Speaker 1: Boom boom.
Speaker 2: All right, everybody, welcome back to episode two of the
Jaws Versus Jurassic Park podcast on the Shureley You Can't
Be Serious Podcast, the what do you think? Uh?
Speaker 3: Now? Eventually do plan to have dinosaurs on your dinosaur podcast? Right? Hello? Hello?
Speaker 4: Yes, I really do hate that, man, That's not true.
Speaker 5: 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 Kolovin.
Speaker 3: Welcome back, everybody, Thank you for joining us again. We
are here to talk about sharks and dinosaurs.
Speaker 4: Dinosaurs and sharks tonight, let's look at the cast and
crew of each of these movies, who they thought about
bringing in, who they ended up hiring, and then what
it meant to them. All right, let's start with Jaws,
since it's the first one here sounds good. Initially, Peter
Benchley went to Spielberg and said, I've got an idea.
I think we should hire Paul Newman as Quint, Robert
Redford as Chief Brody, and John Voight for Hooper. And
then they told him, here's the deal. The shark is
the star of the movie.
Speaker 3: Right. Yes, Spielberg had all kinds of guys in mind
for these different parts, and of all of the people
that he had in mind, the only one, the only
first choice that he actually got was the mayor.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 3: So Murray Hamilton is his name, and he was the
choice that Spielberg had for the mayor that actually came through.
I mean, that guy's perfect as the mayor. He is perfect.
Speaker 4: He nails it. He has that sweet coat that has
the anchors on it that I a couple of jealous of. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, he had been in an at me of a
murder and he had been the cuckold husband and the
graduate if you've ever seen that. And he's this weird
scene with him having a drink with Justin Hoffman who's
having an affair with missus Robinson. He's mister Robinson.
Speaker 4: There you go.
Speaker 3: But he is the perfect slimy, bad decision making but
going to push my bad decisions on you mayor for
this movie. Fantastic.
Speaker 4: And later he does a great job in my opinion
of you know, he was all gung ho on keeping
the beaches open for economic reasons, and then when there's
an attack at the beach, he does a great job
of sort of emotionally saying, my kids were on that
beach too.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean the part where he's he convinces people
to go out and swim, I mean, why why would you?
Why would you do that?
Speaker 4: Okay, so the part of Chief Brody, this is interesting.
Steven Spielberg wanted several different people for this part. One
person in particular really wanted it. Charlton Heston really wanted
the part of Chief Brody. Yeah, and Spielberg was like,
no way, dude, No.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Heston had been in these parts where he was
always the conquering hero, like you just knew he was
going to win. And Spielberg didn't want people in the
theater to get you know, just be relaxed knowing, Hey,
Heston's got this right.
Speaker 4: Roy Scheider is every man. He is the representative of
the audience. I taught between his a sticky situation. I
got my job responsibilities, I've got my family responsibilities. I
got the shark that's screwing up everything and I'm scared,
but I got to do my job, you know. And
it was interesting that Spielberg had never met Roy Scheider
until he went to a party. So Spielberg wanted to
offer the role of Chief Brody to Robert Duvall, but
he turned him down. He saw the movie as a
potential phenomenon, but he was worried it might make him
too famous.
Speaker 3: Steven Spielberg was specific about, I don't want somebody that's
too big and too famous, because he had this idea
that Brody needed to be vulnerable and somebody that the
audience could identify with. But he had talked to five
or six actors and he couldn't find the right person
for the job. And so he's at this party at
Andrea Eastman's house, who was the casting director for The Godfather,
and Roy Scheider also happens to be there and several
other Hollywood folks and Roy Scheider over here's Spielberg talking
to some writer about the scene where the shark comes
out of the water, and he kind of becomes fascinated.
And then you know, parties, you move on, you you
have your drinks, and then he sees Spielberg just kind
of sitting alone by himself, and so he just goes
over for instance down and he's like, you know, Hey,
what's up, what's wrong? And he just Spielberg just spills
all of his depression and anxiety about, you know, talking
to all these actors, he can't find the right person
to be the to be his Chief Brody and be
the every man. And finally, after listening very quietly and
patiently for a while, Roy Scheider goes, what about me,
I'm an actor. I would love to be in Jo's
and bingo bogo. There you go, Yep, going to the
right party.
Speaker 4: That's awesome, that's awesome. I love that story. So Chief
Rody is Roy Scheider, and he had been in the
French Connection. Later he did all that Jazz and Blue.
Speaker 3: Thunder, and he was on a series a little bit
later on where it was kind of a deep sea
SeaQuest man.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that was on for about five and I
remember I was all excited about it.
Speaker 3: And then yeah, Star Trek for the Water or something
like that. He had been in a few things, but
he really found his way as a cop. He was
in Clute, he was in and then he was in
the French Connection and just something about him said cop.
And that's why he's the chief of police in this one.
Speaker 4: For Matt Hooper. The studio wanted Jeff Bridges or Jan
Michael Vincent or Timothy Bottoms, and like we said before,
John Voight was considered, but George Lucas was the one
who said, Hey, how about Ricky?
Speaker 3: Right, Richard Dreyfus. Yeah, the other guys were more pretty boys,
which was kind of the way that he was that
the character of Hooper was portrayed in the book that
he was kind of this handsome, young just out of college,
kind of dashing figure. And obviously Richard Dreyfus is not
that kind of guy, especially not in this movie.
Speaker 4: Yep, this is really interesting to me that the process
of the hiring of Richard Dreyfus. Okay, now, Spielberg calls
him and says, Hey, I've got this project I'm working
on called Jaws, and I need this guy Hooper, who's
a shark expert and all this stuff. Would you like
to play him? And rich drefs sayes, no, way, man, no, and.
