Speaker 1: Well, everybody, welcome back to the Shirley You Can't Be
Serious podcast. Jason, I was thinking, instead of doing something
from our past, maybe what we should do is do
like the movies that are number one and number two
in the box office right now.
Speaker 2: What do you think that sounds fantastic?
Speaker 1: What are they? What's just tell me look it up,
google it, whatever you need to do. Tell me what
number one and number two in the box office right now.
Speaker 2: Are number one and number two? Right eye? It's kind
of neck and neck. Uh, different week.
Speaker 1: Is it a Marvel movie?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: Okay? Is it in one of the new James Bond movies? No?
Start trenk.
Speaker 2: No. Basically every movie theater in the country is shut
down except for drive ins, and so the number one
and number two movies at the box office this week,
coinciding with this podcast that we recorded over a month ago,
Jaws and Jurassic Park. That is no joke. What that
is no freakin joke.
Speaker 1: What a great coincidence.
Speaker 2: I love it crazy, So I really hope you guys
enjoy what we have already recorded. It just so happens
it coincides with this crazy event due to COVID nineteen,
which we will no longer talk about all.
Speaker 1: Right without further ado.
Speaker 4: 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. Graves and Jason Colivin.
Speaker 1: Just when you thought it was safe to go back into.
Speaker 2: The podcast, hold on to your butts.
Speaker 1: Welcome back, everybody. We are here for our Jaws versus
Jurassic Park episode of the Shirley You Can't Be Serious Podcast.
I'm here with my co host and best friend Jason Colvin.
Speaker 4: Up D.
Speaker 1: How you doing, man, Man, I'm good.
Speaker 2: This is gonna be fun today. I really really, I
know I say this every time, but these movies get
me fired up to talk about.
Speaker 1: These movies change the course of movie history twenty years apart.
Speaker 2: They really did.
Speaker 1: It's crazy, and I'm excited about one of them being
the movie that came out the year I was born.
You know, Jaws came out in nineteen seventy five, just
a few months before I was born, and it is
monumental in the history of movies, and it is such
a great movie.
Speaker 2: Both of these movies were so impactful and imaginative and
fun and scary, and I mean they're just pure summer
popcorn gold. I just love both of these shows. Do
you remember when you saw these movies for the first time.
Speaker 1: I remember seeing Jurassic Park in the theater and being
amazed and going back in the memory banks. I would
have had a girlfriend at the time, so I'm sure
I went and saw it with her, But all I
can remember is the emotion with Jaws. I can't say
when I saw it for the first time, because you know,
like I said, it came out before, just just before
I was born. Yeah, but it was. It was one
of those movies that was a big factor of my childhood.
My dad was very into show. We would watch all
the shark documentaries long before Shark Week ever was a thing, right,
and we you know, I learned to scuba dive with
him whenever I was in grade school, and so I
had all kinds of education about deep sea diving and sharks,
and we went shark fishing when I was a kid.
We'd go to Florida and deep sea fish for all
kinds of things, including sharks. Saw a huge one. One
of the times that we saw one that was Jaws
proportioned shark like he was going by the boat and
you're like, holy crap, this guy is as big as
the boat. We weren't trying to catch those Yeah, we
weren't trying to catch those guys. We were just trying
to catch the little ones, which were funn as can
be to catch. But I've always been a shark guy.
That's about you, do you remember?
Speaker 2: Well, So for Jaws, you know we've talked before. You
and I have a little bit of an age difference.
So I was two when the movie came out, but
I mean shark mania took over the world in the
late seventies, and so even though I was too young
to see the movie or appreciate the movie or any
of that stuff, I do recall the idea of you know,
sharks and being scared in the swimming pool. And even
though I lived in a landlocked state for some reason,
you know, sharks were kind of on my mind, you know, right,
I had a toy it's like a shark set, and
the shark would open up and you have all this
crap in his mouth and you had to fish out
like wheels and stuff like that. So sharks were part
of my imagination because of this movie now, Jurassic Park.
I saw an opening night. I had a roommate in college.
His name is Craig Parrish, good friend of mine, friend
of the show. It was like the perfect roommate for
a summer roommate, because every dime that we earned that
summer we spent on entertainment and doing stuff and blowing
it on stuff. So the weekend that it came out
the Friday, I believe it was Friday, June eleventh, nineteen
ninety three, we saw it in Norman, So we were
blown away. We were like, man, that is unbelievable what
we just saw. Right next day we drove to a
Texas Ranger baseball game, came home the next day when
saw Durst Park again. So it was a killer weekend.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can still I can. I can remember the
moment in the theater where you see the brachiosaurus for
the first time and you're just like, whole crap, how
do they do that?
Speaker 2: It really was amazing.
Speaker 1: The other thing and I'll just throw this out there.
I hadn't really thought about it until just this moment,
But when you were talking about the sharks, the poster
for Jaws is so iconic, and I can as you
were talking, I'm like, I can remember drawing that shark
over and over again, drawing that shark coming up to
get the girl.
