Speaker 1: Pushkin. It was a shark bigger than anything previously seen
Speaker 1: in these waters, far bigger the great white as an
Speaker 1: apex predator, but this specimen was truly at the top
Speaker 1: of the food chain. Normally, a shark reaching fourteen, fifteen
Speaker 1: or sixteen feet would be considered large, but snout to tailfin,
Speaker 1: this monster measured twenty five feet, the length of a
Speaker 1: school bus. Its body was thicker too, and its huge
Speaker 1: jaws were set with rows of jagged teeth, each one
Speaker 1: the size of a shot glass. Most Great Whites are
Speaker 1: content to feast on seals, small whales, or other sharks,
Speaker 1: but this creep was billed as a true man eater.
Speaker 1: This shark would swallow you whole, a little shaking, a
Speaker 1: little tenderising, little downyard girl. Rumors of its existence had
Speaker 1: swirled around the island community of Martha's Vineyard since the
Speaker 1: early summer of nineteen seventy four, but the creature only
Speaker 1: surfaced in the waters of Nantucket Sound as July gave
Speaker 1: way to August. When it breached, it did so in
Speaker 1: full view of several boatloads of horrified witnesses. This bad
Speaker 1: fish was the stuff of nightmares, and many there that
Speaker 1: day had endured sleepless nights dreading this encounter, but the
Speaker 1: reality was so much worse than their feared. We were
Speaker 1: very scared, said one onlooker, Richard Zanuk. The shark came
Speaker 1: arching out of the water, only it rose tale first,
Speaker 1: as if mooning Xanak and his crew. This animatronic prop
Speaker 1: would have been funny had so much money and so
Speaker 1: many reputations not been in serious jeopardy. Jesus Christ said
Speaker 1: movie producer Xanak. We're making a picture called Jaws, and
Speaker 1: we don't have a fucking shark. I'm Tim Harford, and
Speaker 1: you're listening to another cautionary tale. Marking fifty years of Jaws.
Speaker 1: The fiasco of the flopping and flailing mechanical shark was
Speaker 1: many months in the future when Hollywood producers Richard Zannak
Speaker 1: and David Brown sat down to a sumptuous lunch with
Speaker 1: the author of Jaws. Peter Benchley, a jobbing journalist, had
Speaker 1: only recently completed his story of an Atlantic resort town
Speaker 1: terrorized by a giant shark, devouring locals and vacationers alike.
Speaker 1: Being an unknown, Benchle's advance on the hardback had been modest.
Speaker 1: In fact, he had been down to the last six
Speaker 1: hundred dollars in his checking account when a bidding war
Speaker 1: erupted over the paperback rights to his still unpublished novel.
Speaker 1: This in turn excited the interest of the movie studios.
Speaker 1: At least one film company had sniffed at Jaws and
Speaker 1: concluded that it would be fighting off more than it
Speaker 1: could chew. It seemed like an impossible tale to bring
Speaker 1: to the screen, requiring an absurd budget and pushing the
Speaker 1: bounds of any special effects then available. But Xanak and
Speaker 1: Brown fell hook line and Sinker for Jaws. They weren't
Speaker 1: any richer than the other movie execs bidding for the rights,
Speaker 1: but they were confident that they could whoo Peter Benchley
Speaker 1: into signing with them. They just promised to make Jaws
Speaker 1: a better film than their rival suitors. But over lunch
Speaker 1: things were off to a shaky start. The producers, aware
Speaker 1: that this would be a tricky film to handle, had
Speaker 1: hired a well regarded, well established director to take the helm.
Speaker 1: This lunch was an opportunity to introduce him to Benchley.
Speaker 1: The director seemed enthusiastic enough and explained his big plans
Speaker 1: for filming The Whale. Eventually winced. The director plowed on
Speaker 1: opining more about the whale. It was on the third
Speaker 1: mention of a whale that Richard Zanak exploded, for God's sake,
Speaker 1: this is a fucking shark. The director was duly fired.