Speaker 3: He it was like a great movie to watch. It's
like a terrible movie to be a part of.
Speaker 4: That's what he said. He said, Well he was right
about that too, though. He was absolutely right. So he
kept asking him, right, He was very emphatic, like no,
I'm not doing this, and he's like, how about we
all say it at the same time. Already one, two, three,
I'm not doing this.
Speaker 3: But yeah, kind of it started to be a little
bit of a d about it. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But he had recently started a movie called The
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It was his first starring role where he was
the lead man.
Speaker 4: And when he sat to watch the premiere, he watched
himself on screen and thought, I suck. He thought he
was terrible.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, I am never going to get cast
in anything again. I better go take this thing before
news gets out that I think it's terrible, terrible performance.
Speaker 4: He immediately called Spielberg and begged for the part of
Matt Hooper, which was funny, and when he showed up.
He showed up to talk it over with him. He
had that scraggly beard and those remless glasses and the
little stocking gap, and they were like, that's it, you
got it. Don't change the thing. Joel Gray wanted to
play the part of Hooper too. I don't know if
you are familiar with him, but oh yeah.
Speaker 3: Joel Gray was in Caparet For those interested in the
eighties movies, he was in Remo Williams.
Speaker 4: And then the third main role he had to fill
with Quinn. The one guy that Spielber had in mind
for this part was Lee Marvin. But Lee Marvin he
was fishing off of the coach Mexico. Yeah, and they're like, well,
we want to talk to you about fishing sort of.
He's like, I'm on vacation. I'm on vacation. Uh huh,
And he refused to talk to them, so like, well,
I guess we got to move on without Lee Marvin.
Speaker 3: He also offered it to Sterling Hayden. For those of
you who don't know Sterling Hayden. If you've seen Doctor Strangelove,
he's the American general who kind of puts everything into
action to cause the destruction of the world, who only
drinks vodka because of fluoridation of the water. He's that guy.
Speaker 4: The producers of the show said, well, you know what
about Robert Shaw. They had just worked with him on
the Sting and said, you know, he can be a
little honery, but he's a good actor. He's he's Shakespeare
and he's a professional.
Speaker 3: What do you think about him?
Speaker 4: And they decided to.
Speaker 3: Go with him. You know, we talked about them starting
the movie without having things done. Nine days before they
started filming, they still didn't have the parts of quent
or Hooper cast. It's crazy nine days, which means for
those actors, hey you're hired, see you in less than
a week and a half start production.
Speaker 4: Here's a copy. Still memorize it.
Speaker 3: Yeah so, but even I mean, we know there wasn't
even a script. There was not a complete There was
multiple scripts that were completed, but they weren't scripts that
they were going to use. They were working on new
lines every night. Spielberg and Carl Gottlieb were working on
fresh dialogue that people would have to learn that next day.
So I guess that's part of the production. Robert Shaw
is an interesting choice for Quin because he had kind
of been in his early career a more of a
dashing leading man type of guy, swashbuckling type of guy,
and then he was like maybe one one of the
best villains for James Bond and from Russia with Love.
He was like the evil James Bond. I mean, he
was awesome, but he's now got to play the part
of this kind of crotchety old man. You know, it's weird.
And I looked at this, he's only forty seven. When
he was filming this, I'm thinking, I'm thinking he's in
his sixties and he's forty seven years old. He was
doing a part unlike any part that he had done before,
and so he was looking for kind of inspiration on
how to play the part. And one of the guys
that he looked to was was a guy named Craig
Kingsbury who was just a local fisherman. But the guy
that they cast as Ben Gardner in Gardner's head. But
this is an interesting story. I just got I pitched
to pick this one up today. So when they were
there and they were putting together like the boat and
stuff like that. They're putting together other boats, making all
the props for the set. Some spray paint that they
were spray painting like blue over to the neighboring house.
And as it out, there was a crotchety, old, angry
man who lived in that house. And his name's Lynn Murphy.
And so he you know, you've just blown paint over
the guy who you shouldn't cross and at any point
in life, and so he goes and balls them out,
and then somehow, because I guess he's the local mechanic
and knows how machines work, they're like, hey, could you
help us out with this boat stuff? And then hey,
could you help us out with a shark? And so
he becomes like a guy on the set who's like
teaching them how to do stuff like he There have
been several actors who have said, had it not been
for Lynn Murphy, the movie Jaws might not have come out.
And he's gotten like no credit. He's not created in
the credits of the movie. It's nowhere. It just just
just happens to be this old car mudgeon league guy.
And I looked at him, and he was in his
forties too. I guess I'm just thinking. I think I
thought I had like twenty years before I could become
a car budget. I guess I could do it right now.
And so Robert Shaw is having trouble with this line
on the reading. He's talking to Spielberg and as they're talking,
Lenn Murphy over yelling at the crew about stop doing
what you're doing. You're messing everything. He's just like yelling
at him because of how stupid they are, and Steven
Spielberg goes you hear that, read it like that, and
that was the inspiration for shop for the rest of
the movie. Quit. That's awesome.
Speaker 4: So those three roles are hugely important. Obviously, there's the
three main roles of the movie, right, right, Except I
would argue the most important hire in the cast was
Lorrange Gary as the role of Ellen Brody. And let
me tell you why.
Speaker 3: It is not who I thought you were going to say,
but okay, go for it. Okay.
Speaker 4: She was the most important hire because she was the
wife of Sid Sheinberg, who was Steven Spielberg's boss, so
he and her and her husband had skin in the
game here, right. The fact that she had an important
role in this movie meant that he was less likely
to fire Spielberg and shut it down.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, probably so.