Speaker 2: Oh man, you're absolutely right, one of the best movie
posters of all time.
Speaker 1: And then you go to Jurassic Park and again it's
it's totally iconic poster. That's the perfect color combination. You
get the black skeleton on the gold background with kind
of the tropical lettering on it. It's just both of them
are masterpieces in movie poster history. So you want to
talk about a little bit about the history of how
these movies came to be? Is that where we want
to start.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd say let's start just on the development of
these two movies.
Speaker 1: Okay, So I'll start with Jaws since it came out first.
The book was written by a guy named Peter Benchley
now Peter Benchley. He had been a journalist. He ended
up being a speech writer for LBJ, and then lbj's
term ended in nineteen sixty nine and he spent the
next few years struggling to make it as a freelance writer.
And he's sitting on the beach kind of going through
what he's going to do with his life. He thought
back to a time where he had read a story
back in the sixties about this fisherman who had caught
this forty five one hundred pound great white shark, and
he's like, I think that would be a great idea
for a story, have a man eating shark that terrorizes
the town. So he goes home and he tells his
wife about it, and she says, I don't think that's
a good idea. I think you should probably think of
something else. But he doesn't listen to her. His wife right,
And so every time his literary agent gets him in
front of a publisher, he proposes two ideas. The first
idea is a nonfiction book about pirates, and the second
idea is man eating shark terrorizes town, and everybody goes, no,
thank you, No, I don't think that anybody wanted to
read that. Now. Interestingly, the other movie that came out
very close at the same time that he was involved
in was called The Deep. You familiar with this movie,
I am, yeah, right, yeah, and it is about pirates,
and yes, Jack limbsset google search, Google Search. So interestingly,
at the same time that he's making these pitches. There
happens to be a documentary that comes out called Blue
Water White Death. So this morning I called my dad
and I was like, hey, you know we're doing this thing.
I remember Sharks is a big part of me growing up.
Tell me what happened when you went and saw Jaws.
And there's this long pause and I'm like, it was
a few months before I was born, and that helps.
He's like, oh, okay, let's see we'd have been in
Georgia that I'm uh, yeah, I really know. I don't remember.
And I'm like, what, Okay, I can remember as a
kid watching TV and seeing Ron and Valerie Taylor and
you telling me things. And he's like, oh, yeah, well
I saw a blue Water White Death back in seventy
one that was in Little Rock, Arkansas, and yeah that
was crazy. And so apparently it wasn't Jaws that was
the big movie for him. It was this Blue Water
White Death, which was a Ron and Valerie Taylor documentary
where they're going and trying to film sharks. They were
a couple of spearfishers who were champion spearfishers, and then
they realized, hey, we're killing all the fish. Maybe we
should just photograph them instead, and so they start shooting
videos and they decided, let's try to video a great
white shark because nobody else is doing it. Why not,
right right, right? Well, why not? It's because they eat you,
That's why not. Dad said that it was just looking
at the idiotic stuff that they would try to do
just to get near a great white shark, Like they'd
find dead whales and just wait for the sharks to
come and start eating the whale so that they could
try to film them. He said they were absolutely insane.
He was saying, you know, cage goes in the water
as are going to die, and the chain mail swimsuit,
all of that stuff. Those are all things that were
impactful for him. And so that's why sharks were such
a big deal. And then so of course they put
out this documentary. It's interesting to folks. So Peter Benchley
gets his funding to write the book of Jaws.
Speaker 2: So Peter Binchley, when he was doing his research for
this book, came across a story of a shark that
was just off the coast of the Jersey Beach in
nineteen sixteen. It attacked a swimmer, it ate a dog,
it ate a boy. Actually, if you watch Jaws, like
sort of sequentially, it's the same type of attacks. Wow,
and Hooper actually mentions it in the film. The titles
that were originally considered for the novel A Stillness in
the Water that it was like, h nah, it's like, okay,
how about this one Leviathan Rising? No, all right, how
about Jaws of Death. No, that's no good either. So
they sat and they kind of went round and round
and round, and basically the only word that Peter Benchley
and his editor liked was the word jaws. And Peter
Benchley was like, look, I just call it Jaws. And
they're like, well, we don't even really know what that means.
He's like, yeah, but it looked great on a book.
So that's how they got the title.
Speaker 1: Jaws is right. I don't even know if they say
the word at all in the movie. I definitely don't
know if they say it in the book. It is
just a word that looks good.
Speaker 2: Four letters, and it scares the crab out of.
Speaker 1: People, right, and it becomes a best seller and it
spends forty four weeks on the best seller list. Everybody's
picking up this book and reading it. Back in nineteen
seventy four, and two of the guys that happened to
pick up the book are David Brown and Richard Zanok.
Richard Zanuck and David Brown had just come out of
the big studio production world. Richard Zanuck's dad, Darryl Zanik,
was actually one of those cigar chomping studio guys, you know,
like in the Three Amigos, one of those guys who
he hired Richard to run his company. And then, like
in Richard was like twenty six at the time, and
then he goes off to Europe and starts having an
affair with this twenty year old when he's sixty three,
and she's like, Okay, you're gonna start writing new movies.
