Why no big movie studios would attempt to make JAWS today
That’s exactly the sort of thing and old guy would say, isn’t it?
Cuz everything was better back in the olden days. Except it wasn’t of course - I know, I was there.
We’re not just talking about ‘They don’t make ‘em like that anymore’ here, we’re really looking at what would stop JAWS getting made in the first place, and if it did manage to get the green light, what constraints would be put on its production.
So let’s start with the most obvious thing:
Bruce.
So, he’d definitely be CGI. 100% that’s the way they’d go. None of this mucking about waiting for him to behave, they’d ‘film’ all the shark stuff in a computer, then cobble it together with the actors (who’d mostly be filmed on green screen too) and that’s be that.
But this isn’t about how would they film JAWS today - it’s about why it wouldn’t happen in the first place.
Some of you might be thinking, ‘but it’s a no-brainer’, surely they’d make it. I mean look at how much cash it brought it!’.
Ahh, but that’s the beauty of hindsight isn’t it? Every great success looks like a sure thing after the event.
Who would’ve put money on coffee shops or buying things off the internet as world beating business models 15 or 20 years ago? If you’d told me when I was a kid that one day people would be able to shoot broadcast quality footage (on a TELEPHONE - I mean, what the actual…?) edit it on a bit of free software, then show it to the world - all from the comfort of their bedroom, I’d say you were nuts.
And it’s exactly the same with movies, no one can really predict what’ll be a hit and these days when studios are looking for their big hits, they only go after the sure thing. There’s no time for much development of character or story. They want an audience locked in, ready to throw down their credit cards and buy a ticket. They want people to know what the movie will be about so the spreadsheets can be filled in prior to release and predict what the payback will be. So then they can start planning the sequel.
Steven Spielberg uses an iPhone to shoot his first music video
They want star vehicles too, not character pieces.
And no slow-burners either, none of this ‘setting the scene’ nonsense, we want to get in there with a big KAPOW, then sprint to the next set-piece.
But then that’s exactly what Spielberg did, except he did it with subtlety.
Shot day-for-night to keep the invisible terror factor high, we’re tricked into thinking we know more about the shark than we do. Because we don’t see anything.
Nowadays you’d have a huge breach as it broke through the water, engulfing its victim. Lots of fast edits, crash zooms and shaky-cam. Flashes of teeth and clouds of blood in the water, then a towering fin receding towards the dark horizon.
It’d be the opposite of what Spielberg did. He said he didn’t want the first attack to be a ‘monster moment’, he wanted to scare the audience into worrying what the hell was going to happen next.
I think its fair to say he managed that.
Tarantino managed this same slight of hand, of getting the audience to believe they saw something when they didn’t, in Reservoir Dogs. When Michael Madsen’s deranged Mr Blonde slices off Officer Nash’s ear, you don’t see a thing.
It feels like you do, but Madsen blocks the shot with his body and then all you get is Nash screaming, lots of blood and Blonde dancing around cackling to himself holding the ear.
Another reason JAWS wouldn’t be made today is probably because as well as there not being many visionaries left at studios, most directors are propping up either comic book franchises or helming endless sequels, prequels and reboots. Or maybe that’s all that’s being offered to them…
But where are the Spielbergs of this generation? JJ Abrams was lauded as the next big thing at one point but he got swallowed up with ‘Star Trek’, then ‘Star Wars’, ‘Mission Impossible’ and even ‘Super 8’. This last one was a straight homage to the Spielberg and the 80s and it too was repackaged near enough wholesale and thrown back at us as the admittedly very compelling ‘Stranger Things’.
M. Night Shyamalan was a strong contender, a talented writer and director of ‘The Sixth Sense’, ‘Unbreakable’, ‘The Village’ and ‘Glass’ but seems to have got a bit lost of late. His tendency to always have a twist in his movies meant this became his ‘thing’. And he became something of a slave to it.
Hopefully he’ll come back with an original movie that redefines who he is as a filmmaker and shows that its not just big flashy summer movies that can excite the public.
And there’s no getting away from it, JAWS took its sweet time getting to the screen.
Principle photography was meant to take 55 days but this metastasised into a gruelling 159. Even back in the 1970s, this was a long time to be on location. Spielberg has since stated ‘I thought my career was over’.
But his producers believed in him. Zanuck and Brown could smell talent like a Great White can smell blood and they stuck by him. It was lucky they’d just come of ‘The Sting’ a year before (again starring Robert Shaw) as their stock was definitely riding high in Hollywood, even so, it was quite a roll of the dice!
