Laurie Strode absentmindedly looks out her bedroom window. For a brief moment a 30ft long great white shark is visible through the drying linens hanging on the clothesline, but when she looks back it is gone.
@@ahhamartin "The Land Shark is considered the cleverest of all sharks. Unlike the Great White Shark, which tends to inhabit the waters and harbors of recreational beach areas, the Land Shark may strike at any place, any time. It is capable of disguising it's voice, and generally preys on young, single women" Don Pardo, 1975
Spielberg basically uses the same formula with both the T-raptors in Jurassic Park. 1. Show what the monster can do. 2. Get a complete badass to tell you how scared you should be of this monster. (Not so much with the T-rex.) 3. Show people's reactions to the monster. 4. Reveal the monster in all it's glory.
Interestingly, I wrote an entire college essay about the shark movie subgenre and why Jaws succeeded while others ranged from mixed success (Deep Blue Sea) to so bad it's hilarious (all the SyFy movies). To sum up: the more you see the sharks on-screen, the more ridiculous and less scary these films become, hence why Jaws' POV camera was a stroke of genius. And why the sequels were all a mess.
That's actually a pretty impressive takeaway! I would also argue that it's also overusage of similar tropes and cliches since there are only so many different ways you can do a Shark movie without making repetitive storylines. The only real reason Sharknado became a cultural phenomenon that stood out from other terrible shark movies was the sheer ridiculousness of the premise.
Fear is born from a lack of knowledge and understanding. Hence why a fear of the dark is one of the earliest and most common. The more you see a shark, the more you understand how it works, the less scary it is.
@@ajerqureshi6411 Yeah but all those shark movies were borderline ridiculous. I mean there was a movie where the damn Jersey Shore cast fighting sharks - which I guess is a nod to the Jersey Shore being the site of the historical shark attack that inspired the Jaws novel. Sharknado kicked off a trend less because the gimmick was so batshit, but because the entire cast seemed about as cartoonish as the sharks themselves. I guess it made them seem livelier than your usual B-movie cast.
Honestly, I find that the animal attack movies that use different animals tend to work better than just shark movies. Like Piranha is considered a B-movie classic despite being a Jaws rip off
Speaking of Jaws trivia, not many people know that because of the setting of the movie, the blue ocean, and how optimistic the entire cast and crew were about its box office prospects, or as they called it "theatrical harvest", its working title ended up being Blue Harvest.
“We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” was a running gag in my family as a kid thanks to this movie. Also, since I was like 8 when it came out I thought they let a real shark eat people. My mom handed me a Reader’s Digest with a story about the SFX which led me into my love of SFX which led me to BATTLESTAR GALACTICA by way of a Smithsonian magazine article. Yeah, this movie changed my life.
Actually, in your alternate timeline, Raiders probably doesn't happen because without Close Encounters, Spielberg probably doesn't take the Hawaiian vacation with Lucas where they first talked about Indiana Jones.
It seems like Spielberg & Lucas were close enough friends that they would’ve had this conversation eventually, unless there was something specific to Hawaii that inspired it
Also, both E.T. and Poltergeist are unlikely to have been made, as their stories both came out of the rejected screenplay 'Night Skies', written by John Sayles, which Columbia commissioned as a sequel to Close Encounters. 'Night Skies' is the story of a farm house under siege by malevolent aliens capable of telekenesis; its final scene is of an abandoned alien alone in a cornfield, left behind by its crew.
If there's a 3rd piece of behind-the-scenes movie trivia that's been shared countless times, it's that Heath Ledger allegedly improvised the Joker's reaction to the bomb detonator not working in the hospital scene of "The Dark Knight." Even though it was more than likely intentional on Nolan and Ledger's part.
If there's a FOURTH piece of behind-the-scenes trivia almost everybody knows its that in Raiders of the Lost Ark, there was suppossed to be this big fight scene with the sword guy, but Harrison Ford was feeling ill at the time, so he suggested that Indy just shoot the guy, resulting in the best gag in the whole movie.
