Oh yeah!

wv wrote:

Still one of my favorite movies.

Even though the sharks scenes when it was
OUT of the water were pretty bad. They
just didnt have the special effects back then.

w
v

Spielberg planned on showing the shark much more than it actually was in the film, but the mechanical shark continually malfunctioned which caused many production delays and rewrites so much of the original planning had to be scrapped. However, in the end he admitted that it was probably for the best because as you say, certain aspects of the shark were just so fake looking.

By the way, the “we’re gonna need a bigger boat” line was completely ad libbed.

I’m dreading the day when they remake Jaws with modern CGI technology. Instead of being about three compelling and disparate characters trapped together in a small boat the movie will be about over the top action scenes with explosions and blood etc etc. No depth just flash.

zn wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

Instead of being about three compelling and disparate characters trapped together

“You were on the Indianapolis?”

“So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”

The most famous line in the movie, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” was improvised by Roy Scheider the actor who played Chief Martin Brody. The director wanted a real reaction to the shark popping up really close to him, so they didn’t tell Roy Scheider that it was going to happen. It was a total surprise. Not only did he react naturally, it scared him so badly that he forgot the correct line. So, when he looked at Quint, he ad-libbed, and they left in the movie.

“That’s some bad hat, Harry”

Truly great movie.

Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss): You were on the Indianapolis?

Brody (Roy Scheider): What happened?

Quint: Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, chief. It was comin’ back, from the island of Tinian to Laytee, just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen footer. You know how you know that when you’re in the water, chief? You tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know… was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Huh huh. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week.

Very first light, chief. The sharks come cruisin’. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know it’s… kinda like ol’ squares in battle like a, you see on a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo. And the idea was, the shark comes to the nearest man and that man, he’d start poundin’ and hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes the shark would go away. Sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he’s got…lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch screamin’ and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin’ and the hollerin’ they all come in and rip you to pieces.

Y’know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men! I don’t know how many sharks, maybe a thousand! I don’t know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin’ chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player, boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water, just like a kinda top. Up ended. Well… he’d been bitten in half below the waist.

Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us. He’s a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper, anyway he saw us and come in low. And three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened? Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

=======================

Everyone knows the story of the Indianapolis speech, right? I think everyone automatically loved that scene the first time they saw it, and for a lot of us, it ranks as one of the great movie scenes ever…and of course Shaw nailed it.

The monologue is not historically accurate in every detail but I have always seen survivors of the Indianapolis praise it.

Two sources, Speilberg on the scene:

http://www.scriptmag.com/features/spielberg-reveals-the-definitive-word-on-the-jaws-uss-indianapolis-speech

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/49921

Steven Spielberg: I owe three people a lot for this speech. You’ve heard all this, but you’ve probably never heard it from me. There’s a lot of apocryphal reporting about who did what on Jaws and I’ve heard it for the last three decades, but the fact is the speech was conceived by Howard Sackler, who was an uncredited writer, didn’t want a credit and didn’t arbitrate for one, but he’s the guy that broke the back of the script before we ever got to Martha’s Vineyard to shoot the movie.

I hired later Carl Gottlieb to come onto the island, who was a friend of mine, to punch up the script, but Howard conceived of the Indianapolis speech. I had never heard of the Indianapolis before Howard, who wrote the script at the Bel Air Hotel and I was with him a couple times a week reading pages and discussing them.

Howard one day said, “Quint needs some motivation to show all of us what made him the way he is and I think it’s this Indianapolis incident.” I said, “Howard, what’s that?” And he explained the whole incident of the Indianapolis and the Atomic Bomb being delivered and on its way back it was sunk by a submarine and sharks surrounded the helpless sailors who had been cast adrift and it was just a horrendous piece of World War II history. Howard didn’t write a long speech, he probably wrote about three-quarters of a page.

But then, when I showed the script to my friend John Milius, John said “Can I take a crack at this speech?” and John wrote a 10 page monologue, that was absolutely brilliant, but out-sized for the Jaws I was making! (laughs) But it was brilliant and then Robert Shaw took the speech and Robert did the cut down. Robert himself was a fine writer, who had written the play The Man in the Glass Booth. Robert took a crack at the speech and he brought it down to five pages. So, that was sort of the evolution just of that speech.

We shot it twice. The first time we attempted to shoot it Robert came over to me and said, “You know, Steven, all three of these characters have been drinking and I think I could do a much better job in this speech if you let me actually have a few drinks before I do the speech.” And I unwisely gave him permission.

