Sharks On The Big Screen And In The Big Blue Sea

0:07Great whites are patient and have explosive acceleration.

0:16hitting top speed with just five swipes of their tails. Sharks have been around for nearly 450 million years, a lot longer than humans. In that time, they've become part of some of our most treasured pop culture. Right then, the meeting has officially come to order. Let us all say the pledge. I am a nice shark, not a mindless eating machine. If I am to change this image, I must first change myself. Fish are friends, not food. Except stinking dolphins. Dolphins, yeah, they think they're so cute. But they've also fallen victim to pop culture narratives. You know where this is heading.

1:01Since the release of Jaws in 1975, five, sharks, especially great white sharks, have endured the Jaws effect, a reputation as aggressive, violent eating machines. The movie's popularity, while inspiring fear in some, has also inspired love and reverence for these sea creatures and others. But no matter your feelings toward them, sharks are struggling to survive in our oceans. According to the World Wildlife Fund, nearly a third of all shark and race species are threatened with extinction. Overfishing and harmful fishing practices are at the top of the list of threats. While the Discovery Channel kicks off its 37th annual Shark Week, we feel inspired here at 1A to bring you our very own Shark Day and get into all things sharks, from the so-called Jaws effect to all the things we get wrong about this fascinating fish.

1:51After 50 years of Jaws, how has the narrative on sharks changed? And how does that narrative affect conservation efforts? We get into it after the break. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast, back with more in a moment.

2:08With us from Pasadena, California, is 1A Entertainment Correspondent John Horn. John, it's always great to have you. Janet, it is my pleasure. Also with us from Woods Hole, Massachusetts, is Simon Therold. He's a senior scientist in the biology department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and he's a fish ecologist. Simon, welcome. Great to be here. And with us from Sarasota, Florida, is author and marine biologist Jasmine Graham. Her memoir is Sharks Don't Sink, Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist. Jasmine, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks. It's great to be here. Now, John, Jaws is regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time because of its impact on the movie industry.

2:50It's considered one of the first summer blockbusters. Why does it still resonate with audiences after 50 years? because it's so well made i mean i was on vacation with our family and my wife and i decided uh and we were in nova scotia on the water so we decided we'd show it to our kids who were three and five they had nightmares the entire now they're 20 and 25 and our youngest had not seen it and i hadn't seen it in a while and it holds up so well i mean it's not only well made there are things you see and there are things you don't see um it's incredibly suspenseful has john williams great music uh you know it's it's shot practically it's an analog movie at the air at the dawn of the digital age so everything is practical it's using real locals uh as actors um and just listening to the whole shark intro the challenge of getting it made was monumental i mean the producers first thought they could train a great white shark to action the movie.

3:54That's how deluded they were about the challenges they were facing. It's a scary film. It has a great shock scare. I think you know about the head floating in the boat. It's just an exceptionally well-made film. And 50 years later, it's as scary as it was when it first came out. Well, there are many movies that followed Jaws, centered around sharks and shark attacks. There's 1999's Deep Blue Sea, 2010's Sharktopus, 2013's Sharknado, which really took the shark narrative pretty far. You could say it jumped the shark. Most recently, there's 2017's The Meg. And all of those movies also had sequels.

4:34Jaws did as well. Jasmine, how do feelings about sharks vary around the globe? Yeah, well, there's definitely a big impact from pop culture. You know, you see enough scary shark movies and everyone sees a shark in the wild or even thinks about going into the ocean and those images pop into their mind. But there's a lot of cultures in which sharks are actually revered, respected. They're seen as guardians. They're seen as representatives of ancestors that have passed. And there's a lot of reverence that exists. But of course, we do have the pop culture influence, especially in Western culture, where everyone, they think of shark and they think of scary great white from Jaws.

5:15Simon, your thoughts? Yeah, I would agree. Sharks are referred. And I grew up in New Zealand and the Polynesian culture, for instance, has a reverence for sharks that is clearly unmatched and certainly not like it is here. So Jasmine's exactly right. There is a range, but I think Jaws in some sense has been responsible for the ways that sharks have been viewed since it came out 50 years ago. Jasmine, I'm curious how much of this relationship with sharks also has to do with our relationship with oceans. I love the ocean. I love snorkeling. Well, actually, yeah, no, I love to snorkel. But there's something about deep water, dark water, that makes me anxious.

