Jaws... Lives UP!

 

For its 50th anniversary, the LiveUp Podcast reviewed 1975's Jaws... and of course it lived up. The original summer blockbuster still terrifies the audience... the suspense!... all those dangling legs! Get out of the water!

We wanted to talk more about the innovation that occurred when Jaws ran out of money. There's that saying that a company can do things "Fast, Cheap, or Good - pick two". Most films focus on the Fast and Good. Each department head (wardrobe, set designer, special effects, hair & makeup, props, etc.) agrees a set budget at the beginning of filming... which they promptly blow through in the name of prestige. I have heard department heads say they need to go over budget to be taken seriously. 

For Example: Once, working as a PA, I brought the line producer a stack of invoices, and he asked me how much I spent per year on makeup. I was very poor (as most PAs are) so I responded that I probably spent $20 per year. I'll never forget his sardonic response: "So $10,000 a week for one person would be excessive?" The head of makeup was invoicing $10,000 each week for the leading lady's makeup... and the line producer kept signing off on it in disgust because he didn't want her to drop out of the film. The resulting movie was terrible, by the way. 

Back to Jaws. The makers of Jaws had a budget problem that included 3 mechanical sharks, each costing $250,000. The sharks kept breaking. They kept delaying shooting so the mechanics could fix it. The filming ran over schedule and the budget nearly doubled. 

To speed up filming, Steven Spielberg had to work without the sharks, so he began filming scenes from the shark's point of view. 

Take, for example, the opening scene. The script called for a more graphic depiction of Chrissie's demise:

We can see in this earlier draft of the script that it calls for Chrissie to see the "water-lump" swimming towards her, and that she's supposed get whipped up in the air as the shark plays with its food...

...but since the shark was broken, Spielberg instead filmed it so we can barely see anything at all. It scares the audience more to not see it. We have to fill in the details with our imagination... which is so, so much worse. 

Spielberg himself has said that "the shark not working was a godsend." It forced him to innovate a solution that changed cinematography forever. 

Jaws's budget constraints leading to forced ingenuity remind me of another 1975 movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Terry Gilliam described the budget restrictions that the Pythons encountered: "I think the restrictions made the film better, because if we had the money for real horses there would have been no coconut shells, which are far funnier. So we were saved by poverty from the mediocrity to which we aspired."

Let that be a lesson to us all - work with what you've got, and make things even more epic.  

Listen to all of our thoughts on Jaws here, on YouTube, or on your favorite podcasting platform.