Jaws with Timothy Simons

Blank Jack with Griffin and David

Blank Jack with Griffin and David.

Don't know what to say or to expect.

All you need to know is that the name of the show is Blank Jack.

You all know me. You know how I earn a living.

I'll catch this pod for you, but it ain't gonna be easy. Bad cast.
Not like going down the pond, chasing talk shows and live streams. This pod, swallow you whole.

A little shaking, a little tenderizing, and down you go. We gotta do it quick.
They'll bring back your tourists, put all your businesses in a paying basis, but it's not gonna be pleasant.

I value my neck a lot more than three thousand bucks, Chief. I'll find them for three, but I'll catch him and kill him for ten.
You gotta make up your minds. If you want to stay alive, then ante up.

If you want to play it cheap, be on welfare the the whole winter,

I don't want no volunteers. I don't want no mates.
There's just too many captains on this island. 10,000 for me by myself.
For that, you get the bits, the context, the whole damn podcast.

Look, I didn't do the Indianapolis speech. Yeah, I don't think so.
You have to be relieved. No, I think that was the right choice anyway, because I think that's

the better

speech. You know what astounds me every time I watch this film?

That introduction comes earlier than I remember,

but yet he is then basically gone for the next 50 minutes. I was about to say, there's not much Quint.
Well, the second half, I mean, this is... There's more Quint in the second half.

This is kind of a fascinating two-act movie.

Yeah, it is hard to be two completely separate movies. Right, right.
And you could argue that each act has a three-act structure kind of within it, but it is two movies

in so many ways. Another way you can think about it is it's a three-act movie, but then act three

grew far beyond what an act three usually does, and acts one and two just kind of got squeezed over. If that, you know, yeah, but I was doing like, let me check run times on this.

It is basically the halfway mark that he's like, fuck it, get Quent, we're going on the boat. And then they're on the boat for the second half of the movie.
Yes.

I don't want to nitpick. I'm wondering, just for sort of like

constructive criticism, was there a missed missed opportunity in there when he talks about the money where you could have said patreon you know i thought about it i thought about it okay i thought about i'm coming in do you make some sort of implication of what you're you want to bring back the the um

the uh the sponsors is that the analog for the tourists on the beach you know and i was like look We're a little behind the eight ball today. That's some complicated math.

I was happy the way I broke pot and cast into different words to fill in the different names he he used for fish. I really like bits and the

replacement. I felt, is there a perfect version of this? Yes.
Is there the jaws of podcast intros? Possibly. I didn't do it.
Maybe it was the jaws to a podcast intros.

Or it's definitely not the jaws of the revenge, though, of podcasts. No, and I think, I don't think it's the orca of podcast intros.
I don't think it's the deep. I haven't either.

Isn't it crazy that Shaw did the deep?

That three years later, he's like, I'll do another one of these. I mean, fucking pay me.
I've never seen the deep. I do never see

I feel like that's the best liked of all the Jaws rip-offs and certainly has the most interesting cast and Yates.

Nick Nulty, Jacqueline.

Lewis Gossett Jr.

Good title. Yeah.
Scuba action. Yeah.
Drugs.

Hey.

Underwater drugs. Ben, write that down.

Ben just sort of very half-heartedly pretended to write something. He didn't.
He didn't scratch his nails against the trumpet. What is this podcast? Take the pen cap off.
He just sort of went like.

I said, we're behind the eight ball today. I don't want to.
And again, I don't want to belabor it because I know we are behind the eight ball. We are behind the eight ball today.
David's life has.

Hashtag behind the eight ball.

David's live has completely Oppenheimered, and yet we are still going to talk about a movie that is, as everybody has talked about. My life has Oppenheimer.
I like this. I think this is good.

David is Shrek and his life is Oppenheimer. I said said that Oppenheimer's reaction to having children was basically to go to his neighbor's house and be like, can you take these?

I have no interest in raising them. Nice to meet you.

The only reason I was even able to give any feedback on the intro is because it was so good. And so I think even saying,

it's not anywhere close to the Jaws 2 of intros. It's so much better.
Well, I appreciate it. You know what I mean? Yes.
But this is also.

Look, let's just say it. Let's just say it.
Oh, David, look out behind you. No, it's true.

There's truly a jaw is behind this is blank check with griffin and david oh yeah that's right we have a jaws beach towel hanging over a sound i'm gonna do a photo shoot with it you're gonna do a photo you're gonna do a beach yeah me and me and marie are conspiring on that wow yeah but uh but this episode's not till january we got time yeah um are you gonna do a polar burger plums this year that might be fun never done that i witnessed it once yeah

And I was like,

this seems like it would be a pain in the ass. It feels like a good way to shake off the Oppenheimers.
Yeah, it might be. Yeah.
My friend Lindsay, a friend of the show, Lindsay Weber, she does it.

Maybe I'll ask her this year. Like, when does that happen? What's the procedure? Yeah.
Right. Anyway.

One time in the middle of the summer, I was in Chicago and I lived kind of close to the, lived close to the lake and it was like a really hot day and I was on my way home and I just said, fuck it.

I'm like three blocks from home. I'm just going to go in the lake.
Like it was so, it was like that kind of hot and humid.

And I went in the lake and it was so cold that when it like got to my heart line, I thought my heart was going to stop. You had that crazy sort of, you're seizing.
Yes. It feels like.

And so I don't know, having had that experience, I don't know that I would ever recommend or do a polar bear. Some people are very into the cold plunging.
I'm not good at it. I'm not that good.

Carson Daly, it saved his life. Do you hear this? No.
Carson Daly.

Really?

The fuck are we talking about?

I want to be the David here. You're Griffin.
The fucking jaws up. We're talking about Carson Daly.

You're Griffin, and I'm David. What is this? Blank, Jack Who Griffin, and David.
I want to see if you can do it.

It's a podcast about filmographies, filmmakers who get a massive success early on and are given a blank check to do whatever crazy passion project they want.

And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce, baby. I usually say early on in their careers, but go on.
Is this the first time you've ever actually introduced it?

I think I've tried to do it a couple of times. We're 10 years in at this point.
Every time there's like a special event on the show, we're forgetting that we've done it two times before.

We are here discussing, of course, the films of early, the early films of Steven Spielberg. What's the miniseries called? I totally forgot.
It's called Podrassic Cast.

Sure, it is. It is.
It is. I'm sorry that that's just the fact.
And we are certainly discovering. Thank you, Ben, for sending this New York Post article about how Carson Bailey does cold plunges.

Okay. He was a wreck mentally and physically.
Okay.

Not to go full David Mote, but Ben, I'm shutting you down. I refuse.

We are discussing his guarantor for life, essentially. Yeah, I'd say that.
Jaws. I'd say that.
I'd say it would have been really difficult to ever lose the status that Jaws gave him.

Despite the fact that he has a bounce two films from now. What is the bounce two films? 1941.
His only true massive bounce where it's like cost too much money. Yes.

Production was somewhat out of control was a bomb. He has disappointments after this.
Right. Relative disappointments.
That is, but he doesn't really make the calamity of his career. Right.

And even that, of course, was completely survivable, partly because he goes on to then make Rage the Lost Arcaniti back to back after it. Right.
Helpful. But partly because he made Jaws.

So no one's exactly going to shut the door on Steven Spielberg even after that. One thing that I'm excited about today is that

Jaws. Jaws.
Jaws. I am excited to talk about Jaws.
But as I was watching it,

the movie Jaws.

I mean, like, I even texted you guys last night to be like, Jaws is a good movie. Yeah, that was the exact text.

Which, by the way, one of your better texts.

I feel like we have a little bit of settings.

There's a little bit. We're going going to scratch the blackboard a couple times.
I have to spend a lot of time in the car,

but I still am interested in having

an active back and forth with you. Sure.
You come in hot with some

what Siri dictated

SMSs.

And yes, I understand that a lot of times they don't make sense. Sometimes there's errors.
Sometimes it's just funny to imagine you saying the words aloud. Right.

Sometimes they're like tone poems, but yes, the way they come across,

David and I, very often upon receiving them, have no choice but to interpret them as you yelling at the top of your lungs.

And it's not like they're being translated by Siri into all caps, but they have that energy. And I do understand that.

I think maybe I put that energy out in my life, but that is, I don't remember me yelling at the car.

I don't think of you as a yeller.

I don't think of you as a yeller. That's what's funny about them is they...

You have yelling energy in the text. Who's that? They feed angry.
Our guest today, of course, the great Tim Simons. I'm so happy to be here.
Return to the show. A Veep of Nobody Wants This?

The hottest show in the planet.

It's a hot show. It's a hot.
Yeah, it's a hot show. Yeah.
On the way in today, a young girl stopped Tim on the street. What? Asked for a photo.
Really? Yeah. Had to take a little selfie.

I said, thank you. Was she a fan of Ralph? She breaks the internet?

she was not a fan. I listened to your Ralph Breaks the Internet episode.
It was great. Oh, hell yeah.
Yeah.

No, she didn't bring that one up. She was talking about Nobody Wants This.
That is

what was her. That wasn't the thing.
It wasn't your Jonah Ryan. It's nobody wants that.
Okay, cool. Veeb was a very successful show.
But I don't think I was telling Ben about this awesome.

I was going to say.

It always sort of had a niche audience. Yes.
And I also think the type of people who watched it are perhaps the type of people who are less likely to stop someone on the street and ask for a photo.

Yes. Right.
I do feel like this show, I was saying this to someone the other day, but nobody wants this. Feels like one of those like Netflix cannot pretend this is not a success.
Right. Yes.

And it doesn't feel like they're trying to convince us it is.

Right. It's just like suddenly the show within a week of it coming out was just like, oh, clearly this thing is hitting.
Yes. And you are an incredibly tall man.

I'm very

show that everyone's watching very quickly maybe cannot blend inconspicuously no i i simply cannot but it like it is it is it's always nice when something seems to connect with of course with people like i i have an opposite approach in my career i love everything i'm in failing thank you that's always been i find it very satisfying actually and rewarding

i hate the public uh enjoying or even watching the things that i'm in i've loved vinyl season two well it God,

it was good.

The scripts? When the cast all gets together and holds hands and all does our sort of vision board.

No, I never read the scripts. Reese Defense is in Venom 3? Yes, and it's a little confusing because no one knows if they are acknowledging that he is also in other Sony Spider-Man movies or not.

I mean, at this point, it'll be a settled matter. Is he not playing the same character? That's what's unclear.

It's not specified. And then some people think that he's secretly playing null king of the symbiotes oh boy all right well i'm killing that out again you know but in the trailer

just playing a hippie in the back of a van playing guitar listen in our defense it was more on topic than

carson daily doing that's true that was a year ago

yeah at least it's like a film that's coming out

for how much tim you yell at us in our texts yes and there's a lot of like guys i need to get back on the show and then we'll throw you options and you'll go eh direct quote: none of these really get my dick hard.

Jesus Christ, did I really write that? Then we'll like kick the can for six months. Then you'll say, like, I need to get in an episode right now.
We're like, Tim, we're booked up.

We'll get back to you the next time. There's some options.
And then you like shrug off the next options. The two episodes you've gotten to do are The Shining and Jaws.

I'm not asking you to say thank you, but I'm just saying you have gotten like two of the most totemic American films of all time. I fully know filler.

fully understand that this is.

I don't know how I ended up here. I'm very excited that I ended up here for those two films.
I think it was just more when I've said those don't get my dick hard. I think it's said.

Not that they don't necessarily or that they wouldn't, but I also am like, I don't know that I have the sort of personal connection to those.

And so therefore, I wonder if it's ultimately a net negative to have New England films. I don't know if the remaining choice is capital letters, get my dick hard.
You know?

Yeah, that. There we go.
Verbatim. That was it verbatim

it did i will say it is very nice to have friends who let me know that you guys talked about me on the show at some point

but there's always this ellipsis where they pause and then they're like yeah they made fun of you because of the way you text yeah because we're friends yeah this is what it's really wonderful to be friends with you tim yeah that's a very nice thing to say thank you it is very wonderful to be friends with both of you yeah and my wife's watching nobody wants this and then suddenly i'm like oh tim's in this and then i'm like you know i'm like you know i know that person like i'm like friends with him you know he texts me things about his dick and its current status relative to a screenshot of

martin breast's filmography jaws jaws tim jaws one of the most important movies i've ever made right

yes to the point that it's sort of like uh how do we really talk about it in an interesting way

check episode because even i feel like uh sort of casual film fan knows Jaws was the original blockbuster and kind of invented the opening weekend and the merchandising and, you know, obviously kick-started Steven Spielberg's career.

Yes. But sharks was big for them.
Right.

I think ultimately. Oh, the sharks didn't work.
Oh, no.

Did you know that? The shark wasn't working. Is that in the dossier? I haven't heard of this before.
They called it Bruce after his lawyer. Did you know that?

Wasn't it ultimately very bad for sharks? Didn't people go around killing sharks after this movie came out? I can't imagine people. Right.
That Jaws actually was good news for sharks.

I think think a lot of things have been bad for sharks, like the presence of humans on our planets,

fishing patterns, like things like that, right? Like, I think, though, after Jaws, and again, this might be in the dossier, this might be one of those things. Like, it was called Bruce Bruce.

Apocryphal, right? I'm reading something here in the dossier that this film was directed by Steven Spielberg, which I didn't know before. What were you guys doing?

No bits, though.

Even watching it again last night, and I can't,

I cannot say how many times I've seen it. So you've seen this this film a couple of times.
I've seen this film many, many times.

Every and even last night, it is still shocking how good it is. This is how effective it is.
That's the thing. It's like it's so discussed in terms of its cultural impact, right?

There are all these things around it.

Uh, but then you also just watch it, and you're like, perfect move. Yeah,

it's it's both like it's not a film where you can find much fault.

No, and even if it did not have the insane cultural industry redefining impact in several different ways, even if this movie had underperformed upon release, let's say, in some crazy alternate universe, I do still think now, 50 years later, people would be like, oh, yeah, masterpiece perfect film.

Like it would have gotten there, which already would make it tough to talk about.

And I, you know, I put this forth on an episode that will come out three months from now.

But it does feel like at three or four different points in his career, Spielberg makes a movie that then the rest of Hollywood's like, fuck, how do we do this? This is the first time

that he's doing it. And there's like the immediate wave of shit like Orca and the Deep and three Jaws sequels that everyone basically agrees to just ignore.
Yeah.

But then there's also just like, I still think modern movies are trying to take lessons from Jaws.

If they aren't, they should be. Yeah.

I also feel like, is this one of things, if is this one of those things where

everybody tries to take a lesson from Jaws, but what they forget to do is make a movie that has the quality of Jaws. And this is like a very specific thing that I was thinking of.

The amount of dialogue that overlaps in this movie.

Like, that's one of the amazing things about it. And I feel like in every movie that would try to copy this, they would try to make it too slick.

Of course. They do not have the conversational nature of it.
This was my thesis that I was starting to formulate upon the rewatch. Because this is like, I mean, Spielberg's third proper film.
Yeah.

We're Counting Duel. Yeah.

And

obviously, it's this transformative moment for his career and for the industry and what have you.

But I also think this is the moment of the full synthesizing of this guy who obviously had this insane, like prodigious ability, right? Just has like a perfect cinema brain,

also kind of synthesizing everything cinema had been up until that moment.

Like, I think part of the magic of Spielberg is not just his innate skill and his vision, you know, and his like facility on set and managing complicated productions.

And I think him having to work through the struggles of this changes the way he approaches filmmaking for the rest of his life when people talk about how improvisational he is, how he likes not planning things out in advance and all that sort of stuff.

But I also think like he's taking things from New Hollywood, from Hitchcock, from the classics of silent cinema. Like he's synthesizing all these things.

And you look at the eras of, I'll say, in particular, American filmmaking up until this point in time. And you're like, this is what's popular.

And then a big shift happens and everyone swings this way. And then a big shift happens and everyone swings this way.

And he's kind of like circling back and marrying classical stuff with modern stuff where like, you know, when MASH comes out in 1970, people are like, that's legal.

People can talk like this. You can't hear what they're saying.
They're overlapping. And Spielberg's like, what if I clean that up like 10%?

The fact that, like, Cassavettes was a big mentor to both Spielberg and Scorsese, and he was like stripping everything down to just the fundamentals of performance writing, you know, breaking down the formalism of blocking and everything.

And then those two guys, I think, synthesize the lessons of what he's doing into things that are more conventionally cinematic.

And it's like, if you have the rawness of Cassavetti's performance combined with like the sort of humor and the messiness of like Altman and the naturalism, but then also with like this sort of Hitchcock visual storytelling, like all these things.

I think that is why this movie feels like such a miracle that he's able to put these elements together that we now kind of take for granted.

And also, as you said, they are rarely ever done this well again.

Yes.

I think a lot. So

a few things. One, Jaws is not my movie.
Me neither. And I don't mean that in an I don't like it way.
It's just that, right, it was, I was, it was so totemic by the time I was watching movies.

I have seen Jaws a few times. I recognize everything that's good about Jaws.
But right, never my movie that I watched over and over again was obsessed with, right?

I really think I didn't see it until I was like 23. That's somewhat surprising, but I get it.