6:09So while I love the ocean, I also have this healthy respect that borders fear of the ocean as well. Yeah, I think that's definitely a thing. You know, the ocean is, compared to land, obviously super unexplored. People tend to fear what they don't understand. There's this idea that who knows what's lurking down there in Marianas Trench that the Meg kind of built off of that to create this sort of idea of what if there's a Megalodon down there. So there is this fear of, well, we don't know what's down there. People can't go down there. We're not looking out there. It's the same fear that we have of like space and are there others out there?

6:50And is it scary out there? It's sort of the same effect that people have. And then there's also a lot of fear around water in general because there are a lot of people that can't swim or don't feel comfortable in water. And so water in and of itself, especially in large quantities like the ocean, is extremely scary, especially if you're in a situation where you can't see land, where you are comfortable, where we are meant to be. And then you're going into a weird environment and you feel uneasy because you know you're not supposed to be there. I think that plays a lot into it as well. Well, let's go to this clip from Jaws.

7:23Here, Captain Brody, played by the late Roy Scheider, and marine biologist Matt Hooper, played by Richard Dreyfuss, discussed the shark attacks on Amity Island's beaches. Now, this shark that swims alone, what's it called? Rogue. Rogue, yeah. Now, this guy, he keeps swimming around in a place where the feeding is good until the food supply is gone, right? It's called territoriality. It's just a theory that I happen to agree with. Simon, how likely is it that a shark will terrorize a beach the way movies often portray? Well, it never happens. Like, quite literally never happens. So, yeah, if I was going to say, you know, one of the things that Jules got wrong, at least scientifically, is this idea that there are rogue sharks swimming around just, you know, just that can't wait to terrify humans.

8:16that simply isn't backed up by any scientific information. So while there certainly are some white sharks out there, the idea that they're actively hunting humans is simply untrue. And it is perhaps the biggest myth that JAWS has helped to perpetrate, unfortunately, to be honest. Let's take a quick pause here. We'll be back with our conversation on sharks in just a moment.

8:49Let's get back to our discussion and turn now to John Horn, 1A's entertainment correspondent. Now, John, the 50th anniversary of the release of Jaws inspired Jaws the Exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in L.A. You sat down with the project's curator, Jenny He, ahead of its opening in September. Let's take a listen. So I just want to make sure I categorize the show. It's the first large exhibition at the museum dedicated to a single film. Is that the right way to say it? The exhibition is the first time we're dedicating our largest gallery to one single film. I know the show is probably, what, two months out from opening.

9:28But at this point, you probably have a really good idea of what's going to be in it. What was the organizing principle? Were you looking for artifacts from production? Were there certain things that, from the very beginning, you thought were the most important things to try to track down? All of the above. We absolutely searched for original production artworks, original production objects. We also wanted to emphasize the production histories and the behind-the-scenes stories. After 50 years, the stories about the making of Jaws are almost as well-known as the film itself. So we leaned into a lot of the mythology and lore surrounding Jaws.

10:11And really, the first thing we wanted to look at is what makes Jaws such a significant film? Why is it still resonating with audiences 50 years later? And we really landed on not only the nostalgia of this movie, but the authenticity with which Steven Spielberg brought into the making of this movie. He took a Hollywood production across the country. He landed on Martha's Vineyard, and he was out of sea, literally, for 159 days. But with all the challenges, all the well-known challenges of that production shoot, the fact that Stephen made that decision to shoot not on a soundstage tank is really what led to the phenomenal success of Jaws, of course, making it the first modern summer blockbuster.

11:00So we really started from that organizing principle of why JAWS? Why would we as the Academy Museum present JAWS? And then we looked into the how. And when visitors come to the Academy Museum, when visitors come to JAWS, the exhibition, you are experiencing the film like never before. We have you walking from opening credits to the end, literally. We are showing the movie in a spatial experience, scene by scene. So you get to experience being underwater from the shark's point of view as you open the doors into the exhibition. Then we take you into Amity Island. We take you into the shark's rampage.