He's like, okay, I'm gonna start writing new movies whatever
you say, yes, yes, yeah. So Richard is this young guy,
but he's making these great movies. He is involved with
the sound of music, he's involved with hiring Francis Ford
Coppola for writing patent, and he's involved with the plan
of the apes. All these things are huge hits. And
then after seven eight years he has a few flops.
His dad is doing this stupid stuff with this girl,
and he basically cancels the contract with his dad's mistress,
and so his dad gets mad and he comes back
and he fires him, and so Richard's like, hey, you
know what, guess what you're going to be next. And
as it turns out, his dad had been giving his
mom these shares of the company as kind of a hey,
I'm sorry, I'm having an affair right now, you have
some more stock in the company. She takes all the stock,
goes to the Border directors and they throw out Darryl.
So he's the last of the cigar jumping It's awesome,
it's deserving of a movie on its own. But anyway,
all through that process, David Brown becomes a head of
the creative operations for twenty century Fox. When Richard leaves,
David leaves with him. They go and spend a bit
of time with Warner Brothers, and then they go out
on their own form this production company. And one of
the first movies that they produce is The Sting And
the next movie they produce is Sugarland Express.
Speaker 2: Young director Steven Spielberg.
Speaker 1: So Steven Spielberg had been discovered by Sid Scheinberg, who
is the CEO of Universal Pictures for about forty years,
and whose wife is Lorraine Gary, who you might know
better as Missus Brody. I can't remember Missus Brody. So
they've got this book that they've read. They both excited
about it. They talk to each other like, we want
to make this a movie, and so they work with
Peter Benchley. They get this script, they hire a director,
and the director is not Steven Spielberg. That's right.
Speaker 2: Actually, when they made the deal for the screenplay, the
director was part of the deal. When Peter eventually sold
him the rights to make his story, he's like, well,
this is the guy I want in charge. Well, then
they bring him in. They had to sit down with
him and they're like, okay, let's talk about what you
got going and what do you think. He's like okay.
So the whale pops up and scans the beach and
they're like shark. He's like, right, right, right, right, shark.
So anyway, when the whale comes up to the people,
they're like, we can't hire this guy. He doesn't know
the difference between a shark and a whale.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so just before they had that meeting, Steven
Spielberg happened to have been walking through and saw the
script and they're like, hey, you know, tell us what
you think of this script. And he reads it and
he comes back and he says, hey, if you guys
don't end up going with the director you have in mind,
I would love to direct this.
Speaker 2: Okay, this is an interesting story. That is a nice
little story. But the version that I heard was he
was in the dude's off, looked down, saw a thick
manuscript that said Jaws on it, and he stole it
and took it home and read it. Oh, he's trying
to get a crack in, and he's like, Hm, this
looks like a very important project. I'm going to take
this home, figure this thing out, see what they're doing.
I love that about Spielberg. I mean, he was doing
whatever it takes to crack in, you know.
Speaker 1: And of course they end up offering it to him.
But at the time, he's thinking about another script. He's
thinking about directing another movie. You know about this? No, okay.
So he had done Sugarland Express and critics raved about
the quality of like the car chase scenes that they
had had in Sugarland Express, but they had criticized him
a bit for not developing the characters very well, and
so he was considering the script called Lucky Lady, which
did start Liza Minelli, Gene Hackman, and Burt Reynolds, and
he's really thinking, Okay, this is a good way for
me to develop some characters. I'll be able to put
this on and I will have rounded myself out. So
Sid Sheinberg, who was his mentor, who was the guy
who had given the youngest director in history a long
term contract of seven years, is like, don't direct that.
Direct Jaws, and so he gives up. He says, all right,
final direct Jaws. And at the time he's directing Jaws,
he's thinking, oh my gosh, this was the worst thing.
You've damned my existence. I'm going to get fired. I'm
never going to work in Hollywood again. And Lady Luck
has made Liza Minelli and Burt Reynolds into a star.
Speaker 2: So when he's out in Martha's vineyard watching a shark
snk to the bottom of the ocean, Burt Reynolds and
Liza Minelli are living it up, and he's like, what
in the heck was I thinking? Yeah, one thing about
this story, this movie. There was a writer strike looming
and so they needed to make it fast.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That was a huge deal because people went into
the movie with some expectations that were misplaced. When whenever
Xanak and Brown decided, hey, you know, we can do
this shark movie. We'll just get a shark trainer to
train the shark.
Speaker 2: Let's just train the sharks is no problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So I went and I asked a buddy of
mine who's a scuba diving instructor and he dives with
sharks all the time. And I'm like, you know, so
what do you want to dive? And when I'm asking
these questions and he's like, well, you know, as long
as you're with the shark trainer, it's okay. And I'm like, oh,
can you train sharks? He goes, no, the shark trainer
trains the people. I'm like, oh, okay, he's training the
people how to be You can't train a shark. Yeah.
