Speaker 1: All right, everybody, welcome back to episode three of Jaws
versus Jurassic Park. This is gonna be the Kapper. This
is where we're gonna give our final judgment on these
two great films.
Speaker 2: I'm super excited to talk about Quin's speech and the
composer for both of these movies, who is an icon.
But I am not quite as excited as I am
about what's coming up next week, which is Guns N'
Roses Appetite for Destruction versus AC DC, Back and Black.
And the first one that we tackle is Appetite for
Destruction and it's gonna get released on the thirty third
anniversary of the release of the album. How awesome is that?
So you guys, be sure and whatever app you're using
right now, be sure and subscribe or follow or do
whatever you need to do to automatically download so that
you don't miss that episode next week. And without further ado.
Speaker 3: Hello everybody, and welcome to the Surely You Can't Be
Serious Podcast, discussing and debating the iconic and the forgotten
of eighties and nineties pop culture with your co hosts
James D.
Speaker 2: Graves and Jason Colibn. Welcome back, everybody, to these, surely
you can't be serious podcasts. We are on part three
of our Jaws Versus Jurassic Park episode. We are going
to dive right in forgive the pun there. So both
of the movies start off with a death scene. Right
in Jaws, you have Chrissy being attacked by an unseen
monster underneath the water, and that sets the impetus for
the whole first portion act one of the movie, if
you will, same thing happens in Jurassic Park. We start
off with a death scene. Despite you know, amazing scientific abilities,
for some reason, they can't get cage that just locks
in place, and so guy falls in, and you have
the Muldoon character who's doing everything he can close upon
his teeth closer, closer, one of his teeth. I kind
of want to see.
Speaker 1: The cavity the Here's the other thing about that scene
that drives me insane. Okay, whatever they're shooting the velasciraptor
with is not working, okay, right, Okay, the little zappers,
the bug zappers pull out the shotguns. Okay, yeah, shoot
hard with the bazooka.
Speaker 2: So both of those set the story going for the
first act of the movie. So with Jaws. You get
this idea that there's a shark out there, maybe we
should shut things down, and then you begin the power
struggle to determine whether the beach gets shut down or
whether it doesn't get shut down. If we switch over
to Jurassic Park, the death is the impetus behind the
lawyer going to the park and putting together the team
of people to establish whether this park is really safe
or not. Do you have the very strange scene where
there's a kid out on an archaeological dig that gets
threatened by doctor Grant.
Speaker 1: That's not very scary.
Speaker 2: You know, these are incredibly well done movies, but they're
definitely parts that I was just like, why did we
choose to do it this way? Why is there a
kid out there in the middle of this, and why
is he like a smart alecky, little snot nosed brat
kid of all things?
Speaker 1: Yeah, somebody's dad needs to whoop him for talking back
to doctor Grant.
Speaker 2: Is And they're all around the computer like I mean,
they're hovering. They're hovering over the computer where we established
this idea that doctor Grant doesn't like computer seeing the
machines don't get along, right, So it's that whole man
versus technology thing. And then this kid, who three feet
back from the entire crowd is able to look at
the screen and go that scary. So the impetus is
said in place so that these experts are called in
to establish whether the park is safe or not. And
of of course the lawyer, whose job it is to
come in and really scrutinize this for the investors, once
he sees the dinosaurs, with everybody else, he becomes full on,
let's forget about safety. We're going to make millions and
millions of dollars, which is of course what this is
the big issue in this movie. It's all about money
versus how safe is it.
Speaker 1: We're going to make a fortune with this place.
Speaker 2: And then, of course the lawyer, the bloodsucking lawyer who's
the only one that's agreeing with John Hammond, is also
the first one to die, and appropriately so toiletting on
top of a toilet.
Speaker 1: The toilet, Yeah, thanks to Jeff Goldblum's character, who wouldn't
stay in the car.
Speaker 2: Well, no, no, no.
Speaker 1: He leaves the team rex to the toilet.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah he does. That's right, Yeah, yeah, that's right.
So let me ask you this to the toilet. Yes,
what was your thought whenever you the scene didn't go
the way that originally it wasn't written that way. It
was Jeff Goldbloom's suggestion that he also grab atorch and
try to distract the t Rex. And so you have
this great moment where doctor Grant distracts the t Rex
from the kids. He throws the flare into the park.
The dinosaur looks and makes a motion to follow the flare,
only to be distracted again by another flare. Ian Malcolm,
we're waving another flare who then brings him back, which
I mean, you see the look on doctor Grant's face,
and it's absolutely appropriate. It's like everybody's he is the
audience at that point, Like what the f are you doing?
Speaker 1: Supposedly to heroically get the kids, you know, but he
the t Rex right back to him, goes off to
the toilet, gets the lawyer killed and breaks his leg
in the process. Not very heroic in my opinion, but
it was better than the runaway that he was originally
gonna do.
Speaker 2: So we've talked before, our Chief Brody was every man right,
He's supposed to be the audience, right, So one of
the big ideas with Jaws, and I mentioned this in
our last episode, is this idea of the power struggle, right,
it's the pissing contest, and it's almost exclusively man and
nature and man and man that's involved. Here we got
Brody versus the mayor and he's the new guy. And
here's a big idea that kind of gets lost in
the movie, but it's there is this idea of an
islander and a non islander, like you know, the kid
at the beginning he talks about, you know, are you
you know, from the island, and he's like, oh, I
live this other place, he says, but I was born here,
which makes him an islander. And then later on the
woman is you know, Brody's wife is like, well, one
am I an island? And she's like, Ellen, you'll never
be an islander. You weren't born here. You'll never it
doesn't matter how long you're here.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So it's this insider versus outsider thing that goes along
with the power struggle that's going on between Brody and
the mayor, right right. And then you have, of course,
you know the probably the biggest pissing contest is between
Quin and.
Speaker 1: Hooper, right, Yes, yes, for sure.
Speaker 2: And but before you even get there, even the mayor
and Hooper have their little power struggle as well. You know,
you'd like to prove that would and you get your
name in one of those national geographic magazines or whatever
it is.
Speaker 1: He says, right, I'm not talking to a man who's
lining up to be a hot lunch, right, right.
Speaker 2: And then you also have this kind of weird dynamic
when they're all on the boat together of Quintin Hooper,
who even though they're warring with each other, they have
a power struggle with Brody. They're not letting Brody do anything.
I mean, We'll get the freaking chief of police on
the boat and he's like subservient to everything that they're saying.
You know, I gets yelled at from messing with the tanks,
and then Shaw he's like, it's okay, you just ask
me like a condescending little It's this neat power dynamic,
and they do a great job both in the script
writing and the acting of without overtly saying it, establishing
that power contest. Right.
Speaker 1: Ye.
