Scenic Routes: Jaws

http://www.avclub.com/articles/jaws,45876/

Scenic Routes
Jaws
Mike D'Angelo
October 4, 2010

A few years ago, Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth co-directed a movie called The Five Obstructions, in which the former challenged the latter to remake his 1967 short “The Perfect Human” over and over again, subject to various arbitrary restrictions. (Example: No shot can last longer than 12 frames, or half a second.) The movie’s thesis—argued more convincingly in some segments than others, but hard to deny overall—is that limited options actually enhance rather than stifle creativity, mostly by forcing the director (or writer, or architect, or head coach) to come up with unusual solutions to difficult problems. Allowed to do anything they like, most people, no matter how talented, tend to fall back on whatever’s worked in the past, frequently with tepid or tedious results. Yanking some expected support out from under them, however much panic that instills, may well be doing them a big favor.

Steven Spielberg arguably had only one obstruction to deal with when he was making Jaws, but it was a doozy: His movie was about a killer shark, but the mechanical sharks he had built almost never worked. So he had to figure out some novel, visually compelling way to suggest many of the attacks, as he lacked the means to properly depict them. By all accounts, this setback seemed like a death knell to everybody on the set, Spielberg in particular. And yet it’s entirely possible that Jaws wouldn’t have become the phenomenon it did had it featured a fully functional Bruce The Shark, as the “compromised” film we have boasts a nearly perfect, nerve-jangling ratio of the in-your-face to the not-quite-seen. Tops in the latter category, in my opinion, is Bruce’s first open buffet at the fully crowded Amity beach, as supremely anxious Amity police chief Roy Scheider sees his worst nightmare come true.

Watching this scene for the first time in a bunch of years, I was struck by how elegantly it’s constructed, especially compared to today’s summer event movies. (Granted, there was no such thing as a “summer event movie” in 1975. Jaws almost single-handedly created that genre.) Spielberg immediately sets up the victims (and fake victims)—first following the fat woman into the water, then reversing direction to track along with the boy in the red trunks as he clambers back onto the beach, asking permission to get his inflatable raft. Now we know what the kid’s mom looks like, her memorable floppy hat included. That accomplished, Spielberg has the boy take us to Scheider, who appears in profile in the foreground, looking screen left, just as the kid disappears at screen right. In addition to which, the kid’s path along the beach horizontally bisects Scheider and a family reclining a few feet away, setting up the moment a bit later when the dad hits up Scheider for some municipal favor, blocking Scheider’s view of the ocean in the process. Then the dog. Then the floppy hat—hi, Mom. Then the boy hitting the surf on his raft. Back to the dog. Fat lady floating. Raft. Dog. More dog. Scheider.

And now comes one of the most subtly stunning effects in Spielberg’s entire oeuvre—way more effective, I think, than the much-celebrated dolly zoom when the shark strikes. (I will get to that.) In three successive shots, we move closer and closer to Scheider’s alert but still quasi-relaxed form, but with both cuts carefully disguised by the blurred motion of a random passerby. This creates the uncanny sensation that Scheider has somehow willed himself into greater and greater prominence in the frame, just by the sheer force of his unblinking hyper-vigilance. To his credit, Scheider doesn’t attempt to sell this moment at all. He lets the camera do all the work; nonetheless, viewers immediately project the sequence’s formal quality—which amounts to a sort of hidden jitteriness—onto the character’s mindset. Did Spielberg cook this up because he was aware that there wasn’t gonna be a whole lot happening in the water a few minutes later? No way to know for sure, but good luck finding any similar moments in, oh, say, Jurassic Park.

After some additional expert tension-building, we get our first indirect evidence of Bruce’s presence, in the form of the dog’s owner fruitlessly calling its name, and a shot of the stick the dog had been fetching floating sadly on the waves. Though it screws with my argument for this piece, I gotta admit that Spielberg’s decision not to show the dog become shark chow probably didn’t have much to do with mechanical failure. More likely, somebody felt like that would just be too much, as American cinema has a long, kind of ridiculous history of shying away from any overt depiction of domestic animals being killed—even in movies, like this one, that are totally willing to show giant arterial geysers spurting from innocent children. (To be fair, I believe Spielberg does have a dinosaur eat a dog in The Lost World.)