Speaker 4: And when you're a twenty seven year old director and
you hire your boss's wife, it's never a bad thing, right.
Speaker 3: And you could you know, you can say that maybe
she had she had preferential treatment or whatever. But she
did a great job.
Speaker 4: She did a great job.
Speaker 3: I thought she was a perfect wife in this one.
I mean, she acted well. She it was very real.
You just she was very believable as the displaced wife
of a New York family who's now in amity. So
who I thought you were going to say as the
most important casting was.
Speaker 4: A mo on pins and needles here. I can't wait
for you to tell me who in the world this
is Susan Becklanine. You know what? She was pretty dagonam
important now that she was.
Speaker 3: Vital because that first scene, if you don't sell that
first scene the rest of the movies like mah right, yeah,
and that first scene is all her, It is all her.
Speaker 4: Let's talk about No, you're exactly right, Let's talk about
her for a second. So she was a competitive swimmer
and a stunt woman, not really an actress.
Speaker 3: They knew what had to happen in the scene, and
so they had three very important things that they had
to consider. Right, They had to have somebody who was tough,
who could handle the physical demands of the scene. They
had to have somebody who was beautiful because it was
supposed to be a girl that this guy is going
to be chasing after. And they had to have somebody
who was willing to get naked.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Susan Beckliny.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so she pointed out. She was like, you know,
so they do a casting call. You know, it's just like, hey,
this part exists. Here's what we got. And I'm sure
part of it was, hey, we need beautiful, tough, willing
to get naked. And so she comes in. Before she
goes in, she thinks, ah, they always make you take
your clothes off. And I'm like, you haven't been in
that many moves, at least not ones that are on IMDb.
I wonder, I wonder how many auditions you had that
you had to take your clothes off for. It was
the seventies, it was a different time anyway. So she decides,
instead of, you know, giving them that option, what I'll
do is I will stick a naked picture of me
in my portfolio folder.
Speaker 4: And when she went to the audition, he went and
talked to Bill Gilmore, showed him that picture and he
said when he saw the picture all he could do
was blush. Right, So he went to Steven Spielberg with
the picture and said, hey, Steve, here you go.
Speaker 3: What do you think of this?
Speaker 4: And Stephen's like, well, yeah, but can she act? He's like,
Steve would look at this picture again?
Speaker 3: On come on? So she was very important.
Speaker 4: She screamed her lungs out too, and she made that
scene super believable. She was screaming like she would die
in you know.
Speaker 3: They well, the way that they rigged her up. They
had ropes on either side of her. I mean, you
see her like moving one way through the water and
the other way, because it has to be like this
nonlinear movement through the water like a fish would do.
And what they did was like they had guys with
rope and three hundred pound weights and this thing wrapped
around her underneath the water and she was really just
being thrown back and forth. And there was there was
rumors that went around like that she's screaming like that
because her ribs were breaking, but that's apparently false. You know,
she did a fantastic job. And then when they had
to go back in and and put in more sound
before the scene, she had to scream while Steven Spielberg
was pouring water down her throat, which you know now
is called waterboarding. We don't do that anymore.
Speaker 4: Rights the Geneva Convention, Steven Spielberg is guilty of a
war crime. So that pretty much is the cast of Jaws.
If you don't include Bruce the Shark. Let's switch over
to Dress and Kark and talk about who was almost
cast in these roles. All right. So Spielberg now has
a little bit more clout in Hollywood, and so he
can a little bit I think, yeah, little scream a bit.
Speaker 3: I've directed The Sugarland Express. Hey, I've directed every single
great movie of the eighties.
Speaker 4: Seriously. So here's here's who was considered for these roles.
All right. So the role of doctor Alan Grant went
to Sam Neil does a great job. Or He had
been in the Hunt for Red October. He was later
in The Piano and Event Horizon. He was an Australian actor.
All right, here's who was considered for the role of
doctor Allan Grant. So, just off the top of his head,
Steven Spielberg was like, how about Harrison Ford. I think
that was a little bit overkill for that role. You
don't need Indiana Jones, you just need doctor Grant. So
he considered Harrison Ford, he considered Kurt Russell. Right, he
offered the role to William Hurt, who didn't even read
the script and just said, no, I'm not interested in dinosaurs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, William Hurt's kind of famous for turning stuff down.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm not a fan of his. I don't really
like him, Okay. And then finally they thought about Richard Dreyfuss.
Speaker 3: That would have been interesting.
Speaker 4: So that's who was considered for the role of doctor
Allan Grant. Now, then doctor Ellie Satler is kind of
like the Susan Sarandon Roland Bull Durham. They considered a
ton of actresses for that role. They looked at Robin Wright,
Gwyneth Paltrow, Julianne Moore, Helen Hunt, Terry Hetcher, Elizabeth Hurley,
cheryln Flynn, and then Christina Applegate was considered. But some
people think that they were looking at her for doctor
Satler or maybe like an older version of Lex. It's
kind of a strange deal. She was young at the time,
she was like twenty, right, But they ended up going
with Lord Dern, who had been in Wild Heart. And
you may know her from The Last Jedi.
Speaker 3: I was going to ask you about that one. How'd
you feel about her performance in the Last Jedi?
Speaker 4: Jason, we don't talk about the Last Jedi. Uh in
her purple hair, we don't talk about the Last Jedi.
Speaker 3: Have you seen Wild at Heart. No, it's pretty weird.
It's pretty weird. This is David Lynch movie, of course.
Speaker 4: And David Lynch makes the weirdest movies.