Speaker 2: So back to my original idea, Brody, we see him
and we know from the beginning that he's a protector. Right,
he's talking to the kids, don't swing on the swing.
It's broken, right, And he's willing to admit that he's
wrong when he's made mistakes, specifically not closing the beaches
and letting Alex die is wrong and he's not your fault.
Yes it was. She's wrong, that's what we said. She's wrong. No,
she's not. And so you see this character development of
Brody going through this process, you know, and he has
to he's already kind of left his known spot and
come into this little island that he's not familiar with,
and then he really has to go into the unknown
of the water because we learned at the beginning he
hates the water. Don't know why he moved to be
the chief of police of an island town when he
hates the water.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and we don't really get a sense of
why he hates the water, do we. I don't think
that's ever really mentioned. No, huh.
Speaker 2: Hooper tells his story in a little bit. We can
talk about Quinn and his story, so we understand why
they don't. But the most we get is, you know,
they call it that fear. What's it called? And he
goes drowning, right, drowning not so good. So Brody goes
through this entire you know, we get to the second
death and then he has to go through this entire
process where he moves from being the guy that everybody's
picking on or condescending to and who he can't have
a voice for. So he's the last guy left. And
where is he. He's in the middle of the water
on a sinking ship. He is facing his biggest fear.
We talked about it with Indiana Jones. We talked about
it with Marty McFly. Chief Brody is stuck in his
biggest fear and what is that. He's in the water sinking,
but he has grown. We watched Chief Brody grow up
and become a man so that he is able to
save everyone else, even and he thinks probably sacrificing his
own life so that everyone else can be said.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's good. When they were filming these types of
scenes out at sea, Spielberg really wanted to make sure
you could not ever see land, because they wanted them
to be isolated. And there was this thought process that
if you could see land, then if they got in trouble,
they just take the boat back. You know, we'll get
them tomorrow, you know. So I wanted them to feel isolated,
and I thought it was funny. This is of course
before digital removing anything. Right. So they would be out
at sea and there would be a sailboat that would
come into like the right edge of the frame, and
they had to wait and wait and wait for that
sailboat to completely cross across all the way from the
right side to the left side, and they had to
pray that there was not another sailboat on the right
side of the screen.
Speaker 2: Right. I mean, this was all because Steven Spielberg was like,
we have to shoot this on the real ocean, right right,
that's right. Had they been on a lake, had they
been in a back lot, none of this would have
been a problem. But we also if you look at
this movie, this movie has a reality that I will
go ahead and say our other movie, even though they
were filming in an actual place, it doesn't seem to
have to be like the other movie has a cartoon
quality about it. I don't know what. I don't know
how to describe it exactly, but there is a reality
that I get with Jaws that is missing in Jurassic Park.
Speaker 1: What do you think I agree with you that the
elements of Jaws are just as life threatening as the shark.
Whereas the jungle. You know, doctor Grant and the kids
they go to sleep in the jungle, they're sleeping with
giant dino cows, you know what I mean. So it's
just not as threatening as deep ocean.
Speaker 2: To that, to Jurassic Park. Our main character, of course,
is doctor Grant, and we learn from the beginning, not
only does he scare the crap out of the little
kid by basically threatening to disembowel him, he doesn't want kids, right,
they smell, yeah, and they're loud, you know it's but
he doesn't like kids. The relationship that he has with
Sadler is so so subtle. I don't know that I
even noticed that they were actually romantically involved for the
first several times I watched it. I mean, what do
they hug? Maybe half a second in the movie. There's
no romance.
Speaker 1: I don't think there really is. I think we're supposed
to believe that there is, but I don't see any
kind of chemistry romantically between them at all. Really, No
huh do they kiss?
Speaker 2: No, no hug?
Speaker 1: Do they hold hands?
Speaker 2: I kind of think that maybe Ian Malcolm touches her
more than doctor Grant.
Speaker 1: I think you're right.
Speaker 2: So doctor Grant doesn't like children, but then is thrown
into this situation again where he has to protect it.
And it's one of my favorite parts in the movie
when Lex screams, he left us, he left us, and
he says, yes, but I'm not going to At that moment,
he becomes responsible for the lives of others, and so
he starts with He starts as this guy who is
interested only in dead old things and doesn't want to
be involved with kids, and ends up with a guy
who hates the dinosaurs and loves the kids. He grows
to be their protector over the course of the movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's interesting. One of the things that
I did want to talk about is I mean, you
talk about this tension between Quinn and Hooper back to Jaws. Yeah,
there was a tension between Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfus.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and it's rather famous. You know, Shaw had
been acting for much of his life at that point.
He's in his late forties. He started acting when he
was in his early twenties, and so he's been around
a while now. Richard Dreyfuss had been in a few
small things, but it hadn't been very much years before
that that he had really gotten his first major film experiences.
He had a couple, he had like two lines in
the Graduate, and then he gets he gets this part
in American Graffiti, right, yep, and that one's a decent
that's a decent supporting role for him. And then he
gets his first starring role that we talked about last episode, in.
Speaker 1: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, right, And.
Speaker 2: So he is he's a young guy. I mean, he's
a young and relatively speaking, inexperienced guy. And so Robert
Shaw would have this this power dynamic put with him
that he said, you know, he was the nicest guy
in the world to me when we weren't on set,
and then once we got on set, it became this
condescending make fun of him, you know, do whatever you
can to go to him for the entire production. And
I have heard this that during the production of this movie,
you know, they're in a beach, right, and so tourists
come in and they're a lot of them are young
girls in bathing suits, and the crew was pretty familiar,
but everybody said that Richard Dreyfus was the man with
regard to the young ladies who might be taking their
vacation in Martha's vineyard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, movie crews in general when they come to your
town are pretty popular guys, and Richard Dreyfus and some
of his buddies tried to enjoy as much of the
benefits of being a movie star as they possibly could.
Speaker 2: Right, So there may have he Obviously, Richard Dreyfus probably
has a little bit of confidence as he's coming in
and Robert Shaw is trying to put that in place.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: On the flip side of that, Robert Shaw has a drinking.
Speaker 1: Problem, for sure, Absolutely he does.
Speaker 2: Now there are a certain contingent of British actors who
are just known for being heavy drinkers. We talked about
Oliver Reed when we had our Gladiator episode and how
he hung with Peter O'Toole and some of those guys,
and it sounds like Robert Shaw probably would have fit
in very well with those folks. Yep, for sure, and
he was willing to admit it. Apparently. I've heard a
couple of different versions of this story, and one version
goes Robert Shaw was, you know, trying to move along
the boat and had to use two hands to do something,
but he had a drink in one hand, and he
says to Richard Dreyfus, can you help me out with this?
