Spoofing JAWS: What I did on my 1976 Summer Vacation

Spoofing Jaws: What I did on my 1976 Summer Vacation

And you thought Steven Spielberg had it rough in shooting Jaws ….

My best friend and I were 11 years old when saw the original Jaws in the summer of 1975 in our hometown, one-screen theater in rural southern Illinois. The impact of this event was not only immediate as well as long-term, but also intermediate, lasting for months and months after that incredible summer release, aided and abetted by spoof after spoof after spoof on TV, magazines and everywhere else. The mid-‘70s were a different era, and because my friend and I were vastly “under-scheduled” relative to today’s standards, we came up with the idea to shoot our own spoof of Jaws. For some reason we thought must have been clever at the time but that remains inexplicable in present day, we titled our spoof “Joss”. We spent months carefully scripting the entire thing, borrowing (i.e., stealing) from every source we could get. We then shot our “masterpiece” in July 1976, the summer following the initial release.

Brownie camera, film roll and developed reel (Tools at hand, 1976)

The only film camera available to us was my parents’ Kodak Brownie 8mm movie camera, which was already old in the summer of ‘76. While there were (I think) brightness/exposure settings, there was only one lens, and no zoom capability. It was powered like a wind-up watch – you wound the mechanism, but if you forgot to wind it fully, the mechanism might slow down (and therefore your result was speeded up).

Putting aside how primitive our camera was compared to the amazing devices we all carry in our pockets now - I think cavemen who used a chisel and stone would have been comfortable with this technology - our family Brownie presented several specific major problems for our project. First, the camera used 8mm film, each roll of which gave us approximately four minutes of movie time. But there was no precise timing mechanism for this four minutes. I think we might be able to tell generally how much was available, but it was no more precise than having a general sense for having used half or three-fourths of the film. And there was a little bit of leader and trailer film at the beginning end. This was a problem at the end of each roll: the camera was still “rolling” but you didn’t know exactly when you stopped actually being filmed. So we had to guess when the film we loaded was “done”. And neither of our families were “rich” by any stretch of the imagination. We could afford exactly two rolls of film – so we had 8 minutes to film our masterpiece. There was not going to be any third roll of film absent a major catastrophe. And of course you had no idea what you had until it was developed, days if not weeks later.

And editing? Forget about it. We had no editing capability - no Verna “Mother Cutter” Fields – except for being able to splice the two resulting four-minute reels together. As a result, we adopted by necessity the John Ford technique of “editing in the camera”: we shot in order, one take for every scene, no editing. (By the way, we had no idea who John Ford was or what “editing in the camera” meant; we just didn’t have any other options.) We also had to make sure our story was 8 minutes, no more and no less – and in fact, scenes evenly divided into four-minute sub-pieces. Miraculously, by carefully rehearsing, blocking every scene and keeping meticulous count of the minutes and seconds, we accomplished that. (We had no idea what “blocking” was, of course; we just knew we had one take and that was “it” so we instinctively knew we had to do it.) And while we didn’t have a “Mother Cutter,” we did have my actual mother playing the Bill Butler role as our cinematographer, who was key to this tracking effort. We had about 10 seconds left over after the end of our masterpiece, which then was our “BTS” (it started to rain after the last scene and we are all running inside the house!).

Trusty Craig cassette recorder, mid-70s vintage

Finally: Sound, you say? Forget about that too. This was a silent camera. And of course we had completely scripted the story—yes, we were kind of crazy, weird and (mostly) bored. Our idea was to use the portable cassette player I had gotten in 1973 for my 9th birthday. We were going to identify a reference point on the resulting film, at which point we’d planned to turn on the cassette player with our recorded dialogue and thereby create our sound “talkie” movie. In other words, we were going to “loop” the entire silent movie on my cassette player and just play the film and cassette at the same time. We labored on that for quite a while after we got the developed reels back, but it never really worked right - we could never get it synced close enough. We decided to go with a modified approach, with me narrating much of the film’s action (think Ray Liotta in Goodfellas – not that we were prescient, we just had no other options). That said, some limited dialogue survived in selected spots. We realized a viewer could tolerate the occasional dialogue that was not perfectly synced, but that no one could sit through 8 minutes straight of even slightly unsynced dialogue. I fancied myself an impersonator à la Rich Little (that was his heyday), and somehow we all thought it would be “hilarious” for me to do the narration in the my best impersonation of Hubert Humphrey. Spoiler alert: after 45+ years of hindsight, maybe this was not as hilarious as we thought at the time. And yes, I was that kid.