Spielberg was 26 in 1974. He’d made the TV feature ‘Duel’ (later to get a theatrical release) but the Goldie Hawn starrer, ‘Sugarland Express’ was his only true cinematic effort at that point.
During his time working in television, famously formidable screen legend, Joan Crawford was horrified at being told what to do by this young whippersnapper. She soon came to realise however that she was watching a new master at work.
Crawford said at the time: “It was immediately obvious to me, and probably everyone else, that here was a young genius.”
Today, no studio in the world would give a summer movie to a guy who’d done an episode of ‘Night Gallery’, a TV film about a truck and a road movie starring the girl from ‘Laugh In’. Just wouldn’t happen.
These days you might get given something with a small budget, due for release when all the big spandex spectaculars were out of the way, but other than that, forget it.
There are many visuals from JAWS that the world now knows and loves.
The ‘Dolly Zoom’ - not a Spielberg invention (Hitchcock got there first in ‘Vertigo’) but it still crops up even now in other movies.
The ‘Trust me Charlie, don’t look back!’’ moment with the world’s most terrifying jetty.
‘Brody and Son’ - where Martin and Sean sit together at the dinner table and we get a beautiful break from all the mayhem.
‘Research and Reflections’ as pictures of shark glance off Brody’s glasses and we see the horror of past shark attacks.
‘Quint’s Ghost Story’ - the soliloquy where Quint bares his soul and reveals why he’ll never put on a life jacket again.
You get all of these (in a summer blockbuster, lest we forget!) and every one of them gives the film layer after layer of nuance and complexity. This is no ordinary thriller or horror, this is a tale of heroism, fear, humour, light, shade and poetry.
And underpinning it all, driving the visuals forward, powering the film towards its frantic and explosive conclusion, is the score to end all scores.
John Williams had been working in the motion picture industry since 1960 when his first screen credit appeared on the movie ‘Because They’re Young’. He went on to write music for the pilot episode of ‘Gilligan’s Island’, ‘Lost In Space’, ‘The Time Tunnel’ and ‘Land of the Giants’. .
In 1972, he hit the the big leagues as cinema entered the disaster movie era with ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ (the remake of which would have Richard Dreyfus in its cast), 1974’s ‘The Towering Inferno’ and ‘Earthquake’.
When Spielberg approached Williams to do JAWS (after Williams had completed ‘Sugarland Express’) Spielberg thought he knew exactly what he wanted for his modern-day take on Moby Dick - but he was wrong.
“Initially, I did a score for Robert Altman called ‘Images’, which was all about Japanese sounds and shakuhachi and percussion and so on and that’s the music Steven thought he should have for JAWS. I thought that was a crazy idea, that this was a simple adventure thing and I need to find some musical theme or idea that might represent the shark or might represent our primordial fear - like we fear snakes, we fear beasts of the sea.”
Without Williams’ score its doubtful whether JAWS would have such a huge effect on the global consciousness. Since 1975, the international language for unseen danger is the ‘DUH DUM’ motif. Like the USS Indianapolis speech, other parts of the score were a huge swerve away from the blood and guts of the action. His playful themes as the tourists arrive on the ferry make you almost forget its a film about a killer shark. The talent to write like Williams simply is not around anymore.
JAWS would not get made today because this next level expertise has been chased away from big adventure movies. To suggest a movie about a killer shark but have a scientist who doesn’t have the body of an action hero and refuse to have physics-defying special effects is now unthinkable.
It’s a shame, because there are people out there who’d like to see movies that aren’t just big cartoons, where the cast isn’t almost twenty strong and where everyone’s hair isn’t absolutely perfect. And most modern movies seem to feel the need to be at least 2 and a half hours long.
So really, the main reason JAWS wouldn’t get made today is simple. The people making the decisions are scared of taking chances. And they’re not really sure what original talent is. And if studio heads and producers had been thinking that way in 1974, it’s doubtful whether Steven Spielberg would have gone on to have the career he did.
When JAWS was released, cinema goers at the time (of which I will be eternally grateful to have been part of) were treated to the golden age of the Hollywood blockbuster. When directors could make decisions and take chances. If things went wrong they could adapt and build up other parts of their script so that when the movie came out people were floored not only by the screams and the jump scares and the creeping dread of it all, but for decades after they’d be quoting the lines, getting dressed up as the characters at Halloween and even subconsciously murmuring those few terrifying notes as they paddled at the water’s edge.
Words by Tim Armitage
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