Speaker 3: He's got some weird stuff, he really does, and it's
it can be amazing and weird and then it can
be just plain old weird. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Okay. For the role of doctor Malcolm, this is where
it gets super interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Spielberg says that he wanted Jeff Goldblum, he offered Jeff Goblum,
and he got Jeff Goblum, And so that really is
the end of it, except listen to these guys that
the casting director wanted, all right, okay, Michael Keaton, Michael J. Fox,
Johnny Yeah, Michael J.
Speaker 3: Fox, Yes, Yeah, that's weird.
Speaker 4: Okay, go ahead, Johnny Depp, Yeah, Ted Danson, Steve Guttenberg.
Speaker 3: Tom Selick, a baby.
Speaker 4: Go ahead, and just offer everybody a three minute a baby.
But here the person who did the best in the audition,
this will blow you away. You're ready for this. Jim Carrey.
Jim Carrey was a fraction of a hair away from
getting the role of doctor Gan Malcolm.
Speaker 3: That's crazy.
Speaker 4: I think he would have been great. I think that
that would have been cool. It would have changed the
trajectory of his career. Right after this, he did a
Centura and The Mask and Dumb and Dumber, and he's
off down that path. And I'm thankful for that. I
enjoyed those movies, but it would have been interesting at
least to see him as that kind of rule.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but Jeff Goldbloom, like he set the mold for
the sexy geek, right, Yeah, I mean, was was nerd
them ever as sexy as Jeff Goldbloom was in Jurassic
Part I don't think.
Speaker 4: So he got buffed up and yeah.
Speaker 3: And he's supposed to be like a math nerd and
he comes and he's all tan and got his long black,
curly hair and all flirting with the ladies and touching
their hands and stuff and rubbing their hair and cheek
in a weird kind of creepy way, but still somehow
sexy because he's so pretty.
Speaker 4: All Right, the role of John Hammond. When they were
casting this, they wanted somebody to be a dark Walt Disney.
I thought that was really cool.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, the character in the book was certainly a darker,
much much, much darker version of John Hammond than then
it is portrayed in the movie. Have you read it? Yeah? Yeah,
what did you think?
Speaker 4: It may be the only book I've ever read where
I think the movie is better than the book.
Speaker 3: Did you see the movie first? No, that's impressive.
Speaker 4: I just think that the movie was streamline and it's
just action like a bullet, right, And there's a whole
lot of chaos theory and sort of scientific bs that
I didn't.
Speaker 3: Care about, right, And and Spielberg has got a knack
for doing that. I don't think he obviously did it
with Ready Player one, which we saw together.
Speaker 4: But we need to talk about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a shame podcast, right, But just to speak
about that on Jaws, you know, after he got done
reading the book, Spielberg said, I kind of wanted the
shark to win.
Speaker 3: Like nobody, no character in the book was actually likable.
That's why the film is really nothing like the book
at all. He even told Dreyfus, He's like, don't read
the book, Okay, just don't read it.
Speaker 4: That makes me want to read the book. I want to.
I want to order Jaws and check it out.
Speaker 3: Welcome to a Jurassic Book.
Speaker 4: The role for John Hammond, you know who he originally wanted,
Sean Connory.
Speaker 3: Shan Connery, And I gotta say, I think he'd have
been awesome. I really if I just imagine him with
his what's the Jungle movie that he was in doctor.
Speaker 4: Something or other, medicine man, medicine man.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, the medicine man is right. So I just
imagined him with his medicine man, long white hair and
a pony tail, you know, and his khaki vest saying
welcome to a Jurassic Park. I would get, yeah, that's
awesome when this guy does it. I'm kind of like,
that's a little cheesy, little, a little round cheesy guy.
But doctor so to blasphemy Richard Attenberg. I mean, he
did a good job, but.
Speaker 4: He did h Yeah, Sean Connery, I.
Speaker 3: Think he would have. I think he would have made
a better like I'm a billionaire developing a park kind
of character. But I don't think he would have been
as good as the lovable old grandfather that he also
has to be in this movie.
Speaker 4: That's true. That's true. So Richard Attenborough had been in
the Great Escape and A Bridge too Far, but he
had pretty much been a director so he had directed
the movie Gandhi and he was in the middle of
finishing Chaplain, which stars Robert Downey Junior, which is a
great movie. But he was pretty much a director. And
when Spielberg called him, he's like, well, I'm in post
production for Chaplain. He said, don't worry, we'll work around
your schedule. If you want to come back and shoot
this part, we'll let you have the time you need
to finish Chaplain. And so he said, great, got me
in the part of Muldoon. They hired a guy named
Bob Peck. Shootah, that guy. Yeah, he did a good job.
They considered Tom Sizemore.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can kind of see that. Yeah, I really
feel like that they didn't do that character just in
this movie. I felt like he could have been way
more than he was in this movie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he didn't do a whole lot.
Speaker 3: And he's I mean, he's supposed to be the Australian
like out back safari hunter man, the great White hunter, right,
and this guy he's okay, he's just not. I don't know,
he's just not.
Speaker 4: At the beginning his watch, a construction worker gets eaten
by a raptor.
Speaker 3: Right, you have the ability to make dinosaurs from mosquitoes,
but you can't get a cage that locks. Okay.
Speaker 4: So for the part of Lex, Arianna Richards was hired
based mostly because she could scream really loud and really long.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and she did a great job at that. She's
a good screamer.
Speaker 4: Okay. The part of Tim was played by Joseph Mazzello,
and he had actually auditioned for a part in Spielberg's
previous movie Hook, but they thought he was too young.
But when this part came along, they thought he'll be
just the right age, and they actually flip flopped Lex
and Tim's age.
Speaker 3: From the book, Tim is the older brother and to
yeher hacker, hacker.
Speaker 4: I'm a hacker. I'm a vegetarian, okay. And then mister
Arnold played by Samuel L.