Speaker 1: For his replacement, Zanak and Brown were excited about a
Speaker 1: precocious young talent that'd recently worked with, but did he
Speaker 1: have the maturity and authority to keep such a movie
Speaker 1: from careering off into disaster. The kid can bring visual
Speaker 1: excitement to it, said Zanak, and will give him the
Speaker 1: support he needs. The kid was Steven Spielberg. If we'd
Speaker 1: read Jaws twice, said Richard Zanak, we might never have
Speaker 1: made the movie. To make a picture called Jaws, you
Speaker 1: definitely need a shark. The titular Great White is the
Speaker 1: heart of the story, and the power of the novel
Speaker 1: is in the realistic portrayal of its deadly attacks on humans.
Speaker 1: Reading the book, twenty seven year old Stephen Spielberg had
Speaker 1: been left terrified. I felt like I'd been attacked, he admitted.
Speaker 1: In turn, he wanted audiences jumping out of their cinema
Speaker 1: seats as if they'd been hit with an electric cattle
Speaker 1: prod and that wasn't going to happen with some scale
Speaker 1: model shark and actors on a sound stage in front
Speaker 1: of a blue screen Jaws. The movie would get laughed
Speaker 1: out of town. Spielberg insisted they film on the actual
Speaker 1: ocean and that the shark be as believably scary as possible.
Speaker 1: He had no idea what he was demanding. An early
Speaker 1: suggestion from the producers was to use a real shark.
Speaker 1: Hollywood had a long history of hiring animal wranglers thed
Speaker 1: coaxed performances from Lassie the Collie, Flipper the Dolphin, and
Speaker 1: cheat At the Chimpanzee. The producers had innocently assumed they
Speaker 1: could get a shark trainer, said screenwriter Carl Gottlieb in
Speaker 1: his behind the scenes book The Jaws Log With enough money,
Speaker 1: Gottlieb wrote that trainer could get a great white to
Speaker 1: perform a few simple stumps on Q. No great white
Speaker 1: has ever been successfully held in captivity, and wild ones
Speaker 1: show scant interest in doing anything but swim and eat
Speaker 1: and make little sharks, and even had a wild fish
Speaker 1: been enticed into performing on que. Steven Spielberg had no
Speaker 1: intention of getting into the water to film the creature.
Speaker 1: He was wise. A second unit had been sent to Australia,
Speaker 1: where dem foot great whites were common. They were to
Speaker 1: film underwater sequences with the diminutive actor standing in for
Speaker 1: one of the movie's principal stars. Less than five feet tall.
Speaker 1: This former jockey would make the real sharks looked much bigger.
Speaker 1: The pint sized stuntman was protected from harm by a
Speaker 1: steel cage, but as he prepared to enter it, an
Speaker 1: excited great white lunged for the boat and became tangled
Speaker 1: in the lines, lowering the cage into the water. A
Speaker 1: frenzy thrashing and rolling of the wan Ton shark crushed
Speaker 1: the cage like a beer cat. The actor then reportedly
Speaker 1: locked himself away in a cabin, refusing to come out
Speaker 1: until they were safely tied up at the dock. The
Speaker 1: footage was great that this was clearly no way to
Speaker 1: make a whole film, As Carl got leeb Riley observed,
Speaker 1: you couldn't work with a star who when you shouted
Speaker 1: action instead heard lunchtime guys. Right now. Hold that Spielberg,
Speaker 1: a film buff since childhood, had the answer. Disney The
Speaker 1: Giants Squid in Disney's twenty thousand Leagues under the sea
Speaker 1: had been terrifyingly realistic. Let just hire the guy who
Speaker 1: made that to create their giant mechanical shark. So sixty
Speaker 1: four year old Bob Matty was brought out of retirement
Speaker 1: and in a Californian shed, he began work on three
Speaker 1: fake sharks. One hundred and seventy five thousand dollars had
Speaker 1: been budgeted for each of these three automatons at a
Speaker 1: time when a luxury Cadillac coup Deville could be yours
Speaker 1: under eight thousand jewels was slated for release in time
Speaker 1: for Christmas ninety teen seventy four, less than a year. Hence,
Speaker 1: so time was incredibly short. The fake fish would need
Speaker 1: to be working and in the waters off Martha's Vineyard
Speaker 1: in May, so principal photography could wrap before pesky tourists
Speaker 1: flocked to the resort come July. As Spielberg began storyboarding
Speaker 1: his film with a rearing, snapping shark. In scene after scene,
Speaker 1: the mechanical creatures took shape what Mattie was, indeed a
Speaker 1: special effects wizard. His models could swim and flap their tails,
Speaker 1: their jaws were chomped, and their eyes would roll. It
Speaker 1: was all quite magnificent. The film crew headed east to
Speaker 1: start work, confident that the shark team would follow close behind.