Yeah that one is a pure myth. MAYBE they worked out a reaction on the day that wasn't in the script and filmed with it in mind, but you don't do improv and screw around with the timing of pyrotechnics or stunts, that gets people hurt. *Especially* when its real set pyro you can only do once rather than a model or CG. Heck, it was even a moving dolly shot and the camera then *stopped* for a bit to get him playing with the detonator, exactly on time to get in position of the bus. And Ledger certainly wouldn't be the one with the actual detonator. If the delay in the bombs going off and playing with the remote was improv at all, it was well rehearsed improv, not spur of the moment. Ledger sold it well, that was good acting. Not improv.
@@robbybevard8034 Yes, I've heard that his fiddling with the detonator in exactly that way was rehearsed a million times (to make sure it matched with the explosions), and rehearsals can supposedly be found online somewhere. Like you mentioned, the camera moves in a way that makes it obvious that the cameraman already knew where to point it, and if the fiddling was truly improvised, the camera simply wouldn't have moved that way. They knew exactly where and when each and every explosion would take place. I heard that one of the people on the movie came up with the idea to fiddle with the detonator because they needed Ledger to be driving away on the bus as the last explosions are going off (to make it look cool, and to be safe so he wasn't still in the middle of all the buildings), so they needed *some* initial explosions to go off, then a pause, and then the rest to go off. It was all timed perfectly, exactly as planned. If those final explosions had gone off earlier, he wouldn't be able to drive the bus in front of the buildings as the last explosions are going off - he would still either be walking to the bus or getting on the bus, not driving away - which wouldn't be as effective of a shot. Also, the detonator Ledger had was NOT A REAL DETONATOR to begin with, so obviously his fiddling with it would be a non-factor. Generally any explosions in movies are being handled by a pyro guy off-screen. Another myth was that Ledger was method acting. Many of the actors on the movie have talked about how he was always joking around and having fun with everyone between scenes (as himself, not as Joker), and there's pictures of him skateboarding outside the studio in full makeup, just to pass the time. The myth of the method acting just came from the fact that he OD'ed and people assumed it was because he "couldn't get out of character." That wasn't true, but everyone thought it was a mythical sort of idea, so they ran with it. Now, that's not to say that there isn't *some* truth in there somewhere (there's a story about him holing himself up in a hotel for a month, supposedly to help get in character), but it's hard to find any trustworthy sources that aren't just sourcing each other. I think he was having a rough time during that period, with depression and drug addiction (that he'd had for a while by that point), and those are mainly what led to his death, not his "dedication to the role."
Another bit of partially known trivia is that Brenchley's book and the film are based, or inspired by, a series of shark attacks in the US around the 1910s-20s. These weren't White Pointers, they were almost certainly Bull sharks.
If you can ever see it in theaters somehow, I highly recommend it. I got to see it in IMAX in 2022, and it literally felt like I was watching it for the first time, having only ever seen it on DVD before.
Here's a piece of Jaws media I don't think enough people know...for some of the sequences with the shark in this film, Steven Spielberg hired at-the-time renowned divers and documentarians Ron and Valerie Taylor, who had previously directed a famous documentary about sharks without the usage of cages, to film sequences of real-life great white sharks attacking cages and boats that are used in the film. The popularity of the Jaws film led to a widespread fear of sharks and rampant hunting of them, which resulted in Ron and Valerie beginning their life long conservation efforts towards great white sharks, partly to undo the damage they unwittingly inflicted on the shark population by being involved in Jaws.
On the back of that, Hooper was supposed to be eaten during the cage dive sequence in the original script. However while filming the real sharks in Australia one got tangled in the mini prop cage and thrashed itself loose. The resulting footage was so good Spielberg felt he couldn't not use it so the script was changed to have Hooper escape and the shark trash the empty cage.