And Richard Dreyfus says, you want me to help you
out with it? He says yeah, and the hands in
the glass and Richard Dreyfus immediately just chunks it into
the ocean. And then the other version was I've got
a drinking problem? Can anybody help me? And it's at
that point that Richard Dreyfus takes his drink and throws
it into the ocean. Either way, it's funny. It's a
funny response to the heckling that he's been getting from
this actor all the while that they're on stage.
Speaker 1: It was the funny, but the entire crew was like, uh, oh,
we might have a blow up here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and we don't want to give Shaw
too much credit credit I mean he was He was like,
you're such a pandemic. I bet you won't even climb
to the top of the mast on the ship, right,
And he keeps offering him more and more money to
do it, and finally Spielberg is like, you're not allowed.
I am saying, as the director of this movie, you
are forbidden to climb to the top of that mast
because it looked like Gryfus was about to go do
it right, right, And it's the same power struggle that
you see going on on film.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, let's talk about the scene that they
discussed the Indianapolis. I thought this was brilliant.
Speaker 2: So that part was not in the book at all.
It was Howard Sackler's idea. He said, hey, you should
have him have been on the USS Indianapolis. And Spielberg
didn't know what it was. I mean, I didn't know
what it was until I saw the movie. It's not
you know now that this movie, being forty five years old,
it's something that everybody knows. But even back in nineteen
seventy five, it wasn't common knowledge. You didn't know about
the event unless you were related to somebody or you
were somebody that was on that ship, right.
Speaker 1: Right, right. They needed something for the character to hate sharks.
Why does he hate sharks so much? Why is he
dead set on getting this shark?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: The Indianapolis gives us the reason.
Speaker 2: Right, and so Howard Sackler had come up with the idea.
And then I mentioned before John Millius had been involved
with the script and was a good friend of Steven Spielberg.
He was one of the guys there with Spielberg and
Lucas when they came in and broke the Shark, and
he took it upon himself to develop that particular monologue,
that scene, and he wrote a ten page monologue for this,
which is too much. I mean, you got to figure
there's approximately one minute for each page. Somebody talking for
ten solid minutes is too much. And so they had
the scene, they couldn't figure out exactly how to whittle
it down. And it was Robert Shaw who said, can
I take a stab at it? Can I take can?
Will you give it to me and let me work
on it a little bit? And he took it home
and he worked on it, or he took it back
and he worked on it overnight and came back with
roughly a five page script, and Spielberg looked at it
and said this is perfect.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's exactly right. And then on the day of filming,
Robert Shaw said, hey, before I do this, I think
I'm gonna have a few drinks and Spielberg is like,
all right, you know, method actor, Sure, go for it,
all right, And he got hammered. He got hammered, he
got hammer headed, and I mean he was slashed and
he couldn't do it. The next day he came back
and said, how bad did I embarrass myself? Spielberg said, well,
I don't really know if we can use much of that. Well,
I'd like another shot at it. Can I have another shot?
And then he came back and he nailed it.
Speaker 2: He didn't just nail it, he changed the entire perception
of the movie in one take. He made everyone in
the crew that Steven Spielberg, everyone in the cast, suddenly go,
this is a movie that might be a success. Because
up until that point they had dealt with the shark,
they had dealt with the script problems, they had dealt
with the problems of filming in the ocean, and Steven
Spielberg thought he was going to get fired every single day.
He almost went and quit the production. And then in
a moment, everyone's perception changed.
Speaker 1: Yep, that's exactly right. You know, you talk about Steven
Spielberg thinking every day he is going to be fired.
He used to sleep with Celery under his pillow because
it was considered good luck. But you're exactly right. That
scene gave them that sort of emotional connection between the
characters where they thought, Okay, this is more than just
a silly shark movie. We got some here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's still watching it. Every time that I
see that scene, I am entranced. I know exactly what
he's going to say. I can almost quote it for
you word for word, and I just sit there and
am totally engrossed in it. And it's at the it's
just after that moment that the shark comes back.
Speaker 1: The scars that they're showing, like the scar scene, Yeah,
it's funny, and I think one of them is an
actual scar. Richard Dreyff shows it.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so they're comparing scars and it's it is
wonderful because this is the way it is with men. Right.
You know, you you fight and then you become best friends. Right,
you antagonize an antagony. It's like being on a sports team. Right,
It's you are constantly giving the other guy crap, you're
trash talking, and then something happens that brings you guys
together and suddenly you're the best of friends, right, yes,
And so that's what happens when they start talking about
the scars, that somebody points out a scar. What happened
to you? What happened to me? You know? And they're
showing scars of where they were attacked by eels or
attacked by sharks, and suddenly Quin and Hooper have found
their common ground. And Brody has this wonderful little moment
where he lifts up his shirt and looks at an
appendix scar to try to decide whether he should mention
it or and then decides not to mention it. And
that scar, as it turns out, is actually Roy Scheider
actually had an appendectomy. It was a real scar. Wait wait, wait,
let me guess mother. Okay, So with both of these movies,
you have this idea of man versus nature, intellect versus ignorance, right, okay,
So you know, the the intellect for Jaws is obviously
the Hooper and Quint and a little bit of Brodie,
and then the intellect for Jurassic Park is all of
the archaeologists and doctor Ian Malcolm. And then you have
what you believe to be the ignorant animals, right, the
ignorant shark or the ignorant dinosaurs. But what makes these
things truly scary is they don't seem to be that
ignorant for sure.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: Right, So this it turns from intellect versus ignorance to
intellect versus something almost supernatural, because not only is this
thing gigantic and powerful and deadly, it also appears that
it's smart.
Speaker 1: That's right. The scene where the shark goes underneath the boat,
really he's taken by surprise. Now use the audience. You're thinking, man,
this guy's in charge, and he knows exactly what's going
on until now, and now he's like, whoa right?
Speaker 2: And that's when, Yeah, that's that's when Quint and Hooper's
power struggle suddenly takes a turn, right, because with them
you had Hooper's intellect versus Quint's know how and experience
and the working class kind of idea, and he Quin
has done nothing but belittle Hooper's fancy gadgets and stuff
until the point that he realizes that the shark is
smart too. And it's at that point that he says,
what exactly can you do with these things of yours?
Speaker 1: Yep, that's really cool? Hey, there is something about that
right around that moment that I want to mention. There
is a scene where Chief Brody is loading his revolver
and it's sort of set at dusk, and you see
a massive shooting star. Did you notice this.
Speaker 2: When you watch the movie every time?
Speaker 1: That is not an optical effect. They just happen to
catch that shooting star at that moment, and it looks
super cool.
Speaker 2: Dumb luck to find the movie right, They got so
many it's InCred So we have the Leviathan versus man
in both scenarios, which goes to the idea of super
much supernatural power versus mankind. You've got mythic, unemotional, almost
demonic and unbeatable with intellect with but both with intellect.