Speaker 3: MF.
Speaker 4: Jackson.
Speaker 3: Are we going to talk about the bloodsucking lawyer? We're
going to talk about Martin Fierro.
Speaker 4: Sure.
Speaker 3: So he got cast obviously, and I mean one of
the most memorable roles, and not necessarily for his performance,
but because he's the first guy to get eaten by
t Rex. Love it. And how awesome was that. I
was listening to the soundtrack show on Jurassic Park. Shout
out to d. A. W. Collins, But he's talking about
the first time he's he saw the movies, Like when
it comes to that part the t Rex eats the attorney,
the guy in the middle row stands up and just
starts shouting, how the fuck did they do that? And
it's just so Yeah. Martin Fierro, he if you've seen
Playing Drains and Automobiles, he's got a hilarious little bit
part as the motel clerk and it's great.
Speaker 4: Do you have thirty two dollars?
Speaker 3: And I've watched.
Speaker 4: And finally, we can't do this without talking about Dennis Nedrie,
who was played by Wayne Knight. Spielberg actually Newman, that's right.
Spielberg watched the movie Based Againstinct and really liked this
guy in Based Againstinct and he stayed and he waited
for the credits to roll, and then he was like, Okay,
that guy right there, Wayne Knight, write that down and
that's how he got the part.
Speaker 3: That's great and he was perfect. He was a perfect
little slide ball on this one too. Uh uh.
Speaker 4: He really does. I like that line where they're like,
find Dennis Nedrie checked the vending machines. All right, So
that's going to wrap it up for our discussion on
the cast and crew. Let's dive into the production of
both of these movies.
Speaker 3: Ready.
Speaker 4: Flipping back to Jaws. Production started in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.
It was used as Amity Island, primarily because even twelve
miles out to see there was a sandy bottom that
was only thirty feet down and they needed an area
that they could get the mechanical shark. And you couldn't
see a.
Speaker 3: Coastline, right, and when the mechanical shark sinks to the bottom,
you don't have that far to go.
Speaker 4: Which he did all the time.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: So the big story about production in Jaws was that
the shark, the star of the movie, hardly ever worked right.
Speaker 3: The shark is not working. The shark is not working.
Speaker 4: This movie had so many production problems it's really interesting
to me. Not only did they pull off a complete movie,
but they managed to make an incredible movie for the ages.
The crew had so much trouble with it that they
called it Flaws rather than Jaws. Spielberg called it the
Great White Turd. You know, you mentioned the first day
the model shark was used it sank to the bottom
of the ocean. This is the really interesting part, Okay.
The fact that the shark did not work caused them
to have to get creative. Yeah, so originally the scene
at the beginning with Susan maclinney, we were going to
have a shark that you could see attacking her. Couldn't
get it to work, and so they said, well, that's
all right, we'll just pull on a rope a few times,
drag her under the water and show screen blood murder
and it'll be effective. And it was.
Speaker 3: It was better, and they remember that lesson when it
gets to Jurassic Park time. Because even in that first
scene where the dinosaur is attacking and you get the
extreme close up on Muldoon's teeth, even though you can
see the tonsils, you do not see the dinosaur.
Speaker 4: That's right, Okay. So at the beginning we did talk
briefly about the first kill, Susan Becklinny. When they were
shooting the part of the dead body, they had a fake.
Speaker 3: Hand and they got a fake hand to look.
Speaker 4: Right, the fake hand looked fake.
Speaker 3: They buried one of the assistant directors, buried her under
the sand and just had her stick her hand out,
so you've got a realistic looking hand and once again,
the what you can't see is more frightening than what
you can see. And they do it so well because
Brody is there with the teenager and then the deput
is blowing his whistle in panic and vomiting on the
side of the dune there because of what he's looking at.
And we don't see what he's looking at other than
a few fingers coming out of the sand. But with
that hidden image, we let our imaginations run wild on
how gruesome this scene is, that it's causing this deputed
paniclick it is ye yep, it's brilliant. It is accidental brilliance.
Once again.
Speaker 4: Also, one of the things that they did sort of
out of necessity, is they got a box that they
made around the camera and they set the camera at
water level, like what you would see if you're barely
treading water.
Speaker 3: Spielboirer wanted to give the audience the perception of being
in the water, right because when are you the most
scared of a shark when your head is above the
water and the rest of you is underneath the water,
right where you feel like you're vulnerable. If you're from
the shore. If you just you know, if everything's being
fun from the shore, you don't have that fear. But
you've got you know, when you can't see your body,
when you're out there and vulnerable, that's when you're most afraid.
And so that's why he wanted that perspective super effective.
Speaker 4: So here's a couple of things. I want to talk about.
Ben Gardner's head.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's fantastic. So the so what happens with Ben
Gardner's head is Spielberg when they're doing their previewing of
the movie. There is such a reaction at that scene.
And let's just talk about that scene for just a second, okay,
because you have this unbelievably brilliant sequence that begins with
this high angle shot of Roy Scheider dropping fish entrails
into the water as shark bait. And he's mad because
they've been out there and they haven't seen a shark.
And you know, Shaw keeps kind of acting like he's
his favorite, but he gets all the crap jobs right,
and so he's there and he's ticked off because he's
having to do the grunt work and he's the freaking
chief of police. I mean this is I can understand, right,
and this I mean, let me just say this polite company,
you would say, you know, a pinon contest, but this
entire movie is measured. I mean, that's what the whole
movie is about. It's about the masculinity fights that go
on between the Mayor and Brody and Hooper and Shaw
and Hooper and Brody and all of those guys. But
he's so he's ticked off that he's got to be
shoveling these fish guts out into the water, and he says,
why don't you guys come down here and shovel some
of this, And just at the moment that you laugh
that you're just about to laugh, the shark's head comes
out of the water and you swallow that laugh into
a shriek and you're like, oh, and that reaction, Spielberg said, Okay,
I gotta get one more of those into this movie.
