Why Bruce the shark from Jaws is the greatest practical effect ever made

“That’s a twenty footer”

“Twenty Five, three tons of him”

Well that’s what Hooper and Quint reckon in the script at least, the reality of course was slightly different. As has been discussed before, Bruce was not exactly the most amenable of movie stars. Perhaps he knew everyone thought he was being a pain in the arse, maybe he’d heard that upstart director call him ‘the great white turd’, whatever Bruce’s reasons for not playing ball, his action should be applauded, because as we know, without all his hissy fits Jaws would never have been the the monster hit it turned out to be.

OK, so Bruce wasn’t actually flesh and blood, he was a machine but there’s no getting away from it, he certainly felt real in the movie. He had personality and drive and even when you knew he was really a big hunk of rubber and steel, you still believed in his performances (however fleeting they might have been).

The definitions of a ‘practical effect’ is a ‘special effect produced physically, without computer-generated imagery or other post production techniques’.

Bruce was built by Bob Mattey of ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ fame. All the mechanical beasts (for there were three ‘Bruces’) had a steel skeleton and were jammed full of air-powered pneumatics that moved various parts of their bodies and hydraulics to make the famous jaws go up and down. There was a ‘right to left’ Bruce, a ‘left to right’ Bruce and one that was attached to a shark sled that could be towed along giving the impression of movement. Added to this there was also a single dorsal fin and a dorsal and tail together. Each Bruce cost $500,000 a piece out of a budget of $9 million, so not exactly cheap.

Every Jaws fan has heard the stories about how many times Bruce broke down or sank but this isn’t what we’re looking at here, we’re going to examine the good stuff, the positives about him, the factors that made him King of the Monsters (step aside Godzilla).

Hooper was right, Bruce was a “perfect engine”. He was constructed for the sole purpose of making people so scared some of them would never even go paddling again, let alone swimming. His creators left nothing to guesswork either, they were meticulous. They scaled up a real Great White and made sure his features weren’t exaggerate - everything had to be to scale. So you didn’t have great big elongated teeth or a dorsal fin that was ten feet high, Bruce was anatomically correct - except for his famous jowls, that is. Spielberg explained that for Bruce’s jaws to open and close they had to allow for quite a sizeable amount of movement, this caused one or two headaches for Bob Mattey, Joe Alves and the team. Spielberg has a lot of souvenirs from Jaws and one of them is a maquette that shows what the full size Bruce would look like.

“This is a maquette with the overhanging upper mandible. A real shark doesn’t have this. but mechanically, we were out able to get the jaws to open and close… so they had to cheat and add this jowl. It was the only way in 1974 we could get the mouth to open and close. Now we could solve it. But Bob Mattey was not able to solve it.”

Notice Spielberg hints that modern movie techniques would mean something could be done to avoid Bruce’s ‘Walter Matthau look’ but would that have been CGI or still practical? Whatever the answer, I don’t really think Bruce’s jaws look any worse for the jowls. I’ve seen plenty of modern movie effects that have either not been thoroughly thought through or have been so meticulously crafted and that everyone at the studio got so excited by what they’d created, they forgot about writing a good story.

And that’s another of Bruce’s big pluses, because of his tendency to have more than one or two ‘sick days’, he never got in the way of the human side of things. He might’ve taken a few chunks out of it once in a while but he was only following orders… Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, they were never upstaged and consequently they’re characters you remember - they’re not just the cannon fodder (shark fodder?) you see in lots of more recent movies where big scary monsters are on the prowl. Jaws was a story about humans from a small coastal community and how they reacted to extraordinary circumstances. How they fought each other and fought together. Only once the humans had been introduced into the story did the shark really take over.

Bob Mattey was the only man who would touch the project too, everyone else turned it down, said it couldn’t be done but Bob just smiled and took it on. Optimism was his default setting. He even came back for Jaws 2.

I was asked if I’d change anything about Jaws and I immediately said no, you don’t change something that’s perfect because it implies that you know better than anybody else how something should be. And I don’t. But maybe there is one thing about Bruce I’d change - how he was treated after the movie wrapped.

The three sharks were either dumped in the backlot or sold off cheap when Universal didn’t think the film would turn in much of a profit, they just chucked them out! It seems very odd in this age of movie memorabilia collecting that studios wouldn’t have even a tiny bit of foresight to maybe hang onto items that cost them $1.5 million to make, but they didn’t. And then what happened? Jaws was the biggest hit of all time! Universal had to make a whole new Bruce to go on their studio tour. I remember it well...

1976 was when I went and it was probably about the coolest thing I’d ever seen - even though I’d not watched the movie yet. And I was still only six years old (I saw it when I turned 7)

One thing was odd though, all that care and attention Bob Mattey and Joe Alves had taken making sure Bruce was anatomically correct obviously got thrown out. When Bruce jumped out of the water to attack the tram, his teeth looked like giant white carrots. They were huge - about a foot long - and they waggled about in the breeze. Apparently the studio had demanded the teeth were increased in size to make him ‘bigger, scarier and cooler - with more teeth!’’ Jump forward 39 years to 2015 and that’s exactly what the scientists in Jurassic World - another Universal picture - were told to do with the Indominous Rex. Spooky…

Now of course the dinosaur went on to eat lots of people but poor old ‘theme park ride Bruce’ he just looked sad and kind of silly. Mind you, I’ve still got the pictures.

Over the years they toned down the Fright Night dental work and he started to look a bit more like his old self but nothing could really compare to the fabulous overacting we saw up on screen.

He may well have been just a bundle of electronics and plastic but he was our bundle of electronics and plastic - and we loved him.

Words by Tim Armitage

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