He went into the Whitefoot, which was a big sort of support boat that we always took our lunch breaks on and all the bathrooms were on that boat, it was a big tug boat, and he went into the hold with my script girl Charlsie Bryant and I guess he had more than a few drinks because two crew members actually had to carry him onto the Orca and help him into his chair. I had two cameras on the scene and we never got through the scene, he was just too far gone. So, I wrapped the company at about 11 o’clock in the morning and Robert was taken back to his house on Martha’s Vineyard.

At about 2 o’clock in the morning my phone rings and it’s Robert. He had a complete blackout and had no memory of what had gone down that day. He said, “Steven, tell me I didn’t embarrass you.” He was very sweet, but he was panic-stricken. He said, “Steven, please tell me I didn’t embarrass you. What happened? Are you going to give me a chance to do it again?” I said, “Yes, the second you’re ready we’ll do it again.”

The next morning he came to the set, he was ready at 7:30 out of make-up and it was like watching Olivier on stage. We did it in probably four takes.

I think we were all watching a great performance and the actors on camera were watching a great performance; Roy and Richard. Richard was in all the shots because Roy was in a cutaway in a separate part of the cabin of the boat, but obviously on Richard’s face… you can see Matt Hooper in character, but you can also see Richard Dreyfuss in complete awe and admiration of this great actor.

Some historical background on the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. Some of the details in the IND speech aren’t quite historically accurate (though of course it doesn’t matter how accurate it is in every detail).

From a source: Captain McVay’s request for a destroyer escort was denied despite the fact that no capital ship lacking anti-submarine detection equipment, such as the Indianapolis, had made this transit across the Philippine Sea without an escort during the entire war. McVay was not told that shortly before his departure from Guam a Japanese submarine within range of his path had sunk a destroyer escort, the USS Underhill.

From a source: . The captain, Charles McVay III was court martialed for failing to direct his ship in a zig-zag path. The captain of the Japanese submarine I-58, Mochitsura Hashimoto, testified that it wouldn’t have mattered and he’d have sunk the ship anyways. Captain McVay was found guilty. He later committed suicide. . In 2000, the US Congress approved a resolution – signed by President Clinton – that McVay’s record should reflect that he “is exonerated for the loss of the USS Indianapolis.”

Of the 1197 men on board the ship, 880 went into the water, not 1100.

The Indianapolis did send out distress signals. She sent 3. They were ignored, mostly through negligence. From a source: One commander was drunk, another had ordered his men not to disturb him and a third thought it was a Japanese trap. For a long time the Navy denied that a distress call had been sent. The receipt of the call came to light only after the release of declassified records.

They were mostly attacked by white tip sharks, which are infamous for their feeding frenzies involving shipwrecks and plane crashes.

While there was a shark feeding frenzy, the sharks fed mostly on dead bodies which had drifted away. But attacks on the living certainly did happen. From a source: One survivor recalled being woken by the pain of teeth crunching his hand. He fought back – the men were discovering that if you poked a shark firmly in the eye it would retreat, unused to retaliation.

Many of the men who died in the water drowned from exposure, starvation, and/or dehydration; or because their life-jackets became water logged and they drowned; or because they drank saltwater and sank into delerium; or because they succumbed to wounds they received in the original explosions. Estimates of the number who died from shark attacks range from a few dozen to almost 200.

The PBY which landed was directly advised not to land on open seas, which violated regulations anyway, but they saw men being mauled by sharks and landed in spite of their orders. The plane was damaged in the landing and could not take off again. It cruised around the edges of the survivors, picking up men who were alone, figuring that men in groups stood a better chance. Quint wouldn’t have been picked up by the PBY because as he seems to describe it, he was in a group. So Quint would never have been in line waiting his turn. (Not that it matters–the important part is him saying that that is when he was “most frightened,” waiting his turn.)The PBY only picked up 56 men, some of whom it had to tie to its wings. Ships had been alerted and later approached, picking up everyone else, including the crew and survivors on the PBY. The PBY was then deliberately scuttled and sunk.

From a source, on the landing of the PBY: I watched the PBY circle and suddenly make an open-sea landing. This took an awful lot of guts. It hit, went back up in the air and splashed down again. I thought he’d crashed but he came taxiing back. I found out later he was taxiing around picking up the singles. If he hadn’t done this, I don’t think we would have survived. He stayed on the water during the night and turned his searchlight up into the sky so the destroyer Cecil J. Doyle (DE-368) could find us.”

From a source: It was obvious the sinking and the failure to rescue the crew was a scandal, which the navy first tried to hide by revealing the loss of the Indianapolis on the same day that President Harry Truman announced the Japanese surrender.