In any case, if the missing mutt didn’t clue us in that lunch will now be served and lunch is us, John Williams’ legendary duh-duh duh-duh now arrives to make it official. We get a long underwater shot of yummy kicking limbs, presumably from Bruce’s point of view, culminating in a view of the little boy’s raft overhead. When the attack finally commences, however, time it. It lasts 10 seconds. That’s it. You barely see the shark at all—even after watching the first shot of the kid being grabbed a dozen times, I’m still not sure whether I’m seeing fins or just corners of the raft flailing about. (Might be clearer on the big screen; I’m watching on an iMac.) There’s one horrible bloody instant, and then he’s just gone. Which is probably quite close to how such an attack would appear to observers in real life. Instantaneous absence. We’re left with Mom in her floppy hat, gradually realizing by process of elimination—well, and the raft with a hole chewed through the center—that she’s the big loser in today’s Shark Lotto.

As for the dolly zoom into Scheider at the moment of the attack, I don’t mean to hate. It just feels a bit gimmicky compared to the earlier invisible-zoom approach, which doesn’t get talked about nearly as much. On the other hand, one could argue that subtlety isn’t necessarily called for when you’ve just seen one of the citizens you’ve been hired to protect devoured whole. And again, I’m impressed by how Scheider underplays the moment. Most actors would feel compelled to signal their mounting horror, but he seems to understand that if the background is radically changing size while you remain constant (for those who don’t know, this is achieved by simultaneously zooming in and dollying back, or vice versa), that’s gonna be plenty charged enough—no need to help out via widening eyes or slackening jaw. All Scheider does (I think) is lean slightly forward right at the end, which more than suffices. We can manage the rest.

That said, I’m surprised nobody has yet created a YouTube parody in which the dolly zoom is portrayed as Scheider’s reaction to the truly frightening man-boobs on the elderly dude in the bathing cap. Giant and droopy is one (revolting) thing; tiny and round is just creepy as hell.

Hunting Bruce, Or, On The Trail Of The 'Jaws' Shark

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127370664

Hunting Bruce, Or, On The Trail Of The 'Jaws' Shark
by Cory Turner
June 2, 2010

Thirty-five years ago this month, one word was on the minds — and lips — of American moviegoers: "Shark!"

On June 20, 1975, Steven Spielberg's Jaws opened in theaters across the country. It starred Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw and a newcomer to the screen: Bruce the mechanical shark. The film was both a commercial and critical success, claiming record box-office grosses (until it was eclipsed two years later by Star Wars) and earning several Oscars as well as a Best Picture nomination.

Bruce itself became a cultural icon — more than the sum of its elastomer skin and pneumatic parts — and gave the beach jitters to generations of Americans. Including me, once I finally saw it — Jaws terrified me so much as a kid that one important fact didn't immediately occur to me: The shark was fake.

Then I found a photo of Bruce being built, a workman leaning harmlessly into its mouth. That was my Heart of Darkness moment. At 10 years old, I decided that (a) I had to see Bruce for myself and (b) I had to touch it. Why? Simple: How dangerous is a shark you can touch?

There was just one problem: I couldn't persuade my parents to take part in a pilgrimage to one of the two places I thought Bruce might be: Los Angeles, where it was built, or Martha's Vineyard, where the film was shot. So I had to wait — until this spring. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

A Few Facts, And Certain Bits Of Back Story, About Bruce

Let's start with the name. It came from director Steven Spielberg — or rather from Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce Ramer.

The shark itself was every bit as big in real life as it's described as being in the film. So when marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) exclaims, upon first seeing the shark, that it's a 20-footer, and Robert Shaw's Quint the shark hunter corrects him, saying it's 25, Quint's right.

The film's art director, Joe Alves, was hired to create the shark, and he remembers very clearly how he decided on those 25 feet. He made two life-size paper drawings of Bruce — one 20 feet long, the other 30 feet. He took the two to a parking garage on the Universal Studios back lot and put them side by side for studio executives. In a classic Goldilocks moment, the bigger shark seemed too big and the little shark too little. So Alves took the middle road.

Thirty years later, Jeff Pirtle, NBC Universal's manager of archives and collections, invited me to his office on the Universal Studios lot and showed me a number of Alves' original schematics for the shark. The width of those famous jaws: nearly 5 feet. The head alone, according to one schematic, weighed 400 pounds.

And the most important number of all: three. There were three Bruces, not one, created for the original Jaws.

All three sharks were created from the same mold. One was pulled by boat, when it had to swim convincingly on camera. The other two sat atop a metal arm, hidden underwater so they could, among other things, vault onto the deck of the Orca and make short work of Robert Shaw.