Shark and dinosaurs, and I love I love Iam Malcolm's
lines and all of this. He is the guy who's
trying to he's he's mocking, but he is absolutely right
in everything that he says. Right, life will not be contained.
Life finds a way. He says what you call I
call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.
He realizes that they are just hurtling headlong into this
idea without taking the time to think about it. You're
so preoccup you're so preoccupied with whether they could, they
never stopped to think of what whether they should.
Speaker 1: He actually even says the line, boy do I hate
being right all the time. Okay, I've got a couple
of little tidbits that I want to throw at you.
I think you're going to be amazed. I really will
be surprised if you heard this stuff. All right, Okay,
So the shark in Jaws doesn't show up until one
hour and two minutes into the film. Okay, yes, in
Jurassic Park, the full view of the adult Veloci raptor
doesn't show up until one forty three into the movie.
Almost two hours into the movie. You don't get the
full view of the raptor. Here is my tidbit. Okay,
you know the scene where the local fishermen put like
a brisket on a hook and they throw it and
they're sitting on that rickety old doc that's just barely
hanging on by three nails. Sure enough, boom, shark hits it.
The chain starts to go and they're like, well look
at that, Charlie, and the doc falls. He drags it
out to see that's a really tense scene, right, drags
that guy on the dock out to the you know,
one hundred yards off shore, and the dock turns around,
starts to come back, and the guy's going to swim,
Charlie swim.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So first is the first point that you suddenly
go this shark is not just a mindless man eater. Yep,
he's coming back. Yep, he's just turned around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's gonna make Charlie pay for this decision. But
there was a young filmmaker on set that day who
was just stopping by to see how things were going,
and they're like, all right, you, hey, come over here,
grab a hammer and nails and help us put together
this rickety old doc. Do you know who that filmmaker.
Speaker 2: Was, No, Jason, I don't know who that is. Can
you tell me.
Speaker 1: The young filmmaker on set that day that built that
crappy little doc none other than John Landis, director of
Coming to America Trading Places American werel from London Animal House.
Speaker 2: That's awesome, good, has a great tidbit. We're going to
put that one on the trivia card.
Speaker 1: Okay. A couple of little tidbits also for you that
I thought were interesting. The voice on the radio on
Quince's boat when Missus Brodie tries to contact her husband
is actually Steven Spielberg's Ye, Peter Benchley has a cameo
as a news reporter on the beaches, yes, which is
kind of cool. Okay, here's another tidbit for you. Quinn's
boat is called the Orca in real life, the Orca whale,
which we typically called the killer whale.
Speaker 2: Yes, is the only known.
Speaker 1: Predator of the great white shark.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: Pretty cool, huh yeah. And then finally I thought this
was interesting. Nobody else may find it interesting. But the
sound editor, the sound editor who had to find sound
effects for everything in the movie. When the shark comes
out of the water and onto Quint's boat, yes, the
sound effect that he used right there is a fizzy
bottle of coke poured out on the concrete.
Speaker 2: It goes got random.
Speaker 1: He jumps out, and it's like, that'd be.
Speaker 2: Fun job to have sound editor to just go, this
is a cool sound. Let's see what I can put
this with.
Speaker 1: I would love to do fully, artist, you got to need
a bigger potion.
Speaker 2: And so then, of course, once they finished filming and
we talked about how they did the editing process and
at Vernon Fields Pool they poured milk in the water
so that they could shoot that scare scene. And I
just to touch on Vernon Fields. She was somebody who
had done like TV editing and wasn't particularly big in Hollywood,
but you know, knew her way around. She started teaching
at USC and a couple of people that happened to
be in her classes were George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
Speaker 1: Who are they?
Speaker 2: And so so she had such a great mind that
really hadn't been appreciated at that point. But when George
Lucas like, need I need an editor, I'm gonna go
call Vernie. She was smart as whip. I like Vernon yep,
And so she gets involved there. She gets involved with
Steven Spielberg because she actually worked with him, I think
on Sugarland Express as well. When she was teaching. She
actually hired This is crazy, She hired George Lucas before
he hired her, when he was still just in at USC.
She hired him and also hired a lady named Marcia
Griffin who ended up being his future wife and is
also an editor. And who you know because you were
the one that sent me the video on how Star
Wars was saved by the editing. It was because of
Marcia Griffin that Star Wars probably was the success that
it was instead of a dismal failure.
Speaker 1: It's absolutely correct. Yeah, that video is really cool. If
you haven't seen it, you needed to check it out.
But yeah, Marshall Lucas cut Star Wars to get rid
of all the confusing crap and streamlined it to the
to the movie that we know and love today.
Speaker 2: Yeah. On first showing, everybody hated it.
Speaker 1: This crap. I don't understand any of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so as Marsha Griffin that came in and
said it, who had been introduced to George Lucas by
Verna Fields. Verna Fields then gets called by Steven Spielberg
to edit Sugarland Express and they start to call her
the mother cutter. Nice nice, yes, right, and just just
to talk about her amazing abilities. She developed this. She
pioneered a technique called wipe by cut, where the cut
takes place as like a figure crosses between the camera
and the character, which so you're at a distant shot.
Somebody walks in front of the camera and suddenly you're
at a close up shot because you do the cut
right as the person crossed in front of the camera,
and so you were having what would normally be called
a jump cut, where you've got a staggering thing into
something that you don't even notice that it happens. Because
of this wipe by cut type of procedure that verna
Field's pioneered. After editing those movies and Jaws, she was
nominated for the Oscar and she won. She goes on
to be a Hollywood executive. At that point, she moves
from the lady editing TV shows to the lady who's
now ordering people around at major Hollywood studios. And then
once they're done with the editing process, the last thing
left to do put in the soundtrack.
Speaker 1: Before we do that, I just want to mention one thing. Yeah,
on Jaws, they were scheduled for fifty five days of
shooting right May first to June twenty eighth, nineteen seventy four.
They actually finished in one hundred and fifty nine days.
That's three times what they were scheduled for. This is
late September when they wrapped Flash Forward nineteen ninety three.
Principal photography was wrapped on November twelfth, nineteen ninety two.
That's twelve days ahead of schedule and on budget. Spielberg
learned a great deal from Jaws, and he applied that
to later movies.
Speaker 2: Okay, so onto soundtrack in both of these movies, the
composer is the same. You may have heard of this guy.
His name is John Williams.
Speaker 1: The soundtrack for My Youth is John Williams music.
Speaker 2: You cannot have watched movies in the eighties and not
heard a soundtrack by John Williams. It's the greatest of
the soundtracks. Like if you put soundtrack greatest hits of
the eighties, it's all John Williams.