I'm also with you. I didn't see it until I was like much older.
We were talking about it before, about like those things that you miss because

they've been parodied or talked about so often.

I saw it. I saw it.
It's dudump, dud-um, dud-ump. And then, yeah, I saw it.
There was a shark. I had seen all the other Totemic Spielberg movies much earlier.
Much before you saw Jaws.

Much, much earlier. Yeah.

I think I was also scared of Jaws as a younger boy. Scary.
You hear it from everyone who lived through that movie of like, oh my God. I wouldn't sit on a toilet for five years.

I wouldn't go in a swimming pool. You know, people talk about it.
It's not like one person said that's an overreaction.

It felt like there was a generational trauma around water from Jaws that like shook people to their core. A little bit.
A little bit.

And then so Jurassic Park is my sort of Spielberg creature feature that I grew up with. Jesus Christ.
Ben just knocked over a gigantic block. It was so loud.
Ben, can we swipe our for a second? What?

You gotta get it together. Do you need some cold plunges or something?

Take the cap off the pen.

I'm fine. Yeah, him run down.
We need it. This is the Jaws episode.
Now, how long it took?

Jurassic Park is...

Jurassic Park is actually two minutes shorter than Jaws. Wild.
Which is surprising when I say that out loud because Jurassic Park feels long.

That feels like this movie with a lot of acts and sort of... Oh, do you think Jurassic feels longer than Jaws?

I do. I feel the opposite way.
The thing that surprises me

is that they're the same.

They're just a little over two hours each. But Jaws is so much more patiently paced.
It is.

And has such more kind of like rhythms like the waves of the ocean it does whereas jurassic park is very propulsive it is and jurassic park has a slow build to mega propulsion yeah

and is all about the kind of like whatever sort of capitalist you know sort of machinery around this and jaws has all those elements as well in a simpler yeah fashion that's not really being like thrown at you.

Like you can just sort of like engage with it very quickly. And do I like that? Like Jaws, it's just economy with Jaws, which you admire.
Yes.

And yet I'm more used to the but then you're also like the amount of like hangout movie. It is a big hangout movie with just a couple of sort of, well, more than a couple, several exciting sequences.

Right. Yes.

There's no, I haven't seen Jurassic Park in a little while, but it also kind of feels like the kind of stuff that's in Jaws, when you think about summer blockbusters, the fact that there's just a moment where they like have a glass of whiskey and they say like, you want to get drunk and fool around yeah like that probably wouldn't is that's not in jurassic park because it feels like that would get skipped over yes i i church i agree which i i jurassic park is making the the same decision jaws makes the wise decision of like we don't need a movie star no we need like good interesting you know the thespians

character actory guys right um

i mean it's it's very obvious to compare those two movies it's just we watch them back to back not to and to report either but but also i i mean and i make this point in the jurassic episode coming out the fucking two and a half years from now but uh they both have this sort of like id ego super ego thing with their main trio which i don't this is not the first thing to do that you know i think that's so much the success of like the original star trek and everything but this thing of like cast three interesting actors who are not the types of guys you expect to put in something like this right and then have them basically represent the contradictory and complementary sides of a psyche in addressing a problem that feels massive.

Yeah.

Just leave.

Stay, stay, stay. No, no, I'm saying, like, in Martha's Venus, just get ahead of it.
That's my response. Just take the summer off.
Tim's burning to say something. Yeah, go ahead.

Well, no, I think that's a great read, but I mean, I think the first thing that I was like, is this a good time to talk about Roy Scheider? Yeah. As a movie star? Like, as because if you want to.

I mean, like, we can build build to Roy if you want to. There's a few previous Roy Scheider episodes.
Last Embrace. Sure.
Which he's good in in my memory. He is.

And is a somewhat forgotten Jonathan Demi movie, but is kind of, in a lot of ways, very emblematic of a lot of Roy Scheider's post-Jaws corporation. Port of Roy Scheider movie.

The kind of classic Roy Scheider. Somewhat thicker.
Dark thriller. Yes.
Kind of own that lane. That's good.
And then all that jazz. Well, that's just sort of like a same year as Last Embrace.

That's a big totemic. And I think it's his best performance and is such surprising casting rate it would be almost anyone's best work

right right um but no this is fascinating it is so weird that roy scheider is the star the ostensible star of jaws yes and i also for as many huge and unbelievable things that he's done and i'm such a huge roy scheider fan me too that

It does it every time I see that he's the lead of it, it is like, why wasn't this man the biggest movie star? And it wasn't part of the movie star. But that's the other thing.

It's not like his legacy is he was the star of Jaws and he fucked it up. Like, it's not like, oh, he didn't become a movie star because something went wrong.

You look and you're like, he was above the title, the lead in movies for like 15 consecutive years. Yes.
But certainly, Robert Shaw is dead within three years of this movie coming out.

And Richard Dreyfus kind of has the career you maybe expected Roy Scheider would have had as opposed to Jaws bump. Well,

I would, I wonder, and I like watching the things that Roy Scheider does,

I wonder if a part of that is

he plays the movie he is in rather than trying to bring a star persona to it.

And I think that there is maybe that's something of why of like,

he doesn't make the movie about him. He's like, how do I fit in to make this movie better while also using the things that are sort of naturally magnetic about his own personality?

Maybe that's doing deep. I just want to pause on Scheider just because I feel like we should discuss that he wasn't the first choice.

Well, I just feel like let's have more Scheider discussion when we're in the DOS. The side of Scheider later.
Exactly. But I do love Roy Scheider, obviously.

I heard you guys got Regal to sponsor the side of Scheider. Yeah.
Regal, actually, we've switched them over to that. And a lot of episodes is just going to be dormant.
Yeah.

We already got an email. Regal is suing us?

Yeah, obviously, this is Roy Scheider's second best aquatic sort of thing after Sequest DSV.

But to that point,

Sequest DS DSV was produced by Spielberg, was it not? I believe so. I watched Sequest DVD.
It seemed like Spielberg doing a favor for Roy Scheider, where it's like, you know what?

I'm going to give you incredible syndication money. Right.
I mean, I think probably didn't turn out to be, but that was the hope. That was the hope.
Yes. Yeah.
But that was also right.

In the 90s, it's like, you know what, Roy, you've become the and guy on a TV show. Like, that's what you can do.
But versus like, you know,

it's just interesting that by the 90s, Roy Scheider was not at living legend status.

And I think even when he passed away and he kept working until his death, there was this sort of feeling of like, oh, right, Roy Schneider's still alive.

And you're like, this guy's in like four of the most important movies ever made. Yes, like maybe we should save this for side of Schneider, but just side of Schneider.
But

yes, you're 100% right that he didn't sort of have that sort of late career up on a pedestal.

This is one of our best movie stars we've ever had. And I feel like we need to start putting our arms around the fact that that is true.

I think he is very, very beloved by our generation of cinephile. And I think

for the reason you just so specifically and eloquently laid out.

I mean, there was the fucking Nighthawk trivia, which is the great, for my mind, the best movie trivia here in Brooklyn, went last year to the Halloween

installment, and they did a costume contest. And there was a group of five Scheiders.

that were all perfectly dressed and the audience was just kind of like bowled over. But they got it.

And it wasn't just that the costumes were good, but seeing five people dressed as different versions of Roy Scheider next to each other, you're like, God, his career was fucking incredible.

So it's like French Connection, Jaws, Sorcerer,

2010 and all that jazz. What was that? Maybe.
Maybe that's what it was. Maybe somebody.
Did somebody try to throw in like some 7-ups or something?

Fucking. Weirdly, there was someone dressed as Orlando Jones, the 7-up guy.

Make 7-Up yours new. I was dressed up as Cool Spot, but that's...
But I do think it's that thing of like, if you just narrow the things down, you're like, incredible.

And then you're like, the sort of forgotten B movies of Roy Schreider are the exact kind of thing we all bemoan don't happen. Right.
You watch any of those and you're like, well, this rocks. Yeah.

So draws. Yeah.
So I think I watched this movie when I was about 10 or 11 on VHS. Okay.

It was like at a house I was staying at and I watched it. And I remember finding it scary.
Sure. And then,

yes. And then as I loop back around to like, now I understand more things about Steven Spielberg and movies.
You know, I watched this probably again

as a teen, later teenager. teenager, and I sort of developed that opinion of like, well, right, it's just so pure and impressive.

And, you know, this is the kind of stripped-down thing that even he can't achieve anymore.

And then I've seen it like a couple times since then. And every time I watch it, I have that reaction of, yeah, yeah, this is very impressive.
Yeah.

But it's not like people are obsessed with Jaws in a way that I probably can't be. Yes.
Won't have. No, that's how I felt, too.
I've never seen any of the sequels. A perfect masterpiece.
Me neither.

Because I have not supposed to be good.

I believe I was just at like a dinner party in the neighborhood a couple weeks ago. We were playing like one of those word association games.

And I think, guys, I don't want to fucking brag. I think it's called Clover.
Okay.

Where you have like these two things together. You have to find a common word.
And then the other team gets the cards and they have to put the cards together

using.

the clues from the common word. And one of the common words was Jaws 2, and it was like fish child, which is apparently a thing in the later movies.

I I believe, in Jaws, the revenge, one of them is basically implies that the son or mother of Jaws is mad about what happened to Jaws. Yes, right.
Right. It tries to imply an emotional.

This time it's personal. Correct.
One of the greatest taglines of all time. For a movie that sucks.
Right. Yeah.
Because two is just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.

Which is also a good tag. Jaws taglines are incredible.
It's fascinating for how much the other three movies are kind of like gentlemen's agreement.

We all will ignore them unless we just want to revel in trash. That all four have like totemic perfect taglines.
Can you tell me what 3Ds is? That's what I'm trying to remember.

The 3Ds is the least impressive. The revenge is this time of it's something like terror in a new dimension.
It's the third dimension is terror. I do think that's that's pretty good.
And

I do think 3D movies, when they had their big surge in the 2010s, were often doing taglines riffing on that.

Well, it's in the same era as Friday the 13th Part 3, which had the tagline A New Dimension in Terror. Oh, and Amity Phil 3D, which I like this tagline.
Warning, in this movie, you are the victim.

Which is a good tagline, although it sort of also applies, like, this movie is so bad, it will victimize you. Yes.

Jaws. Jaws.
But yes, I want to say. But the sequels mostly become the family of Jaws hunting down the family of Brody.
Right. Yes.

So one thing that every time I watch, I understand what you're saying when you're like, this isn't my movie. But every time I watch it, I am like, oh, this should be everybody's movie.

And you're right. It should be.
It is shocking even last night. Yeah.

How remembering how horrifying most of these, how horrifying and still truly scary these moments are. Like the one in the pond where the guy gets his leg bitten off.

We watched this with our kids a couple summers ago in that mindset of like, oh, we haven't seen Jaws in in a while. We'll watch it with the family.
And when Shaw gets eaten,

our young children

turned to look at us in this way of

this to us.

They both started sobbing. One of them ran upstairs and hid under the covers, and the other one put all the pillows from the couch on top of them.
It is still incredibly affecting and horrifying.

What's fascinating about it, too, is there is like no viscera. There is a lot of blood.

Liquid. But like you're like, the guy's clearly got blood capsules in his mouth that he like activates and then starts spitting blood.

And then there's a lot of blood everywhere in the boat that's getting mushed in with the water. So it's just kind of red water everywhere.
But like the for the viscerality of the moment,

it's easy in your mind's eye to be like, and then you see him ripped in half and his intestines are spinning around and whatever. It is so much more impactful than any kill like that.
Yeah.

Well, it's also like, it's intense and it's crazy, and Shaw like nails it so hard, and it's scary, but then it's also like,

you know, the moment where you are most of all, if you settle down, like, oh, right, this is clearly like this fucking giant puppet they could barely use that's sort of going like, ah, not only that, and only shot in the middle of the morning.

It's like the Ed Wood scene,

where, you know, Martin Lando is like putting the tentacles around himself, going like, oh, no, like it's much better than that.

But like, you can see Shaw is like, I'm going to have to fucking make this work. For how notoriously the shark didn't work, the only shot where I think the shark looks bad is in that sequence.

Where it lands on the boat, and you're like, you can tell, like, this is not an organic thing. Right.
Yes. But I will also say.
But that makes it scary in a weird way.

His performance of...

how much he doesn't want to get eaten by the shark, and I know that this seems reductive,

that his performance of that moment is so good and so his, he is so terrified. And after everything that you've heard, you can't believe it's going that way.

It's so, it's still so effective that I wasn't even thinking about looking for the shark not working. Yeah.
No, go ahead, Griff. You say one thing.

Every time I watch this, I'm like, how did Sean not win the Oscar? And then I remember, fuck, he wasn't even nominated. And it's like a Mandela effect thing of like, how is that possible?

Well, this film was

rewritten at some point. Snubbed by the Oscars.
He is my winner for best supporting actor, though.

It feels like a damn dunk. This might be.

Is this...

Because again, this is like a film history blind spot for me.

To me watching him in this, this feels like one of the best film performances that has ever been. I kind of overrated it.
Let me give you the five nominees.

They're not bad, but they're weird, I would say. George Burns won for the Sunshine Boys.
Of course, we recently talked about George Burns on Going in Style. Yes.

Brad Duriff was the nominee from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I feel like there's various people in that ensemble, obviously, who are impressive.
He is the, you know, maybe the standout. Sure.

Burgess Meredith in the Day of the Locust, kind of an awesome nominee. I've never seen it.
I probably love Burgess. Oh, I love Burgess.
Legendary Stick Man. Chris

Sarandon in Dog Day Afternoon, another movie where you're kind of like multitude of options here. I was going to say, I wait, it wasn't John Cazalee.
Or Derning. Yeah.
Who are both amazing.

But I think it was the sort of like issue point of, oh, this performance brings like respect to the trans community at a time where that was not done. Yeah.
Pushed him over the edge.

But I would certainly nominate Kazal or Derning over. Jack Warren in Shampoo, who like, I'm never going to be mad at a Jack Warden performance getting nominated.

I don't have him nominated. I have, right, Robert Shaw, John Kazale.

Danny DeVito and Brad Durriff from Cuckoo's Nest, and then Keith Carradine from Nashville, a performance I love. And Nashville's another movie where you're like, there's a bunch of performers.

So I would nominate Henry Gibson for Nashville. Sure.
I would nominate Kazal. I would nominate fucking Shaw and I give him the win.
Yeah.

I have Shaw winning. Yeah.

Am I generally overrating the historical significance of the Oscars? No, you're not.

Jaws was snubbed by the Oscars. I mean, like, it got a best picture nomination in three Tech Noms.
It won all three technical awards. Spielberg was snubbed.

There was a very obvious, like, no, no, new Hollywood is happening right now.

We are not indulging this commercial stuff, this monster movie, this like sort of elevated monster movie, but that's all that is.

The five nominees for Best Picture, it is one of the most outstanding fields. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Barry Linden, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, and Nashville.

Yeah, I mean, that's like a flooring, like where you're looking at that and you're like, the worst movie nominated is one flew over the cuckoo's nest. A movie that I think is good.

Like, it's not, I don't think that movie has the same staying power as the other four. And obviously, a one best picture.
Here's why I find it surprising.

For everything you're saying,

it is like an era where people are getting nominations for Erwin Allen films. Yeah, sure.
You know, like

you have fucking like airport and towering inferno and a fucking Poseidon Adventure acting nominations. It's not like they're beyond this.

I also think he's like borderline at legend status at this point. Obviously, George

has 50 years on him. He's not a legend, but he's a very respected British actor.

And writer like a tipple sure they obviously no one could have predicted that he'd be dead within three years and that in retrospect they definitely should have given him this but this is also coming the two years prior to this are the sting and pelham 123 the guy's on a fucking heater run but like obviously the sting he's great in that but yes

we've been getting into caper movies in the house like so i showed uh we have a thing where we do like papa movie nights david this is something you're able to look forward to nice It is really nice.

It's like where I pick a movie that they would never pick. Right.
And then ultimately they end up loving it. Every other week is rad.

Just every week, it's rad. Hey, guys, we're doing this again.
My guy loves rad.

So,

but recently we've sort of, we've gotten into like, I want to introduce them to caper movies. So we started with the sting.

And they did enjoy it. I do think pacing-wise.
The sting's pretty boring. Yeah.
No, it's not. But I mean, like, I love it.

And I do think it's something that they'll come back to. You have to be a dork like us watching it with a sense of context.

It's like a fun dad movie, but I remember the first time I saw this thing as a teenager with that kind of setup of like, damn, this is, this was like a huge fucking movie.

And people being like, this movie's so much fun. And you're like, okay, yeah, that's fun.
They definitely were into

the next one we watched was Ocean's 11. So like getting them and so I'm not sure.
It's a film with a more modern storytelling.

A more modern storytelling, but it is really funny watching those kind of movies with kids that age because they are like, wait, is that true? Wait, are they really not friends now? Sure.

Wait, is this a part of the thing? Like, you know what I mean? I don't expect that. The cons.

Oh, shit. They got me.

Pelum 123 was, I think, a modest hit. Sure.
But that movie's cult reputation grew in later years. He's so good.

I'm just like,

his career. No, he's like, his

great career. Yes.
Sometimes you have that thing where you're like, why'd this person win for this?