So they found that out the hard way. You're not
going to be able to train a shark. So that
meant they had to build one. In addition to that,
Steven Spielberg, in a moment of artistic foolery, I don't know,
he demanded that they film on the actual ocean. Any
other director would have said, all right, we'll go to
the back lot, or we'll go over to a lake
or whatever. But Spielberg was like, Nope, it's not going
to look like the ocean. I don't want to use it.
We have to go and film in the actual ocean.
I wonder how many times he went to sleep at
night going why the heck did I say that?
Speaker 2: Every step along the way during the making of this movie,
it could have either been complete disaster or genius. Right,
and he makes the right step every step of the way,
even though he is precariously on the edge of falling
and dying and never working again.
Speaker 1: It's the right step that he regrets every single time.
It's the right step that looks like the wrong step
every single time.
Speaker 2: Let's flip over to Jurassic Park and talk about the
development of Jurassic Park.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, this sounds great.
Speaker 2: So here we catch Steven Spielberg about eighteen years down
the road. By the time he gets to Jurassic Park,
he has directed Jaws, Close Encounters, et Raiders of the
Lost Ark, Empire of the Sun, Nina Jones, and The
Temple of Doom. Last Crusade, Last Crusade, and now he
gets to Jurassic Park.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This is based on a nineteen ninety book by Michael Crichton.
Speaker 1: Right now, Michael Crichton writes this story about these guys
who go to an amusement park and suddenly the attractions
at the amusement park turn on the guests and start
killing them. And the name of that movie is West
Worlds World.
Speaker 2: You know, it's funny because as he was developing this
story Jurassic Park, He's like, I can't make it a
theme park again. I've already done that.
Speaker 1: Right. He had come up with the idea of dinosaurs
and come up with the kind of science behind it,
but he couldn't figure out why why would we bring
dinosaurs back to life? What would be the motivation? And honestly,
I mean, the only one that really does make sense
is an amusement park. I mean there's got to be
a profit motive, right, That's right.
Speaker 2: He mentions. In nineteen eighty one, he had a screenplay
that he was working on where it was like a
Frankenstein type of thing where some guy figures it out,
resurrects a dinosaur, and then it terrorizes people. But yeah,
the only thing that made sense was entertainment purposes. Who
would pay for this. There's no real scientific reason to
do it, and it costs billions of dollars, so it
has to be for entertainment purposes.
Speaker 1: Right, And his book idea got to turn down in
his mind. He wanted it was interesting to him that
kind of universally kids are fascinated by dinosaurs, so he
always wrote the book from the perspective of a kid.
He wrote it from a perspective a kid who was
at Jurassic Park, and he kept pushing this book on
the publishers and nobody was interested, nobody wanted to publish it,
and finally one of them said, I want a book
that is for me, an adult, not a book that's
from the kid's perspective. And it was that rewrite that
led to the story that became Jurassic Park.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. That's really interesting because Steven Spielberg, when he
later gets the directorial job, decides that he's going to
shoot the movie with the awe of a child, which
I think was genius. So you needed that adult story,
but maybe from a kid's perspective and the awe and
the fascination that goes with it. So, as he's writing
this book, he's working on a TV show called Er
with Steven Spielberg.
Speaker 1: Right, it just to be a movie, is that right? Okay? Yeah,
stuff was a movie idea.
Speaker 2: So they're sitting around one day and Spielberg's like, well,
what are you doing. And he's like, well, I'm working
on this story about dinosaurs, and Steven's like, well, tell
me about it. He's like, well, you know amber and mosquitoes,
and you know dinosaurs, DNA dinosaurs and so and bingo,
mister DNA. And so Spielberg's like, man, I'd love to
direct that. He said, well, when I get done with it,
you're going to have a crack at it, right, And
so they had this kind of informal discussion and sort
of agreement which the lawyers later get involved in the
blood sucking lawyers get involved and they have to work
out the details. But the studios were bidding on this
before it was even complete. Yeah, just the idea of
this story, right, Which that's how you know your big
time in Hollywood, right.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean that they were all major studios, but
they all had their own director associated with the idea.
Speaker 2: This is the type of stuff that really I get
fired up about, Like, we have this movie already in
our history of Steven Spielberg, but this is what we
could have got. You ready for this?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: So Warner Brothers wanted it for Tim Burton.
Speaker 1: Right, that's the one that I'm just like. That would
have been such a different movie. I mean it would
have been It would have been Claymation dinosaurs, It's true,
and probably claymation archaeologists and probably clamation kids.
Speaker 2: That Beatlejews would have shown up and it had been
weird Columbia.
Speaker 1: Michael Keaton would have played the t Rex.
Speaker 2: What what are you talking about? Yeah, Columbia. They wanted Richard.
Speaker 1: Donner and Joe Dante. Is that the other one?
Speaker 2: Twentieth Century Fox wanted Joe Dante, who did Grimlins? Who
did Grimlins?
Speaker 1: So that could have been interesting.
Speaker 2: Richard Donner, Leith, the Weapon, Goonies, Superman makes good movies, right,
But here's the one that caught my attention to the most.