Speaker 1: Absolutely is.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you I don't care who you are, you've
been living in a forest in the entire time for
the past forty years. You've heard the Star Wars theme.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anybody, if I come up to you, it's like
it's like the Watch on Bad If I come to you,
come up you and I go, dud. You know exactly
what I'm gonna do. Right. That's two notes, two notes
that he made into something amazing. I'll tell you the
story of John Williams. Okay, yeah, I did So John
was born to John and so most people call John
Williams Johnny because that was his name growing up. His
dad was also a music guy who worked in music
for films. They ended up moving out to la where
he went to high school with his future wife. They
didn't actually date while they were in high school, but
Barbara Ruick met her there. She went on to become
an actress and was in several movies and films and
TV shows in the fifties and was a singer as well.
Had a musical background. And there's this really cool here's
here's my interesting tie in for this particular episode. Right,
So I saw this picture of Barbara Ruick dancing with
Bob Fosse and a couple of other folks w Olds
and somebody else on the affairs of Adobie Gillis. Bob
Fosse went on to direct a semi autobiographical picture about
himself called All That Jazz, which starred Rus Schider. Very good.
He had all ties in, right.
Speaker 1: And de Wie Relds is mother of Princess Leah.
Speaker 2: Very good, very good. All ties In scored by Johnny Williams.
And so John Williams gets drafted. He does his military
service as a musician does pretty well. Ends up. He
themes his first like a promotional video for the Navy
while he's in the Navy, and then he comes back
and has to decide do I want to go to
Juilliard or do I want to go arrange and compose music.
He is pianist. He plays several instruments, but he is
best at piano, and he says, Okay, I'm gonna go
to Juilliard. So he goes to Juilliard to become a
concert pianist. And after a while there he starts to
look at all of the other pns who are there
and he's like, I'm not as good as these guys.
This is not this is maybe not what I should do,
and that it's crazy. At that moment, he changes movie
history because he decides I'll go back and I'll start
arranging and composing. And that's what he does. He goes
back to la and he before Jaws. He composes dozens
of movies and hundreds of TV show episodes and so
he's getting his ten thousand hours in and through that
process he decides to start conducting because he doesn't want
to leave it to lesser conductors to get the conducting
right as well. And one of the movies that he
happens to write the score for is a movie called
The Reavers starring Steve McQueen, and I was to the
soundtrack and it's very It starts off very folky like
if you listen to the theme, it's got this kind
of folky guitar going and Southern style to it, and
then it moves into the orchestra and you're like, there,
I could see that's John Williams. You're familiar. You get
that John Williams familiarity. And so, of course that movie
came out in sixty nine, right about the same time
that Steven Spielberg is becoming a director of TV shows,
having to write scripts, waiting for his big break, which
is going to be Sugarland Express. And what he does,
because he's the son of a musician, is he goes
and buys soundtracks and listens to them while he writes
his scripts. And I identify with this. I've done this
exact same thing many many times. You just listen. You'll
listen to classical music or you listen to soundtracks and
it inspires you to make a story out of it,
and so that's what he's doing. And so he's at
the album store. He's flipping through the albums and he
sees this album for a soundtrack from the reverse, takes
it home, listening to it, writing a script, writes a
wonderful script, and thinks to himself, Man, this guy is good.
If I ever get a chance to direct a feature film,
I want this guy to be the guy that composes
the soundtrack.
Speaker 1: Nice.
Speaker 2: And so, just as it happens, a few years later,
he gets the opportunity at a Sugarland Express and he says,
I want John Williams. And so John Williams, who at
this point he's in his early forties. Now, he's been
the young guy most of his life, right, he has been.
The directors have all been older than he is, and
he's been the young guy who's learning the ropes. But
then with Spielberg, I mean, Spielberg's in his early twenties.
He's a young young man, right he's And John Williams says,
he looked like he was eighteen when I went to
go talk to him. And he says, but just within
the first five minutes of talking to him, I realized
that Spielberg knew more about soundtracks of history than I did,
which is as a that's a big statement for John Williams.
Yeah really, and so he's like, I just I'm thinking
this kid's going to be listening to rock and roll music.
But apparently he rebelled against his parents who played classical
music by listening to soundtracks and not listening to led
Zeppelin or whatever. And so they do the Sugarland Express
and he still has that same style. He still has.
You've got this kind of folky guitar, it's very similar
to the Reavers. And then it moves into something that
you can say, yeah, I feel John Williams in this.
I've got the orchestra. I've got the same orchestration going on.
I feel it. But Jaws is different. John Williams talks
about this. He says there's a point in his life
where he lose to somebody very important to him, and
it was his wife, Barbara, when he was young man,
younger than we are right now, early forties. Barbara suddenly
had a brain aneurysm died suddenly and John was left
as the father of three teenage children. But he says
that point in his life it was almost like a
gift where he realized how he needed to do things.
And I can say with certainty if you listen to
his soundtracks before Jaws and then listen to Jaws, you
can hear a difference. And he lost his wife in
March of nineteen seventy four, and he wrote the soundtrack
for Jaws in March of nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1: Dang, let's talk about his meeting with Spielberg. Okay, okay,
So Spielberg is working on the movie and he meets
with John Williams and says, all right, let's hear what
you got. And John Williams goes to the piano and says,
all right, here's what I think the soundtrack for Jaws
is going to be. Ready, dun Bill, why's like that's good,
that's really good. I no, seriously, He's like, no, seriously,
that's it. Two notes become the most recognizable soundtrack of
all time.
Speaker 2: And it's perfect. It is perfect because it's frightening. It's frightening,
and with two notes, he he is able to give
you not only here's the shark, but here's how far
the shark is away from you.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's so good. How he manipulates the audience with
this theme.
Speaker 2: Right, If it's that's too, that's far away, you've got
a long space and poop, he's around, but he's not.
If it's duh, dump dump dump dump dump dump dump
dot dump dump, you're about to get your legs bitten off, right, right,
So I listened to this and thought about it carefully.
When he was still a young man, he worked under
a composer named Bernard Hermann, who you may not know,
but that's the composer of Psycho.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2: And so I look back and I listened to specifically
the shower scene. So I listened to the shower scene. Right,
it is almost the reverse of Jaws, and I can
we'll play both of them for you here, and you
can kind of hear out how it's the reverse. But
whereas Psycho starts with and then it goes u uh uh,
it's the reverse. It is the reverse of Jaws, which
is bu It's incredible.
Speaker 1: Psycho goes und done done instead of done dune.
Speaker 2: So yeah, okay, yeah cool. And just for the for
the musicians out there, he does a fantastic John Williams
does a fantastic thing with the other part of the
melody in this where you've got the and then you
go no, no, you know you've got this other part
to it. But whereas the underlying part is in e,
the higher pitched melodic part is in E flat, which
means they're right next to each other on the keyboard.