Speaker 1: Spielberg playfully nicknamed the sharks Bruce, after Bruce Raemer, one
Speaker 1: of his lawyers. Each Bruce was a marvel and by
Speaker 1: far the most ambitious practical movie effects ever created. If
Speaker 1: only someone had tested them in seawater, putionary tales will
Speaker 1: return in a moment. Steven Spielberg and his exasperated crew
Speaker 1: soon had new nicknames for the malfunctioning model sharks. Jaws
Speaker 1: was replaced by Flaws. The special effects team were rechristened
Speaker 1: Special Defects. When things got really bad, Spielberg called his
Speaker 1: mechanical actors great white turds. Each Bruce had performed well
Speaker 1: in freshwater tests, but on the rough ocean and in
Speaker 1: corrosive saltwater, every began to fail. The lifelike neoprene sharkskins
Speaker 1: soaked up water, adding vast weight to the model. This
Speaker 1: seawater also degraded the special paint coating, requiring new pigment
Speaker 1: to be flown out from California every day at great expense.
Speaker 1: The sharks were bolted to intricate platforms attached to the seabed,
Speaker 1: which became gummed up with barnacles and kelp. The hydraulic
Speaker 1: hoses that made each bruce waggle began to fray, and
Speaker 1: worst of all, the electric switches that controlled their complex
Speaker 1: movements shorted out. The first time a bruce was towed
Speaker 1: out to sea and placed in the water, it sank.
Speaker 1: Bob Matty, like Victor Frankenstein, defended his monstrous creation from
Speaker 1: the angry film crew and promised things would sooner improve,
Speaker 1: but it was clear Steven Spielberg's plans were in tatters.
Speaker 1: The script was filled with shark. He lamented, shark here,
Speaker 1: shark there, shark everywhere. The young director filmed what he could,
Speaker 1: interior scenes, scenes on the docks, scenes on the beach,
Speaker 1: street scenes, all the time hoping Bob Matty would perform
Speaker 1: a miracle, but deep down fearing that his burgeoning directorial
Speaker 1: career was about to sink without trace. The producers had
Speaker 1: budgeted for a tight fifty five day location shoot that
Speaker 1: when the last of those days rolled around June the
Speaker 1: twenty sixth, not a single frame of mechanical shark footage
Speaker 1: had been captured. The opening scene of Jaws. Both a
Speaker 1: book and film is the savage death of lone swimmer
Speaker 1: Chrissy Watkins. Chrissy, oblivious to the killer shark cruising nearby,
Speaker 1: takes a leisurely moonlight skinny dip. The awfulness of Chris's death,
Speaker 1: with the shark toying with her as she cries for help,
Speaker 1: sets the tenor for the rest of the story. Spielberg
Speaker 1: thought that having Bruce burst from the water jaws agape
Speaker 1: would have been a spectacular opening for the film that
Speaker 1: just wasn't going to happen. In Peter bench His's novel,
Speaker 1: Poor Chrissy never sees the beast that attacks her in
Speaker 1: the dark, and Spielberg followed suit, using a specially designed
Speaker 1: waterproof box and put his camera at water level to
Speaker 1: show Chrissy being tossed and mauled by an assailant just
Speaker 1: beneath the surface. The actor playing Chrissy was strapped into
Speaker 1: a harness with ropes, leading to two teams of stage