And you step back and you're like, oh, the four years leading up to this performance, the guy got kind of undeniable or he was overdue or whatever it was.

Shaw was kind of perfectly positioned in every way. Other than, I think you're right.
It was like the level of success of Jaws kind of scared me. We don't need to give this awards.

We have other things to bestow awards on. We are currently in this phase where we are really recognizing like challenging Hollywood productions.
And Jaws is not one of them. I don't want to.

Spielberg famously was snubbed for Fellini. Have you seen this video, Tim?

We can talk about it in the dossier, but Spielberg had a camera on him when the nominations were announced, assuming he was about to get an Oscar nomination.

And so there is footage of him going. I mean, you can see it's on YouTube, right? It's widely available.

They realize it's not happening. He's like, Fellini, they gave it to Fellini.
Fellini is the sort of I got beaten by Fellini. That's what he keeps saying.

For Amarcord, was the surprise fifth nominee and director.

Otherwise, it's Mielish Foreman, Stanley Kubrick, Stidley Lumet, and Robert Altman. I think everyone was predicting that he was the fifth and those four were locked.

What is the sense of how he's saying? Does it make him look like a

save face? He's like wearing Jaws merch. He's in his home that has like a Pac-Man cabinet.

Like it's clear, like this overgrown child just made the biggest hit movie and now lives in a toy palace and is his own biggest fan and is like feeling his shit.

And he's surrounded by friends who are hyping him up. And I believe the video starts with them being like, we're here with Steven Spielberg, who's about to get his first Oscar nomination.

He's 29 years old. Yes.

Look, the Steven Spielberg story. I'm opening the documents.
He goes from being kind of shocked and mock outrage to then at some point settling and being like, you know what?

If I'm going to get beaten, Fellini is.

And then he's sort of like, I got an ominous best picture. It is crazy.
Like in real time, you see him getting a little humbled, but he starts out hot.

And just, it's 1976, so like putting a camera on you. It's not like people now where it's like, yeah, sure, turn your iPhone on.
Right. It's like someone had to have a fucking kid.

It's a great performance. Anyway, there's three-point lights.

I don't want to move the Shaw shank up in the. I don't know.

This is like where we talk about Robert Shaw. Robert Shaw.
No, wait. All right.
You relax. Okay.

Giving us all these actor segments. We're going to get to Shaw next time.
And when are we going to get dry fussy?

Let's not. Let's not.
You want to put your whole full dry fussy into it? I'll tell you who puts this whole dry fussy into things. Richard.
Dickie.

So

I've got a question for all the gamers out there, and I'm pointing it at you, David. Are you seriously going to miss out on Alienware's? biggest gaming sale of the year.

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You know, it's Alienware with some of the most advanced engineering out there with systems at the top of every reviewer's lists. And what about a gift for yourself?

Give yourself a new Alienware 16 Area 51 gaming laptop. I mean, this thing's got performance at the absolute next level with Intel Core Ultra Process.
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These really are incredible deals on PCs with otherworldly performance, so I'd visit alienwear.com slash deals soon and grab what you can before the lowest prices of the year go dark.

David, this episode is brought to you by Mubi, the global film company, the champions great cinema. From iconic directors to emerging auteurs, there is always something new to discover.

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Joshua Connor's really good in it.

He's the guy right now, as far as I'm concerned.

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I just, before I open the dossier, I want to read this review that I just found. Somehow, I never saw this movie and decided that I need to see a big old wet shark boy attack dumb teens.

And that's exactly what I got. And also, it was a reminder of how cool the ocean is as far as ecosystems go.

Something that's been bringing me comfort during this whole crisis is: I just think about how right now there's an octopus just doing some fluttery moves, or Stingray is just chilling at the bottom of the ocean.

whoever wrote this might be our finest living film for it. Just wanted to.
So, Ben, you first saw Jaws in early COVID, it seems. Because you logged in on Letterboxd.

You had like two weeks where you're like, I'm going to log like America's finest poetry on Letterboxd. And then you clearly were like, All right, enough of that.
Like, stop doing it.

Yeah, pretty much. Lost interest.
Briefly, we're in the running to actually become the poet laureate of America. Yeah, I don't know.
I should have maybe stuck with it. But

I did see it for the first time, and I was totally shocked by how effective it was and how much it continued to

be like

a

incredible film that is scary. What about Stingrays Fluttering at the bottom of the ocean, though? I'm thinking about it right now.
Pretty cool. I feel like the octopus fluttering?

Yeah, the octopus is fluttering. You know, Stingrays flutter too.
They got that kind of like wavy thing

on the very edges.

They did a 3D remaster of this that I thought was very expertly done.

And I said this about, or I will say this about Jurassic Park as well, the two earlier Spielberg movies that have been post-converted to 3D.

That unsurprisingly, Spielberg's shooting style and filmmaking rhythms are very well suited for 3D, more so than most filmmakers who try to intentionally make 3D movies.

And watching it in 3D in a theater for the first time, never having seen it on a screen, did help sort of like activate Jaws for me a little of making it feel new and experiential and place me a little into like what it would feel like to see Jaws for the first time, even though it was in some weird new version.

But that re-release, I think, happened in 2021. I want to say it was summer 2021.
They put Jaws and E.T. both back in theaters when they were like, we don't really have many summer blockbusters.
2022.

Okay.

But COVID was recent enough.

Ben, you were watching this early lockdown.

I do find in a lot of ways, I don't know, and I'm not looking forward to seeing people try. Any movie will ever actually capture the energy of the COVID crisis the way that Jaws does.

I think the whole fucking story of reopening the beach and the mayor and the pressures and the concerns, seeing in 2022, I was like, holy fucking shit, the amount of stuff this movie gets right about how people react in situations like this still 50 years later feels dead on.

Especially the moment where it's not just the mayor saying, We've got to stay open. Yes.
This is the economy. Yes.

When he goes up to the person that works for him and is like, why aren't you in the water? Yes. And that person has to go get in the water when the mayor himself is not going to get in the water.

That was, I think, the moment where I was like, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and agree with you on that one.

Steven Spilberg's debut film was called The Sugarland Express. It was well received by critics.
Did well at the Cannes Film Festivals.

Just the one. Pauline Kale put her chips down

very quickly. But it didn't really make a lot of money.

And it didn't really sort of alter his career in any particular way.

But so

he

wants to make, it's interesting. I did not know this.
The next movie he wanted to make after

Sugarland was The Taking of Pelham 123. Good taking, JJ.

And United Artists, Universal Artists, sorry, called the film director-proof and went with Joseph Sargent. Given Joseph Sargent's career, which is kind of workmanlike,

they kind of were right. Yeah.
Like, that's one of my favorite movies of all time. And I've never been kind of like, and it's because of Joseph Sargent.

Like, even though there's nothing, he did everything right. Yeah.

But it's really just a perfect concept, perfectly executed, perfect cast.

Joseph Sargent's one of those classic, if you give him all the right elements, he will nail it, which isn't to say that the movie directed itself. Yeah.

But you're like, he's probably not a guy who can make something out of anything. Yeah.
But like given a slam dunk script and a perfect cast and whatever. Yeah.

So then another movie he wants to work on is

MacArthur. What is that? About the general MacArthur.
Oh, I see. Wow.

He gets replaced on that project. Did that project actually happen?

By this. Yeah, oh, it did with Gregory Peck.
It was also directed by Joseph Sargent. So he's just being like boxed out of everything by fucking Joseph Sargent.
I got Sargent. I got Sargented.

He does have a movie called Watch the Skies that he's written that he signs a development deal on. Obviously, that's going to become Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Sure.

We'll deal with that later, but that's like a script. We are just going to do it on Patreon.

We're planning on Patreon.

Yeah, yeah, we'll throw it on Patreon. By the way, E.T.
is going to Patreon. Yeah, E.T.
is getting tagged on to our Twin Peaks Season 2 episode.

Just on the back of that, if you want to listen we're joking

i i love your work

i love your work

and i you know that i am very complimentary of everything that you do and i listen every week and i love watching a lot what is it i've never been so happy that something was put on patreon than the second series the second season of

you but that's great yeah um so

He's cutting Sugarland Express. Zanik and Brown, the producers of that movie, are throwing him scripts, and he's like, nothing's really sparking for me.

And when he meets with them, he sees the manuscript for Jaws.

He likes the title. It's a good title.
I will say it's a good title. It's a good title.
It's a really good title. He says he basically stole the book,

read it over the weekend, and came back and was like, I wish to do Jaws. And they were like, look,

we'd love that. But the agent who sold it to us has a director as part of like a package deal.

And that director

was

Joseph Sargent. No, man.

There was the initial,

there was the initial hope that it was going to be Stanley Kramer, who's obviously a big director at the time.

John Sturgis, the man who made Magnificent Seven and The Green Escape. But the director who was actually attached was called Dick Richards, who'd made the Culpepper Cattle Company.

Not like a, no offense to Dick Richards, but not a well-remembered guy. Rich Dickards.

And apparently, I had to say it. That's not a good thing.
At At some point,

it had to be said. They had a lunch with Dick Richards and Peter Benchley, who wrote the book Jaws.

And Richards kept referring to the monster at the center of the movie as a whale. And Benchley said, for God's sake, it's a fucking shark after he did this three times.

And they had to pull him out of the package deal, which I think was, you know, whatever. They had to maneuver that.
And then they go back to Spielberg and they're like, Jaws is now available to you.

Jaws. Jaws.
And Universal's a little scared because Steven Spielberg's a young man. Yeah.

They probably are like, we just need some sort of like hired hand guy who's a steady guy, who's done a lot of productions. But let's also call out.
It's a bit of a risk.

But this is also like basically the earliest days of film school. There are not many people who know how to direct movies.

Like, yeah, I'm not sure that this guy has like a prodigious amount of talent that is kind of immediately undeniable when you watch his early TV work,

where, like, if you watch that, and you're just like, this guy knows where to put the camera. I guess he's on the list of 40 people we know who can make a movie.
Yes.

But there is less competition for these positions. There is more of an old boys' club and the feeling of studios want to hire these old, steady hands.

Right. Sort of.
He's fighting against his age, but he's still. But he's also, he's hot stuff.
He knows he's hot stuff.

He also, if I'm financing that movie, you're throwing a lot of money at a guy who wears like cut off jean shorts totally.

And that would make me nervous. But I think people can look at any footage he's shot, and this is what the studios are doing, and going, like, this guy undeniably has it figured out.

Bielberg starts to feel a little shaky. He's like, wait a second, I made Duel.
Jaws also has like four letters in it.

It's also about this kind of like unseen monster that's just right, you know, like this. He's worried about repeating his shtick.

So he reads the book, you know, he's looking through the book, and he's like, I never really liked the first two acts too much.

I really loved them on the boat, the last 120 pages, like them on the hunt in the sea, the extended drama between them.

And so, as they're working on the script, Benschley wrote several drafts, and then they start to bring in other people. He's like, can we like expand that? That's right.

And like, that's what, as you're saying, like, it's half the movie, essentially. Right.
Because, I mean, the middle act, I assume I've not read the book. Have either of you read the book?

I read the book years ago there's like a whole thing where um there's a fair there's a cucking I'm saying like it feels like he took out all the middle stuff that I hear people describe that is like weird interpersonal drama between the guys yes that I'm like yeah no one's showing up for this spook's like they should just be friends yeah um the other thing

tension from them having different personalities right they don't need to bone each other's wives in the book only Brody survives.

Well, there is a little bit of a moment that might allude to that and that Dreyfus just comes over and is like, hey, is anybody eating this? And he just like gets in. Right.
You know what I mean?

He cucks that lunch. He kind of cucks the lunch or whatever.
So maybe that was intentional. There's a lunch cooking.
Yeah. But this is, this is Spielberg, master of economic storytelling.

He went, you can see that and assume how this guy would treat his friends' wives. Nonetheless, Spielberg continues to have cold feet.

He's worried of, this is a quote from Peter Gottlieb, who's one of the writers. Carl Gottlieb.

Sorry, Carl Gottlieb, who came in later and like sort of made it funnier, essentially, where he apparently said, who wants to be known as a shark and truck director?

He tried to leave at one point. Better than a Boston Truck director.
Exactly. Yeah.
Tried to leave at one point to shoot Lucky Lady, which is a film that happened. Have you heard of Lucky Lady?

I know that title. What is it? It's like a dramedy, like a throwback prohibition movie with Burt Reynolds and Gene Hackman and Liza Minelli.
Okay. And it's famous for George Lucas

visited the set. and was so impressed by how it was run.
It was shot in England that he hired a lot of the people who worked on it to work on Star Wars. Wild.

He was kind of like, this is the kind of set I want to run. Can we just point out that

you said that the people that are starring in that movie are Burt Reynolds? Burt Reynolds, Gene Hackman, and Liza Miller. And you talked about the efficiency of the set.

How the fuck is that? Maybe that's awesome. Maybe that's part of it.
It was sort of like a Zen Garden. It was just very quiet, serene, efficient.

It's a Stanley Donan movie, and it was a emotional outburst whatsoever.

Ceciligo.

Anyway, Steven Spielberg made Jaws.

He stayed on Jaws. Oh, okay.
He did end up directing it. Right.
And

I'm going to check my notes that I took.

No, I had that. Yeah.

He made Jaws. Yeah, I had that.
He made Jaws. Steven Spielberg.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. And I guess S, I'm sort of inferring.
Yeah.

Steven S. We should maybe, well, let's cross-reference that.
David, what do you have there in your notes? Stevens Spielberg. Steven Silberg versus Justin S.
Okay.

Well, we have to trust it at this point. We do.
I call him Steve. Yeah.
Okay. The Indianapolis speech.
So Benchley writes the sort of drafts that everyone starts to work off of.

Gottlieb is brought in at one point and starts to flesh out the characters more, give it a little more humor. The famous USS Indianapolis speech

is largely attributed to John Millius

and Robert Shaw himself. Yes.

Just to make that, you know, kind of more of a monologue.

It is fascinating how much that whole generation of film brats are speak with such awe of millias yeah where they're like we all wished we could write like him and would just go to him with things like this and be like you need to just crack this one scene for us can uh can i just have like a sort of quick uh shawshank sidebar

did

in that moment of like it somehow being accredited to shaw does it go into specifics about what he put in was it just the performance was it stuff Shaw wrote? Was there like so he wrote?

I think there was it in his own language. There was a, right, there was a already lines on this.
Milius is asked, can you make it more of a speech?

And he wrote like a very, very like many pages long speech. And Robert Shaw, himself an accomplished writer, read it and was like, this is too much.
This is sort of John Houston-y. I can't do this.

Let me rewrite it. And it's his rewrite that is the dialogue.
So it was like a tiny moment originally. Milius blows it up to epic scale.
Shaw makes it a little more natural and stripped down. Oh,

that's amazing. The character of Brody,

the film's main character.

The main character, right? The Roy Scheider

opens and closes on him. Police chief Martin Brody.
Charlton Heston supposedly wanted the part. This is in Charlton Heston's kind of like genre days.

Spielberg thinks he's a little too overwhelming and he desperately wants Robert Duvall. Would have unbalanced the movie.
Duval is interesting. He makes perfect sense in that moment.
Yeah.

Sort of area as Scheider. I think.
Yes. Not a great actor who's not as overwhelming a sort of face.
Right. At that time, as I love to say, considered Hollywood's number one, number two.

And Spielberg doesn't want Heston or Scheider. Duval.
Duval was. Had a real complex about, I'm always the second guy.
They never let me play the lead. Right.
Things like Godfather Network,

Harclock Snelling. But I couldn't be more valued as the guy next to the explosive.
Yeah.

Spielberg doesn't want Scheider because he's like, this is a cop. He's just going to do the tough guy thing from French Connection.
Like, I don't want that.

Now, Spielberg. Scheider's coming off an Oscar nomination.
French Connection is such another seismic movie. Definitely.
Yeah.

Spielberg, in his dotage, not his dotage because he's still kicking like crazy and making great movies, but later on

says that that's not true. And oh, he ran into Royce Scheider at a party and Roy Scheider was feeling down because he couldn't get a good part.
And he was like, you'd be perfect for Jaws.

So I don't know if you want to believe on this. For Quint, they wanted Lee Marvin.
Makes perfect sense as well. Also, I think it would have unbalanced the movie.
I think a little, little too big.

Yeah. Then they want Sterling Hayden, who makes a lot of sense.
Totally.

You know, they're going to

real pillars. Sterling Hayden in like

long goodbye mode. Guys who could play like Captain Ahab.
Yes. Right.
You know,

do you buy that? Bob wasn't able to do the role for some scheduling reason. Do you buy that Lee Marvin has like has been on a boat?

Well, you're saying that because he's such a horse guy, such a Western guy. Yeah.
Well, no, I just think I guess I'm thinking of like Lee Marvin in point blank.

I buy that Lee Marvin has been on a movie boat. Yeah.
You know, like Heston, Lee Marvin, there's a version of this movie that is like, not to be rude, but like

Sergeant directing, Marvin, and

Heston.

