“You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” …but do we need another Jaws?
The “Under the Mask” Blog is an online outlet for the “Dont Go Out There” podcast hosts to further add creative content into the horror community.
by: Shannon Pietrasiewicz
“You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” ….but do we need another Jaws?
So over the last few decades, rarely have we seen a film have the kind of lasting impact that we have seen with Jaws. This movie is considered to be the first “summer blockbuster” and helped influence the movie market to release large scale films in the summer.
As a kid, every other Friday night was movie rental night with my dad because my mom would be working third shift. He was the one to introduce me to Jaws and as a result he probably spent a ridiculous amount of money renting me all 4 of the Jaws movies on VHS over and over (and the Back to the Future trilogy but that’s a whole different discussion). So my love of Jaws began when I was still in elementary school and the obsession has never stopped.
Jaws as a whole can sort of be considered lightning in a bottle. This was the first book released by author Peter Benchley and only the second movie to be full feature theater release to be directed by Steven Spielberg (his first movie did not fair so well). The book was released in 1974 and the rights were bought by Universal that same year attaching Spielberg to direct. The movie was problematic from the very beginning.
As pre-production on the movie started, initially it was believed they could train a great white for the movie. Obviously this is a completely ridiculous concept and had they tried it, Spielberg probably never would have worked again. Then they decided to build a shark and in turn ended up building 3 that were used for different aspects of the movie. The movie was shot on Martha’s Vineyard and they were aiming to complete shooting in about 55 days and be done before the tourist season began. Five and a half months later, the film was completed. A common phrase uttered during filming was “The shark isn’t working”. In fact, the first time they put the shark in the open water, it literally sank to the bottom. This ongoing problem with the mechanical sharks in the end would turn out to work in their favor though. Now a days with CGI and such, there are no shortage of shark movies with plenty of shots of the sharks. Almost all of these look really cheesy of course. Spielberg had to improvise given the issues with the sharks, which were jokingly called Bruce after his lawyer. So given the ongoing issues with the sharks, Spielberg came up with different ways to convey that the shark was present without ever seeing it, such as the now infamous yellow barrels or John Williams infamous score.
There are a few scenes in the movie that were going to be much more graphic upon their initial filming. The second victim of the movie, Alex Kintner was killed as the beach was crowded with locals looking on in terror as they realized what was happening. This scene really brought the reality of what was starting to happen in the movie. That was a scene that as kid scared the crap out of me. What they had initially intended or the scene is fuel for nightmares. Had this scene and others been filmed the way they had originally been intended, Jaws would have obviously received an R rating, not the PG rating it received (PG 13 didn’t become a rating until almost 10 years later). Had the movie been more graphic and received that R rating, it’s unlikely that it would have become the blockbuster that it became.
When the movie was released, they never expected it to have the kind of success that it had. People were lined up around the block to see the movie and it also scared a large population of people from ever wanting to go into open water. Very few movies can have that kind of an effect on the public, but this one definitely did. Jaws would go on to break $100 million dollars within the first 38 days of release. It remained the highest grossing movie until a few years later when the original Star Wars was released. To date it has made $471,961,371 worldwide on a budget of $7 million, of which all but $1.3 million was on the initial release. The last $1.3 million comes from a few re-releases.
Jaws is known for several iconic shots (the first time the shark pops out of the water when Brody is chumming), lines (most notably “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” and “Smile you Son of a Bitch”) and of course the score for the film. Two notes that when you hear them, you can instantly identify what they are from. When you combine all of these things together, you get a movie that 45 years after its release is still terrifying and entertaining audiences. Jaws also still has a massive fan base that thanks to social media is able to interact from all around the world. It has also been the subject of several books (check out Jaws Memories from Martha’s Vineyard for what I consider to be the best book out there and is full of behind the scenes photos) and more recently podcasts.
So the reason that I give you the background on Jaws and why it is such a great movie is because over the last decade or so, remakes and reboots of movies have become such a common practice. I love Kirby’s line in Scream 4 when Ghostface asks, “Name the remake of the groundbreaking horror movie in which the vill…” and Kirby replies, “Halloween, uh, Texas Chainsaw, Dawn of the Dead, The Hills Have E-e-eyes, Amityville Horror, Uh-uh, Last House on the Left, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, My Bloody Valentine, When a Stranger Calls, Prom Night, Black Christmas, House of Wax, The Fog, Piranha! It’s one of those, right?” While we have had plenty of new ground breaking horror since Scream helped to revive the horror industry in 1996, we have also had to endure a multitude of remakes and reboots. Very few of these have been an improvement on the original (although I do think Leigh Whannell’s Invisible Man was phenomenal) and some of them (* cough, Nightmare on Elm Street) have been down right terrible. So when it comes to Jaws, there are always people talking about whether the film should be remade. I can’t emphatically say no to this idea enough. Jaws is a classic and if anyone was to try to remake it, we wouldn’t have the type of suspense that was built in the original because we would more likely end up with lots of CGI shark that would take away the psychological effect that was so successful in the first movie. Another issue would be recreating the perfect casting that occurred in the original. While there are many actors who arguably could do a good job in the role, how do you live up to the performance of someone like Robert Shaw (Quint) or Thirdly, you have the storyline. Do you try and stay true to the original story or do a new take on it? Take the remake of Psycho for example, where they wanted to stay true to the original and ended up making a shot for shot remake that no one asked for. If you change the story, you end upsetting the legions on die hard fans out there (myself included). The Jaws franchise even tried to capitalize on itself resulting in 3 sequels that increasingly went down hill (although I get guilty pleasure enjoyment out of Jaws 3).
In the end, I hope that I never have to hear that this movie is being remade, because regardless of how it were to turn out, it would never come close to what the original is. As for horror as a whole, lets continue to get more original ideas out there and not just reboot (or in even worse cases, just copy) things that have been done before. My hope is to get more movies that come in and really have an effect on us as an audience. I remember the first time I saw Scream, Saw, Cabin in the Woods, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, and Ready or Not. All these movies are very different from each other, but part of my love for them was at the time they were released, they also weren’t like anything else so for that reason they stick with me. So here’s hoping that the future can bring us some new amazing horror for all of us to enjoy.