Sharks, including great white sharks, had long been hunted well before Jaws. The record rod and reel great white was taken off South Australia in 1959. It's just that the general public, and even science, didnt care until after Jaws. Jaws initiated mass interest which then lead to more knowledge and more understanding. Without Jaws this would have taken much longer. The fear of sharks was also there long before Jaws. Jaws merely tapped into a well established fear. It didn't invent it. The line the mayor says ("you yell shark, and we've got a panic on our hands") didnt come out of thin air. I love Ron and Valerie Taylor but they had no qualms about returning to film more footage for Jaws 2. 😉
I've been a shark buff since childhood, so I know a whole lot more about Ron & Valerie Taylor & other shark documentarians than I do about Spielberg, Lucas, et al. I love movies, the finished art form that we see on screens, but compared to reading about sharks & people who've devoted their whole lives to studying sharks, all the behind-the-scenes stuff about moviemaking isn't nearly as cool.
@GibusWearingMann I'm always very surprised whenever I see a person who's never watched Jaws..... I guess it's one of those movies I've always assumed everyone has seen. I think it's a lot to do with my age as well. I'm 51 and though I was too young to remember when Jaws first came out I do remember when Jaws 2 hit the theaters. I remember my brothers went to watch the movie with a bunch of friends from our neighborhood and one of the parents. My Mom wouldn't allow me to go because she said I was too young. To say I was upset was an understatement. I remember crying and was damn near inconsolable. Lol. And then it was almost like an automatic switch and suddenly I was laughing uncontrollably chasing my grandma with some water I scooped out of my pool. My grandma was so special and we lost her way too soon and she'd be gone not even two years later. But I remember back then Jaws was such a cultural phenomenon. I was very familiar with concept of Jaws well before watching. I believe I ended up watching Jaws 2 first not realizing the significance of the original. I also remember the excitement people would have whenever Jaws would air on one of the three t.v stations. I'm not sure if you had seen any of the sequels but part 2 is definitely worth watching. The other two not so much. But for me I would watch any sequel to Jaws at least once hoping that it may come close to the first two.
. I had my toy shark in 1977 at the Drivein watching "Star Wars". The showing had a commercial for Jaws coming back through the theaters. Hard for some to believe today but that was as much excitement as the movie we were watching. Funny that night I was told I STILL wasn't allowed to watch the "too violent" Jaws, but the movie we were there for had a scene where the population of a planet dies...
When I was at university two decades ago someone had the idea to combine showing Jaws with a pool party at the university's aquatic center. It was such a hit they did it again the following year, but showed Jaws II.
The shots of the woman getting jerked down in the water before she's figured out what going on in the very first scene freaked the hell out of me as a kick, and to this day still makes my gut churn. Such a good movie.
As someone who used to work in a public library, a little piece of me died when Emma asked what's microfiche and Patrick said nobody knows. I was constantly going through microfiche to find old articles that people asked for. It was the only time in my life where I even remotely felt like Batman. Also, it's that stuff Vicky Vale and Knox are using to find out what happened to Bruce's parents for those in the comments who genuinely don't know.
Do they still have those at the libraries? I live in a small town out away from the city we don't really have a library and the town next to us has a small one I doubt they have one. I haven't been to the city library since I was a teen.
I thought Patrick was old enough to know! I remember going through microfiche at the library, although I can't recall what sort of things I was researching. I seem to remember that you could print from it. Is that possible? I could hardly believe it at the time, I thought it was so cool.
putting the script on screen alongside the visuals are just one of the many reasons i love this channel. your film analysis is almost scientific, much love to the team
Came over from Nebula to say this is one of your best. I love the videos spanning genres and the entire industry as much as the next person but there’s something about the specificity of this that is so compelling. Perfect choice to frame it as a journalistic procedural
Verna Fields is probably the most important person in late 70s cinema almost no one's heard of. She also trained Marcia Lucas that saved A New Hope in the edit.
@@shaggycan Just like most films, It's not special to Star Wars. The edit doesn't change the worldbuilding, which is the original Star Wars's best aspect.