11:48We have a recreation of the chalkboard on which Quint scratches his nails. and that's how you of course encounter Quint in the movie and that's how you will encounter Quint in the exhibition. Then we take you into Adventure Ahead which is the moment where the three main characters of course Quint, Hooper and Brody set off to hunt the shark and at that point it's three men in the sea and the shark and the last gallery in the exhibition that deals with the film is Into the Deep where we have a scenic recreation of the orca boat itself and you are out at sea with the shark. And the last gallery, we also want to look at the enduring impact of Jaws.

12:33So everything that came after the movie opened in 1975. So you already have, I think, in the collection one of Bruce, or maybe the only existing Bruce, which I believe is one, if not the largest item in the museum's collection. Is that right? Yes. So we have the sole surviving shark from Jaws and it is the largest three-dimensional collection object in the museum's collection. And this shark was made after production. It was pulled from the original mold as the three screen-used sharks. And, of course, after production, people thought, the studio thought that Jaws could be a success, but they had no idea how much of a success it would be.

13:15And after the film came out, they really wanted to capitalize on the movie. and so they went back and saw that the screen used sharks basically deteriorated. They were rotting away. But they made a fourth shark from the original mold and this shark hung at Universal Studios in Hollywood as part of the tram tour attraction until about 1990. And at that time, it moved into a junkyard, famously. It lived in the sun. It baked in the hot sun and the California sun for decades until it was acquired and restored by the Academy Museum. And it now hangs in the museum. It's been on view since we opened to the public in September 2021.

14:01There's a phrase that applies to authorship in Hollywood, and it is that failure is an orphan and success has many fathers. There are some scenes, and specifically Robert Shaw's character speech about the USS Indianapolis, that several screenwriters have taken credit for. Do you get into some of the arguments about authorship? We Need a Bigger Boat, the famous line by Roy Scheider. Do you start to talk about some of the controversies surrounding the making of the film? Yes, there are overlapping truths, as I like to say. And we do look into some of these stories in the exhibition. It's really fascinating also thinking about the screenplay development process.

14:41Now we think about Jaws and its screenplay as almost a near-perfect template for screenwriters with its three-act structure. But as we know, as Jaws fans know, the making of that screenplay was anything but formulaic. Steven Spielberg, let's start off with Peter Benchley. Not only was the novel purchased for its rights to be made into a film, but Peter Benchley was also contracted to do a few drafts. He submitted his drafts, and then co-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb was also told famously to eviscerate it, and Carl wrote certainly his own draft screenplay as well. Stephen himself wrote an entire draft, and then other screenwriters also took a stab at the screenplay.

15:31And then famously, during production, even when they were on Martha's Vineyard, Stephen and Carl Gottlieb and even the main actors every day would gather at Stephen's log cabin on the vineyard and they would rewrite the next day's pages. So, John, your question is really on point, because how can you really say, you know, this person was the author of this dialogue or this scene? It was very much a collaborative effort, of course, led by Stephen's very keen directorial voice. One of the things that's important about Jaws is not only was it kind of the first summer blockbuster and changed the way that films were released, it is an analog movie in what quickly became a digital world if you were doing a exhibition about a modern day uh film there wouldn't be much to show because it's all done inside of a computer but here you have so many practical things including bruce the artificial shark what are some of the other memorabilia that you found and there are a couple of items that you were especially excited to acquire.

16:45Yes, and the fact that the shark is an animatronic, the fact that it's analog, as you say, special effects, it also really led to the thinking of having a tactile experience for our visitors. So we really lean into the interactive. We want you to be able to create your own iconic dolly zoom shot when, of course, the shark is at the shore and Chief Brody's dread is getting closer and closer that famous of course alfred hitchcock um uh invented shot that he used famously in vertigo so we really wanted to lean into the fact that you can also experience the movie yourself and i have to say the the fact that the shark is not um computer generated the fact that it was living in the ocean together with the characters with the actors really led to why it was so scary.