Speaker 1: hands on the beach on queue they'd whip her to
Speaker 1: and throw in the sea, though the instructions became confused
Speaker 1: and the woman was pulled both ways at once, dragging
Speaker 1: her under. It's this take where the actor's terror is
Speaker 1: possibly real that made the final film, but she wasn't
Speaker 1: the only person on set struggling to keep her head
Speaker 1: above water. Spielberg's bosses back in Hollywood started to suggest
Speaker 1: that the film be shut down. The young director was
Speaker 1: losing confidence in the project too, fearing it would be
Speaker 1: a turkey. His demands for realism were coming back to
Speaker 1: haunt him. We were a bunch of upstarts who thought
Speaker 1: we could take on the ocean, said Spielberg. And you
Speaker 1: can't take on the ocean. Filming one scene, again using
Speaker 1: cinematic sleight of hand to make up for the lack
Speaker 1: of a working bruce, a boat was being tugged and
Speaker 1: towed to simulate an unseen shark that was ramming it.
Speaker 1: The motion proved too violent and the boat sprang a
Speaker 1: leak and began to list. She's going over went up
Speaker 1: the cry as a rescue craft race to save the actors.
Speaker 1: This concern for the talent annoyed both the camera crew,
Speaker 1: who were about to lose one thousand feet of precious
Speaker 1: film to the sea, and the seventy year old soundman
Speaker 1: who held his fifty thousand dollars tape recorder over his
Speaker 1: head and bellowed, fuck the actors, save the sound apartment.
Speaker 1: Such incidents didn't exactly endear Spielberg to his crew. They
Speaker 1: viewed him as a sort of Captain Blygh and mutiny
Speaker 1: was only ever a whisker away. They didn't have scurvy
Speaker 1: or anything, said Spielberg, explaining their anger. But I wouldn't
Speaker 1: let them go home. Screenwriter Carl Gottlieb thought the filmmakers
Speaker 1: were falling apart before his eyes. Cold bored missing home
Speaker 1: and missing out on other work, he worried that mental
Speaker 1: exhaustion and alcoholism was on the horizon. Sensibly, a beer
Speaker 1: ban was introduced at sea. Shooting a movie on location
Speaker 1: is a laborious business, but on water progress proved glacial
Speaker 1: even without the misbehaving bruces. The tides dragged boats off
Speaker 1: their marks, Unexpected storms brewed, and actors fell over board,
Speaker 1: causing more delay as dry costumes and fresh makeup were
Speaker 1: sent for. The script also called for a horizon clear
Speaker 1: of other craft, since when the film's hero set off
Speaker 1: to kill Jaws, they're supposed to be far from help
Speaker 1: of any kind. But as the summer of nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: four progressed, Martha's vineyard became its usual magnet for yachts
Speaker 1: and pleasure boaters. Each time a boat came into frame,
Speaker 1: the camera stopped and the crew moodily waited for it
Speaker 1: to pass. Every hour of filming at sea was costing
Speaker 1: two thousand dollars, and back on land the budget for
Speaker 1: food and accommodation was rocketing as the island's economy switched
Speaker 1: to summer pricing. No one has ever taken a film
Speaker 1: one hundred days over schedule, fretted Spielberg. I'll never work again.
Speaker 1: Jaws should never have been made. It's a piece of shit.