And you're like, it's probably a movie that we think rules. Yeah.
Right. But it's more of like, ha, look at this.
These guys all chewing scenery. This is fun.
And

it's the kind of Tim Simons dictated all cap screaming text version of the movie that is still, you know, discussed to the movie. That everybody loves.
Everyone's so happy it's happening. Yes.

Robert Shaw comes from Zanikin Brown, who had produced the sting of producing this movie.

And Spielberg was kind of like, oh, that makes a lot lot of sense. Another really hard thing to try to explain to kids is like the inner workings of like off-track betting.

When you're watching a Sting,

they're like, okay, wait a minute. So what does win, place, and show mean? And like trying to get them into the particulars of like the delay of the tape and you know what I mean?

Multiple languages in that film. Yes, anyway.
But Shaw has an Oscar nomination under his belt. He has one for man for all seasons of the movie.
He's amazing.

And he's also kind of like the Irish Sam Shepard of his time where it's like, here's this guy who's just like

credibility character actor. Great writer.
Also great writer. Great dramatic person.
Wright. Likes a bit of a temple.

Wait, he likes a bit. Is that sourced in the first movie? For Hooper.
Yeah. John Voigt is the first choice.
That would be fucking wild. That would be insane.

Yeah, totally different movie. Yeah.

And then when he turns it down,

Spielberg goes to Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms. He loved the last picture show.

I was going to say, the way the character is written,

it feels like he's supposed to be more of this kind of like

the softhand rich boy thing that is in there. Yeah.
Yeah. Bridges makes sense there.
But in a form where everyone else is like, this guy's fucking doofy.

He doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. The magic of the Dreyfus casting is you're like, this guy's absolutely a scientist and he's silly.
Yeah.

Obviously, George Lucas is the one pushing for Dreyfus post-American graffiti.

And

Dreyfus is like, I found the movie, the script boring. My character seemed to be just there to give out shark information, but I had no money.

That's a weirdly rude thing of Dreyfus to say, which isn't usually his manner. Right.
He says, I gave in, I surrendered, I was a prostitute. Yeah.

Every fucking Dreyfus quote is like that, where he's like, this movie sucked and they forced me to do it and I made money. Ha ha ha.

And then at the end, and then he's always like, and the thing I really love to do is insert some piece of shit no one remembers. Like, it's like, my real passion project was playing Dick Cheney.

You know, like,

but then there's that.

There's the clip. He's one of the world's greatest assholes.
There's that clip of him on the view promoting vice. And they're like, you hadn't done a film in like six years.

What pulled you back into playing Dick Cheney? And he was like, money.

This movie's dumb. I don't care.
I met Richard Dreyfus once when I was in college. He came to speak on our campus.
Okay. And

I think it was like something to do with the Bush,

the Bush gore election in 2000. And I went up to him afterwards and I said, hey, man, I really liked doing the goodbye girl.

And he just like touched my chest, I think, in a very nice, weirdly a very nice way to say, but I think what was behind it was, I'm so glad you didn't say Jaws. Sure, right.
You know what I mean?

Even though it's like the movie he won the Oscar for at the time. It's sort of forgotten now, but at the time.

A little better known. And at the time, A, from

Jaws, Close Encounters. Yes.
You know, I don't know what else. Even probably American graffiti more.
Yeah. Mr.
Holland's Opus.

Hey, I loved how you played that teacher like a fucking absolute pure asshole for the entire fucking movie. Really moved me.
There were some eight-year-olds there that kept calling him Mr. Holland.

And they were like, oh, Mr. Holland, Mr.
Holland. And he did not respond well to that.
He did not enjoy that, even though it was coming from the mouths of children. But, like, talk about

Scheider's post-Jaws career versus Dreyfus's post-Jaws career.

It's not just that he has a couple more major blockbusters and that he wins an Oscar, the youngest to win best actor, a record held for several decades, right?

And an Oscar that almost seems like, of course, undeniable. Right.
This guy, runaway Freight Tran. He basically remains a major movie star until the mid-90s.
Absolutely.

He's, I think he's often known for being a bit of a jerk, but he's

i mean his 80s are not great but he has hits he's above the title studio

there's no question about that yeah but he didn't yeah he didn't

it's right he continues to exist as a star right despite kind of not really making a lot of hits anymore stakeout's a hit stakeout is a solid hit what about bob is a solid hit yes there's stuff like down and out in beverly hills or whatever yeah right you know yeah yeah i mean mr hollins opus was a hit with that but that at the time, it was kind of like, oh, what a nice comeback.

A bit of a passion project for him. And then that's basically the end.
Like within like three years, he's like third building the crew.

I mean, he has, to me, Krippendorf's Tribe, a movie I'm obsessed with the existence of. Oh, that's sort of the end where it's like, can Richard Dreyfus still lead a movie? Maybe this one.

And they're like, okay, that's enough. I did a sort of accidental trilogy watch of culturally insensitive Disney's 90s live-action comedies, which is Man of the House,

which is Chevy Chase and Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and it's all about like a little Indian's like weekend group.

And then

Jungle to Jungle and Crippendorf's tribe. You have to do them in that order and ascending

insensitivity. Crippendorf is astonishing.
Well, Krippendorf is an insane movie. Yes.
I'm sorry.

Well, no, I was just going to say that we have another Dreyfus connection in that

Richard Dreyfus's brother is the music teacher at my kids' like public elementary school. Really? And he has like, I think he was the bait.

I just, I completely forgot about this until you said this is like a passion project. I think his brother, in a way, was the, the, what he based that off of.
Yeah.

Um, but he's like a very nice man, and he has like sort of like he's kind of balding, but he has long gray hair down to his shoulders. He kind of looks like a music teacher.
Yeah, right.

He also wrote the, uh, he wrote the elementary school's like pride song. Okay.
And like every, all the kids sing it, it, and it's really amazing. It sounds a lot like Mr.
Largo from The Simpsons.

That's the thing. Like, does Mr.
Largo also own like a sort of like a country club?

Because

I think his name is, it's not Ben. What is Richard Dreyfus's brothers? Ben is his son.
But I know the name of Richard Dreyfus's brother. Ben, what's the name of Richard Dreyfus's brother?

Lauren Dreyfus. Okay.
It's Laurence. Well, this seems to be maybe another Dreyfus

because I don't know. Well, this Dreyfus is also the co-owner of like a sort of small country club in La Cañata, California.
Wild. Which has like a pool.

It's actually where my kids learned how to swim. Yeah.
Because it's like, it's not expensive to get like a pool membership and we don't have a pool or really access to one.

So that's where my kids learn to swim.

Yeah. And he's kind of always around there just looking kind of like Richard Dreyfus.
Apparently, Richard Dreyfus also doesn't like to do ADR and voiceover work.

So if they're like, hey, we need you to do this. He's like, I don't want to do it.
And just sends his brother. This guy teaches music, owns a country club, and does his brother's ADR.
ADR.

Like, what a fucking life. Wild.
I'm trying to find this guy's name. I can't.
I'm surprised it even took that long for him to land on Dreyfus.

I mean, I know we'll get to it, but infamously, Spielberg was very resistant to casting Dreyfus in close encounters. Right.
It felt for a while Dreyfus was constantly needing to convince people.

to hire him.

Why was that the case in after working with him in... Hmm.
I wonder.

the middle? That's difficult. And I feel, I'm trying to remember who it was, but he had a more...
I mean, this is the thing. Richard Dreyfus was a very unconventional leading.
He was.

And he looks older than he is. And he's got this sort of...

But now I'm just sort of like, that was such a look in the 70s. And it's kind of the Dreyfus look.
Well, now, of course, you were like, yeah, movies.

have guys like that in them especially in roles like this i do think to have someone who was that nebishy yeah you know was sort of like and not be in one scene of the movie.

So perfect for the energy of this movie, obviously.

And it is a performance that does kind of change things. Like, it becomes one of those archetypal.

Yeah. I mean, especially, right? Because the movie, it's like when you're with Quint, Brody,

you're like, yes, okay, I understand this movie. This is the kind of bulletheaded guy who's trying to like cut through this crisis and the best he can.
And Scheider feels like an upstanding guy. Yeah.

And then Shaw, you're like, yeah, I get that. That's like a fucking sea dog.
Great. Cool.
I get that guy. And Dreyfus, you're like, oh, huh.

This is like an element I don't think about when it comes to like,

you know, monster hunting on the water. Right.
Right. That you would have this kind of like, right, squirrely guy.
This weirdly confident, blue-blooded marine

biologist wearing a fucking Canadian tuxedo. Who also, like, I do like the subplot of him being a little bit embarrassed of his background.
Right. Right.
That's like he wants to be a salty dog. Right.

Which I think if you cast someone like Jeff Bridges, it's like that's how he reads at first. And the whole movie is him going, I'm dying for these guys to take me seriously.

Whereas with him, it's almost like a secret he can successfully suppress, but once he knows, he's so self-conscious about it.

I mean, I always think about there's the stories of how much Shaw would antagonize Dreyfus.

And the line that rings in my head constantly is when they were in the boat before Take Shaw would go, Remember, mind your mannerisms, Dreyfus.

Oh,

mind your mannerisms. And there is this balance of, like, yes, he's a very mannered actor.
It works in this movie.

You need him to balance out the trifecta of the three of them, but there is a juice that comes from the feeling that Shaw is genuinely fairly annoyed by him as a person, and Dreyfus is on edge trying to win him over.

I mean, in a way, you can almost be like, Yeah, how, well, how did Richard Dreyfus end up being a dick? It's like, well, because Robert Shaw is psychologically broke him.

I don't know. I mean, stop minding his mannerisms.

Look,

in regard, regarding the production of Jaws, the highly discussed production of Jaws. I think Apocalypse Now is maybe a movie that's only the only more discussed production.
Sure.

But let's also say, like, a year ago, there was a Broadway play. Not a very good one, I think.
Sure. Called The Shark is Broken.
Written and performed by Robert Shawson, who looks exactly like him.

Does look really? That's a three-hander of the three of them in the boat.

The reason it's

not a very good play, right? It's mostly just them explaining the production of Jaws. It sounded kind of dramatically horrible.
It's one of the most disgusted things ever.

I feel like people forget that it was obviously shot on Martha's Vineyard pretty much on location.

It started way earlier than it was supposed to because the studio was afraid of an actor's strike, which never materialized.

So they were trying to get ahead of that. Okay.
So Spielberg hadn't really done any any preparation. It started about two months early.
And

there was a lot of pressure. Spielberg is 26 years old, basically, looks younger.
He's being put in charge of basically the first movie to like shoot on open water ever. Right.

Like, you know, it's like this, you're doing a water movie, you shoot in a tank. But Spielberg is like, creates the saying of never shoot on water.
Exactly. Right.

Spielberg is getting backed up by his studio, right? Like, it's not like he's fighting with them exactly, but he, his biggest idea for this movie is we should shoot on the real sea because

I want, you know, that sense visually of like they're actually out in the open ocean and it works, but obviously it was a nightmare for the production.

I, I, the, one of the, again, one of the things that when you go back and you watch it and you're like, yeah, this is perfect. I can't believe how good it is, is that I still am watching it now.

And I'm not sure how they did it. I'm not sure how they did the shark.
I'm not sure how did they get those three barrels to get sucked under the water? No. No fucking idea.
That's my thing.

For how legendary it is, the shark didn't work. And I called out the one shot where I think it kind of falls apart, but not at the expense of the movie, right?

Every other shot of the movie, I'm like, the shark looks incredible. And I cannot believe they got it to do this.

I cannot believe in 1975 doing underwater animatronics that they got it to do any successful movements. Absolutely.

And beyond that, that they got the shot in focus, the perfect framing, the perfect performance. It's not like he's often shooting the shark in total isolation.

You know, it's not like insert shots in a tank. It's like insane that they got what they did.

The producers of the film had initially thought, which seems insane, that they could use a real shark and use shark trainers.

And you perform like some simple stunts that you film, and then you use a dummy for other stuff or miniatures or close-ups or whatever.

And after losing the lives of 10 consecutive shark trainers, they realize that maybe they should build one instead.

As Carl Gottlieb puts it, for all the money and love that the Hollywood can offer, there was no one foolish enough to claim to be able to train a shark. You cannot train a shark.

You can't do a fucking job position. Of course.

So Spielberg's like, but now, okay, Ben's going to become a shark trainer. Spielberg's like, get me the guy who made the squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

All right. So they start working on that.
Ben, the sharks would know your respect for water. They would see see that in you.
Yes. They would be like, I also like wet.
Wait, he gets it. He gets it.

Ben's going to become the fucking Owen Grady of sharks. He's going to have a bunch of fucking sharks on jet skis following him.

They do.

We see you, Ben. They do get some second unit footage of sharks.
The shark cage stuff

is them trying to pull that off.

But I think

the great white sharks are too dangerous. Yeah.
Right. Like you can't, you can't do anything with that.
Do you know where I learned that? Where? The movie Jaws. Yeah.
Watching the film Jaws.

So they have these mechanical sharks. It's very famous.
Again, these three full-scale 25-foot great white shark models. Yes.
And there's essentially like it's made out of steel.

It's got these flexible joints. There are images you can see of the sort of cross-section.
It is astonishing how complex they are, but also like complex in a very rudimentary way.

Like there are so many different things. They can do side to side.
They can move their jaw. They can go up and down.

There's a lot of mechanics inside, but they're all basic like kind of hinges and shit. Yeah.
Exactly. They weighed 2,000 pounds.
Oh, my God.

They were covered in like, you know, nylon, stretchy polyurethane kind of stuff.

And they had like sort of a left-side shark and a right-side shark.

And then a dead-on shark, I guess. Like they had sort of three kinds of sharks.

And this one issue that they had was that when you start putting them in the salt water, it fucks with them in all kinds of unpredictable ways that none of them saw coming.

I was going to say like just replicating shark skin, I think must be a Herculean task, let alone making it in a way that is flexible enough that it can respond to all the mechanisms inside of it.

And then the second you put it into fucking water,

of course it doesn't work. Basically, it's like, it didn't work very well, but there's no one who could have done it better and they did the best they could.
Like, it's sort sort of the upshot.

It's not like it's like, ah, the FEX guys fucked it up. It's like this is a pile A situation.
Right. Right.
Patrick Willems, our buddy, did a very good video of like, you know,

the classic filmmaking lore of like, well, they were supposed to shoot the shark a lot and then the shark doesn't work. So then Spielberg has to rethink the whole visual approach.

And it's what makes the movie magical, that the shark has so often implications. Yes.
And these

are the rights from Harryhausen to Hitchcock. Right.
Yes. And I think he learns a lot.
Like the fact that, as you said, he had less prep time. Everything's going wrong.

This is an approach he basically tries to recreate in all of his movies after this of like, keep myself on my toes, keep myself fresh.

Patrick did this great video of like, what would the movie even have been if they had the shark working?

I guess it's like. a more straightforward monster movie with a bunch of awesome like shark kills and stuff, right? Like that's what it is.

But I'm like, even if the shark worked quote unquote i don't think any of that footage would have been very good probably not i don't think you could achieve a realistic shark footage no and as we're saying like jaws

bruce pulling up onto the boat eating Robert Shaw is the most sustained, direct, like closest to full-body, direct sunlight, extended view you get of the shark doing shit.

And it's the one part where the fakeness of the shark starts to show itself. But also, at that point, you've bought into Jaws and Robert Shaw is selling the shit out of it.

If the movie had seven sequences like that, it would not work. I completely agree.

It's almost like when they start attaching those flotation devices to the shark, that extended sequence, you never really seeing from the shark's perspective. Yeah.

And you're having to do so much work with your imagination to kind of barrels are brilliant but it sounds bad yes like if i told you like hey we're not gonna have the shark but there'll be some barrels so you'll know where it is like that sounds like you've lost your movie yes sure

but i think yeah cutting to seeing the shark underwater it maybe would have been not as effective yeah no i think it would

just to see the barrels going underwater especially after moving up the shawshank again yeah robert shaw repeating the like not with two barrels he can not with two.

Like, he says that or some version of that line three or four times so that by the time the three barrels go underneath, you're like, oh my God, this is the biggest thing we've ever seen.

I mean, it's the kind of like classic, one of the ways in which this film is really influential, but like a movie that teaches you the rules. Yeah.

That gives you the language to understand how to track stuff and that makes you feel smart

because you're like, I'm on the same page as these guys.

Obviously, 55-day shoot balloon to like 159 days. It was a disaster.
Spielberg thought he would never work again.

The whole thing was crazy. Did he?

No. He retired from filmmaking at the age of 46.
Yeah. Well, and that's that.
And I don't know why we did his later movies because there weren't any. Yeah.

It was a flight of fancy on our part. Obviously, again, this is so discussed.

But what you might not know about the John Williams score is that he had temped the movie with John Williams' score from the Robert Altman movie Images,

which he found kind of experimental and disturbing.

And

Williams then is shown the movie with his temp score. I do not know that score.
Do you know it at all? He's more of an all-time score guy. Yeah.
Never seen images. What's that one about?

It's psychological horror. It's him doing.

Yeah. Yeah.
I get you. Yeah.

I get images. I'm getting images confused with, what's the Sandy Dennis one? Cold Day in the Park.
Uh-huh.

Yeah, I have seen him with it. Yes, I have.
I've seen this movie. It's just in New York.
Yay! Right. It's him doing like an internalized kind of Bergbeny psychological thriller.

