JAWS--A Film You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

[erik]

The New Yorker's Michael Sragow looks at director Steven Spielberg's 1975 film JAWS, and how a film that almost tanked the young Arizonan's film career instead became one of the most memorable films of the 20th century:

www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/08/restoration-of-steven-spielbergs-jaws.html

[Dianna]

I saw Shark Week last week and there was a documentary about the movie.. There were all kinds of problem with the mechanical shark, it worked before the filming until they put it into the salt water. lol. Still one of the scariest best movies of our time. IMO

[erik]

Quote by dianna re. JAWS:

There were all kinds of problem with the mechanical shark, it worked before the filming until they put it into the salt water. lol. Still one of the scariest best movies of our time. IMO

Nobody had reckoned on how the salt water would affect the shark's electronic mechanisms. But Spielberg did the right thing by only implying the shark's presence until two-thirds of the way in, pretty much doing it the way Alfred Hitchcock would have done it, and thus ramping up the tension and suspense. This is the utter irony of the thing: the element that caused the most problems on JAWS actually seemed to have led to it being such an obscene success, artistically, critically, and commercially.