Speaker 1: Actor Robert Shaw, himself an accomplished novelist, was no fan
Speaker 1: of Peter Benchley's story. The forty eight year old British
Speaker 1: star was a late addition to the cast, signing on
Speaker 1: just days before production started. Despite his reservations about the
Speaker 1: source novel, the Experience Shakespearean reluctantly agreed to play quint,
Speaker 1: a grizzled and fiery shark fisherman. Shaw was a masterful actor,
Speaker 1: but he had a flaw. I do tend to drink
Speaker 1: when totally bored, he admitted, and with the constant delays
Speaker 1: on set, Shaw got bored totally bored. A production assistant
Speaker 1: was charged with keeping the actor off the booze, but
Speaker 1: the second Spielberg's boat chugged out of the harbor, Share
Speaker 1: would nod his head towards the nearest bar. Let's go kid.
Speaker 1: Another of Robert Shaw's predilections proved even more disruptive than
Speaker 1: his drunkenness. Shaw developed a deep antipathy for one of
Speaker 1: his co stars, and as they spent hour after hour
Speaker 1: at sea together, Shaw made his dislike for the man
Speaker 1: all too clear. He could be vicious, said Richard Dreyfus,
Speaker 1: the young actor playing a cocky marine biologist to Shaw's
Speaker 1: weatherbeaten seafarer. Shaw didn't appreciate Dreyfus's approach to acting, nor
Speaker 1: his lack of stage credits. He'd even whisper criticisms of
Speaker 1: his co star's performance seconds before a scene. Just as
Speaker 1: Spielberg was shouting action, the older star began calling Dreyfus
Speaker 1: fat and sloppy, and complained that Dreyfus never stopped talking.
Speaker 1: It got ugly, said Spielberg. A particular low came when
Speaker 1: a scene required Dreyfus to be showered with sea spray,
Speaker 1: so Shaw, off camera grabbed the fire hose supplying the
Speaker 1: water and directed it straight into his co star's face.
Speaker 1: The cycle of humiliation was repeated day after day. Shaw's
Speaker 1: frustration and boredom prompted him to drink, and the drink
Speaker 1: awakened in Shaw what Dreyfus described as an evil troll.
Speaker 1: Shaw's a perfect gentleman whenever he's sober, said an observer.
Speaker 1: All he needed was one drink, and then he turned
Speaker 1: into a son of a bitch. Perhaps weary of attacking
Speaker 1: Dreyfus over his acting, Shaw began to set his co
Speaker 1: star outlandish challenges, asking Dreyfus to perform press ups and
Speaker 1: sit ups to prove himself. Finally, Sure proposed a wager
Speaker 1: for one hundred dollars, would Dreyfus climb to the top
Speaker 1: of a tall mast on their boat and jump off
Speaker 1: into the ocean. He had my number, said Dreyfus, who
Speaker 1: found himself unable to just ignore Shaw's bullying. Jaws was
Speaker 1: now weeks behind schedule and millions over budget. The crew
Speaker 1: were rebelling, the locals were increasingly resentful of their presence,
Speaker 1: and Bruce, the mechanical shark, was still not working. Could
Speaker 1: things get any worse? Perhaps if one of the movie's
Speaker 1: lead actors took a high dive off a mast and
Speaker 1: into the brooding ocean, cautionary tales will be back. I
Speaker 1: don't care how much money he offers you. You're not
Speaker 1: jumping off the mast. Not in my movie. Steven Spielberg
Speaker 1: had finally intervened in the battle between his stars. Shaw's
Speaker 1: bet with Dreyfus was off. The director could stall the studio,
Speaker 1: shutting him down over the malfunctioning sharks and the unreliable weather,
Speaker 1: but not if he let one of his stars drown
Speaker 1: on a Dare this excitement over the more normal rhythm
Speaker 1: of the location shoot resumed? Delay, delay, delay, and still
Speaker 1: no working roofs.
Speaker 2: Have that belt fully anchor up and reset?
Speaker 1: About Gerald. We spent a lot of time trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how to make this movie, sitting around for
Speaker 1: seven eight hours waiting for the shark to work, said Spielberg.
Speaker 1: This all sounds infuriating, but maybe these delays made Jaws
Speaker 1: not worse, but better. Do you do your best work
Speaker 1: under a bit of time pressure against a tight deadline.