And so that's where we get Ben Gardner's head right, right.
So they didn't, you know, they filmed all of this
footage in the ocean and then they're done, right, they're
in post production there, they're editing, they're doing sound, they're
doing stuff like that, and he wants to film an
underwater scene. Again. Well, he's over at vernon Field's house
and she's got a pool, and so they make a
fake boat, they stick it in the pool and they
dump milk into the pool to give it the murky effect.
Speaker 4: And it's perfect.
Speaker 3: It's fantastic. And that scene, man, you are locked in
just like he is, at the size of that tooth
and then all of a sudden, boiling there's ahead with
one eyeball coming out.
Speaker 4: Spielberg said, you only get one really great scare per movie,
because from that point on the audience was on guard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the reaction to the shark was about half what
it was before they put that scene. Yeah, after they
put the scene in, because people were they were prepared
for another scare. But I mean that is part of
the joy of the movie, is that tension that you feel.
I mean, yes, the scares are great, but you know
you're watching a great scary movie if you are on edge,
and if you've seen that head pop out, you're gonna
be on edge for the rest of the movie.
Speaker 4: Here's the other thing about that, when that shark makes
it appearance, when he's like, hey, you can come down
here and shove some of those this the shark appears.
First of all, you get a great look at him
for the first time the entire movie, and you don't
have John Williams music training you to know that here
he comes. Right, So the entire movie you see the
fin you get a perspective, and you hear the music right,
dun't dun dun dun dun dun, and it's like warning
you here he is. He's in the water, he's close,
he's coming. That moment, you don't get any of that,
and so it's a complete warning music.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, So they when they originally filmed this one,
Chief Brody has the most memorable line of the movie
immediately after it, which was a Roy Scheider ad lib.
It was totally him. It was not in the script.
He stumbles backwards and he says, you're gonna need a
bigger boat, and it is it's the best line in
the movie. But the way they had initially filmed it,
he delivered it almost immediately after the shark, after the
shark's head pops off, and nobody heard it because everyone
was still screaming from having seen So they added like
ten solid seconds of film in between the shark popping
up and him saying the line just so that people
didn't miss that awesome one.
Speaker 4: I've got three big things I really want to talk about.
Speaker 3: Okay, Okay.
Speaker 4: The first thing is Lee Fierro slapping again and again
and again.
Speaker 3: Chief Brody Yes, and god rest is sol Lee Fierro.
We are recording this in May. She passed away last
month from the coronavirus. No way, I didn't know, Yeah
said no, Yeah, she just just passed away. And it
was I read an interesting story today. You know, the
actor who played her son, Alex Kidner. Thirty years after
the movie has been made, she wanders into a restaurant
and sees on the menu the Alex Kittner Sandwich, and
she says to the waitress, She's like, oh, you know,
I was in this movie and he's he's like, oh really,
what part did you play. She's like, actually, I played
Alex's mom. And they're like no way and rush off.
And just a few seconds later, the guy who played
Alex comes out. He's the owner of the restaurant and
he hasn't seen her in thirty years, and it's this
fantastic coincidental reunion that they have very.
Speaker 4: Sweet that's really cool, all right, So she had to
slap him again and again and again. They did seventeen
takes of this, right.
Speaker 3: She couldn't do a fake slap. She couldn't do it.
Speaker 4: Bake, so she hit him so hard she knocked his
glasses off a few times. One time she broke characters.
She's like, oh God, I'm so sorry, and he's like,
don't don't be keep doing it. It'll be worth it.
Speaker 3: Oh again. One of the most memorable scenes in the
whole movie. Yeah my boy is dead.
Speaker 4: And for the next forty years she had fans coming
up to her and said, will you please slap me?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I have kind of, I don't know, a kind
of weird special affection for her because she was a
community theater lady in a small town, and after this movie,
she was a community theater lady small town. I mean,
she teach acting in this little town and do small plays.
But this was her one. You know, brush was stardom,
and I encountered so many of those folks in acting.
It's just yeah, when I read about her passing, it
kind of hit mark strings a little bit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that makes me sad. The next thing I want
to talk about is Cooper, quint and Brody are on
the boat and there was a scene where they shot
a harpoon into the shark and they hooked it to
the back of the boat and they were going to
try and tire the shark out, and the shark runs
and they actually jerks the boat in such a way
that they sort of tumble and it gives a real
big pull on the boat. Right, So they actually to
film this, they hooked up a speedboat and they screwed
in a islet into this side of the boat, and
they hooked to a pulley down on the bottom and
they toild the speedboat to take off, and when when
it pulled the slack, it jerked the boat and it
was really effective looking on screen, but they jerked a
big hole in the bottom of the boat.
Speaker 3: Right. They had actually built two orchids. They had one
that was supposed to be the boat that they use,
and they had one that was supposed to be the
boat that sinks. And then they do this little bit
with the speedboat, pull a hole in the one that's
not supposed to sink, and it starts.
Speaker 4: Sinking, dropping like the Titanic. I mean, it's going down
like a rock and yeah, Bilburgh's on the speaker, going
get the actors off the boat. Get the actors off
the boat. But they have high dollars sound equipment on
the boat, and the sound guy's like, f the actors, get.
Speaker 3: The sound equipment right, Dryfus is like, he's a seventy
year old man. To save him.
Speaker 4: I'm fine.