Or even like a Polanski movie. Yes.
Yeah.

Williams calls him laughing and says, No, no, no, this is not the score you want. You've made a pirate movie with a scary shark.
You need a primal score.

And he, and this has been replicated in like every single documentary about John Williams or whatever, just goes dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, you know, on the piano.

And Spielberg starts laughing and is like, you know, essentially, like, I didn't pay you for two fucking keys.

And he's like, no, this is the theme. It's going to be good.

And Spielberg has said it's 50% of the movie. But also, that, I think, was slightly new to have like specific character theme like that, like a musical cue.

that lets you know immediately the movie is now in this character's hands and especially for a character that is largely unseen like that.

The thing I'm always surprised by stupidly every time I rewatch this movie is like how much score there is and how little of it is that there's

more classic Williams-y stuff in here you know there are like three or four other major themes and jaws that repeat that sound like classic fucking William Spielberg shit and even the moments where like the two-note thing that Spielberg is like I didn't pay you for two notes it feels like even when it's that it's much more complicated yes the the what do you call it not the Portman two the the thing that where everybody kind of collectively thinks something is something different what's that called?

Hmm.

Like

the Shazam and Kazam thing. Oh, Mandela effect? Mandela effect.
Like the Mandela effect of the two-note thing. Is that that's the only music the entire film?

Yes, or that it is at some point just those two notes. Which it never is.
Which it never is. It's all much more, it's there.

It's just much more complicated, and there's a lot more to it filling it out.

But there's this like very kind of lush Amity Island theme, and there's the sort of like the three boys are on the high side.

Exactly some adventure themes. right? Yes.

It's a good score. One best score for John Williams.
Good job by John Williams at the score. Okay.
Yeah. That's it.

For Jaws?

You know what? Hold on. He did it for Jaws.

I actually did make a few checks about

behind the scenes stuff. And he only won for that movie.
He has, I believe, five Oscars.

Let me double-check. They gave him five Oscars for Jaws.

What is John Williams' last Oscar? That's the one that people, that's the more challenging. His last win? Yes, his last Oscar.
That's a good question. Can you give me the decade? 90s.

His last

win is Jurassic? He didn't even get nominated for Jurassic because he won for Schindler's list. Is that the last one? That's the last one.
Okay.

My guess was going to be Jumanji. I don't know that he

won an Oscar for Jumanji. Did he do Jumanji? I can find out for you.
My guess is no. That's a double snub.
If he didn't win the Oscar for it and didn't do it. Get to do it?

James Horner did the score for Drumont.

Is that, oh, well, that's the James Horner music, right?

He already, of course, had won an Oscar for Fiddler on the Roof, which he gets like a scoring adaptation Oscar for, but this is his first real Oscar.

He wins again for a movie called Star Wars and again for a movie called E.T. Okay.
And again for a movie called Schindler's Last. Interesting.
Yeah. Pretty cool behavior from JW.

But it is really rude that he has not won for 25 years. Yes.
And they also, I guess,

I'm assuming they haven't nominated him at all in those 30 years. Oh, wait, an additional 20 million nominations.

He gets nominated four times every year.

David? Yep. Oh, wait, hold on one second.

It was just here.

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Burr. Ah!

Do you know what that's me reacting to, David? What? Cold mornings and a holiday plans. Oh, sorry.
Burr. Ah!

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The film begins with kind of a famously scary sequence. Okay.

Are we going to start talking about the movie? Yes, in which a young woman and a young man canoodle on like a beach.

You're jumping way ahead. Okay, I don't know if I'm jumping way ahead.
No, because what I like is that it doesn't open with canoodle. It opens with this physical flirtation, this very naturalistic.

What you're saying, like you're dropped into this overlapping dialogue, a very kind of like,

it feels, it feels almost a little bit documentary-like. And then you get into the Spielberg specificity of visual storytelling of how their sort of flirtation happens and caught glances

and gesture.

One thing that's fun about this whole like moving shot through that crowd is that you probably could have landed on any one of those people.

And there would have been a little story about them, or maybe they would have started running down the beach. This goes back to the episode that you did about

Westside's story.

Or, no, sorry, about the Fablemans, when everybody's like, when your reaction to people saying that they were underwhelmed was he made a movie about how he wanted to fuck his own mother, like he is in the fucking pocket.

One thing that I love about this movie is how fucking horny it is. Yes.

In these, like, sort of, not throughout, but just these little moments where it's just like, Spielberg's thinking about making out.

I feel like as Spielberg gets older and becomes famously kind of unhorny,

people often, and famously just like Treekly. Sure.
He and others would look back at Jaws and being like, remember how Jaws is, yeah, kind of horny and hot and a kid fucking explodes in it? Yeah.

And Spielberg now is like, yeah, I would not, you know, explode a child on screen anymore. Right.
Like, you know, it is crazy that I did that. This is, this is young,

juvenile, horny Spielberg in a great way.

But also, look, when we covered the second half of Spielberg's career many years ago, it was a pre-Fableman's era, how little we knew, right? And like the cultural narrative on on Spielberg was like

Wonder Kid Dork, who never got over his parents getting divorced.

And people made much hay of how much the divorce hung over all of his work. But then you see Fabelman's and you're like, the fucking psychosexual dynamics of this are so much more complicated.

And now, if you like map that onto all of his other films, I think they all become more interesting,

especially the early ones.

And a thing I was really taken with watching this is like Sugarland Express is like a young dude's movie right that is like the film you expect a 20-something like full of vim and vinegar like uh uh filmmaker to make right jaws is weirdly like a sad broken middle-aged man movie it becomes that yes but not right at the start right no this the opening is kind of what you'd expect out of him but it becomes

that thing right

And I watch this and I'm just like, how did he have the sort of like emotional intelligence? Obviously, he cast the right actors, right writers, you know, work work the script, whatever.

But to like be tapped into this, and you do go back to the Fabelman's thing of like, right, the fundamental thing with Spielberg was he was basically like pulled into adulthood too early, right?

Right? That like his mother brought him inside of a marriage and was like, you hold secrets now, and like your sense of the grown-ups in your life has been like collapsed.

There, there is a restraint and a maturity to this that seems insane. That, how old is he? 26? 29, you said?

He's 26 when he's making it. He's like 29 for the Oscar nomination.

Wild. It's wild that a 26-year-old made this movie

that has as much restraint and maturity as it does. Right.

And then, like, you watch this opening, which is kind of horny and feels like something a little bit more like a young guy made, but it also has that Hitchcock thing of like, this guy simultaneously seems really horny and also seems to have a very complicated relationship with sex.

Yes. Right.
Which also makes sense for everything we know about him now. Before we actually, can I ask a question? My first note was that the

DP was Bill Butler.

For Jaws. For Jaws.

When did he start? Because I mean,

I guess in my head, I would have assumed that he had always been working with. Kaminsky.
No, Kaminsky is Schindler's list.

That's when that starts. Yes, yes.
Spielberg does not move over to him until Schindler's list, but I don't think so. He did a lot of Slocum movies.
Right. Douglas Slocum is kind of his big guy.

jaw is Bill Butler, he only worked with the one time, I think. Close Encounters is Vilma Sigmund.
I refer to him. Yes.

Did Zygmunt do Sugarland as well? Am I wrong? Sugarland was shot by Sigmund. Yes.

And 1941 is William Fraker, who's another big name of the time.

And then Raiders is Slocum.

And E.T. is Alan Davio.
Yeah, he would kind of move around.

Do you have any idea why, after the success of this, that he wouldn't have worked with Bill Butler again?

I have no idea, but my guess, you know, back then it was like he probably wasn't like picking everyone in the, with the same kind of right, there's a little how

who's available. Bill Butler shot one flew over the cuckoo's nest, right? Famously replaced Haskell Weschler, who got fired.
Um, or quit or I can't remember.

Um, but yeah, Bill, you know, Bill, that's a big experienced guy. And maybe it was like, hey, there's a fucking, like, there's this story where like Spielberg is like, I want to use tripods.

And Bill Butler and the crew had to be like, you can't shoot with a tripod in the open ocean. Your audience was going to throw up.
Like, because it's going to, and they, he was like, no, it'll work.

And they had to shoot some footage for him. And he was like, oh, I see.
Like, it's moving too much. Like, you know, you, you can't do this.
Bill Butler only died in 2023. He was 101 years old.

Got hit by a bus.

He was not Orson beaned. I just always like, hey, died at 101.
How did he die? Oh, he was killed by ninjas.

R.I.P., the great Bill Butler. Can I say

in this first sequence of running up and down the beach, just while we're talking about the photography of it,

that, and I'm going to make, this is going to be

a very broad swing on a comparison, but just to one of your recent guests, Arkasha Stevenson, or recent. Who, by the way, you, you helped connect to get on that episode.
Thank you very much.

Oh, my God. My pleasure.
Because everybody should know who Arkasha is because she's unbelievable. And I've never been an omen person.
That's never been like my flavor.

But I thought the first omen was fucking incredible. And one of the things that I loved about it was that just about every single shot in that movie did not have to be as good as it was.
So true.

Like she fucking put so even to just. The normal Hollywood thing now is to make sure the shots are not very good.
Yes. Yes.
But it's. It's almost the fact they seem to be intentionally bad.

Yes. And I loved seeing

the amount of thought and planning. No wasted image.
No wasted image in that movie. And to that same extent that

in this first sequence, you could completely have this whole first sequence work and do it exactly what it needs to do and still be really effective. But also, the shots are fucking incredible.

But it's this thing, I mean, it's why. We jumped down your throat, David, of saying two young people canoodling, because it's like the short drama he establishes within like 90 seconds

of like

there is a specificity and charm to the way he captures their sort of silent courtship and the the beginning of it you know what feels like this could be the whole movie we just watch these two people as you said it's like we came across 40 other people who could have been the leads of the movie right but like halloween as well like any movie where it's like You're kind of in it being like, this is the movie I'm watching.

And then it ends and you're like, oh, I was essentially watching a little prologue. And they don't feel like the surprisable horror

victims. It feels like there's a level of compassion.
But it's a very horror movie thing.

You do also think about, though, like Fablemans has the whole fucking sequence of him being hired to make the like Beach Day video. Yes.

And his weird status of like, you know, shooting the popular kids in a way that makes his bully more upset. Yes.

You know, like there's something fascinating here of him making this movie of like the happy, pretty, normal kids on the beach who can just give each other looks and then be like, you want to go fuck in the water?

A comp that I was thinking about this moment, do you remember in neighbors when they have like that whole plan uh like the seth rogan movie neighbors when he's like all right once they start talking we have 30 seconds until they decide to go upstairs and have sex like and i like that that this like it doesn't matter what generation you are from there's if you just start looking at a member of the opposite sex for long enough it's going to be like all right well so we got to leave now right like we just got to go have sex now uh

just quickly to say the the butler conversation right and this is speaking what david's saying of there not being as much much of a like this sort of like set union between director and cinematographer.

We always work with each other and we're going to carve out time for each other and whatever. Right.
Butler in 75 does Jaws and Cuckoo's Nest. The year before that, he did the conversation, right?

Pretty cool. Within this decade, he does Grease.
He does Rocky 2. But then in between it are 80 titles you've never heard.
Right. The guy was just doing shit.

Like right before Jaws, he does the Manchu Eagle Murder Caper Mystery. That sounds good.
Like even coming out of the world. He's got Jaws going on.

He just felt like he was treated as like, well, obviously you are the finest image. No, because that just didn't exist back then, right? Or it's just starting to.
He does the Omen 2.

He does something called Uncle Joe Shannon. That sounds good, too.
He's just doing shit. I don't think...
So

my dad's a photographer and grew up like, you know, like in central Maine, making a living as a photographer.

And I don't think that people under a certain age, basically anybody that doesn't know a world without digital photography, I don't think they understand how hard it is to just get any image.

To get any image, much less a good one

when you don't know. You just have to be like, I understand how light works.
I understand where what the focus depth is.

I understand if the sun's behind them, how to get light on their face or to not have it or to like when to take detail out. Like, I don't think they understand how fucking hard this is.

So it does make sense that a guy like that who can make jaws and make the conversation is also like, yeah, I also have to go do the other movies because if they don't, if I don't do it, they literally don't have another human being that knows how to do it.

Here's another thing

that's just, I don't think people think about that much. Right.

You know, playback is only invented by Jerry Lewis in like the fucking 60s. Yeah.
It's still a fairly new technology at this point in time. Okay.

But video playback was them attaching a small camera next to the film camera and them having a monitor that showed them a vague reference image of what it was looking like.

But not only is it off a little bit in orientation, it's a different fucking format. Right.
You're not seeing what the shot's actually going to look like.

Right now they're actually tapping a feed in to show you what the digital camera is capturing. You can see

the shot. And they can color correct it in real time.
In real time. Right.

So like not only is it that tough to get any image, but even the image they're looking at for reference is not representative of whether or not that image is working.

And they just have to wait for it to be thrown into a fucking chemical bath like the Joker.

And then everyone like goes to rushes, this thing that we don't have anymore as the sort of tradition of like the cast and crew getting together late at night in a screen room with alcohol and basically being like, oh, fuck, I hope these things look good.

And you hear the stories of when like rushes were explosive, when people were like, holy shit, we have lightning in a bottle. The arc of just being like, oh my God, it's in focus right it's not

the image

we have some usable version of the image and then if on top of that you have like the performance works or the shark works or any of that

that's why i'm saying i still can't get my head around that they got the footage they got yes with all the x factors right yeah i mean part of it might be the fact that they had 59 days and then it took a hundred and days it did take us a while and it was hard yeah right right should we do a little sim sense check-in about how sims is doing since he got here?

Sims, how are you doing? How are you feeling? It's fine.

You're with a legend of twin daddy here. It's true.
An incredible resource. Yeah.

In the field. The problem with twin parents is that they're,

which is good in a way. Like, there's no twin parent I've met where they're like, listen, listen, three simple rules to raising twin infants.

Like, it's actually, if you just do this, this, and this, it'll be okay. Instead, they're just like, I have no memory of that.

It was terrible and I don't remember.

And I remember later. The brain blocks things out in order.
Roman Mars, friend of the show, a huge fan of the movie Jaws, is also a twin parent. Wow.

And he sent me like a comforting email when he learned I'd had twins that was like, honestly, after like three years, you're really going to feel normal again. And I was like, three years? Yeah.

Roman.

He's nodding. Yes.
Well, here's the thing. My gosh, Shimoana will be out by then.

I didn't, I was talking to Ben about this before we ran into each other down the street and we like sat at a nice little table and we talked. You know, congratulations are in order.
Congratulations.

Thank you so much. And we talked about how I maybe hadn't played

you announcing to me that you were having twins in the right way that made you would have feel made you feel calm because I was like, oh no, you're fucked. Like I really wasn't.

I want to see if I can find the forbidden. Wasn't really very gentle about that.
And I am sorry. But it is true.
But also, Casey Belois, who was at the time Beep was on,

was the head of HBO Comedy and then kind of slowly started moving up. And now he's, I think, running all of Mac.
Yes, no, of course.

So he also has twins that I think are maybe six years older than ours. And when they were first born, he was like, look, it gets a lot easier at three.
And I was like, cool, cool, cool.

And then I would see him a couple years later. And he's like, here's the thing.
Seven is when it really gets dialed in. And I was like, oh, great.
And then they would hit seven and I would see him.

And he was like, you know what's great? 13. You're going to hold it.
This is true with all parents. You're right.
Like parents are like, well, actually, now I just feel okay about it.

And it's like, well, no, when you say normal, you mean a version of normal. A version.
Like you felt better about this six months in and then two years in. And then, you know, what, of course.

I understand that.

There are like little markers. And I just want to let you know that, like, it is a really, of course, it's like a very beautiful thing, but you are also in the...

possibly the hardest part of it. I think there's no question.
I think when you're, when you have young children, the hardest part is true infancy. Yes.
Like that, because that's

the sleeplessness, them not giving you anything back. Like it's really, you know, that's, that's an unusual feeling.
And there is also a moment, like even one thing that's going to open up your world.

You already have a child, so you kind of already know this, but with twins for sure is like when they're just able to hold their own bottle with their own little hands,

that is a thing where it's just like, oh. Oh, God.
Okay. I now don't have to hold the bottle for them.
Right. Or get wait for them.
That sounds great.

Anyway, I love you and I hope you're doing the best that you can. I'm doing fine.
We'll talk about it. Well, I'll talk to you sometime.
I should talk to you sometime. You should.

I don't remember anything. Yep, exactly.
Useless motherfucker. So, were you on Veep when you had young twins? Like,

they were born at the end of shooting the first season. I actually had to leave in the middle of episode seven of season one because they were born like sort of very intense.

It must have been really intense. It was very, very stressful.
If you go back and watch in the eighth episode, you can kind of see that I'm only in there for like one scene. Right.

And it was because I had like flown back for one day to basically finish out some version of a storyline. I was supposed to be in that episode more, but they rewrote it.

So I came out and filmed like one day, finished out, and then went back home. Right.
Right. It was, yeah, it was very, very stressful.

Well, I'm glad you made it. Here you are.
And here we are.