Microfiche is a photographic data storage solution for archiving statistically bulky items, such as daily newspapers, with many sections and pages. The material is photographed in black and white and each page is a tiny, individual photo, printed onto a sheet of heavy duty film, roughly the size of a large smart phone, but thinner. You place the sheet of film, which may contain weeks of daily newspapers, into the specialized microfiche reader, which is like a self-contained rear projector, combined with a microscopic lens, which blows up the tiny pictures into readable text and pictures. More advanced machines could create a Xerox-like print of any individual frame.
Thank you. Like I said in the comments, I was really sad that Patrick and Emma didn't know what microfiche was. I realize it's meant to be a joke, but there are plenty of people in real life who haven't lived the magic of microfiche.
Also, for those like me who know microfilm but had never heard of microfiche before this video: from what I gather they're conceptually similar but microfilm comes on reels & microfiche is a sheet
I worked at a Crown Books in the early 1990s. If someone came in looking for a book that wasn't in stock we would check the microfiche to see if it was still in print. I always got a kick out of using the machine.
Like Spielberg was I’m only 26 myself and “Jaws” is my all time favorite movie and by the end of this masterpiece of a video it gave me incredible chills.
I love when you talk about my favorite movies to watch while home sick for work. Looking forward to your thoughts on Big Trouble in Little China someday.
I suspect that in a world where Jaws wasn’t a blockbuster Spielberg still would have been hired by his friend Lucas to make Raiders, possibly leading to Spielberg the franchise director who spent his career making Indiana Jones’s well into the late 90s. Except for one small detail, with his confidence shattered by the failure of Jaws, he would not have the confidence to tell George Lucas that his character’s name was wrong and we would be cursed to live in a world with Indiana Smith.
I've seen Jaws, but last Christmas I had to explain to my family that I knew the answer in a trivia game (Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October) despite having never seen the film, because I'd watched a youtube video about its use of subtitles.
The best scene is, camera looking down at the water, the boy trying to get on his board, jaws swimming sideways mouth agape toward the boy grasping him in his mouth. Jaws looks monstrous, frightening, but also makes me ultra mad because hes eating a child. It's awesome.
I'm part of the discord, I donate every month, I watch every video but I never pay attention to the end of the old video or posts, because I love being surprised to what the video is going to be about. Today I'm very excited.
Jaws is my favorite movie. I know a lot about it obviously being the target audience of this channel as you said, but I actually never thought about how all those insert shots really sell the movie in a way that gives it such a tactile feel. All those little shots (usually set to my fave John Williams score) ground the movie in something that's happening "right now". Hooper grabbing his little tracker gizmo, because he's a scientist, when he *should* be tying off the rope to the barrel, builds such a great amount of tension. I legitimately cannot imagine the movie without that shot even though it is not pivotal to the plot.
Can't remember if it was Thomas Flight or someone else, but they commented that the tactile nature of the inserts in Dune was one of the things that made it feel real as well.
You should do one on Jurassic Park, what if they used Go-Motion instead of going ahead with CG? Or what if they adapted the novel more closely with extra horror themes more than the final film?.
Honestly, movies like this and The Dark Knight are my go-to examples when someone wants to say that R ratings make movies better. Sometimes, less is more, especially when trying to create settings dark and macabre.
i think extending the autopsy scene to include all the dialogue after “so this is what happens…” that clearly cuts off abruptly and quints death being slightly longer so the hard cut in the middle after he pukes up blood feels less like a jump cut in both visual and audio and more like a normal cut
In the "making of" documentary that I watched on the Jaws dvd, they cut a little of the scene of the man's leg sinking to the bottom to get the PG rating. What also helped was the logic that people aren't going to go out and imitate a shark killing other people.
That scene with the shark cruising past the Orca, seen from above must have been a shot done near September 1974... So cool. Not just being towed along. It swam. Totally convincingly.