Speaker 3: Yeah. They actually they had some film footage that went
into the water as well, and they're like, oh crap,
it's ruined. But as it turns out, back in the seventies,
film was bathed in a saline solution and they sent
it off to a film lab and not a bit
of it was lost.
Speaker 4: Did not lose one frame.
Speaker 3: See.
Speaker 4: Okay, this is the type of crap that I would
do with my twenty year old friends. Okay, yeah, we're
making a multimillion dollar movie. But I got a great idea.
We'll just screw a big thing to the side of
the boat and we'll send a speedboat off and jerk it.
Oh whoops, pulled a hole in it. I mean, that's
just dumb, stupid twenty year old stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Okay, And the last thing that I really really feel
like we need to talk about Spielberg sent Ron and
Valerie Taylor to Australia to film real great white sharks.
Speaker 3: We talked about them and talked about them in our
last episode. They were the the spear fishermen turned documentary
filmmakers that devoted their lives to catching footage of real
great white sharks.
Speaker 4: Right, this is this is a super cool story. So
they go down to Australia and they're looking around and
they're like, hey, we've got great whites down here, but
the biggest we got are like fifteen sixteen footers. Well,
the great white in the movie is supposed to be
a twenty five footer. So Spider was like, well, why
don't you get somebody that's super small and make the
cage really small and that way the shark looked bigger, right,
makes sense?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: Okay, so they drop.
Speaker 3: This find a small man.
Speaker 4: It's a jockey. He's like four foot six or something
like the real small guy.
Speaker 3: So yeah, so he's come in and he's like, i'll
do it, I'll do anything, and they put him in
there and he's in there with real sharks. I mean, yes,
they're only twelve feet, but they're twelve feet. Yeah, that's
freaking huge. I mean, that's twice as big as a man.
I mean, that's scary, scary.
Speaker 4: Stuff, especially if you're four foot tall. It seems really big.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, just as an explanation, you've got a limited
amount of air in your tank, and if you're scared,
you use that air up way faster. Well, not only
did they have to make the man smaller and the
cage smaller, they had to make the tank smaller. So
they've got this tiny man with his tiny tank in
this very very scary situation, and like fifteen minutes, he'd
be like, amout of air matter hair.
Speaker 4: So they pull him out. They pull him out, and
while he is on the boat, the shark gets entangled
in the cage and proceeds to freak out and roll
and destroy the cage and the lines. And while they're
filming all this and they're like, this is incredible shot
right here.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's like it couldn't be any better, right, right,
couldn't be any better unless the actor had been in
the cage at the time. The cage was empty. And
so for the script, the script called for Hooper to
die at this point, right, Yeah, Hooper was supposed to die,
but They've got this brilliant footage of an empty cage
and it's not like today where you can just computer
digitally stick somebody back in there. And so what did
Spielberg decide to do.
Speaker 4: He said, well, the Shark's going to rewrite the script.
Hooper is going to swim off and live. We cannot
let this footage go unused. And you know what, it
makes it to the movie, and it's incredible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I'm glad that Hooper lives. I do it
would have it would have been a bummer. I mean,
I'm I don't know. I just maybe it's because that's
what you know, I've grown up with. But yeah, they've
got to they've got to be paddling back to shore together.
Speaker 4: Right, yeap? All right, So that's that's sort of what
we got production wise on Jaws. Let's flip over to
the drafts and park. Jurassic Park started production August twenty fourth,
nineteen ninety two, in Kawai. The scene that takes place
in Montana was actually shot within a two hour drive
of la It was in the Mohave Desert, and it
saved him three hundred fifty grand just shooting it that
close to the studio, but most of it was shot
in Kawai. While they were shooting, Spielberg was determined not
to get behind schedule. So he had gone way over
scheduled with Jaws and and some other movies that had
kind of gotten away from him, and so he kept
it to like four or five takes, and after four
or five takes he's like, Okay, we're moving on. And
that kept everybody disciplined. They were moving so quickly that
they got like the construction company that was building sets
ahead of them. That guy says, we call it a
successful We never see the crew. Well, there are several
scenes where like there's a guy in the back like
putting the finishing touches while they're getting ready to film
a scene. So back to Kawai for a second. All right, Yeah,
So I know that we mentioned kind of in our
Raiders Lost arc episode that I had recently taken a
trip to Kawai. It's the most beautiful place on Earth.
I loved it there, right. I wish I would have
paid more attention to like shooting locations and stuff. I
did see some stuff, but I think I could have
seen more. I drove right by the spot where Dennis
Nedri says Dodson. Dodson, we've got Dodson here, but I
was right by that place.
Speaker 3: But anybody cares.
Speaker 4: Nobody cares. Don't get cheap on me, Dickson. But they
built an elect that that giant fence, that giant electrical
fence that Timmy gets zapped on. So that scene was
shot like in Wyamea canyon, which seems strange to think,
but it's like the second biggest canyon in the United States.
And so they had to haul all this construction equipment
to build this giant forty foot fence. If you look
closely at the screen, you can see both edges of
the fence, like literally it's only twenty feet white.
Speaker 3: Right, but these can climb over when you could have
just walked around, walk around the edge of it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but they had to haul all this construction stuff,
like for days and days and days deep into the
jump to build this humongous fence. The guys who built
it were like, people do not understand the effort and
time it took to build that sucker and make it
look real and right and everything. And they got a
couple of seeds, They're like, okay, moving on.
Speaker 3: I wonder how little is done on that side of
things anymore. It seems like everything is digital, largely because
of this movie. Now that it's not even like all
those costs are cut, because why build it when you
can just generate a perfectly good looking one with a computer.