Just coming out to Triumphant Time. Yeah.

I feel like one of the most famous cold opens of all time. It is.
Thank you for bringing us back to the show. Certainly.

What is the movie Jaws? One of the most parodied sequences ever. Yeah.
Right. Spielberg himself parodies it in 1941.
1941, right? I don't think I've seen 1941, so this is news to me.

I have, look, I'll be watching it soon for the first time. I have never been able to successfully make it through.
I think I've never gotten past the 20 or 30 minute mark.

But the opening sequence is Spielberg being like, I'm ready to make fun of myself. And people being like, this is the most hubristic shit I've ever seen.
Right. Wow.

But again, another reason that like this has been the reason that this movie is so good is that this has been parodied so many times.

And yet you watch the real thing and it's like the moment where she is actually taken underwater.

There is all the screaming and then the moment where it is cut short and then silent is still immensely effective. David has this very detailed Jaws.

towel hanging behind him, which we've referenced, which is the poster image, this beautiful painted image of Jaws basically just going straight up, nose to the sky, right? Right. Um,

the exact kind of image you never see in the movie. Yeah.
But there is this beautiful marriage of like the poster setting the expectations for like, holy shit, that does look scary from that angle.

And then to the point of like, what would the movie have been if the shark had worked? There's no version of it that's scarier than the one where you don't see the shark.

It's the most, I know it's three. It's the most.
It's an observation that's been made. It doesn't matter.
It still is so, you're right.

Like it popping out as much as the poster seems exciting would never look as startling as her being pulled down. It is a hell of a poster.
It is.

But like, I think the movie kind of doesn't work without having the poster. The prime certainty

of sharks is that you won't see them. Right.
As someone who goes to the beach a lot, unlike you, you don't really go to the beach. No, my.
Tim, where are you on the beach?

I'm more of a semi-fable now. You're from now.
You're from Maine. Oh, yes.
This is like, I.

But are you from coastal Maine or I'm from central Maine? Right.

And obviously, even coastal Maine like it's chilly up there like not everyone's like running into the water right yeah but I think you know Maine New England this is where this movie is set obviously this is a sharky area yes I'm from New York I go to the beaches in New York there's less shark stuff there but once in a while there's the sort of notice of like hey like someone got bit by a shark

in the fucking rock a ways don't like it and

you know everyone's like well I mean basically the re what they say is like I mean it doesn't really happen that often so you shouldn't be too worried about it but there's also nothing they can really say about, like, but look out for this.

Yeah.

Because sure, if you see a shark, get away from the shark. Yeah.
But largely, it's more just kind of like, nah, kind of just, they kind of just come out of nowhere.

The fucked up thing is that there's now more shark attacks than ever. It's because the planet is warming.

Unfortunately.

But so now I feel like in the last few summers, I like to swim, like going to the beach.

I've been very mindful of the fact that I feel like if there's some kind of person that would get bit by a shark, it'd be me.

No, but going back to the fucking earlier point, I think the sharks would sense your respect for them.

I'm genuinely not even joking now. I think you're less likely to be attacked by a shark than almost anyone.
Like a fin bump? Yes.

They also, in all the news stories about shark sightings, it always seems to be like somebody was flying a drone or there was a helicopter flying over and they spotted sharks.

And it's always like, here's the story. This person didn't know how close to a shark they were.
Yes. You hear a lot of that.
Again, very chill thing that people love to hear, right?

I think it's Ian Edwards, The Great Stand-Up, has a bit about shark attacks and being like, it's weird that we refer to them as shark attacks when we're the ones invading their home. Sure.

It's not like sharks. It's an uncomfortable shark.
They fucking show up at your door and stab you. He's like, I would call that a shark attack.
But of course, the thing with sharks that I understand

is that they're not actually very interested in eating us. We're not that tasty.
We're a lot of bones.

And instead, more what happens if a shark is attacking you is that it's kind of biting to find out what you are. Yeah.
And then we'll probably send you go. Yeah.

And then you're just bleeding to death because sharks are very powerful.

Okay, but what I've learned from a lot of research watching the movie Finding Memo is that if they smell blood, their eyes go all black.

And all the sort of intellectualizing of fish are friends, not food, yes, goes out the window. And then you have Chum and Anchor exactly holding them back.
Try to throw it all away, mate. Yeah.

But obviously, in Jaws, it feels like this shark has more of a fucking chip on his shoulder. Yeah, he's got kind of like an attitude.

Specifically, the fourth time it's personal, this shark seems to have some personality. Like, this shark is basically like, you know what? Martha's Vineyard, these assholes, I've had enough.

But isn't this the thing that's so great about the Shaw speech where you're just like,

somehow this movie gets away with making this shark feel like a real shark and supernatural at the same time?

I think every other shark movie and like the shark movie subgenre is weirdly durable in that, like, it has very few classics, but also like every 18 months, some distributor that didn't exist two days earlier releases a shark movie with four actors you've never heard of, and it just quietly makes $45 million.

Right. There is just kind of like a very high basement for shark movies, right? Um, but almost all of them start to like

pathologize pathologize the shark more, make the shark feel more magical or powerful or whatever it is. Or there's movies like Deep Blue Sea where it's like, these are super sharks.

Like they're literally

supercharged with a meg or whatever. Yes.
This is a movie where you have Robert Shaw give that speech explaining what is scary about a shark.

And what is so successful in that speech is him basically saying, like, there's no rhyme or reason to this. They're just like an evolutionary like landmine.
Right. Oh,

um, they're designed to make us terrified. Off of the New England thing.
You mentioned that when we were like trying to figure out,

it's an iconic New England movie. And you mentioned, you were like, just because of your New England connection, it might be interesting for you to, so, to, to come on for Jaws.

And so, I think with that in mind, just sort of going forward, I think I was trying, because again, what are you going to talk about when you talk about Jaws?

I think a lot of the stuff that I kind of wrote down

is like sort of trying to come at it with that point of view of like the from

knowing a little bit about both uh like a tourist facing and local facing economy and community and the the sense of like like they talk about it a lot at the beginning about like you know when will i ever be an islander stuff like that if i'm not mistaken i think we had that conversation about how long does it take to become a mainer in the shining episode which we sometimes you're never a mainer we did talk about it a little bit like even if you're you live live there for 30 years and you raise your children there, it's like, yeah, but you weren't born here.

And you said we're some fucking insane shit, like homily about like baking in an oven or something. If the cat, just because the cat has kittens in the oven, don't make them biscuits.

Like that just means your parents weren't born here. That is one of the smartest things ever said.
I mean, it really, but I mean, like, there is a lot of cat here.

Ben, there might be a new poet laureate in town. I'm just, you just, but you said that last time, like, I was supposed to go, like, ah, yes, of course, as fucking Cicero once wrote.

Like, you know, you just like dropped that. And I'm I'm like, much like just because a cat, what you know, better every time I hear it, it does.

Um, but there is, there is, I, one thing that I really like about it is that there is a lot of specificity

to that, and like that is almost how we're introduced to the Brodies. I feel like it's like this second dialogue scene, right? Right.
Is that sort of like

her trying the accent and then being like, no, but actually, you're never ever. You're, you're never going to get it.
Yeah. And,

and I think that one thing that is interesting on this is that like, so my sister is like a small business owner. She has a bookstore.
And one thing that she has to combat all the time.

Call out the store. Oh, it's called Hello, Hello Books.
It's in Rockland, Maine, which is sort of in the Mid Coast

and a really amazing town. And it is, it's sort of like halfway between

bougie tourist destination and just like

mid-coast working-class main town. Right.

So, there is always a push and pull about what you do for the year-round community, but also understanding that there is a tourist community.

And one thing that she constantly has to deal with is basically people from New York coming up, spending two minutes in her bookstore, and then coming up and being like, You know what you should do?

And she's like, I know what you should do. You should fuck off.
Shut the fuck up. You should shut the fuck up.
And I do think it's interesting that you have to make them New Yorkers. Yes.

Immediately puts them at arm's length. So I'm not, is this not a defense of the mayor?

But somebody from out of town coming up telling you how you should run the town when they have only been there for a matter of months, I think is an interesting choice.

That whether or not he knew it was happening,

it was interesting. Well, and even though Scheider is playing a much like milder, more empathetic version,

here's a guy who's like made a lot of like city cop movies. Yes.
You know, and so he feels like a man on

whatever, fish out of water. Like just the economy of the characterization in this movie.

So many things like that, where I'm like, in a modern movie, that would be three scenes where everyone says exactly what they're thinking. Yeah.
Right.

And the backstory, and it would start with him driving into the town and then being like, now look, the locals might be a little hostile to you at first. And then you see it happen four times.

And it's like, this is a movie in which all that characterization is done through action and behavior quickly.

And not only that, like one thing that I have honestly only since really listening to you guys talk about Spielberg, because I was never like

somebody who, I just always enjoyed his movies, but I never looked at them very closely. Like his use of space.
Insane.

And I think one of the amazing things about the opening of the movie is that when he is at the police station and they're like, he's like, I have to like run over to the store or go talk to somebody.

They don't, he doesn't go and get in his car. They show him walk to that store just to be like, this is how small this town is.

That it is a much more use, it is a much better use of your time to just walk rather than get in. Which tells you a ton.
Yes.

I mean, it's look, it's much discussed and we will be talking about it for the next several months.

But the Spielberg Wanner is really a thing that no one else can touch because he does it in a way that is so unshowy, does not call attention to it. And that's what it is.

When someone points out to you that it exists when you're a younger film fan, you're like, they're cuts in the back. That's not what he does.
Right.

And then you see, like, oh, yeah, he does it right in this very unostentatious way. And they are always like in the name of simplicity.
Oh, you know what? We could link these two moments together.

That makes it one setup. We spend more time getting the performances right rather than needing to break this up and spend half a day on it.
Right.

And he is able to communicate so much in the shifts of the blocking and positioning and physicality, everyone's relationships to the space, and it never feels ostentatious.

The one that always blows my fucking mind when I watch this movie, I don't even know what the thing's called, but that like transportation, that thing they're on that's bringing the car. Yeah.

That like sort of like a moving barge sort of thing. It's like a little fairy, yeah.
Yeah, like a single car ferry, right? Like this shot that basically starts with him, like

pulling the car onto that, getting out.

The thing is moving in water. The camera is moving slightly.
They're moving in relation to each other. The entire dynamic of the mayor kind of like sussing him out.
It's called the Chappy Fairy.

It's insane. In the movie, it's called the Amity on Time, but it exists.
You can go visit it in Martha's Vineyard. What is it supposed to do? It transports like two to three cars, like total.

It does also seem strange because in my, even just watching this last night,

I don't know cars or very few cars. Anyway, doesn't like the car pull on and they pull out and then they just kind of end up at the exact same spot and then the car leaves.

I mean, it's kind of like it's the Goodfellas Copa Cabana thing where if you watch it, you're like, they move in a circle. Right.
Right. Like if you actually think about what's happening.
Yes.

And it's not just that like someone needs to tell you you can't tell. If you look for it, you're like, they basically start back where they enter.

From the moment they enter through the side door, the entrance they'll end up going through to the theater is directly to their left. That's so great.

And they just circle the kitchen one time and then go there.

The one thing that I do will also say about sort of like backstory and like the economy and the restraint of this is that it's clear that Brody and his family have moved there and he's taken this job to get away from, and he kind of mentions it offhand like, oh, there's violence in the city or something.

Right. Scary 70s New York City.
It's just not for him. He's got a kid.
He wants to just settle down.

And that like, you know, that is a part of the story of like, oh, well, you can't ever escape the violence.

You know, we thought we were going to, but it's never really explicitly stated outside of him just kind of saying that New York in the 70s is kind of scary. Here's the other thing.

These kinds of movies used to just have so much more respect for the audience.

They will figure it out. And it's the thing I love to say, but it's like, if you let the audience figure shit out, they like the movie more.
Yeah. They, they feel smart.

My question is, okay, his job now is like police chief in essentially a town in Martha's Vineyard, Amity, right?

A shark kills somebody. Now, I know they don't know that it's a shark, but is that something you call the cops for?

There is that moment later where Dreyfus or whoever is like, have you called the Coast Guard? And he's like, no, it was like local jurisdiction. I'm like, what were you going to do?

Arrest the fucking shark? Like, you're a policeman.

They got guys in the back trying to develop shark handcuffs. Do an RNG.
At what point are you like, this is a shark attack? I am now bringing in like people who know about sharks. I am a policeman.

I know about people crime.

I don't. That is like if I got

a shark, do I call the cops?

I mean, I wonder.

Well, but I would call 911. 911.
Oh, yeah.

Jewel right, but I think it says a lot about what the core themes of this movie are, especially the first half and the mayor and everything, that it's like the concern is immediately, how do we communicate a sense of safety?

Your job is public safety.

How do you maintain public safety? Because I think there is this feeling of like, how do you solve this? I don't know. It's sad.
It's a tragedy. A woman got eaten by a shark.

This guy has to let everyone know that everything's okay. They should have had a scene where they had someone like sit with one of the victims and draw what

the shark looked like.

And his teeth were sharp. Yeah.

Okay. Okay.
Kind of like a jawsy thing going on. Yeah.
Imagine like a paperback and I'm swimming up here. So there's this big mouth.

Like straight up. The initial mouth.
Straight up. Tail finger mouths.
The teeth are like this.

Almost like you're pulling the corners of your mouth down.

um the initial tension of jaws uh-huh is that brody's like let's close the beaches there's a shark yeah and major large mayor larry vaughan

uh wonderful performance in my opinion by murray hamilton and an incredible suit uh obviously an iconic suit uh howard kramer always would say it's his favorite character because he refuses to close the beach yeah wants summer to continue the the thing about i made a little note about that jacket that he's wearing which he actually wears twice in that there is and this is again about the push-pull of a public and public, but also tourist-related area, is that the locals sometimes have to play into their own caricature.

Right. And I like that he is wearing that in that.
Right. He's not going to be like, I'm a sober civic manager here.
No, he's like, I'm a mascot for a beach town. Yes.

And I like that he is doing that. I like that they made that.

There is like, you know, whether or not he like really believes he's like, there is an expectation of the people coming here of like acquaintance, of like well, and also he's like,

we're not going to pay our bills if we don't have the beach in the summer. Like, Amity is not exactly like a thriving metropolis in the winter.
Like, we need, you cannot close our beach.

Also, Brody comes here because he thinks this is going to be an easier way of life, right? I think the immediate hostility from the locals is them being like, you're innately too intense. Yeah.

You at your lowest register? Like, crime is not a real thing here. We need like fucking Andy Griffith to patrol the police.
You know, we need like a Mayberry department.

And like, I, I, either all that jazz or Last Embrace, I said something about like

Roy Schreider being the tautest actor. He's very taut.
His skin seems kind of.

It just, there is a physical tension to just his existence where I just see him showing up and I'm being like, God, just fuck it. Can this guy cool it? Can his face relax?

And to the, to that point of him being too wound up, one thing that I like that the movie does is like, it isn't just like, oh, he was right the whole time. He was right the whole time.

Like, yeah, sharks are bad. Right.
But there was like, he took a really bold, took a bold leap and said, sharks are bad. Yeah.
Shark attacks are scary. Yeah.
There is an

understanding

in that, like, yes, it is the mayor trying to put his finger on the scale, but like they live next to the ocean. Yeah.
Like these things are going to happen. It's inevitable.
It's inevitable.

You, you have to try to be as safe as you can, but this will never be a completely

without risk. And I like that he is like, yeah, maybe I am overreacting.
And he does dial it down. They put a little pressure on him.
They kind of, the coroner's like, well, maybe it wasn't a shark.

This is what I was trying to get at, though, with the magic of the shark never crossing into the supernatural. Is like,

I err on Brody's side in most of what you're suggesting how he reacts. But I do think after the first one, there is a logic to like, look, this is a beach side.
It sucks.

There's a shark attack every few years. Like, what can we do? Yes.
We all hate sharks. Tell everyone there was a shark attack, maybe, and like, that's that.
Right.

But you see, even when shark attacks go up, you're just like, statistically, it is very low in probability that any of us will ever be eaten by a shark.

But the more time you spend in the water, the likelihood increases a little bit.

The more it goes on, the more he has to like really stand his ground of like, I have an obligation to do whatever I can to protect these people, even if it is only in communication.

And this scene where everyone is like sort of in the press conference or whatever, the town meeting asking him, is the beach going to be closed down?

And it almost feels like they're saying, they're waiting for him to say yes. They want the relief of he's taking care of us.
He says yes, and they immediately all go ballistic.

And the mayor just has to jump in and go like for 24 hours. He's saying for 24 hours.
Which again, not to, not to defend the mayor too much, but like after one shark.

This is what we're saying. It's like, maybe

it's somewhat understandable until a boy explodes. Yes.

And

in a movie with a lot of famous shots, I think that Scheider sitting on the beach in the Zoom, you know, the Hitchcock Zoom, the Dolly Zoom. Look,

that's right, the most famous shot with Jaws, right? That for me, and Jaws coming out of the water with their drills. Which is just so impeccably timed and framed.

The Dolly Zoom, it's not like that shot didn't exist. It wasn't.
It's not like Spielberg's inventing it. Right.