Most notes, you've got spaces between the notes for them
to sound good. When you played notes that are a
half step apart, they don't sound right together. They don't
go together, and that creates the discomfort that you feel
whenever you hear those notes that don't belong together. He's
playing notes that don't belong together, and it makes you
on edge. It puts you at the edge of your seat,
in fear of whatever it is that's going on.
Speaker 1: The brilliant Well, let's talk about what he did for
Jurassic Park.
Speaker 2: All right. So Jurassic Park you have dinosaurs eating people right.
Speaker 1: Yes, scary scenes, yes.
Speaker 2: But whereas with Jaws you have tension and fear, John
Williams does something completely different with Jurassic Park. With Jurassic
Park you have awe and reference. It is like you
were walking into a cathedral.
Speaker 1: Yeah it is. It's fascination and wonder and amazement and
beauty rather than the mindless eating machine that the shark.
Speaker 2: Is, right, because Steven Spielberg didn't want this to be
a horror movie, right. He wanted to approach it from
the perception of a little kid. And little kids aren't
scared of dinosaurs. They're in awe of dinosaurs. And so
that was the idea that he conveyed to Williams. And
that's why Williams composed a score that was majestic and
awe inspiring, as opposed to having this discontinent sound of
notes that don't belong together that puts you in fear
and tension.
Speaker 1: The scene in Jurassic Park when John Hammond brings doctor
Grant and doctor Sadler and they see the brachiosaur eating
from the trees and the swell of the music and
doctor Grant is about to faint and John Hammond is like,
doctor Grant, my dear doctor Sadler, welcome to Jurassic Park.
That scene I've seen a thousand times. And when that
goes with what I'm seeing on the screen and the
emotion of the music, it's emotional. I mean I get
choked up sometimes when I watch it, it's amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah's incredible. So I want to go back just real quick,
because there is this moment in Jaws. You've got all
of this tension music that gives you fear and trepidation,
but there's this moment when the chase is on. Right,
did you listen?
Speaker 1: Did?
Speaker 2: Did you get a chance?
Speaker 1: Yep?
Speaker 2: And suddenly, in the midst of all of this scary,
intense music, suddenly it turns into a swashbuckling adventure. It's
amazing because every time I see it, it just the
whole mood of the movie changes in a moment. And
Steven Spielberg said this. He said that Jaws would only
have been half as successful as it was without John Williams.
And so you look at this and you go, wow,
if if I don't hear the shark, I don't know
what's going on. The shark is invisible because, as we noted,
there were production problems which made them make decisions about this.
But even though you can't see it.
Speaker 1: You hear it right right, that's right.
Speaker 2: You fear it, you have you understand how near or
far away it is. And then in just a moment,
he switches, he switches gears on you, and suddenly you're
no longer following the shark. You're following the three adventurers
on their quest to conquer the shark, and you think
to yourself, we're going to win. We're going to win.
This is this is the this is where the sailors win,
they take over, they win, and it's this wonderful, exciting,
exhilarating music, which then when it twists again and everything
goes badly, makes it that much more effective.
Speaker 1: When John Williams won the Best Score for Jobs, he
was conducting the orchestra at the Academy Awards and when
they announced his name, he had to leave the orchestra,
run up there except his award, and then hustle back
to continue directing the orchestra. Here's a couple of tidbits
I want to throw at you about Jurassic Park that
I thought were pretty cool. Right. One of the things
that Steven Spielberg takes a sort of creative license on
is the height of the velociraptors. Lost raptors are kind
of known archaeologically to be only about six feet tall, right,
six foot turkey ish, but he makes them ten feet tall.
That he just decides they're going to be scarier that way. Well,
during filming, paleontologists uncovered a ten foot tall specimen of
raptor called the Utah Raptors. Pretty cool. They were super
excited when they discovered that while they were filling that's awesome.
Speaker 2: I'm going to throw in a tidbit between you dibits here, okay,
because of it. It also involves a discovery three years ago.
On August nineteenth, two thousand and seven, teen forty two
years after the movie Jaws brought the story of the
USS Indianapolis to the world at large, a co founder
of Microsoft named Paul Allen located the wreck of the
USS Indianapolis in the Philippine Sea at a depth of
over eighteen thousand feet.
Speaker 1: That is awesome. Love that a couple of tidbits for you.
At Jurassic Park, when Dennis nedri is first introduced, he
is watching Jaws on his computer screen.
Speaker 2: Nu.
Speaker 1: Huh, Yes, how did I miss that? He is watching
freaking Jaws?
Speaker 3: What? Yes?
Speaker 2: Scrap Now I got to go look at it again.
Did we already talk about his clothes and his wardrobe change?
Speaker 1: No, let's talk about that, okay.
Speaker 2: So Dennis Nedri. Wayne Knight has several different outfits that
he wears during the course of this movie. One of
them is a Hawaiian shirt, the other one is like
a member's only jackets, gray jacket as it turns out,
and his yellow raincoat. Yes, the yellow raincoat, right, this
is what the kids each one of the kids, Sean Aston,
Corey Feldman.
Speaker 1: And and Chunk Jeff Cohen.
Speaker 2: That is the costumes that they are wearing in the movie.
Speaker 1: Uneyes, Oh that's incredible man. The yellow raincoat is what
Mikey is wearing. The Hawaiian shirt is what Chunk is
wearing when he does the truffle shuffle. And members only
jacket is what Corey Feldman is wearing over his purple
rain shirt in the Goonies. Really purple rain Okay, a
couple more tidbits if you go back and watch the movie.
When the Dela posaurus is spitting venom at Dennis Nedri, okay, yeah,
the first shot that he spits, he goes and it
hits him kind of in the chest. He actually, if
you watch closely, the actor Wayne Knight has a big
blob of it in his hand and he takes it
and wipes it on his chest to sort of help
the help the effect a little bit of a blooper
that you can see he goes from having a little
bit on his chest to having a whole lot because
he just took a big scoop of it and rubbed
it on himself from his hand. And then finally, one
of the things that a lot of people were kind
of interested in, and it's never really covered, it's kind
of mentioned and then dropped, is is what's wrong with
the triceratops? Why is the triceratops sick? And it's this
sort of mini mystery. In the middle of the movie,
by the way, the big gigantic pile of triceratops dung
that she's digging through to check for lilac berries made
of clay and straw, and they poured honey on it
to draw flies. So it really wasn't that smully, It
wasn't really that big of a deal. But when Lauren
Duran's character is sifting through the poop looking for lilac berries,
she doesn't find any. But the answer to the mystery
is the scene that was kind of cut out was
that the triceratops would swallow stones to help grind up
for digestive purposes, and it had thrown up the stones
after they had rounded out and were no longer of use,
and that's where the lilac barriers were, and that's what
was making the triceratops sick. All right, let's talk about
the reception of these movies.