Speaker 4: As I mentioned before, I visited Kawhi, and while I
was there in twenty sixteen, I had several people mentioned
to me Hurricane and Nikki, Well, that happened in nineteen
ninety two. That actually happened on the last day of
shooting for Jurassic Park.
Speaker 3: Throw back to our Raiders of the Lost Arc versus
Back to the Future episode in case you haven't heard it,
The pilot with the pet snake, Reggie.
Speaker 4: Jack tell us the who he started the engine.
Speaker 3: And I mentioned then did I couldn't figure out why
he wasn't in the rest of the movie. Seemed like
such a great guy, and then he wasn't in any
other movies. So I thought they did such a good job.
Because it turns out he's not an actor. He is
a pilot. He was the pilot that was helping them
scout locations. They needed a pilot for the movie, and
they said, Fred, would you like to be our pilot,
and he said, sure, sounds great. So fast forward eleven
years and Hurricane Anik comes in and they suddenly need
to fly people out and the only guy who happens
to be flying into a hurricane is Fred Sorenson, the
guy who played Jacques and Steven Spielberg Raiders the Lost Art.
Speaker 4: Okay, so this is a great story. I love the story. So,
Kathleen Kennedy, they're set up to shoot the last day
of shooting it for Jurassic Park. It's a dead on
hit for Kawhi. So they the whole cast and crew
go below ground for their hotel and they waited out
with every other person in flip flops and swimsuits, right right.
Speaker 3: Jeff Clobloom describes it as terrifying and boring all the
same time.
Speaker 4: Terrifying and boring, and Richard Attenborough slept through the whole thing,
and Spielberg's like, how could you sleep through this? He's like,
my dear boy, I survived the Blitz. So hurricane and
Niki takes the turn north and it's a dead hit
for Kawhi. They actually had one more day of shooting,
which I found interesting. I was like, well, what were
they going to shoot. They were going to shoot the
Gala Mimus herd. They originally were going to shoot that
in Kawai. They later had to come back two weeks
later and shoot it in o Wahu because that hurricane
had knocked down all the trees in Kawai. And they
were going to shoot mister Arnold's death scene. The Raptors
were gonna get Samuel L. Jackson and he was supposed
to fly back, and they thought, well, now we'll just
throw a fake arm in there and we'll we'll just
move on, you know. Once the hurricane moved through, they
realized it's complete devastation. But she's got to get all
these people off the island, so she runs to the
airport to see what's going on. When she gets there,
she realizes there's nobody really getting in and out of
here except for healthcare workers and people that are helping
with the hurricane. And so she's weighing her options, trying
to figure out how to to work this out, and
this guy comes up to her and says, hey, do
you know who I am? And she turns around looks
at him. She's like no, and he says, does the
line that's my pet snake, Reggie mean anything to you.
And that's our guy Fred freaking Sorenson there to rescue
the crew.
Speaker 3: Of Jurassic Park.
Speaker 4: So when the t Rex is attacking the car, of course,
you have the animatronic t Rex, and you have the
cue the kids. All right, kids scream and Steven Spilber gonna.
Speaker 3: Have a megaphone.
Speaker 4: You're like, he's doing all that, and it made the
cast crack up, right, uh huh to have this gigantic
animatronic t Rex and you have Steven Spielberg's boice. Okay,
let's talk about the ending for Jurassic Park.
Speaker 3: Do you know about the story, well, I mean I
know that the ending was different like the I mean,
obviously John Hammond lives and there wasn't this notion that
the t Rex would come in and saved them from
the raptors. That was something that they came up when
they realized how good the digital design was. When they
realized how good the CGI was, they rewrote the end
of the movie. And not only did they do this
awesome CGI of course with and it's that may be
the best I mean, because you don't have them even
in the dark like you can. You can fake a
lot when something's in the dark, right, but this is
a brightly lit room and they still all of the
dinosaurs look very real, very active, interacting with the skeleton,
smashing it up. It's all awesome. And then you have
that awesome scene where the t rex roars and the
giant banner comes floating down saying dinosaur earlier.
Speaker 4: You just talking about that scene gives me Chelsea like,
that's like my favorite scene in the entire movie where
the t rex like defeats the veloss of raptors and
like roars in victory.
Speaker 3: The t rex roar was a combination of a dog,
a penguin, a tiger and alligator and an elephant.
Speaker 4: Well, whatever it is, it it's awesome.
Speaker 3: All right. The I believe that the raptors I think
were dolphin and some other sound some sort of oh,
a lion. I think it was like a mix between
a dolphin and a lion of all things.
Speaker 4: I think it's like horny dolphins.
Speaker 3: Like the it was did you just say horny dolphins?
Speaker 4: Horny dolphins. I think they were like in the process
of mating or something, And yeah, okay, he could you
could you play the dolphins out for me.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, not that one, the one where they're screwing.
You play the one where they're screwing, because that's what
I need. I think that's the perfect sound for a
lost raptor. All right, that does it for this episode
of the Surely You Can't Be Serious Podcast. Please join
us next week when we dive into Part three. Dive
just catch that nice we dive into part three of
the Jaws Versus Jurassic Part discussion. I am so excited.
We're going to talk about soundtrack, We're going to talk
about character development, we're going to talk about what happened
in the aftermath of these movies, and then we're going
to give final judgment.
Speaker 4: I can't wait to talk about the USS Indianapolis scene.
We haven't talked about that yet.
Speaker 3: I'm very, very excited to talk about that as well.
Speaker 4: Should we sing? Should we sing the.
Speaker 3: Song Farewell and do to ye fair Spanish ladies? Farewell
and I do to ye Ladies of Spain? And I
don't know the rest, so you'll have to listen next time.
Here how it goes when I sing it again? Ah,
that's good. And 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