It's perfectly applied, but also every time I watch it, I'm like, it might be the smoothest execution of it on a technical level. It is incredible how fast it is and just how like buttery it is.

Yes, exactly. It's so smooth.
And it also really.

just like the language of the movie, you're like,

we are kind of entering the supernatural a little bit, right?

Like, it does feel like it's like, not supernatural in terms of like, this is a magic shark, but supernatural in terms of like, okay, now things are just not normal. Like,

and like, that's like, it's like, he can no longer just do what we were just doing of like, it's a beach town. Yeah.
Sharks exist in the water. I can't control everything.

Now it's like, he's like, this is my fault. Yeah.
Right. Like, so there's that horror to him.
And also, it's like, this is something we can't control.

I, I'm just, while we're talking about shots in that sequence, like, I weirdly, again, this is like the most quotable line, like the most quotable lines from this movie might not even be the best performed.

I honestly, I think there's a part of me that thinks my favorite shot from that sequence is like when you have like the sort of cross wipes of people walking in front of the camera and you kind of get

closer to him. Yes.
I felt like that to me might

be so subtly disoriented. Yes.
And it's so it ramps up the tension of that. And this is a little bit of a young man thing.

How well like this

you're a young man i am a young man no i'm like a young man director that i don't necessarily know if i love the choice but i think maybe if it's in the 70s or whatever like like

audience expectation that whole sequence starts out with a somewhat larger woman walking into the ocean almost as like oh well this is the person it's almost like a misdirect that this is the shark i think that is intentional as much as i don't like that it feels a little fat shamie you know what i mean but also you're just like you just think he can't kill the kids.

Yes. And Spielberg has said, like, I wouldn't have the guts to do that now.
Like, that's young Spielberg, like, having the guts to be like, yeah, you didn't see that coming, did you? Oh,

what's going to sound like a horrible side tangent, but I swear it's going to become relevant very quickly.

Jeff Daniels talks about when he was cast in the movie, Speed.

Spoilers for a 30-year-old movie. Do you know the thing I'm going to say? Yes.
I've watched this clip like a million times. Of course, Jeff Daniels, the spoiler is that he dies midway through speed.

So he has a moment where he discovers a bomb. Right.
And it's like, oh, this guy in the last second of his life recognizes I'm about to blow up. He's in the

SWAT gear. And then we just like hold on his face for a second and then kaboom.
Right. Spoilers.
Jeff Daniels sees that in the script. It's like, how do I play this?

Reaches out to Roy Scheider, who I think maybe he had worked with at that point, had some direct line to, and is like,

in my mind's eye, this moment should be the moment of you pulling back after accidentally throwing the chum to jaws right

um

how did you get there as an actor like your reaction in that shot is so incredible how did you get there and roy shider is like here's the secret i tensed up the muscles directly under my eyes and my cheekbones and then on action i just dropped them

love that and he was like i wasn't thinking anything it was just tension release done

And it is,

they are the two most iconic shots in the movie. And they both, if you look at them, are just him doing that.

Where for a guy who we've talked about is so tense to begin with, him just releasing a tiny bit

is like such a, holy shit, something's wrong for the audience. Right.

Like, one thing that I love about that quote is it sort of, it illuminates one of the things I love about.

filmmaking and film acting in that like sometimes it can just be technical and I don't want to take emotion out of these things but like sometimes this is the magic of it for me is the marriage of the things yes that's the thing and so when it is just like what were you thinking it doesn't matter what I was thinking my face was tense and then I relaxed it and that moment of Jeff

Daniels in speed like it is a haunting shot and it has haunted me since I was a kid who saw it and didn't really understand death or that somebody I liked might die. Right.

It's so brilliant in speed because you're like, this guy's kind of the steady hand. He's the guy on the phone with Keowner.
He's going to help him out.

And then he's like he's gone but that's why they correctly identified I need to be the shider like it needs to happen yeah right and I just and so I love that

that one simple technical like musculature thing yeah is what was able to communicate a much larger emotional moment even though the emotion might not have been there replay those two shots and the shift in his face is microscopic.

Yeah. It is.
It's not like you can't really see what you're talking about. No.
But you can see an expression that feels like a lodges with right.

And you would think, oh, he must have been doing something under the hood emotionally.

And this is a reflection of that conveying it. But he was totally just thinking in terms of technical technique.

I mean, I'm sure you've, you're a phenomenal actor, Tim, but I'm sure you've had this experience where you're like on set trying to crack a scene and you're like, I just got to load so much under there.

So it's like coming out of my eyes. And I want to underplay it, but I'm just trying to fill up.
And then you look at it and you're like, none of this comes across. Yeah.

Not like I'm doing too much, but just all this shit I was internalizing, none of it reads. Yeah.

And then sometimes you're like, I just looked at the light.

Like there's a big bright light here.

And if I look at it and my eyes are a little bloodshot right before they call action, it is a thousand percent more impactful than if I think about everyone I know who died. Yes.

I mean, like, and again, I don't want to like take out those things because I think they have been incredibly helpful. Sometimes it absolutely works, but then

it's magical in a way where you're like, I had to put myself through that. Yeah.
Right. But also, it doesn't necessarily guarantee that the thing is going to be good.

Sometimes it is just look at the lights. Sometimes it is.
You just have to be still and then you just have to shift. Yes.
Shift your face a little bit. A tiny bit.
Yes. Yes.

David, do you love it when actors talk about acting? I love actors. It's so zone out so hard.

It's very interesting. No, I don't need Ray I to replace actors in movies.
And then he's finally going to like the art form. I just want all movies to be the Lego movie with Pharrell.

Peace like peace. Yeah, it's just like, let's have that be all movies now.
Just Legos can be the actors. Yeah.
Um,

the death of the kid is what brings in uh Quint

because there's sort of a shark bounty now, screech, exactly. Uh, and who were one of the greatest character introductions of all time.

Yeah, I probably first knew the Simpsons version of it, I think, and then I learned this version of it after the fact. True of so many movie things for me.

Uh, and then Hooper, who's basically coming in being like, I am Mr. Shark, yeah, and I can tell you that the shark that killed this person is very large and abnormal.

Like this is, I, you know, I'm the shark expert. And Quint's like, and I'm the shark catcher.
And I can tell you that the sharks are scary. I just love that they punt Quint for like 40 minutes.
Yeah.

You put him in there. He's in the mix.
And then, right, we'll check in with him. His introduction is so explosive.
And you're like, so now the movie is his.

And you're like, no, they all just go like, fuck off. The air gets salty.
It does. It does.
Wherever you are. Yeah.
When

one of the first things that he says, which is in the monologue that you did at the top of this, again, I want to reiterate, great job. And thank you.

And that was an example of me really filling up and loading in as much sense memory as I did. I would have told all of my feelings.
Thank you.

I think one of the first things that he says is, you all know me. You know what I do.
Yeah.

Oh,

talk about fucking economic characterization. There's so much said in this guy introducing himself by being like, you know, my fucking deal.

And you're like, oh, this guy's been annoying this town forever. Yes.
And I love, again, this is another sort of like coastal main thing of like, of like the charm of the town.

It's what draws the tourists, but also we want to try to keep the actual workmen of this town. Like, we don't want you to see that.

We want to somehow sweep this under the rug so you get the sense that even the like the locals have locals.

And like Murray Franklin trying to get Brody to take it easy also feels like, hey, look, we got this fucking guy who all the time is like scratching chalkboards, delivering soliloquies. Right.

If there's a real shark problem, we elevate it up to Quince.

But also that he's just like, we always have these overzealous guys who want to go on and on sharks and we just fucking calm them down and ignore them. What we really care about here is lollipops and

saltwater taffy. Right.
Taffy and

small roller coasters. I don't know what they do.
It's like there's like, I think there is something in that.

Again, even if it's not the main point, I think there is something interesting there about class.

There's not only the class of people that's coming to the town, there's the class of people that live there. And then they are, and they all kind of look down on the class that Quint comes from.

Yes, the true salty sea dog type. Right.

Not like sort of suit-wearing land lovers. But also you're like guys like this,

ostensibly, you have to imagine, run the economy the other. eight or nine months out of the year.
Yeah, sure.

I'm sure this town's economy is like overwhelmingly the summer vacation tourist months, but the rest of the year, it's fucking exporting fish.

And it's like off-season, like, you know, I remember any place you go that's seasonal and you go to like some nice restaurant and you're like, you know, it's like, yeah, in the off-season, this restaurant kind of just turns into like a burger place or whatever.

Cause it's like the clientele completely changes. Like that's how life is.
And some of them might not even, they're just like, yeah, in October, we close. It's close.
Nobody here is employed

between October and I'm thinking because I know the Adirondacks best and the Adirondacks has this thing of like in the summer, it's like this summer crowds, right?

Boating and whatever, water skiing and hiking. And then in the winter, it's snowmobilers is the people who like are in there in the winter.
And like that's an entirely different clientele.

Like they don't, yeah. Anyway, snowmobilers.

Not to skip too far ahead, but I think that class thing, I really noticed at this time when Brody's wife, he's about to get on the boat with Quint and Quinn is singing the rhyme about virginity.

Like, you know, the old, you you know, the kind of sea shanty rhyme or whatever. Yeah.
In that you kind of see how annoying he could be to the community.

And her reaction is like, it seems filled with, not only is my husband going to go out on a boat to try to find a killer shark that could kill him, he is also terrified of water.

I don't know when he's going to be back. And also, he's going to be on the boat with this fucking guy.
This fucking guy.

This fucking guy who's talking about a 15-year-old losing his virginity, which is pretty remarkable in this facility. Is it really going to be playing Rogan all day on the boat? Yes.

Shire's going to come back and be like, You made some interesting points.

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You've also got Hooper. And with Hooper, we have this, to me, classic Spielberg sequence where it's like, let's have him find the dead body of the fisherman in the most fun.

way possible for you know the audience is kind of relaxing for like an undersea moment right where they're like this is like an exploration moment, not like a Jaws moment, right?

And then like his head pops out and his eyes gazing out. Unbelievable.
And everyone like jumps, right? Screams. And then to me, most importantly, laughs.

Like the whole audience laughs because they're just like, oh, he got us again. I'd say it's also the only image in the movie that like goes into full like EC Comics.

Yeah. You know, like horror.
It's more like, right, Cormany in a way, too. It's like more R-rated.
This film is hilariously rated PG, which is funny because it has like news.

This one wasn't the one that created PG movies. No, that's more like raiders.
It's more like Temple of Doom, Gremlins, mid-80s.

Back then, it was just kind of like, look, there's R-rated movies, there's PG, which is basically like, I don't know, bring your kids if you want to.

And R-rated movies were like, say, for just if a film mentioned communism, that would get an off-rate. Right.
It's like, this film has divorce in it. Rated R.
Right.

You know, like something like that. Right.

But you put both of them. John, it's like, yeah, tits and blood, PG.
That's the funniest thing. You put tits in a movie, and people will be like, well, I guess it can't be G.
Right.

And then, right, yeah, exactly. Like Lawrence of Arabia.
They're like, yeah, it's probably a G. Who cares?

I don't know. Like, there are some movies that are G.
Like, I think like Star Trek the Motion Picture is a G. Like, there's things like that where they were just kind of like, I don't know.

I didn't see anything too crazy happen. I guess it's a G.
It is wild how few G movies there are now where PG has basically become G. Yeah, because now even that doesn't exist that much.

Now, like, Peril qualifies you for like a PG or whatever. I don't know.
Yeah, like Paw Patrol is PG because, you know, it runs the risk of making that. That turtle.
That's what I'm saying.

It's on the edge of falling off the bridge.

That moment, even last night when I was watching it, I had forgotten it was coming and I jumped. I like actually.
It's a great idea. It's the best jump.
His one eye is floating

along with his head and a bunch of fucking maggots. Right.
But the question is.

Was he so scared that his eye popped out of his head? Yeah. Because how else did it get out? That's his fright feature.
I think some, you know, some fishies might have been nibbling on it. Oh, sure.

It loosened it up a little bit. Well, that's head cannon, David.
You can't support that. Yep.

I mean, I guess you're not like relaxed in that sequence. He is exploring a wreck or whatever.
You just don't think that's going to happen. No.

I like that there's this sort of like escalation to the frenzy of the shark becoming a fun thing because it starts to be perceived as like a potential winning lottery ticket for the locals. Right.

Are you in a way of sort of like, are you tough tough enough? In a way, right? Yeah. Like when, when Quince looked to his son, like, go in the lagoon, please.

He's like, no, that's for like old ladies. Like, I don't want to go there.

This is where I'm like, it's, it's the shit that like reminded me so much of the various stages of like the fucking COVID experience where there's this thing of like, oh, what?

So are you one of these guys who's fucking scared? You're going to wear a mask in public?

You know, like that whole kind of thing where you're like, there are these like dueling public narratives of how we should respond to this that then becomes like a reflection on the individual and everyone getting in their head of like, what do I want to project to others?

I want to throw out a couple moments that I had.

Two things that I really liked. One was a sort of character, one for the wife, who is sort of eventually, especially once they get out on the water, sort of forgotten.

But I do like the moments she has leading up to that. At one point, I think when

Hooper comes over to the house,

he says, Is your husband home? I'd really like to talk to him. And she says, So would I.

And I like that that's just a very simple moment that we don't really dwell on, but it's clear he's been in his fucking head and not with him with a son.

It's such an important reset moment for the movie.

And I feel like it's infamously one of those things that Spielberg kind of just discovered on set. There was no moment like that in the script.

And what could just be a scene of like fucking Brody being inconsolable after this child death becomes this like

he needs to keep going moment. You have this small moment of humanity and human connection in a way where like his wife can't reach him because she's trying to talk to him like an adult.
Yeah.

And she is like too deep in grief. Yeah.
But his son just mirroring his face is kind of just breaks through him. Oh, it's so great.
Yeah.

And I also love he says something at one point where it's like,

Hooper says, like, why do you live on an island if you're so scared of the water? And he says it only looks like an island if you look at it from the water. That's true.
I don't know why.

I mean, I just really. I love that.
I mean, but it's so true. Like, so many people who live, I feel like in an island community, it's like, I don't learn to swim.
Like, that's where I don't go.

I live in the islands. Like, not

land.

Anyway. Right.
This is, we're now, we're about to transition into the mega final act, like, the last hour of the movie. Just call out because she's about to disappear for the rest of the movie.

Lorraine Gary. Lorraine Gary.
The wife of Sidney Sheinberg. Who was the president of Universal at the time?

Yes, sure.

And then she becomes the main connective tissue through all the films. She's in Jaws one, two, and four.
Okay. She's not in three.

Four is her fun. Revenge is her final film role.
Okay. And that was like a, I think a small role.
Like, cause she had basically, basically.

The son is played by a different actor in every movie, right? Because Dennis Quaid is him in three, and Lance Guest from Last Starfighter, I think, is him in Revenge. I don't know.
Okay.

That's basically fucking

a bunch of TV. Jesus Christ, Griffin.
But her movie roles are Jaws.

She has a tiny role in Car Wash. She's in I Never Promise You, A Rose Garden in some sort of mid-sized role.

She's in a comedy called Zero to 60 with a tiny role.

Then she's in Jaws 2

1941. Wow.

And then a George Burns movie called Just You and Me, Kid. And then she retires.
Also, kind of like a return. She comes back for Jaws from the Revenge.
Jaws of the Revenge is sort of like a hat tip.

Yes, right.

It also kind of feels like the name of every George Burns movie. I don't.
Yeah, just you and me, Karen. Just you and me, kid.

But she's kind of talking. I mean, like, as much as, right, she's sort of this odd kind of nefo-e hire, she is, she's good.
She's very effective in the movie. Yeah, I agree.

I think she's incredibly good. Yeah.

But yes, okay. Like after the final that's sequenced with the kids pretending to be the shark and then like the Jaws actually shows up at the other end.

And another like cut out the fucking shoe leather thing that like, you know. We don't see the aftermath of that.
We get that.

Well, you have your scene with Brody and the mayor where he has his unraveling of like, my son was on that beach. Like, it finally hits him.

He doesn't become like quote unquote a good guy, but he also was never coded as just simply a bad guy.

But he's like starting a process enough that Brody just goes, like, you have to give me the money. Right.
We're going to hire Quint. We're going to go get the ship.

And then jump straight to basically, we're getting on the boat. But it's like the whole movie has been

the holding back on activating Quint. And he's just like, give me the fucking cash.
Hard cut to. So I recently re-listened to the interstellar episode you guys did.

I talk about this a lot on the interstellar episode, right? How it jumps from, not JAWS, but like how it jumps from, this is a big point for me about what's so brilliant about interstellar. Yes.

From, you know, are you going to like here, you've figured out what we're doing here at NASA to the things taking off. Yeah.
Yes. Yes.

And like there's no like prep or like, here, meet everybody or here's what it's like. It jumps from him driving off in the car crying to the rocket.
The rocket fucking rocket shooting rolls.

And even though they do a little bit of, you know, I think they have the moment that we were talking about with the rhyme. I think that might be after the sale.
Sure, sure, sure.

But there is that moment sort of through the pier when it, like it is sort of zooming slowly in on the ocean. And it reminded me of that interstellar thing because it was like, it is undeniable now.