17:40You see it coming out of the water. You see it, it's fearsome, you know, 25 foot entire mass of this shark swimming through the water. So, yes, I think that very much was key to why this movie really put the fear into all of its audiences. One of the things that's most notable about the film, and it starts at the very beginning of the movie, is John Williams' score. Yes. Literally, as soon as the film starts, you start to hear the Jaws theme. How do you make a theme or a work of music come alive in a museum exhibition? Oh, I feel like I'm giving so much away, John. Tease. You can just tease. Well, of course, the famous Jaws theme is two notes.

18:31E and F. And so we will have an opportunity for visitors to be able to play those notes themselves. The film won a couple of Oscars, three, including one for editing by Verna Fields. Could you talk a little bit about the editing of the film? Because I think the editing of Jaws is mis... I won't say misunderstood. I think Verna does not get as much credit as she might deserve. Yes, as you mentioned, Jaws won three Academy Awards for sound, for original score, and for film editing awarded to Verna Fields. And we absolutely will be spotlighting Verna and John Williams' work on Jaws. We have the original movieola that Verna Fields used to edit Jaws.

19:17It comes from the collection of Steven Spielberg. and we really wanted to also tell that very famous story of Stephen filming the pickup shot of discovering Ben Gardner through Verna Fields' pool. The famous story, as you might know, John, goes that Stephen had no more authorization, no more funds to do any pickup shots, but after the first test screening, he wanted just one more scare. And so he borrowed the prop head of Ben Gardner and went to Verna Field's pool and put some carnation milk in her pool and shot that scene again. And that precision is also what makes that jump scare so visceral and so famous.

20:02Gosh, when I talk about it, I can see it already. There's also, amazingly, some great stories about casting. Spielberg literally had not cast Roy Scheider's part until like a week and a half before casting, was talking to Roy Scheider at a party about how frustrated he was about not being able to find an actor to play the sheriff. Is casting part of the exhibition as well? And how do you animate the amazing cast that was put together? Yes, absolutely. Casting is certainly part of the exhibition. and as you walk through the galleries, you will encounter each character as they are introduced in the film itself.

20:43So of course we see Brody first, then we meet Quint, and then we meet Hooper. We talk about the major characters, the main characters, but we also want to spotlight the local casting as well. The film was shot in Martha's Vineyard and there are so many colorful actors who led to really memorable scenes, Ben Gardner. Of course, we talked about that. And Ben Gardner is really interesting. He was played by Craig Kingsbury. And Craig Kingsbury very much influenced Robert Shaw's portrayal of Quint. He's a local who is not a professional actor. Big personality, as he's described by most people. Yes, the way he sounds on film in Jaws was pretty much how he sounded in real life, is what I heard.

21:29I want to just ask one thing. just at the very beginning. Why was Jaws, what was the conversation to pick Jaws? Why was Jaws a single film? Why was it such a good single film to focus on? Yes, it's the Academy Museum's mission to celebrate significant movies and movie makers. And I don't think anyone would argue about the significance of Jaws in cinema history. Not only is it, of course, groundbreaking, being the first modern summer blockbuster, as we spoke about, Now, it is truly, at its core, an entertaining and engaging film. It has its artistic and technical merits. But it's also a movie that after the first time you watch it, dare I say, it stays with you.

22:13And it's, of course, Steven Spielberg's second theatrical feature, but it's already, you see in the movie so many hallmarks of the Steven Spielberg we know today. He had made Sugarland Express, I believe. And dual for television, but it was released as a theatrical feature outside of the U.S. Right. And I think the other thing that he did is that one of the things you notice is how much is not shown. Like we don't see the dog getting eaten. We don't see what literally is inside the shark. We see things being tossed out of it. Spielberg is very clever in how much he lets the viewer's imagination fill in what you don't see.

22:52Yes, yes, absolutely. And at this time, Steven Spielberg, when he was making Jaws, he was 27 years old. But even then, the young Steven Spielberg had such an encyclopedia knowledge of film history. So he really drew, of course, famously from Albert Hitchcock. And what you don't see is scarier than what you do show the audience. So that was very much a part of the development of Jaws. That was very much, it seemed, a part of Steven Spielberg's intent. We've had the privilege to research in Steven's collection and seeing his handwritten notes when he writes about Hitchcock's influence, it really solidifies for you how much not only practical film knowledge was at play here, but the love of cinema too.