Speaker 2: Okay. So we've mentioned before that Jaws was the first blockbuster, right,
and blockbuster is a word that existed since World War Two.
It's actually where it came out. They would drop bombs
during the Blitz, which our friend John Hammond, you know,
the actor Richard Attenborough, lived through drop bombs that would
take out a whole block. They would call those blockbusters,
and so that there was a little bit of an
idea that you know, hey, a movie can you know,
have a bigger impact. That's what the blockbuster came from.
But it wasn't until nineteen seventy five that the word
became associated with movies that were major hits during the summer,
because in nineteen before nineteen seventy five, summer was considered
a dead period for movies. People were on vacation, they
weren't going, they weren't school, they were doing other things,
and so people did not go and watch movies during
the summer until nineteen seventy five. And you mentioned to
me this movie was originally supposed to be released in December.
That's right, But because of that, because of going long
on the production, it didn't get released until midsummer June
of nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1: But what happened, Yeah, so the release date was pushed
back to the summer of nineteen seventy five. In May,
And keep in mind, at this point, Steven Spielberg and
his crew are still wondering if audio are going to
accept a giant rubber shark as the threat.
Speaker 2: They may not. They they didn't know how the public
at large was going to feel about this. But they
had done some screenings, and there is a point in
the movie Steven Spielberg is watching one of the original
screenings that they do for the test audiences. So there's
this scene where Alex Kittner is getting eaten by the
shark and the blood literally shoots up out of the water.
You know, they had to it was it was an
amazingly grotesque scene given that this is a little kid,
and so at this point in the pre screening, someone
jumps out of their chair and runs out of the theater,
and Steven Spielberg thinks, oh no, I went too far.
And he watches this guy and he goes out of
the theater and he sees him throw up in the
trash can. He sees him vomit into the trash can.
He's like, oh God, I've made it too bad. It's
not going to work. Oh no, what's going to happen.
And and the guy, after he gets done throwing up,
turns around and goes back in and watches the rest
of the movie, and he's like, holy cow, this might work.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know. It was tested in Dallas because it
was far from the ocean. He wanted to know if
a shark was scary to people who are landlocked, and
the answer.
Speaker 2: Was yep, yes it is. Bat Yes it is.
Speaker 1: People were scared to go swimming and swimming pools. After
this movie came out, this was the first movie to
gross over one hundred million dollars at the box office.
That was something that nobody had ever achieved before.
Speaker 2: So another thing that had never that did not happen before.
This was a mass release all on the same day,
so they took an entirely different tack with this movie.
When they saw their final product, when they saw how
test the audiences reacted, they thought, wow, we may actually
have a real hit on our hands. And so they
did a marketing campaign where they had all of the
actors come and do all of these TV spots promoting
the movie. And it's it's incredible because if you watch
some of the stuff that Richard Dreyfus did, he's not
he's not complimentary. He's like, if this movie fails, it's
not Steven Spielberg's fault, it's the it's the production company's fault.
I mean, he doesn't look favorably upon it.
Speaker 1: He is actually defending the movie before the release, like
he's like, I know people are gonna hate it, and
you know, it's just not going and it's not Spielberg's
fault that this movie is gonna fail.
Speaker 2: Right, But they do these promotions the other not everybody
else is as critical as Richard Dreyfus is. They're doing
their promotion and then they do something unprecedented. They release
it in over four hundreds all on the same day. Now,
people listening to this or brother are gonna be like,
why Is that unprecedented? What happens all the time? Yeah,
it didn't before this time. It used to be that
a movie would come out in a few theaters and
then a few more, and it was something that was
a trickle out effect. But with jaw, as they said,
we wanted to all hit all at the same time
so that everyone is talking about it at once, and
it changed. Forgive me for saying this again, it changed
the paradigm. It was a shift, and from that moment on,
every major motion picture would have a gigantic release. I
mean a standard for today is twenty five hundred theaters
on release day. Yep.
Speaker 1: The marketing campaign was genius on this deal too. It
included shark related messages like, if you happen to see
a great white here's how you deal with it. This
is part of the marketing, right. Awesome. There was a
great white shark on the cover of Time magazine, and
it also created a boom in tourism at Martha's Vineyard, which.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's great. At the time that they filmed this,
the population of Martha's Vineyard was five thousand people. Within
just a few years it had increased to fifteen thousand people.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the reception of Jurassic Park. Okay, So,
Jurassic Park was released June eleventh, nineteen ninety three. The
studio's biggest concern in competition the summer of ninety three
was The Last Action Hero, which also happens to be
the last movie that I walked out of it because
it sucks over.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. The first movie I walked out of it
was Jaws three. The last movies you walked out it
was Last Action Hero.
Speaker 1: The movie and book generated so much interest in dinosaurs
and paleontology that universities had a record increase in students.
I'm sorry, I get ahead of myself. Jurassic Park was
released on Friday, June eleven, nineteen ninety three, and it
broke box office records its first weekend with forty seven
million dollars on the.
Speaker 2: First weekend, first weekend.
Speaker 1: Yes, it eventually went to make more than nine hundred
million worldwide. Compared that to what we just discussed with Jaws.
One hundred million, right, nine hundred million. David Kep, who
is the screenwriter, remembers the day it opened. I was
in New York and I walked to the theater that
he was watching, and the guy comes out and announces
this to the giant line ladies and gentlemen. The seven
o'clock show of Jurassic Park is sold out and people
go oh, and he goes. Also, the ten o'clock show
is sold out, and they went oh. Also, Saturday Night
seven and ten o'clock show are sold out. And David
Kep's like, I'm not an expert, but that seems like
it's doing pretty good.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's a good sign.
Speaker 1: This movie was very well received. It made tons of money.
I thought this was interesting. Spielberg received two hundred and
fifty million dollars from the movie gross and profit participations,
which is the largest sum ever for a director.
Speaker 2: Can I just say something about Steven Spielberg and the
finishing up of this movie. We talked about the soundtrack
and what happens with it, but Spielberg, at this time,
I mean, while while Jurassic Park is being finalized, before
it has the soundtrack finished, he's already filming Schindler's List.
It's astounding that he's doing both of these movies almost
at the same time. I mean, he's finishing one as
he's in the midst of directing the other. But what
would happen is he would be directing in Poland. He
would have the weekends off. On the weekends, he would
fly to Paris. Someone from the US would take tapes
of what John Williams had been composing for Jurassic Park,
fly them over to Paris. They would sit and listen
to the tapes and watch the film. At the same time,
Steven Spielberg would give his notes. The guy would fly
back give them to John Williams. Steven Spielberg would fly
over to watch to continue directing Schindler's List, and then
he within the span of two years, he makes two
of his biggest movies of all time as they overlap.