You ready for this one?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: He didn't have the vacuum any specific studio, but James
Cameron wanted to make Jurassic Park.
Speaker 1: I can see the way that capture your attention. You're
the James Cameron.
Speaker 2: I love James Cameron's work. Yeah, this is what he
wanted to.
Speaker 1: Do with it.
Speaker 2: You ready for this?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: And you can see this coming right? You know who
he wanted to play doctor Grant, Right, Arnold Schwitzendega n
uh yes, And he wanted Bill Paxton his Malcolm okay,
and Charlton Heston as mister.
Speaker 1: Hammond that a can kind of see. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But when Michael Crichton set the rights to the novel
out for movies to bid on, he set the price
really low. His price was one point five million dollars.
So when the bidding war went out for Michael Crichton's
novel to be made into a movie, he set the
price low on purpose. The price was set at one
point five million dollars because he wanted to guarantee that
this movie was made. When he auctioned off the rights
for a movie called Congo, it sat in development hell
until after Jurassic Park, basically, so he got a chunk
of money for it, but it didn't ever seem to
get made, and he was frustrated with that process, and
so he wanted to ensure that this movie was going
to get made.
Speaker 1: All right. We will be right back after these messages.
Speaker 3: With so many podcasts out in the world, you have
a plethora of options. Take a chance with Too Many
Captains a movie podcast mixing comedy with an academic look
at film and Hollywood culture. This podcast is perfect for
those looking for a fresh perspective, from deep dives into
classic films, to debates on digital streaming versus physical media,
and film discussions based on randomly chosen topics and are
what are we talking about? Segments. There's something to satisfy
all your movie podcast cravings. So if you're feeling lucky
or feel the need for speed, grab your shake and
martini or some fava beans and a nice ki Anti
and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or Google Play.
For more content, visit a Movie podcast dot com. Find
us on Instagram at Too Many Captains Productions and on
Twitter at It's a Film Podcast, Too Many Captains, the
jolliest bunch of podcasters this side of the.
Speaker 1: Nuthouse, and the mates's too many Captains on this island.
Speaker 2: All right, So let's flip it back to pre production
for jows.
Speaker 1: All right, so Xanak and Brown were wrong about the
idea that you can train a shark, so they then
have to build one. They hired Joe Alves to design
the shark. He did the model of New York and
Escape from New York, and later on he was the
director of Jaws three and three D. I don't know
if that's something he should be proud of or not,
but he was that guy. Not too bad going from
the guy who made the shark to the guy who
makes the movie.
Speaker 2: But that's a pretty big jump right there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is just a bit of trivia. But
when they were doing Jaws two, they fired their initial director,
They fired John D. Hancock and it was suggested at
the time that Joe Alps come in and co direct
with Verna Fields, who was the one who had edited
Jaws and she's an amazing editor and amazing person all around.
But they decided not to do that. They went with
Jenos Bizarre to finish up Jaws two.
Speaker 2: Okay, side note, real quick, go ahead, what do you
think about Jaws two?
Speaker 1: Many?
Speaker 2: What do you think about just three?
Speaker 1: Horrible?
Speaker 2: What do you think about just four?
Speaker 1: You know, I talked about Jaws movies and my dad.
That is one specific memory I have from my childhood.
We went to go see Jaws three in three D
in the theater. I'm wearing the glasses and three quarters
in the movie. My dad turns to me and says,
this is the most awful movie I've ever seen in
my life. We're leaving. What that the movie's not over? Yeah,
I'm not going to watch the rest of this.
Speaker 2: I an option.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I really didn't. I thought, man, once you're here,
you got to go to the end. That's just what happened.
So I didn't. I didn't. I never got the experience
of the exploding shark pieces coming at you in three D.
We were gone before that moment in the movie because
it was so bad, and Jaws four was worse.
Speaker 2: Okay, Jaws two pretty good. Jaws three. For a ten
year old me with three D glasses on inside the theater,
I was entertained. I thought it was great when the
shark broke the glass and three D nearly wet my
pants in the movie theater. All right, Jaws four was
the biggest steaming pile of crap in nineteen eighty seven,
with maybe the exception of Superman four Quest for Peace.
I don't know.
Speaker 1: Ooh, that's a hard one. I don't know that I
can give a judge McCall on which one of those
is worse.
Speaker 2: I mean, you have to talk about that later.
Speaker 1: Okay. So the shark that Joe Alves built was named Bruce. Bruce.
Do you know why it was named Bruce.
Speaker 2: Steven Spielberg's lawyer was named Bruce.
Speaker 1: Blood sucking lawyer. Yeah, so he named the mechanical shark
after his lawyer, which they built in Sun Valley, California,
but never tested in the water.
Speaker 2: This is what I was talking about. These decisions that
they made along the way could have been absolute train
wreck disasters, and in some cases really were, and they
skillfully or luckily figured it out of way around it.