Speaker 1: Say if your answer is yes, then you're not alone.
Speaker 1: It's certainly not uncommon to hear people say that creativity
Speaker 1: is spurred on by a ticking clock. In April nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: an explosion wrecked the oxygen tanks inside Apollo thirteen yestin
Speaker 1: we've had a problem. The three astronauts inside were headed
Speaker 1: for the Moon, but now had to hunker down in
Speaker 1: the small lunar module designed to hold just two. If
Speaker 1: the men were to survive the trip home, they'd need
Speaker 1: to improvise a system to remove deadly carbon dioxide from
Speaker 1: the air in their craft, using only the items available inside,
Speaker 1: from bits of cardboard to plastic. Okay, that's two lithium
Speaker 1: hydroxide canisters and one roll of that special gray ape.
Speaker 1: At mission control, engineers work feverishly to bodge something together
Speaker 1: and compose a list of verbal instructions which would be
Speaker 1: clear enough for the cold, tired and oxygen starved astronauts
Speaker 1: to follow. Okay, removed the inner bag from the outer bag,
Speaker 1: cut the inner bag along the heat seal along one
Speaker 1: side the filter built in this way wasn't pretty, but
Speaker 1: it worked and the men were saved. A win. Then,
Speaker 1: for creativity under pressure, an evidence that deadlines focused the mind. Well,
Speaker 1: The Harvard Business Review wasn't convinced. Two thousand and two
Speaker 1: paper Creativity under the Gun examined examples where indeed time
Speaker 1: pressure had produced impressive results, such as the Apollo thirteen explosion,
Speaker 1: but the author's actual research findings were more surprising. Theresa A. Marblay, Constance,
Speaker 1: Noonan Hadley, and Stephen Kramer collected nine thousand diary entries
Speaker 1: from one hundred and seventy seven employees across seven US companies,
Speaker 1: then asked those workers to note how time pressure they
Speaker 1: felt during the day, but also described something that stood
Speaker 1: out in their minds about each day. In a sad
Speaker 1: indictment of the modern workplace, most of the diarists felt
Speaker 1: they were operating under time pressure nearly every day. While
Speaker 1: some workers felt burned out by this, others did renish it,
Speaker 1: writing that their teams were pulling together and making progress.
Speaker 1: But when the half of business reviewed team dug a
Speaker 1: little deeper, they found that far from being spurred on
Speaker 1: like NASA's Apollo thirteen engineers, workers under the gun were
Speaker 1: usually less creative. Working in a hurry often means firefighting
Speaker 1: and multitasking, scheduling meetings, replying to emails, attending meetings, applying
Speaker 1: to more emails, leaving precious little time to focus on
Speaker 1: the primary work task at hand. One comment that summed
Speaker 1: up most of the diaries was the faster I run,
Speaker 1: the behind it I get, and the first thing to
Speaker 1: get jettisoned when time was tight seemed to be creativity.
Speaker 1: Just five percent of the thousands and thousands of diary
Speaker 1: entries written on busy days reported that any playful and
Speaker 1: creative work had been produced. The Harvard Business Review authors
Speaker 1: argued that, of course creativity was possible under a time crunch,
Speaker 1: but only in very specific circumstances. The Apollo thirteen engineers
Speaker 1: were able to give the carbon dioxide problem therefore attention,
Speaker 1: no multitasking for them, and the imminent deaths of the
Speaker 1: astronauts gave them more than enough motivation to see their
Speaker 1: task through. But in most situations, the experts concluded that
Speaker 1: the cornerstones of creative work exploration, idea, generation, and experimentation
Speaker 1: just didn't happen when workers were scrambling against the deadline.