23:47Let me ask you this last question. This movie, having seen it within the last 10 days, still is very effective. Can people go through this show, see how the movie was made, and still be scared by it? Or when you see the magic, if you peek behind the curtain, do you think it ruins how effective the film can be? I don't think so. I think it's still scary. No matter, even if you know how it's made, when you're watching the film in front of you, perhaps with an audience in the dark, it is still gripping. You talked about Verna Fields earlier. The editorial pacing, the editing really gets to you. So I think that visitors can come out of this exhibition, learn about it, and still the magic of Jaws will still resonate.

24:42Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, John. So authenticity, but not necessarily scientific accuracy. John, what else can you tell us about the impact Jaws had on the movie industry? How did it reshape it? Well, summer used to be a time when nobody released movies. It was considered kind of the dumping ground for films. And films then were released the way art films would be released today. They, you know, opened a couple of theaters here and then they moved to a couple of theaters there. There's no such thing as a wide release. It was all regional release. So Universal, which made the film, decided to do a couple of things.

25:15They were going to release the film nationally at the same time. And rather than buy newspaper ads in select markets, they were going to blanket the country with millions of dollars of newspaper ads. I mean, of television ads. So what you had was a shift from kind of a slow release to this national instantaneous release supported by a huge amount of advertising. And it turned out to be the model. I mean, it's a model we follow now. A couple of years after Jaws came out, Star Wars copied that model. The movie grossed in real dollars today. It's the second highest grossing film of all time. So it completely changed the distribution model.

25:53and it also changed the idea of the blockbuster, that a studio could make one movie that was going to basically pay for everything else on its slate. For more information on the exhibit, visit the Academy Museum's webpage at academymuseum.org. Desiree writes, In 2023, I did a shark dive in West Palm Beach. As we went up to do our safety stop, the sharks followed us because they weren't done with us, even though we were done with them. They were just like dogs, just curious and wanting to see what was going on. Now, there are over 500 species of sharks. Simon, tell us about their diet. The great white shark gets a lot of attention, but we're talking about 500 different species.

26:32Yeah, as you can imagine, they eat just about everything. But white sharks are typically, at least as they get older, marine mammal eaters, so seals. They love a good whale carcass. It's a great place to see a white shark. But they also eat a lot of fish too. A lot of sharks are predatory, so they will eat fish, crustaceans, lobsters. And then, you know, fascinatingly, some of the, you know, three of the biggest, the biggest sharks are planktivores, meaning they eat the smallest animals in the ocean. So plankton in huge amounts, kind of like baleen whales. So they, you know, sharks have been around for hundreds of millions of years and have, you know, have filled a lot of ocean niches during that evolution.

27:23Jasmine, how do you think sharks' diets have shaped humans, maybe not understanding, but at least their perception of them? Well, I think in general people have fear of predators because they see them as, oh, they hunt things. If they hunt fish, they can hunt me down too, that sort of idea. But something that's interesting is some predators kind of get a pass from that if we decide that they're cute. So like dolphins are also predators, but we think that dolphins are cute and we get excited when we see dolphins, but we get scared when we see sharks. So I don't think it's entirely just their diet.

28:02It's also the image that has been created that we have in our pop culture. and I think that to some extent the the fact that you know we see them you know taking down a seal and things like that it kind of sets sets us up for this fear um that you know it could take down a person if it so wanted to um and I think that that's really where this movie concept comes from that they're amazing predators. They're really good at hunting down prey. And as a movie maker, you take that and you just spin it slightly, and suddenly they're hunting down an entire island of people. Well, while we're talking about Jaws, we of course have to talk about the soundtrack.

29:03John, what makes the Jaws soundtrack such a classic? I mean, you hear those opening bars and you automatically know what it is. It has, it's a very simple piece of music. And you hear it from the very beginning of the film. That's what I had forgotten. As soon as the film starts, you start to hear it. I think it's just ominous. It's simple, ominous. It kind of summons up this dark force. It's not overly orchestrated. it just hits you in the gut and it's obviously iconic. I think it suggests like a lot of the movie what you don't see and I think the brilliance of Jaws because the fake shark looks so bad that Steven Spielberg decides to use score and then those drums that you see on the top of the ocean to suggest what's underneath.