails, and wait an hour and a half until the sailboat slowly crosses the frame and finally disappears. Then another sailboat appears.
Most of the interviews are done at a sufficient time remove that there's no longer any compelling reason for the actors, crew, or producers to pimp the film. It made its fortune -- and more. If Spielberg ever had any intent of interpolating "art" into his film, the marketing quickly devolved into merchandising. I wonder what happened to all those "Jaws" T shirts. They were all over the place. A publisher asked me at the time what I thought the design of the dust jacket on my book about anthropology should look like. I suggested a shark's head rising vertically to eat a naked girl.
Fortunately, occasional mention is made of social abrasions. It relieves the heroic tone of the rest of the documentary. The movie people swept up the local groupies. Marriages dissolved. Robert Shaw was always dressing down Richard Dreyfus in public -- just a fat slob who can't do push ups and has no stage experience. Shaw, on the other hand, was sometimes so drunk he had to be carried onto the set. Half of his "Indianapolis" soliloquy was shot while he was plastered.
But at least Shaw got the job done, which Bruce the shark could not do, forcing Spielberg to shoot several scenes from the shark's point of view, so that the mechanical beast didn't have to be on screen. It made for a much better movie, as Alfred Hitchcock and Val Lewton had found out many years earlier. Had Bruce been compliant, we might have wound up with just another monster movie, with Bruce appearing in the first scenes and openly devouring everyone.
Spielberg claims, and I believe it, that the logistics of shooting at sea and the job of building the shark and getting it to work in salt water were so demanding that he was left with little time for creativity or art. This turned out to be a budget buster. The suits at Universal Studios, used to simple, cheap production, were in a frenzy.
The technology of the time not permitting digitalization, imagine taking half a day to set up the barge carrying the filming equipment and positioning it properly next to the fishing boat, the Orca. You're about to roll. Then a big sailboat from Hyannisport appears on the supposedly empty horizon. There is nothing to do but sit back, bite your nails, and wait an hour and a half until the sailboat slowly crosses the frame and finally disappears. Then another sailboat appears.
Most of the interviews are done at a sufficient time remove that there's no longer any compelling reason for the actors, crew, or producers to pimp the film. It made its fortune -- and more. If Spielberg ever had any intent of interpolating "art" into his film, the marketing quickly devolved into merchandising. I wonder what happened to all those "Jaws" T shirts. They were all over the place. A publisher asked me at the time what I thought the design of the dust jacket on my book about anthropology should look like. I suggested a shark's head rising vertically to eat a naked girl.
Fortunately, occasional mention is made of social abrasions. It relieves the heroic tone of the rest of the documentary. The movie people swept up the local groupies. Marriages dissolved. Robert Shaw was always dressing down Richard Dreyfus in public -- just a fat slob who can't do push ups and has no stage experience. Shaw, on the other hand, was sometimes so drunk he had to be carried onto the set. Half of his "Indianapolis" soliloquy was shot while he was plastered.
But at least Shaw got the job done, which Bruce the shark could not do, forcing Spielberg to shoot several scenes from the shark's point of view, so that the mechanical beast didn't have to be on screen. It made for a much better movie, as Alfred Hitchcock and Val Lewton had found out many years earlier. Had Bruce been compliant, we might have wound up with just another monster movie, with Bruce appearing in the first scenes and openly devouring everyone.
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