Speaker 1: I really think that Verna Fields is such a major
part of this movie being what it became because you
had to I mean, in the script it called for
a shark and then shark and then shark, and there
was no shark to be had, and so you had
to do stuff, and they had to come up with
ways to give you the shark without showing you the shark.
But as it turns out, that's the perfect thing to do,
because you're more scared of what you can't see than
what you can't see.
Speaker 2: It's absolutely true, and they lucked into it. So there
are three mechanical bruises that were made, each with specialized functions.
One shark was open on the right side, one was
open on the left side, and the third was fully skinned.
I think each one of these ended up the bottom
of the Atlantic at one point or another. But each
shark costs two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You know,
we didn't really talk about this, but the budget the
initial budget of Jaws. Yeah, seven million bucks, not very much.
And when you get ten percent of it into a shark,
that doesn't work at all in a movie starring a shark, right,
he is the star of the movie.
Speaker 1: Right, So the very first time that they are to
have the shark, they put him in, they say action
and the shark sinks to the bottom of Nantucket sound
And as David Brown puts it, and we thought, so
did our careers in the movie industry with it.
Speaker 2: Okay, when you get a bunch of twenty somethings working
on this thing, I can just see the way it goes. Hey,
we've built this shark. Great, did you test it? Oh? Yeah,
work great in the garage. Sweet should we test it
in the water before Now, we'll test it when we
get out there. Oh mentioned that this is going to
be saltwater. The whole time. I didn't realize that that
was going to short out the shark.
Speaker 1: And talking about the twenty year old. So one of
the guys who helped out with the script and specifically
helped out with the monologue that Quinn does was a guy,
John Millius. And he's a young guy. He's a friend
of Steven Spielberg's. And one night George Lucas shows up
and then they're probably I'm guessing, drinking or whatever, and
they're like, hey, let's go look at the shark. And
then so they go out and they're looking at the
shark that doesn't work anyway, and then somebody gets the
bright idea to climb into its mouth, and then all
of a sudden, the jaw breaks. It's like a chunk,
and John Milius is like, and we all scattered like
children that's just been.
Speaker 2: Caught, including the director of the movie. I mean, this
is not.
Speaker 1: The director of that movie, and the director of the
future biggest blockbuster of the seventies.
Speaker 2: It was Lucas who got stuck in there by the way.
It was So this is very interesting to me. Okay,
the shark was untested, not all the roles were cast,
and they were still waiting on a completed script, and
they had started principal photography.
Speaker 1: Yeah, holy crap, Great, let's get started. Yeah right, so yeah, yeah,
and not only that, you have a deadline. You know,
we're not only gonna get started, We're gonna get started
with the deadline because they're supposed to be this strike
and so they're doing everything to scramble to get done
with this thing by June so that they don't run
into trouble with that strike. Peter Benchley wrote three different
versions of this script and finally told Spielberg, I am
written out. I cannot write another bit of this, And
so Xanak and Brown said, hey, Steven, go talked to
Howard Sackler, and Spielberg's like, who's that. He's a playwright.
He wrote this play called The Great White Hope. You're like, oh, perfect,
great White Yeah, sounds good. So they worked on the
script and kind of got the basic outline of the movie.
Then Spielberg tried to write a script himself that didn't
work out real well, and then he very wisely this
is another one of those brilliant decisions, says, Okay, this
is an intense, scary movie. We got to have some humor.
I mean, what do I say. A movie is not
going to be good unless there's at least a little
bit of humor in there, right, So that's right. Yeah.
So he goes and he finds Carl Gottlieb, who is
a friend of his, who is a fantastic comedy writer.
He at the time is working on working on TV
scripts for The Odd Couple. He was one of the
guys in mash He does some acting and obviously script writing,
and so every night they would shoot during the day
and then at night they stayed in the same little
cabin there on Martha's vineyard, and they would work on
the script throughout the night.
Speaker 2: It's an incredibly stressful writing situation. I mean, basically, every
hour of every day you're either shooting a movie, writing
a movie, worrying about a movie, thinking about the movie.
I mean, Steven Spielberg has talked publicly about how his
nightmares about It's day one. I'm over budget, I need
to get shots in and then Shark's not working and
all that stuff.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I can identify with that, Like I still
have dreams to this day. I haven't been in a
play in twenty years, and I still have dreams that
suddenly I'm at the stage and I've not studied my lines.
I don't know what the play is about, but I'm
about to walk out on stage.
Speaker 2: And I'm in my underwear. Hey, I thought this was interesting.
So Carl Gottlieb told Spielberg, if we managed to pull
this off, people will feel about the ocean the way
people felt about the shower after watching Psycho. And you
know what, he is exactly right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he nailed it. It's funny, you know when he
first when Spielberg first sent this script to Gottlieb, he
just attached a note to it and said, ifiscerted. So
things are going so badly at this point Steven's Fielberg
decides to quit, he said. He said multiple times he
just was waiting to get fired, and eventually he had
just had so much of it that he was like,
forget it, I can't I can't finish this. I'm going
to quit. And so Richard Zanak heard he was coming,
heard he was coming to quit, went and got his
Jaws T shirt. They already had the merchandise made, right.