And while you wouldn't know it from watching the film, Bruce the mechanical shark had a dirty little secret: It didn't work very well. Stories abound of the animatronic shark stalling the moment it hit water and sinking to the seafloor. In fact, the finicky mechanics ended up pushing the film both over budget and over schedule.

But Alves insists that when it worked, the shark "was just great."

"When it first comes out of the water, and [Roy] Scheider says, 'C'mon down and chum some of this [stuff],' and you look and the shark comes up, it was just fantastic," he recalls.

So what happened to Bruce? I took my question straight to the top, to Spielberg himself. Actually, I got his spokesman, Marvin Levy, who's been working with Spielberg since Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

"The original Bruce — or Bruces — were all destroyed," Levy told me. "So there is no Bruce existing anywhere, nor any parts thereof."

I held out hope. Maybe there's something hiding in a warehouse or archive somewhere?

But Marvin was quick to set me straight: The Bruces, all of them, are gone.

But Who Would Dismantle Bruce? And Why?

Alves says that by the time they finally finished shooting Jaws, saving Bruce simply wasn't a priority.

"We were in deep trouble," he says. "The studio was reluctant to make the movie; they had no confidence in it. When we came back, they just dumped the sharks in the back lot, and they just rotted away."

Heartbroken, I visited Facebook, where Bruce has its own page — and more friends than I ever will. Many of those friends hold out hope that it's still alive — I mean, intact. And it's here — on Facebook — that I first heard about a possible fourth Bruce. It sounded too good to be true, so I asked Pirtle, the NBC archivist. And he laughed.

"The fourth shark was brought to my attention probably two years ago, by a Jaws fan who had found my phone number and said that the fourth Jaws shark was in existence at an auto parts junkyard in Sun Valley," Pirtle said.

According to Pirtle, this fourth shark was never used in the film, but it does appear to have been cast from the original Bruce mold at the time of the film. It was made for use at the Universal Studios Theme Park in Hollywood, where it hung by its tail from 1975 to 1990.

What happened to this fourth Bruce? I started cold-calling junkyards to find out. The conversations went something like this:

"Hi, I'm calling from NPR. Do you happen to have a shark in your junkyard?"

Silence.

"Hello?"

Then, a few calls into my list, the voice on the other end of the line didn't hang up on me. It was the voice of Nathan Adlen of Adlen Brothers Auto Wrecking in Sun Valley, Calif..

Adlen inherited the business from his father, Sam Adlen, who in 1990 was buying vehicles from Universal's transportation department. Adlen doesn't know exactly how it happened — his father died more than 10 years ago. All he knows is one day, lumped into a batch of cars from Universal, there was a shark.

"It caught my father's eye," Adlen said. "When it got here, it was a little bit damaged. I think we added the teeth back to it and whatever else needed mending."

I flew across the country and headed for Sun Valley. But I had to be sure this was Bruce, so I brought a little help: the man who designed him, Joe Alves. And Alves brought his friend Roy Arbogast, whom he hired more than 35 years ago to help create the original Bruce mold.

We met at Adlen's U Pick Parts auto yard. Adlen led us through a compound of buildings, through a garage and a pair of gates until we emerged into a sea of junked cars — 26 acres' worth — and a tiny oasis of palms and loquat plants. In the middle of that oasis, atop two metal poles, was a shark. Its skin was cracked; its color badly faded. Instead of rows of menacing teeth, it had harmless wooden dentures.

But as Alves pointed out, the size was right.

"You know what amazes me though, seeing it?" he said. "How big the damn thing is."

But was it Bruce? Alves thought so, but he deferred to Arbogast. Arbogast walked under the belly of the beast, poking it with the handle of a rake. Then he stopped. I watched him, anxiously awaiting a verdict.

"That's the real one," Arbogast said.

I asked if he was sure.

"Definitely. It's from the same mold," he said. "It's just kinda nice to see it again after 25 or 30 years. It's amazing that it's still here."

It's older than I am, this fourth Bruce. And while I know I'm not 10 years old anymore, I just couldn't help myself. I asked Adlen if he has a ladder. A few minutes later, two men emerged from the garage with a wheeled platform ladder, like you'd expect to find on an airport tarmac. They pushed it right up to Bruce's lower lip, and I climbed.

Its jaws are open, and I leaned in close enough that I could see individual flecks of paint peeling from the creases of its mouth. I looked into its eye, then back to its splintered fence row of teeth.

I reached out my hand.