Speaker 1: Don't be fooled into thinking that time pressure will in
Speaker 1: itself spur creativity, the Harvard Business Review warned bosses. That's
Speaker 1: a powerful illusion, but an illusion. Nonetheless, Jaws began as
Speaker 1: the ultimate tight deadline movie. The producers wanted the film
Speaker 1: to wrap in just fifty five days before high summer
Speaker 1: on Martha's vineyard and ready for Christmas nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: the traditional release season, but also in time to benefit
Speaker 1: from the buzz around the novel. This was a mammoth task. First,
Speaker 1: Spielberg had to turn Peter Benchley's sprawling book, with its
Speaker 1: endless side plots and incongruous sex scenes, into a workable script.
Speaker 1: Robert Sure wasn't the only person to think that the
Speaker 1: novel was a piece of shit. Spielberg supposedly said the same,
Speaker 1: which got back to Peter Benchley. Spielberg knows flatly zero,
Speaker 1: retorted the novelist, he is b movie literate. The round
Speaker 1: blew over. But Spielberg then had to find someone other
Speaker 1: than Benchley to crank out a screenplay, storyboard, the resulting script,
Speaker 1: cast the roles, set Bob Matty to work on his sharks,
Speaker 1: and establish a floating location shoot. All this in a
Speaker 1: matter of weeks. Talk about multitasking. Much as Peter Benchley
Speaker 1: was wrong to insult Spielberg's storytelling skills, the director himself
Speaker 1: admits that in all the hurry, he was in danger
Speaker 1: of making a fairly standard monsterflick, one where the shark
Speaker 1: might be seen in the very first scene. But the
Speaker 1: constant delays gave him room to reconsider. It was good
Speaker 1: fortune that the shark kept breaking, says Spielberg, because I
Speaker 1: had to be resourceful figuring out how to create suspense
Speaker 1: and terror without seeing the shark itself. The script went
Speaker 1: through several iterations that what made it to the screen
Speaker 1: was the version Spielberg hammered out at night in the
Speaker 1: house he shared with Carl Gottlieb on Martha's vineyard. This
Speaker 1: fits with another finding of the Harvard Business Review. Creativity
Speaker 1: comes with collaboration, but most especially when just two confederates
Speaker 1: work together. The paper argued that having a single focal
Speaker 1: point to bounce new ideas off might help people stay
Speaker 1: oriented toward the work. The other thing that Spielberg had
Speaker 1: spare time for thanks to the delays was working with
Speaker 1: his actors. The director had found the characters in Benchley's
Speaker 1: novel too flat and unlikable, but he hit on a
Speaker 1: way to make them more appealing and relatable. He encouraged
Speaker 1: his cast to improvise sure Dreyfuss and the rest would
Speaker 1: belly ache about sitting around waiting for the shark to work,
Speaker 1: but they also had time to really think about their performances.
Speaker 1: One of the film's greatest lines, when Jaws surfaces right
Speaker 1: beside Robert Shaw's fishing vessel, the Orca, and he's told,
Speaker 1: you're going to need a pleigo Podge, was pure insation
Speaker 1: and never in the script. Likewise a monologue delivered by
Speaker 1: share In it, his character explains that his deep hatred
Speaker 1: for sharks stems from a grizzly wartime experience being shipwrecked
Speaker 1: in waters infested with them.
Speaker 2: No distress signal of vincent.
Speaker 1: This speech had already passed through the hands of several
Speaker 1: script doctors, but Shaw edited the lines and took them
Speaker 1: to Spielberg and Gottlieb after dinner one evening. I think
Speaker 1: I have a version that will work. He told them.
Speaker 1: It was a showstopper, said Richard Dreyfus, whose character sits
Speaker 1: beside shore as he tells the grim tale of his
Speaker 1: shipmates getting eaten one by one.
Speaker 2: You know the thing about a shaggy again, lifeless eyes,
Speaker 2: black eyes like a doll's eye. When he comes Outdie
Speaker 2: doesn't seem to me Lewin until he bides you, and
Speaker 2: those black eyes roll over white and then ah, then
Speaker 2: you hear that terrible, high pitched screaming, the ocean turned
Speaker 2: redden speed of all the pound and the horror and
Speaker 2: the arkme in the repeated pieces.
