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The Shark is Still Working

No one in 1918 could have predicted that a war in Europe would lead to the spitball being banned in the American game of baseball. For decades, pitchers loaded the ball with tobacco juice, hair tonics, grease, mud, sweat, and other substances, and except for the poor fielder who had to wipe his hand off after throwing the ball, everyone accepted it as part of the game, nasty, gross, but part of the game all the same. In the trenches of World War I, Spanish Influenza mutated and spread like wildfire. Hygiene became the word of the day and nothing is less antiseptic than a baseball loaded with a bodily fluid. Nothing could destroy a sport faster than an outbreak of flu traced to a hurler spewing on a ball. While older pitchers were grandfathered in, the era of the spitball was over. That is the way things work in life. Events, actions, and things can affect the course of events in ways that no one could ever predict. The same is true for certain films.

There are films more important than the creators could ever imagine, whose cultural significance goes beyond the story it is telling on the screen. A Birth of A Nation inspired a bunch of southern racists in Atlanta, Georgia to restart the KKK, an organization that became the largest fraternal organization in America, terrified thousands and controlled the politics in numerous states until their own corruption got the best of them. The image of John Wayne inspired thousands of kids to sacrifice themselves and their bodies in fruitless wars over the last half century. President Richard Nixon showed Patton to advisors during a key moment during the Vietnam War. Real life mobsters actually watched The Godfather to learn how to dress and act. Rocky is credited with helping America escape our 1970’s malaise. Ironically, Rambo became a Reagan era icon and Wallstreet became must viewing for a whole generation of traders and barons who looted this country. Black Rappers looked to Scarface for inspiration and a model of how to be a gangsta. Yet, maybe the most important film in modern times is Jaws. It changed the movie industry itself and how Americans attend the cinema.

On the surface, this seems a strange claim to make. After all, it is one in a long line of rubber monster horror flicks, a well made rubber monster horror film, but a rubber monster pic all the same, just that the rubber and latex monster had been replaced with a mechanical shark. Do not me wrong, it is a great film, maybe one of the best films ever made, but it changed what Americans would watch at the multiplex in ways no one could have predicted. As problems were mounting on the set, a young director named Steven Spielberg was wondering if this movie might become his swansong.

The 1970s were a critical era in America cinema. The confines of the Hayes Code, which curtailed what could and could not be shown, was a thing of the past. The sexual revolution was in its full flower. American filmmakers, looking to Europe, were focusing on small, personal stories that often challenged convention, were playing not in smaller art houses but mainstream theaters. It looked like American cinema was on the verge of entering adulthood. Filmed, shot, and conceived in a new manner, examining subject matter ignored previously, this era has been called the New Hollywood period. Jaws ended that. The lesson studios learned from Jaws was not good storytelling, but that simple over-the-top action sold tickets. Successfully, films were easy to understand and could be summed up in one or two sentences. Jaws = shark eats people.

Also, releases were staggered, starting in a handful of theaters in major cities before distributors would send prints to other locations, depending on the success of the movie with initial audiences. It was not uncommon for it to take a year or more for a film to make its way around the country. Spielberg realized that his movie was a summer film, something to terrorize people thinking about going to the beach or off to the pool, that it’s impact would not be nearly the same being shown in a snowstorm in the middle of Iowa. Plus, with the cost of nationally marketing the film, they would actually get a bigger payoff per screen by getting more people into the theater before the marketing campaign faded from public memory. For the first time, a film would open on hundreds of screens simultaneously, 465 on June 20^,1975 to be exact, and expand to 675 theaters by the end of July. It was a monster hit, dominating the box office for five straight weeks, taking home over $100 million, beating out The Exorcist to become the most successful domestic box-office film. (It took in $470 million worldwide, or $2 billion in today’s dollars. It would be beat two years later by Star Wars.) With those numbers, every studio wanted their own Jaws. For better or worse, the summer blockbuster was born. The next time you watch a crappy buddy cop flick with more explosions than common sense, or the latest Adam Sandler comedy, blame a mechanical shark named Bruce, nicknamed after Spielberg’s lawyer.

The documentary The Shark is Still Working is the ultimate examination of the blockbuster film, featuring interviews from cast, crew, and fans, including filmmakers like Bryan Singer, Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez. Like many film classics, the ultimate success of the film might lie in an accident of fate, a lot of the time the shark did not work. Bruce was really three mechanical sharks that frequently malfunctioned because salt water corroded the hydraulic insides that gave it movement. (Weary crewmembers began to call the mechanical shark “Flaws” behind the director’s back.) This, along with other problems of shooting off of Martha’s Vineyard, like unwanted sailboats coming into frames and cameras getting soaked, caused the young director to have to get creative. How do you shoot a picture about a shark if the shark is not working most of the time? Taking a page from Alfred Hitchcock, Spielberg realized that what we do not see is often scarier than what we do. Throughout most of the film, the shark remains an unseen force of nature, hinted at, maybe a fin seen here and there, but always mainly in the audience’s imagination, the place where true terror resides.

The gang is all here, even the reticent Spielberg and the departed Roy Scheider, to share their memories of the film and of its less than stellar sequels and knockoffs. A lot of never heard antidotes and stories are detailed, including Spielberg and the crew’s reaction to some archives of the man who was Robert Shaw’s inspiration for the character of Quint, to John Williams reaction to his most famous music being snubbed by the Oscars, to annual conventions of Jaws fans known as JawsFest.

Movies have unforeseen consequences. I grew up in the Midwest, about as far from Selachimorpha (the scientific name for sharks) as one can get and to this day, when I go to the ocean, somewhere in the back of my mind, S-H-A-R-K. One of the scariest films ever is still scaring audiences thirty-five years later. Still, I am more scared every summer when I see how many crappy big budget blockbusters I am going to have to suffer through. I don’t think Spielberg intended that.

Verdict: An A+ Documentary