‘FINS’: A 2010 student spoof production of JAWS

One weekend in 2010, a group of friends from Wakefield, MA made a spoof of JAWS for a high school film fest - and it’s epic!

Steve Erban:

I was not in the elective ‘TV production’ course in high-school, but a lot of my friends were. Each year around Halloween the TV production department hosted ‘Fright Night’; a student arts showcase and horror film festival, where the students could proudly display their talents and have some fun indulging in whatever our underdeveloped, uninhibited, minds could come up with. 

Over the summer of 2010, after watching the 1975 classic, I suggested to our tight-knit group

of friends that we do a JAWS spoof for the film fest that October. 

Fellow Jaws enthusiast and great friend, Rob DiNanno, was really the only one excited about the prospect of this. I spent the summer writing out a script, revising it with him and got others in our group of friends on board. 

We based our version of the famous shark tale around the absurd premise that a great white shark worked its way into what is essentially a dirty pond in our hometown of Wakefield, and threatened to ruin the Halloween festivities for that year!

I personally built a paper mâché great white shark, painted in latex and stuffed with spray foam insulation, secured a tiny row boat, and got together a wonderful cast of fellow classmates to help produce and act in this film. In addition to helping direct, edit, revise script, props master and more, Rob stars as our Chief Brody. 

I played Quint, and another friend played Hooper. We filmed it around town and on location in the lake over the fall and would edit in and after school. As highschoolers filming on the water with shark mannequins, boats, extras and rigs that pulled a human through the water, while juggling school and marching band (Rob and I both) was daunting, but very enjoyable and formative. It premiered at the 2010 Fright Night and was a huge success in town! 

Students and Teachers alike loved it, and it remains a TV production teaching example staple to this day. It is one of my fondest memories from high school, and it was totally worth spending days in a polluted town lake for!

Rob DiNanno:

Is there an equivalent term to ‘arsonist’ for someone who has a strong desire towards the deliberate submergence of a watercraft? If so, I fit the bill. 

Ever since seeing Jaws at an arguably too early age in my life, I have relentlessly spent summers sinking old canoes, flipping kayaks, and yelling “SHARK!” near any body of water murky enough to enable my twisted imagination. I’ve been mystified by any and all things involving sharks and boats, and filmmaking since seeing Quint, Brody and Hooper for the first time in the waters I’m accustomed to as a Massachusetts native. They all seem to be inseparably fused in nature because of the impact this movie had on the gelatinous fungus in my skull - which later became a fully formed adult brain. 

So really, to remake the classic that I was so obsessed with seemed all too obvious. Why didn’t I think of that? There could never be a better excuse to sink a boat! I had waited my entire sixteen years of living for this opportunity, and I was going to make damn sure we did it right.

Steve carried much of the weight of our little production, and ultimately became the main cause of attraction for people who were anticipating the screening. He has that quality people speak of in tones of reverence and admiration, and is someone everyone knows or would like to. To see him as Quint?? He’s already one of the funniest people I know, but that just sounded too good to be true. 

Lake Quannapowitt, the setting for the second act of our movie, had once been enjoyed by the public as a recreational oasis. For the duration of my life, however, the lake has been essentially off-limits due to deliberate chemical waste dumping by the town gas & light department. This provided a nice tongue-in-cheek logic to the presence of our bulbous and repulsive toothy protagonist.

For months we took direct notes from the production approach of Jaws, and ultimately encountered many of the same hurdles (albeit on a much smaller scale), as well as a few of our own in the filming and editing process with the brand new DSLR technology and ZOOM audio recording at hand. We put a lot of work into making something we felt proud of - maybe in part to absolve ourselves of any guilt in having had so much damn fun making a school project. I can still taste the ‘Pirate’s Booty Potato Flyers’ we used for Quint’s town meeting snack, and feel that hot sun melting the fake blood onto my fingertips.

It wasn’t just the filming that was fun - our screening was a blast. The stuff of dreams for us at that age. With every anticipated uproar throughout the night until our movie came up on deck, I could feel the palpable unspoken essence of what makes Jaws such an enduring and influential phenomenon. The music, the characters, the setting, the interplay of curiosity and fear towards the natural world, and the tale of triumph in making it come to screen… 

It all comes together to build a boat that will never sink.

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