Apparently, Robocop was supposed to move like Spiderman (Smooth, cat-like is how I think they describe it) until they got the suit and realized it was like wearing a sack of bricks. Can anyone imagine if Robocop moved like a hero in a Marvel movie?
to add a bit more to this - having recently watched the RoboCop episode of The Movies That Made Us: I'm also glad that Peter Weller wasn't allowed to use the more dramatic(?), artistic movements he wanted for his performance. and he was close to being replaced by a stunt man
Michael Caine would not have been able to buy his mother a new house, though. Thank you for this video--such an amazing piece of film with so much to digest...er, no pun intended.
It never ceases to amaze me how many of our favorite movie lines and moments were either improvised or created because something didn't go according to plan. Movie making is a chaotic process in the best of times, and I feel like a lot of great actors and directors are where they are because they can figure out how to make the most of a bad situation
Really creative people are the ones who learn how to work with what they got, not what they want! It's one of my favorite things about learning about film or really any complicated endeavor that required a bit of out of the box thinking.
13:25 Had a math teacher in high school who was a real hard case. Thru a fluke his son became my best friend and still is to this day. They grew up on the Vineyard. It's legendary in their house about the time Dad took his baby out sailing one afternoon in July 1974, only to be harassed by people with megaphones from the shore. WTF? Oh it's some movie. Fuck 'em, the ocean is for everybody. Being a hard case my friend's dad found the camera on shore with his binoculars and proceeded to sail through the background of every possible shot for the rest of the day. Later when the book on the making of JAWS came out, there is a statement from Spielberg about how "Trying to making this small bay look like the ocean almost killed me. Sailboats kept drifting by ruining everything." This page hangs framed in their house next to photo of the teacher and his baby in their sailboat. A big reason why the production was so hard is California boys underestimate the pettiness of New Englanders.😂
wow, just imagine if those "California boys" had been born in ye olde England. they wouldn't take any guff from those newer England, swill-drinking swine. that's my takeaway, and you can, too.
I'm beginning to worry that the whole 'Don't worry, Nobbles isn't like Charl, he's nice' is a bait-and-switch, and the twist is that Patrick's constant meanness to him is going to turn him evil
Let's not forget Piranha was also gave John Sayles his first screenwriting job, leading him to get the money to make his own fantastic directorial works.
That's how to analyze the production process. A detailed timeline and line by line breakdown of the script. It provides insight into the movie direction with story Interpretation and presentation. Well done, Patrick & Co.
another minor Butterfly Effect: after the success of _The French Connection_ and _The Exorcist,_ Friedkin's next planned "big" movie was going to be about aliens, with _Sorcerer_ being a smaller, quicker job to fill the gap between them. But due to _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_ coming out, he scrapped the followup movie and made _Sorcerer_ bigger and more expensive, dragging its production out and leading to it opening a month after _Star Wars,_ a coincidence of timing to which many people attribute its poor box office return. So without _Close Encounters,_ we could have gotten a smaller, more subdued _Sorcerer_ instead of the criminally underrated masterpiece of suspense filmmaking that we have now, as well as a Friedkin movie about aliens in place of _Close Encounters_
This might be my favorite Patrick H. Willems video ever. Real stuff of film history, challenging pre-conceived narratives and so on. Wish he took this approach with Star Wars, but credit where credit's due.
9:20 😂 I haven't seen JAWS , yet when you insist on me to pause this and go watch JAWS , actually that's what I'm doing , will come back to watch rest of the video.
@@mephistoXFC459V i mean was there even a driver? I thought Duel was a paranormal truck but then i looked it up and realized they just never even go into detail about it
Most famous movie-trivia? The filming of 'Apocalypse Now'? Werner Herzog pulls a gun on Kinsky on the set of 'Aguirre, Wrath Of God.'? Or, perhaps that Jackie Chan does his own stunts - e v e r y o n e loves knowing that! More suggestions?
Well, I think the scene at 18:34 would’ve actually been better if some of that shark were shown. THAT particular scene always seemed a bit fake to me because it seems to me that if a shark, especially one the size that the one in THIS movie is supposed to be, came THAT CLOSE to the waters surface then SOME part of it - it’s nose or a fin - WOULD be visible.
your honk honk joke very nearly resulted in my death - a piece of poorly-chopped cucumber, inhaled. Also I'm going to go get the same haircut as your Emma
There are different kinds of art and I think creating a commercially successful movie that has fans who love it so many years later is art. Selling out is when you change your style to get paid a lot of money by big corporations, but starting out with the goal to be a commercial success and then achieving that is not selling out. He succeeded at making a commercially successful film, and that isn't easy, as plenty of movie flops have shown.
I mean for most of the 70s to 2000s and 2010s it was still the best looking shark in shark horror film history until like the Shallows i guess which honestly has the coolest looking Shark design ever…..not sure if the film is considered good but still
Fantastic video. Wrong Death Star explosion, though. Star Wars, as seen in the 1970s never had that silly hoop around the main explosion. To us old geezers, seeing that screams "1990s", not 1977. (Not unlike the silly words "A New Hope")
To be fair though, it's harder to get a high quality, high resolution copy of the original Star Wars. Yes there's the "despecialized" and 4K1977 copies online, but that's third party stuff, and Patrick probably wants to use official versions for whatever reason.
I mean I hate to break it to you but Star Wars came out in 1977. The Empire Strikes Back came out in early May 1980, months before the film released Star Wars; Episode IV A New Hope was rereleased. It will never stop being hilarious though when people try to pretend that Episode numbers didn't appear until the special editions in 1997 instead of REALITY where it was added within 2 years of the release of the movie so that it would line up with Episode V The Empire Strikes Back. Even more hilarious are the people who have claimed to have owned VHS copies that didn't have Episode numbers. LMFAO those never existed to bein with but the earliest you could RENT copies was 1987.
Every time Patrick makes a joke in this video about footage of the shark lurking in the background like a human serial killer/slasher having been cut from the final cut of the film (hiding in the beach-going crowds on the Amity docks, smoking pot and drinking at the late-nite teenage seaside reverie, etc. etc.), it really makes me long for the existence of an entirely different shark movie where the shark is just an actual serial killer. Like, it's just hanging out with the human characters on land in a trench coat with an obvious fake mustache, acting like a normal human, then suddenly there's a shark attack in the bay and it mysteriously disappears, only to reappear several seconds later in a sopping-wet duster with blood smeared all around its maw. And none of the characters seem to notice anything amiss with the land shark, until the very end when they piece all the clues together and then it's played like some huge twist reveal.
"You're gonna need a bigger boat" was indeed improvised by Scheider, but it didn't happen the way people think and it didn't happen because of Scheider having a stroke of genius either, the fact is Scheider didn't even coin the line, believe it or not the shark did, that's right, good old Bruce got in one more bite when it comes to creating the world we know today. It's kind of ironic that the mechanical shark, the very thing that it's lack of presence caused so many re-write's, also was the cause behind one of the most quoted movie lines of all time to be adlibbed, a line that wasn't even in the re-write's. Because of the shark breaking all the time everyone who was working on the crew was getting really frustrated, and one of the things that kept causing the delays to be even longer was the fact that the boat that the crew who ran the shark wasn't big enough to carry all the tools and other essentials needed to repair the thing, so every time it broke it had to be drug back to the shore for repairs causing the delays to be agonizingly long, as a result everyone was walking around complaining saying "They should have gotten a bigger boat", it wound up becoming the catch-all phrase for when someone would propose doing something inevitably someone would say joking around "You're gonna need a bigger boat", I can't remember from watching the interview with someone who talked about that whether it was Scheider's idea to say it adlibbed or someone gave him the idea, but either way because of the shark constantly breaking members of the cast and crew had already been walking around saying that all the time before that scene was shot.