He goes and puts his T shirt on before Steven
can walk in, and when Steven walks in and sees
him in the shirt, he cannot bring himself to quit.
And so Xana says, I think I might have saved
the movie just by changing my clothes.
Speaker 2: That's awesome, what a great story that is.
Speaker 4: All right?
Speaker 2: Do we ready to go talk about pre production for
Dressing Park?
Speaker 1: Right? So interestingly, these two, these two movies, nearly twenty
years apart, end up having the same kind of trouble.
They build a gigantic t Rex. They actually built several
of them. It is animatronics, just like The Shark was
supposed to be hydraulics and everything. But get it on.
They've tested it all out. It works well. You know,
we're not gonna be in the ocean, so no problem
there until Steven Spielberg decides, hey, the t Rex scene
needs to be in the rain.
Speaker 2: It needs to be pouring rain.
Speaker 1: And he's like, if I may, We've tested this for
the weight that it has on it right now, and
you're about to pour water on it and it's made
out of foam rubber, and he's like, well, let's see
if it works.
Speaker 2: Stevens is like, listen, dude, I've been through Jaws. Tests
are overrated, Okay.
Speaker 1: And so the answer to the question was, no, it
doesn't work. If you pour the rain on top of
the foam rubber, it makes it very heavy and the
hydraulics that were specifically precisely tuned to adjust to a
certain amount of weight do not do it right. And
the t rex started shivering in the rain.
Speaker 2: It looked like it had It was like having a
seizure or something.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: It was shaking, shake and shaken.
Speaker 1: They would take a break from time to time and
suddenly the t rex, without anybody there, would just start moving.
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's talk about that t rex for a minute.
It took two years of prep to get the sets
and all the dinosaurs ready to go for this movie.
Speaker 1: Two years, right, So they hired the guys that were
the best in the businesses at Animatronics at this time.
Speaker 2: Right, So you're talking about guys like stan Winston, Field
Tippet and Crash McCreery. Yes, they took on this project
Steven Spielberg is like, okay, guys, I need dinosaurs on screen.
So here's what I want to do. I'm wanna do
as much animatronics as I can. I wanted to subsidize
that with stop motion stuff, and then maybe we do
a little bit of computer stuff here and there.
Speaker 1: If it works, what do you think, And.
Speaker 2: They're like, sounds good. Yeah, heck yeah, let's do it,
without knowing whether they could actually do it or not.
Speaker 1: The animatronics that they have on this are amazing. They
are amazing, they really are. They look realistic, and from
what I understand, the boy who played Timmy, when he
saw the animatronic Tricerah Cops for the first time, he
started crying because it looks so amazing and real.
Speaker 2: It's really really good. When you say animatronics, I think
Chuck E Cheese, you know what I'm talking about. You
know the jug band Christmas whatever, where they're up there.
Speaker 1: And everybody's imagining the sharp robotic movements up and down
and the heads turning sharply and scarily.
Speaker 2: It looked like robots. Yeah, but all this stuff was hydraulic,
and so when the door shuts to the Explorer and
the t rex is like sharply pulls his head around
to look. You think it's real because it's it doesn't
shake and it doesn't move like a robot, you.
Speaker 1: Know, right, They're they're filming a being that looks real,
actually moving. Now you mentioned just a second ago stop motion.
Do we want to go into that a little bit. Yeah,
let's talk about it. Okay, So stop motion. If you
watch some of the older like Clash of the Titans,
you can see that. You can see how stop motion looks,
and there's a bit of jitteriness to it because with
stop motion, what you're doing is you're taking a figurine
of some kind, you are photographing a frame of film
with the camera, and then you're moving it a little
bit and then you're doing another one. Well, what that
means is you have a series of still shots as
opposed to a series of someone in motion, and so
you get this jitter. And what they had developed was
a thing called motion blur. And so they called the
guys over at Industrial Lights and Magic, which was just
i mean in a little warehouse at the time, and
they said, hey, can you guys help us out and
put some motion blur with this stop motion dinosaur stuff
that we got going so that it looks more like
it's in motion, and they said, yeah, or we could
just do the whole dinosaur. And the head the head
of ILM at the time was like, hey, guys, you know,
shut up. You know, Stan is a friend of mine.
He gets us jobs like this. You know, shut up.
You're going to try to take his job away from him.
That's not cool. And Spielberg was like, hey, you know,
just to show me whatever, you got to guess. But
the kind of director. The manager of ILM was like,
you guys, don't do this all right, just leave it alone.
But they weren't going to do that on their off time.
They would come after hours and they developed a running
t Rex skeleton. Yes, And so the manager was like,
don't you dare show that to any of the Jurassic
Park people. And so when Kathleen Kennedy came in, who
was the producer of Jurassic Park, when she came in
to see what their motion blurred looked like, he of
course had it playing on a monitor and she was
instantly like, oh my gosh, yeah, this is amazing. The
world is about to change. Yep, yep.
Speaker 2: So I actually wrote down the date.
Speaker 1: I thought this was interesting.