Speaker 1: Dreyfus and Shaw had been at loggerheads throughout production. Sitting
Speaker 1: together hour after hour in boredom had sparked a bitter conflict,
Speaker 1: but more canny observers saw some method to Shaw's mad
Speaker 1: baiting of his co star. I think it was absolutely planned,
Speaker 1: said one of the crew. Sure knew the plot called
Speaker 1: for antagonism between his salty old mariner and the cocky,
Speaker 1: upstart marine biologist. If Shaw could get Drayfus to hate
Speaker 1: him in real life, then further acting wouldn't be required.
Speaker 1: The malfunctioning Bruss just gave Shaw the time he needed
Speaker 1: for his plan to play out, and interestingly, Shaw's show
Speaker 1: stopping monologue marks a pivot in the script by showing
Speaker 1: his vulnerability and humanity. The fisherman wins over the marine biologist,
Speaker 1: and of friendship blossoms in real life. Shaw's baiting of
Speaker 1: Dreyfuss also stopped the second Spielberg called cut on the scene.
Speaker 1: On August eighteenth, nineteen seventy four, weeks and weeks behind schedule,
Speaker 1: Bob Matty's Sharks began to work as planned. Filming wrapped
Speaker 1: on September the eighteenth, though the director hadn't stuck around
Speaker 1: for the final shots. He had caught wind of a
Speaker 1: coup plot to throw him in the water. The second
Speaker 1: the camera stopped rolling, he wisely fled back to La
Speaker 1: to avoid their disgruntlement. The endless delays had taken their toll.
Speaker 1: Spielberg began having nightmares regularly for the next three months.
Speaker 1: There were still pickups to shoot, including a scene completed
Speaker 1: in the warm tranquility of an La swimming pool and editing. Jaws,
Speaker 1: now wildly over budget, would miss its lucrative Christmas release window.
Speaker 1: But the film was good, excellent. Even test audiences loved it,
Speaker 1: and the critics were bowled over. A problem plagued film
Speaker 1: turned out beautifully, wrote Variety. The critics were especially impressed
Speaker 1: by Spielberg's restraint in not showing the shark for the
Speaker 1: first eighty two minutes of the film, making the unseen
Speaker 1: beast all the more terrifying for its invisibility. The lack
Speaker 1: of explicit carnage also had the added bonus of making
Speaker 1: Jaws a PG movie, meaning whole families could go see it,
Speaker 1: and widening its box office potential. Summer was until then
Speaker 1: a dead zone for new releases, but Jaws upended that.
Speaker 1: It turned a profit just two weeks after opening in
Speaker 1: June nineteen seventy five, and by Labour day it was
Speaker 1: the most successful motion picture in history. The age of
Speaker 1: the summer blockbuster had dawned and Hollywood was transformed, and
Speaker 1: this runaway success of Jaws was in no small part
Speaker 1: down to the delays caused by Bob Matty and his
Speaker 1: mooning fish. The key sources for this episode were the
Speaker 1: Jaws log by Carl Gottlieb and Joseph McBride's Steven spielberg
Speaker 1: a biography. For a full list of sources, go to
Speaker 1: Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales as written by me Tim
Speaker 1: Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dinny. It's
Speaker 1: produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design
Speaker 1: and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional
Speaker 1: sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio Bender.
Speaker 1: Dapfhaffrey edited the scripts. The show features the voice talents
Speaker 1: of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Messaam Monroe,
Speaker 1: Jamal Westman, and rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have
Speaker 1: been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Retta Cohne,
Speaker 1: Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Pose and
Speaker 1: Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: It's recorded at ward Or Studios in London by Tom Barry.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please remember to share, rate
Speaker 1: and review. It really makes a difference to us and
Speaker 1: if you want to hear the show, add free sign
Speaker 1: up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus