JAWS first Assistant Director Tom Joyner passes away
Tom Joyner, the first assistant director of JAWS and the production manager of JAWS 2, has passed away.
The name may not be as familiar as that of the likes of Spielberg, Verna Fields, Joe Alves, Bill Butler or Michael Chapman, but Joyner is there in many of the key behind the scenes photos of the film, which was shot on location on Martha's Vineyard.
Speaking in an interview with Herb Adelman for the Directors Guild America, he said: “JAWS would have to be the pinnacle picture of my career…It was a year of my life. I was actually on it two weeks short of a year from actual time of prep ‘til the time we finished shooting.”
In that same interview Joyner remembered location scouting – and helping search for the Orca.
He said: “Joe Alves and I went out on a search for the Orca. And the studio was [Universal Pictures] - this was a very small picture…Everybody involved in JAWS had totally underestimated the scope of the project...but we--Joe [Joe Alves] and I drove from Massachusetts up to Maine, along the coast, trying to find the picture boat. And we came from Portland, Maine all the way down.”
Being the first assistant director meant that Joyner was there for the duration of the extended shoot that ballooned from 58 days to 159 days, explaining how they would try and work round the weather, the tides and the small problem of a non-cooperative mechanical shark named Bruce.
Tom said: “We would always try to have an alternate call sheet wherever we went. And even within the call sheet, have alternate opportunities to go to, inserts to pick up, or other shots, or other sequences we could do and keeping the cast on a ‘we’ll notify’ and always trying to have something else we could go to.
Tom Joyner on location with JAWS director Steven Spielberg
“But once you make a commitment to the ocean and to a certain site of the ocean, it’s difficult; you lose a lot of that flexibility, ‘cause you can’t move the entire company back and go to a land sequence or to go to something else. You lose, you just, the time you get there, it’s time to wrap. But there was a lot of changes and things we did do, but unfortunately, we exhausted all of those things due to subsequent shark breakdowns.
And eventually, we got to a point where it was just shark shot after shark shot after shark shot. Steven [Steven Spielberg] and Verna Fields, the editor, were very creative in coming up with the concept of the barrels. That once a barrel was shot in to the shark, we could track barrels across, so we did a lot of times going off shooting barrels, shots of barrels going back and forth.
“And that was a wonderful way of creating that heightened fear with the John William’s music, of course. Seeing the barrels coming through and you felt the ominous presence of the shark. We didn’t have a shark that worked so, well, all we could do was shoot a barrel.”
As well as the Steven Spielberg shark classic and its 1978 sequel, he was assistant director on Spielberg's big screen debut The Sugarland Express (1974), production manager on Two Minute Warning (1976), assistant director on Slap Shot (1977), unit production manager on The Blues Brothers (1980), production manager on Starman (1984), unit production manager on Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) and co producer and unit production manager on Predator 2 (1990).
He was Executive Production Manager at Walt Disney Pictures from 1985 to 1987, supervising films such as Ruthless People, The Color of Money, Outrageous Fortune, Tin Men – starring Matt Hooper himself Richard Dreyfuss, Good Morning Vietnam and Three Men and a Baby. From 1990 to 1996 he was Vice President, Feature Production at Warner Bros., supervising the production of films like The Client, On Deadly Ground – also starring a post JAWS the Revenge Michael Caine, Doc Hollywood, Point of No Return, and The Bodyguard. That's not a bad record for this or any vicinity.
Rogelio Fojo kindly got in touch with The Daily Jaws, making us aware of the loss of Tom, and the filmmaker was good enough to share a few words and memories about the man he met in an LA yahd, not too fah from the cah.
He said: “I met Tom at a backyard barbecue party in LA almost two decades ago. A friend had invited me to bring a short-film I’d recently shot on 16 mm, my very first attempt at filmmaking, called Chimera.
While the host was busy inside the house setting up his TV set to play the VHS I brought of my rough cut, I struck a conversation in the garden with a tall guy about movies in general and horror films in particular. His wife Laura, standing next to us, claimed that her favorite horror movie was Hitchcock’s The Birds. I protested immediately that JAWS was the superior one, the ultimate horror movie (I happen to think that good horror movies must scare you).
Tom revealed that the hand that scratches the blackboard with the drawing of a shark during an iconic scene of the film is not the hand of actor Robert Shaw ("Quint") who had already left the set for the day, but actually the hand of Tom Joyner himself.
“Laura laughed and said that JAWS also happened to be her husband’s favorite film. “In fact”, she added, “Tom worked on that movie”. I was shocked, delighted to hear that, while my mind was rushing through memory files, trying to remember this guy’s face among the multiple beach extras at the Martha’s Vineyard location… when Laura finished her sentence: “He was the First Assistant Director in Jaws”. My jaw dropped to the floor while Tom smiled sheepishly.
“In his humble, unlike-Hollywood demeanor, Tom Joyner was the best kind of celebrity I could ever dream to meet. Revisiting this first memory of him fills me with joy! Knowing that we later became friends, though, fills me with the sadness of his passing. But hey… we delivered the bomb. Here’s to swimming with bowlegged women, amigo Tom!”
Words by Dean Newman
Photos supplied by Rogelio Fojo
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