It's astounder.
Speaker 1: It is, it really is. Laura Dern when she saw
the dinosaur CGI on screen for the first time, she cried,
people don't appreciate it now because it's so commonplace. But
at that time, when when you looked on the screen
and you saw a freakin dinosaur, it was like nothing
you'd ever seen. Like we were used to giant rubber sharks.
Speaker 2: Holy how did they do that?
Speaker 1: That's right, all right, so let's get final judgment.
Speaker 2: Indeed, Okay, where Are you all right? These are two
iconic movies. Yes, they changed the paradigm in different ways,
nearly twenty years apart from each other. Okay, we've talked
about for two and a half episodes. We've talked about
what they did. Looking back, I just have to say
to myself, Okay, I'm just gonna look and watch these
two movies. As I look and watch these two movies, now,
it's been forty five years since Jaws came out, it
has been twenty seven years since Jurassic Park came out.
They're both old movies at this point. And so I
just looked and I said, okay, what problems do I have?
And how have these movies aged over time? Right? Okay,
I look at Jaws, and it's impressive. As the mechanical
shark comes out of the water and onto the boat,
I'm not thinking to myself, Oh, there's the mechanical shark
coming out of the water. I'm thinking, holy crap, that
guy is gonna eat one of those guys. And sure enough,
that's what happens. As I see the shark's jaws chomped
down on quin and him screaming for mercy, I am
I am not thinking about the production of this movie.
Speaker 1: It's great se at all, great scene.
Speaker 2: It is a movie that, despite the fact that it
is forty five years old, in its technology, I am
not distracted Jurassic Park. I loved it when it came out.
When I watched it and I saw the dinosaur for
the first time, I was just like everybody else in like,
holy crap, how did they do that? That is astounding.
It changed the way the movies were made. Looking at
back at it twenty seven years later, it's still amazing.
But there are features that I kind of go that
did an age as well as I had hoped it would.
And it's not just me. I watched this with my
children and the first scene that was so amazing back
in nineteen ninety three of the Bracyosaurus when you see
it for the first time, my kids went, that doesn't
appeal and I kind of went, guys, I mean, remember,
this was the first time that this had ever been done,
but it hasn't aged as well. Then i look at
the first scene with doctor Grant and the kid, and
I'm going, why is this kid here? And why is
doctor Grant so mean to him? And then I'm looking
at the scene where the car is falling through the
tree as they're trying to escape and trying to escape,
and I'm thinking, why don't they just go to the
other side of the tree. And so as amazing as
Jurassic Park is, there are problems with it from my perspective,
and I can't say that it is as timeless as
Jaws is. And so that is why I say Jaws
wins the contest between Jurassic Park and Jows.
Speaker 1: Okay, your way off base. Here's what we're looking at here,
all right. Yes, these movies are old. Yes, when you
look at them from twenty twenty, there are things that
are not as favorable. I mean, the shark that we
only see for about twenty seconds of Jaws would have
a lot more problems if we got a good look
at it. These two movies are amusement park rides. Think
of the greatest roller coaster, like I'm thinking the Titan
at six Flags over Texas. Okay, that's Jaws. Super high,
super straight drop, exciting thrill ride, still fun today no
matter what. Jurassic Park is like that same ride, except
you have ten loop to loops. So it takes something
that's awesome and it makes it even more awesome. Okay, Now,
do you have Jurassic Park without Jaws? Probably not. Jaws
is the granddaddy of Jurassic Park, and it owes a
lot to Jaws. But I do think it steps up.
Instead of having one threat, you've got two raptors and
a t Rex instead of one shark. You also have
a poison spitting de laphosaurs running around, so you have
more things to be scared of. I do think the
water element makes it more scary, but I know when
I watch these two, the more entertaining movie for me
is Jurassic Park. Do I love them both? Absolutely? Do
we owe a lot to what they've contributed to the
movie culture. Absolutely, Jaws changed everything. But from my perspective,
the most entertaining of these two movies is Jurassic Park.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm gonna give a quick rebuttal argument, ok because
there there's an idea that I wanted to touch on,
and I'll just as as kudos to Jurassic Park. The
same kids who are like, yeah, that doesn't look real
when it when it came to the velociraptors chasing the
children through the kitchen or the t Rex like attacking
people in the land Rovers, they were burying their head
in my shoulder and saying, tell me when it's over right.
I mean they may have been unimpressed initially, but with
Jurassic Park, from t Rex moment on, except for that
car falling scene, it is intense and frightening. But I
talked in our very first episode on this on these
two movies about how the criticism of sugar Land Express
was even though they had these fantastic car chase scenes,
there wasn't any character development. In Jurassic Park. I feel
like he falls back into that same trap. I think
that the character development is minimal. It's there, it's there's
something there, but you do not, from my perspective, emotionally
connect with doctor Graham Sattler. Maybe no, not even Ian Malcolm.
You don't really have the connection with them that you
do with the characters in Jaws. And we talked about
how the movie was about the shark and the movie
was about the dinosaurs, so they weren't as much worried
about the actors. But I just think that Jaws brings
a higher caliber of actor and especially that scene that
we talked about earlier today, the USS Indianapolis, the drunk
talk the comparing of Scars. I can see why that
moment changed everyone's perception about this movie, because it was
that moment that you made a heart to heart connection
with all of the characters, the Holy Trinity that was
fighting against the demonic Shark. You made that connection at
that moment, and I just never had that moment in
Jurassic Park.
Speaker 1: No, you're exactly right. I will not argue I don't
really care about the characters in Jurassic Park. The one
character that I do care about the biggest emotional impact
for me character wise is when the raptors are fighting
the t Rex. I want the t Rex to win. Yeah,
everybody else, I'm just like, Oh, who's gonna get it next?
I don't really care, right Les the Hacker.
Speaker 2: Eh So, so you felt when you watch Jurassic Park.
You felt the same way Steven Spielberg when he read
the book of the of Jaws. At the end, you
wanted the shark to win. You wanted the t Rex
to win.
Speaker 1: I want the t Rex to win.
Speaker 2: So they did that. I mean, at least for that,
you can say they did that perfectly because the t
Rex wins and the people still survive.
Speaker 1: Right. Yeah, that's well, we sure want to hear from
you guys. Are we way off base? De took Jaws,
I'm taking Jurassic Park. Where are you? Hit us up
on Facebook, hit us up on Twitter, email us. You
might even get a shout out on the next podcast.
Speaker 2: We'll see you guys next week.