Orca mast and crow’s nest/outdoor tv antenna tower

Our scripting was derivative of every spoof we had seen of the original since the summer of ’75 (and if you were around, you remember it was spoofed EVERYWHERE). I played Chief “Bloody” and my buddy/collaborator (the Zanuck to my Brown) played the intrepid oceanographer, “Fatt Snooper”, complete with a pillow under his shirt. He also played little Alex Kintner. We recruited another classmate who did Caption “Squint” as well as most ever other role, male or female: the kid on the beach with the chief discovering Chrissie’s remains, Mayor Vaughn and Ben Gardner’s head. We also converted Alex’s mother into Alex’s father, and he played that role as well. The literal girl next door (my neighbors’ daughter) played Chrissy.

We tried our best to fit in every iconic scene we could. Considering we didn’t have YouTube or other social media platforms to research and view scenes multiple times but were instead relying on our single searing viewing at age 11 and the ubiquitous spoofs, we really got a good number of them in our 8-minute featurette. We worked in Chrissie’s swim and demise, the discovery of her in the next morning, the Alex Kintner scene, the town hall scene with Quint scraping his fingernails on the chalkboard, Ben Gardner’s head rolling out of the hole in his hull, Quint being strapped in his chair on the boat and going “fishing” for our shark, “Joss,” Hooper going overboard to confront Joss, Quint’s death, and Brody’s epic final confrontation with the beast, among others. And my collaborator insisted on opening credits, so we had that too.

Author, then and now – or, young chief Brody/Bloody morphs into Richard Dreyfuss as an adult. Sorry the early photo is not clearer, but, that’s the story – no technology in the 1970s!

A mechanical Bruce that didn’t work and the exhausting filming on the unforgiving oceanwaters near Martha’s Vineyard? We would have killed for such luxuries! But we nevertheless had a few tricks up our sleeve.

We were landlocked in rural southern Illinois, so no body of water to work with. When anyone jumped in the water, we had our cinematographer (my mother) set up at a low angle. Then the actor jumped off a bench and someone else was set with the sprinkler out of the camera’s view and turned it on to simulate a splash. We had no cage, so the gag for Fatt Snooper (our Matt Hooper) was to jump into the ocean to try to have a martini with our shark, which was a shark poster for this scene. Snooper was to slip a mickey into the shark’s martini, but our clever Joss told Fatt it was the shark’s “family tradition” to switch glasses after a toast, so instead Snooper drank the mickey fell to the bottom of the ocean. For Squint’s epic demise, I switched into my (terrible, I’m certain) Howard Cosell impersonation and set it up by announcing it like a boxing match (“…in this corner, weighing in at 3 tons…”). Then our Squint slipped and fell and got gobbled up into a cardboard cutout of a shark, from a side view, with mouth gaping, while saying “That’s all folks!”. And to simulate Chief Bloody’s final scene on the sinking Orca (which we named, appropriately, the “Corny”), I climbed onto our outdoor tv antenna tower, which looked something like the mast of the sinking ship – low angle shooting did a lot of work in our shots.

And our other gags were equally cheesy. For example, on the beach scene the morning after Chrissie’s demise, the “kid” and I are indeed heaving our breakfast, but instead from our reaction to the leftover pizza from last night’s beach party. (“Anchovies!” [barf]) And when Snooper describes witnessing Joss gobble up little Alex in as much gory detail as we could muster for 12-year olds, he turns and asks me as Chief Bloody: “You know what this means, right Chief?” Instead of me saying something like “it was no boat accident” or “we have a shark problem”, my reaction was “Yeah, there goes our G rating to PG….” And then when the raft washes ashore, it actually flies in from off camera and smacks me in the face. Well deserved, given the writing….

In recalling and writing this, I will say: eight minutes of Jaws spoofery has yielded a lifetime of memories about this crazy project. Family and classmates still ask about it!

Author’s note: Scott Wylie was the “Zanuck to my Brown,” the “Benchley to my Gottlieb” (or vice versa??). This is written through my eyes, but we were every single ways 50/50 collaborators - he in fact probably drove it more than me. Forgive me, old chum (so to speak). He was the best compatriot then - and still is. -Rob Endicott

March 23, 2024

Words by Rob Endicott

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