Speaker 2: So we talked about when the match meets the gasoline, right,
this is it?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: So April twentieth, nineteen ninety two they called black Monday
because that was the day that CGI was realized as
being much better than stop motion, and Spielberg said, we're
going with this, and they realized. I heard one guy
who is the stop motion animator. He's like, you know,
we knew that our job was going to end one day.
It's kind of like when you have a dog. You
know the dog's going to die, but when the dog
actually dies, you still grieve like you weren't expecting to. Right,
they didn't get fired. Spielberg kept them on.
Speaker 1: They were the experts in the motion of dinosaurs. I mean,
they had done all kinds of work. They had a
database of knowledge that was very useful.
Speaker 2: This is a huge moment in movie making history. I
don't want to glaze over this real quick, but no,
I mean.
Speaker 1: This is the most important thing that this did for
movie history. I mean, you you move from we use
computers to do a little bit of cleaning up to
we make living breathing organisms with computers that you believe
are real. Yeah, it's incredible, And I'm gonna I'm gonna
point this out, and I'm somebody liable to throw something
at me for this. This is interesting. So the idea
of Jurassic Park is, of course that John Hammond's creates
this thing that ends up the thing he creates destroys
his own creation. Right, Yes, So Steven Spielberg had been
the special effects guy for twenty years, right, he had been.
He had he had done amazing things, or for a
twenty year period, amazing effects. You've got Close Encounters, You've
got et you've got Jaws, you get Jurassic Park. And
then after Jurassic Park he doesn't make really any special
effects movies anymore. Like he loses is his edge, and
the thing that he was a part of creating ends
up destroying who he was.
Speaker 2: Interesting, that's interesting. I do think it's funny that when
the stop motion guys realized that the computer generated effects
we're going to take over this project, one guy said
to the other guy, he said, we're out of a job,
and the other guy said, don't you mean extinct? And when
Spielberg heard that, He's like, that's going in the movie.
Speaker 1: The Yeah, they so once it started and once it
started rolling, they were literally creating new things every day
and making it better every day. The guy said, we
would do things that a week before we had no
idea that we could do, just because we were given
free reign on this, and we ended up amazing ourselves
once it was all finished.
Speaker 2: We would do something that we thought was done, and
we'd get better the next day. And then we didn't
prove it. We couldn't believe how fast weare.
Speaker 4: Movie.
Speaker 1: And just so it's clear, in this movie, there's only
about fifteen minutes worth of dinosaur footage in the movie itself,
and nine of that is animatronics. I mean, we're talking
about eight minutes of digital footage that changed the landscape
of movies from that point on.
Speaker 2: And I'm just going to say from my personal perspective,
in my opinion, the minimizing of computer generated effects is
important because it grounds it in the real world. When
I watch movies like I don't know, some of the
later Star Wars movies where it's all CGI, Yeah, it
just doesn't work for me. It's dead, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So you know, we did Man of Steel, Zack
Snyder says at one moment in the documentary that they did.
He feels like that CGI can be useful, but if
a character is putting his hands on something, it needs
to be real. And I think that's a good line
to draw, especially as far as it's come at this point.
But there are a great many movies out there that
they don't They don't hold fast to that rule, and
some of the CGI is just an absolute distraction. And
the thing that's springing to my mind is, of course
jarge our Binks and I hope you want Goobi's inability
to look him in the eye. And I think I
said this before, but I'll say it again because it
makes my point. I'm watching The Jedi Council with my
boy who's eight at the time, who says, is this
the car soon? No? Then why is Yoda animated? Yes,
that's right. If it looks like it's animated, you shouldn't
have it in the movie. You had something real before.
Speaker 2: So as a rule, anytime you're watching Jurassic Park and
you see the full body of the dinosaur, that's a
computer generated effect. Okay, So the t Rex at the
pad when he's on top of the car up the
you can actually tell when you see his full body,
that's computerized. When all you see is his teeth, that's animatronic.
The real famous footprint in the mud by the t Rex,
that's animatronic. All that is is a pair of legs
that they made a special animatronic for. Spielberg had this
exposition problem, right, so we needed to explain how they
got the dinosaurs and how they created it, and it's
DNA and all.
Speaker 1: This weird DNA.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he came up with the Mister DNA ride
that the main characters go on and explains how this
all happens. And they said that it took fifteen pages
of script and cut it down to three.
Speaker 1: Genius move Yeah, and it's it's so very simplified but perfect,
I mean, because it's a perfect exposition. It gives you
what you need to know, and it's engaging. And there's
a great little scene where they look like dig Doug.
Is there? Crowd amber? All right, everybody? That we'll do
it for this episode of the Shirley You Can't Be
Serious Podcasts. Please join us next week as we take
on part two of Jaws Versus Jurassic Park. Jason.
Speaker 2: Join us next week where you'll Get the Head, the Tail,
and the whole damn podcast.
Speaker 1: All music images and movie clips are used for the
purposes of commentary and education in conjunction with the fair
Use agreement under the US copyright law.