Yes. The movie has to go to the ocean and it is sort of pulling you out.
underneath the pier. You were sort of leaving the safety of land and going out into the water.

And very soon after that, we were just out on the water. Obviously, Spielberg was right in that you do feel like you're out on the open ocean.
And it does feel different.

You feel like you're in a new environment. Totally.
But also, like, how many fucking movies and scripts do you read where you're like, why is this scene in it?

Outside of some feeling that it must be in there? You know, like this notion of, I guess, you got to show how this happens.

And you're like, but in reality, showing that scene does not give the audience any new information and it's not entertaining.

It's like the William Goldman thing of like, don't show someone trying to hail a cab. Right.
Like, they either put their hand out and a cab arrives because you need them to get in a cab, right?

Or you're writing a scene about how hard it is to hail a cab, in which case, that better be pretty pivotal to the point you're writing. Right.

Like, I don't need two minutes of someone being like, oh my God, you know, like, you know, like, you know, just obviously, like, you're allowed to break the laws sometimes.

Like, he puts his hand out, he gets a cab. But also, like, fucking

Quint feels like the inevitable. Yeah, you're right.
And now we spent this long avoiding, but now we're with them, right? Just now we're in his world, yes.

And now, uh, they're both Cooper is kind of trying to prove himself to Quentin, like you say. And Brody is kind of like, now I'm stuck on this fucking boat.
I'm like, I'm landman. I hate this.

I hate this. And like the chum moment that we already talked about with Jaws popping out, he's complaining about like, he's like, I know how to drive a boat.
I can like go full ahead or whatever.

Like, and then, you know, instead, I'm doing this shit. And then, of course, that's when Jaws is like, by the way, yes.
Hello.

I do love, just to jump back one last second, but the last pre-boat thing I want to call out: the whole like narrative cul-de-sac around the guys successfully catching the shark and everyone doing basically like the full parade being the like George Bush mission accomplished thing of like, we are telling you that we have defeated the problem.

And Brody and Hooper both just being like, well, Hooper recognizing the bite circumference is wrong, saying it's

Brody relaying it. Like it's such a good, oh, this is the moment that these two guys are going to be inextricably linked.
Yeah.

That they share this and no one else listens, and they're the only two who are concerned and won't accept this.

And I also love that whoever's taking the picture basically says, get out of the picture, nerd. Yeah, you're fucking this up.
You're fucking this up.

Get out of there because he's still trying to measure the fucking bite. And they're like, get out.
Right.

But you're right. You cut to the high seas, and it's like the movie immediately feels so different.

Yeah. And also now, like, where Straw is controlling the tone of the film.
He is as an actor, which is what makes the performance so seismic. Right.

And a sort of a crucial point is when he like smashes the radio because he's like, no, no, like this is me taking on this shark. We're not calling the Coast Guard or whatever.

Because what should happen is, right, someone just comes in and like machine guns this thing. Like it's like a, it's a, this is a problem shark.
This is not a regular situation.

It's a great white shark. It is a great white shark.
It's a fantastic white shark.

I do kind of love when, right at the beginning, you see how nervous they are when basically like quint is basically just treating this like any other fishing trip yeah he's just like ripping beers and

like he's got an actual fucking fishing pole also their plan is just like put chum around the shark will show up and we shoot harpoons at it and right like they don't have like a complex plan really but he's gonna try and catch it with the giant fishing pole at some point

another plan

cooper's plan is like i'll inject it with strychnine where it's like what and also like i mean brody has like a very cop plan at one point when he's just like, what if I just shoot at it?

What if I just unload it? It just for, like, I don't know how people deal with sharks.

I'm not a shark expert, but it just kind of suggests to me that, right, no one really has a foolproof, like, shark problem. Here's your shark solution.

Yeah, Brody's treating it like somebody was trying to hop the turnstile in the fucking subway. Well, and Quinn has this very interesting strategy.

His sort of whole approach to shark killing is: I watched all of my friends get eaten by sharks across three days, and now I'm insane.

Right? Like it is what is so great about the monologue is it kind of explains him in a way that also doesn't feel too neat because you're like, oh, this is his backstory. This is why it's personal.

Right. This is why this guy has devoted his life.
But also you're like, oh, but this guy also lost his mind in this moment.

He's not just got like a regular problem with sharks because they eat people. He's got a really, really big thing about sharks.
Right.

And it's like kind of the only thing that makes him happy is to watch a shark die

like that's my read on it isn't like for every shark i kill i bring back the spirit of one of my friends like there's no like mental calculation he's also not like i really want the good people of amity to like be able to go to the brains those fucking people yes he sings dirty limericks at them from his boat and like too too many and demands apricot brandy and sings bad songs simply to make them uncomfortable like you know me you know what I do.

Like, yeah, you go fucking crazy all the time about sharks. Dare I say it, Tim?

Does Robert Shaw's performance as Quinton Shaws remind you at all of a... And I think you should leave sketch? There is kind of a Tim Robinson energy

here. Which one, though? Demanding apricot brandy.

Doing things his own way.

Are we going to, can we try to get that back? I just

fucking ball and run with it. Which fucking sketch, sketch, though, it's not jumping out to me.
This is the thing.

The first one I jump to is the Tim Heidecker charade sketch, but that's not even Tim Robinson.

But I do feel like there's that kind of like bullheadedness. Yeah, but that's still, that's a very different type.
David, this is a software session.

Are we doing this just to annoy David? Because if so, it's annoying.

It's annoying. I find it quite annoying.

No, no, no. But no, here's the Carson Daly argument.
Here's the reason that this doesn't work.

The Tim Robinson thing really is something that a lot of of people independently bring up especially about george c scott and doctor strange law yeah i do think we were kind of the first ones to bring it up

but i think you're kind of forcing it on this one like tim robinson feels pretty organic pretty natural

one thing it's almost this weirdly this robert shaw performance

is almost like when he does those two monologues is almost so grounded yeah that you can't put the tim robinson thing on it i'm not saying maybe it's too small a slice because there's a there's a certain energy to which he imbues that with the feeling of it being the most important thing in the world.

And then he also dies a shocking death.

Spoilers for I think you should leave. You know what? It's the too small slice.
It is. It's too small a slice.

Robert Shaw is kind of ripping off too small a slice in these.

Yeah. They use too small a slice.
David is fully just like checking your nails. Is that scene where Robert Shaw eats the gift receipt?

For the Apricot brandy. Yeah.

And then he makes Brody, like Hooper does like the scientific thing where he makes he eats one and then he eats the other one. He's like, no, he touched it.

So I thought Branch is just really funny. It really is.
He's like a whole case. Like, how long are they going out there? This dude's going to drink out.
He's never coming back. He's never coming out.

How long are they out there? Just a night, two nights? What are we talking about? I don't know, but that's what I love. I love that it's like, it becomes abstract.

And also, like, in some of the reverse shots of the boat, like later on, they're like kind of not that far out. Like, you can see the island.
Yes.

Well, because I think shark attacks and stuff happen close, obviously, close to shore because people don't go that far out. Yeah.
Yeah.

I want to throw out a shot that is just incredible of Robert Shaw on the pulpit with the sun behind him,

which just again, like, it's an unbelievable

just doesn't have to go that hard, and it does. Let's just say,

more generally, this is one of the all-time great movie looks. Yes.

Quince is just like a perfect looking character. Sure.
And a lot of it is like Robert Shaw's face, his like captivating eyes. Big nose.
Yes. But then like

the facial hair, the outfits. The fucking hat with like the weirdest bend in the brand.
Yeah, the kind of very, the peak. Yes.
But it's like off-center and like a really sharp angle.

There's the Indianapolis monologue, obviously. I mean, the shark cave sequence is incredibly exciting.
The freaking fishing. and it's thrilling somehow.
Fishing's not thrilling.

But, like, the long sequence of Shaw setting up the fishing line while

no one's really paying attention to what he's doing. Bro, to get behind me.
Oh, yeah. When it's just like the little clicks of the thing.
Yeah. And that belt, his whole harness.
Yeah.

I love that shit. The barrel thing we mentioned, obviously, is sort of a brilliant workaround that just like sort of makes the movie better.
They introduced the idea to do it. It was explosive.

He's going to do it. We'll get to it.
The pressure tanks. Oh, yeah.

he pulled the wrong uh pulled the wrong side of like the sheep shank or whatever right and then it like we established that the tanks are explosive right what am i going to do it's jaws they kill the shark what do you want from me i mean

it is true it's a shark it eats him what do you want well because there is the barrels

it's true that there is only so because like in the book Both everyone in the book, everyone except for Brody dies. Yes.
So Richard Dreyfus, Hooper dies too. It is in the book, they just

love like this in Jurassic, where in both cases, you're like the character who dies in the book. Let's have him make it to the end.
And they're the same character. Same sort of version of the.

You're right. You're right.
Right.

But in the book, also,

they just sort of wound the shark enough that it finally dies. It's a little underwhelming.
And Spielberg was like, I think we should explode the shark. Really good idea.

You know what else is great about it? Smile, you son of a bitch. Sure.
But also, I feel in the movie a catharsis to them blowing up this fucking thing. I mean, the blow up.
The filmmakers. Right.

Where they're like,

they never have to work with that thing again. Right.
To be like fucking picture wrap on shark, done.

100%.

The obviously an underrated, but such crucial little choice. And I'm not saying that we're done talking, but I'm just, you know, it's, it's.

Not just that they blow up the shark, but then that they paddle home afterwards like nice little boys, letting the audience kind of go like,

okay,

you know, like, you know, as you're walking out, you're not just walking out with like, Jesus Christ, I'm so rattled, like, but there is this sort of like sweetness.

But there's that final shot, and you're like, oh my God, they're paddling back up onto Lamb. We're going to see like Brody reunite with his wife.
We're going to see the mayor apologize. Right.

It's like, no, no, no. And then very

surprising when credits start to fade in over that image. Right.

And it's just like a nice shot of the island. Yeah.

You don't even like see them paddling onto the beach and then walking off. It's just like, oh, here's a nice shot of the island.

I think it's made clear enough. We've made enough references for guest availability, recording order, timing scheduling stuff.
This and Jurassic are the two we recorded very close together. True.

Out of order. Two very famous movies.
But also, they are so paired. They are.
And even like, I feel like Jurassic does this same thing of like, end the movie once they're getting away. Right.

You know, like all you need to see is just that they like, they got back. Right.
Right. Like this ends with they made it back to land.
That ends with they're in the helicopter.

You don't need to like fucking resolve any of these threats. Yes.
Right. No, we're going to, we will figure all that out with ease, right? Yeah.
Yeah.

The, I like in that scene around the table where Quint and Hooper are finally getting their Hopper or Hooper? Hooper? Hooper. Hooper.
I may have said Hopper earlier. Sure.
The

oh fuck. Sorry, guys.
Really embarrassing.

I like it when he like offhand in in one of like, you know, they're telling all all these war stories about how they got their scars or whatever that then leads to the big monologue.

But at one point, Quint says something about, like, I got this one when I was out celebrating my third wife's demise.

Yeah. Like, that's just the lead-in to one of those stories.
And then I like that Hooper gets him with the

Mary Ellen heartbroken right here. Like,

that Quint really likes that. He likes a good joke.

It is great to see after all the like, you know, you got city hands too busy counting money all your life. Again, like the class thing between them.

To see them bond. To see them get along is really amazing.
Yes. Yeah, the singing together.
Yeah. But it's good that Quint doesn't make it, I think.
This is how Quint should go.

He should get eaten by the biggest shark there ever was. Yeah.
You know what I mean? Like. To a certain degree, it does feel like this guy has been waiting for the release.

Like, it's part of what makes his performance so incredible is that it doesn't fall into like maniacally laughing with joy, like finally,

but it does feel like it's a sense of inevitability. Why does this guy hunt sharks?

Because the only way he can still get hard is to kill a fucking shark, but also he just knows that someday a shark's going to catch. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like he should have died then. Right.

He should have died then and he didn't. So he's got it.
It's broken beyond repair. Yeah.

What are you looking up, Griffin?

I'll save it for if I pull it out in time.

He goes out fighting, too. We got to honor that.
True, yes. That's true.
He grabs that machete and he's like, yeah. Yeah, it doesn't do much.
The shark eats him. Yeah.

I mean, that whole moment of the shark eating him, while also incredibly terrifying, is just really well played.

In that, like, even with all of the inevitability of it, with him being like, I'm just intentionally putting myself in situations in which I could get killed by a shark because that's how I should have died.

He is still like, this sucks. I am terrified that this, and I'm trying to make sure this shark doesn't eat me.
Yes. Yes.
Yes. Yes.

Oh, one more little magical thing, David. Yes.
You know what? We're doing great, man. We're doing an incredible good job.
Yeah.

So there's a moment where

Brody is in the foreground and Hooper's up on the top, up on the bridge behind them, and a fucking meteor streaks behind them,

which is

a thing that I think is the kind of magical shit that happens on a set that means you are going to make a movie that will will last forever. You know what I mean? Oh, sure.
You can't plan for that.

You can't, whatever. It's like at the end of Barton Fink, where the shot that they use for the last shot is when that, like that, the bird dives straight down into the ocean.
Right. Like not planned.

It just happened and it happened to be framed perfectly. And now the movie's legendary.
I think that that meteor is the kind of thing. It's like, even if you could put that in post,

you wouldn't think to be like, well, what if a meteor was streaking behind them? It just happened and it's fucking magic. Yes.
Yeah. Yes.
And, you know, you shoot 150 days.

You're about to end up getting a couple miracles. You kind of get a couple of free ones.

I was talking to a friend of the show, Alex Ross Perry, about just the state of Lega sequels and reboots, and especially through the horror prism, right? I mean, the sort of like...

shift from franchises go on forever to the 2000s we need to reset all these franchises to modern sensibilities to now the we need to return to the original timeline of franchises and bring everyone out for one final go-round.

And I think we were talking about this in relation to like the failure of the Blumhouse exorcist experiment

and like, is there anything that is still sacred? Is there anything that is actually never going to be touched?

And he put forth Jaws. He's like, Jaws feels like the one thing, but everyone's like, you can't do it.
And I said, isn't that so funny when there are three Jaws sequels?

Yeah, but there's another one that's like that. What? E.T., yeah.
The thing is, like, it's kind of Spielberg movies. And Indiana Jones exited that, but everything else kind of didn't.
Yes. Yeah.

Now, even like, there is one of my least favorite films of the last decade, that insane E.T.

Super Bowl commercial that was like seven minutes long and brought Henry Thomas back and was quote-unquote sanctioned by Spielberg to some degree, where I was a little astonished, where it's like, obviously, like Spielberg will parody Jaws himself.

Other people do it, whatever. But I was like, I know it doesn't count.
It's not a movie. I was like, how dare you rebuild the puppet for this? Yeah.

There is like a purity to ET only existing on camera one time

in this one time period. But it is interesting.
It's something I've thought about a lot, where something I think about the fact that they made three Jaws sequels.

the second one was successful, though, with a major drop-off. The third one had an even bigger drop-off.
The fourth one got to the point where it was like, people hate this and it bombed.

Where there was this feeling of like, oh, they made three. They made some money off of it.
No one fucking thinks about them again.

Basically, only like Jaws dorks who like have the cultural memory of living through them and are fasting with them as curios.

It does feel like there's this collective sort of amnesia of like, Jaws is a perfect movie that exists in a vacuum.

There

I wonder if part of this is like to what we were talking about right when we first started that it is in a way sort of so timeless and so perfect.

If you were going to remake it, you might think like, oh, we have to put more blood and gore into it. But in a way, that shit is already there.

The child exploding. The other thing the guy's leg hitting the bottom of the ocean.
Like it's horrifying. You can just make a shark movie.
which they do.

And that's sort of the thing with the Exorcist. Like, just make an exorcist movie.
It doesn't have to be the Exorcist movie. That's the thing I found interesting.

I don't know if JJ got into this at the dossier at all, but they obviously immediately wanted to do a sequel and fast-track it. Right.

And Spielberg was kind of like, I don't want to fucking go back and do that shit again. And they were like, okay, cool.

And like two times they circled back to the idea of doing the quaint Indianapolis movie. Right.
Right. Which makes some sense.
Which in certain ways you're like, is that worth unpacking?

Isn't it better to let it live as the monologue? But on the other hand, you read about the other three movies and you're like, that probably would have been the smarter way to go.

But it would have been quite a nasty movie.

Right. Yeah.
Yes.

Jaws was a very big success at the box office.

It was the biggest success ever of movies at that time. Yes.

Do you know this, Ben, that Jaws basically invented the wide release? Right. And now, of course, what we think of as a wide release, it was only like 480 theaters or whatever.

But this was the first time.

Now, the Godfather had kind of started that a little bit, like started that concept, not the opening weekend, but the like, let's go wide fast and it'll make a lot of money. Right.

But Jaws is like, let's open wide. Jaws is the like the square one of opening weekend box office culture.
Yes. It's the beginning of everything.
There are earlier movies in the box office game. Yeah.

But this is the first one where it's like, there is a business being built around marketing blitz telling people this movie will be playing in every state on this day. Wow.

And you want to be there opening weekend. What was that accidental? Was it

creating the idea of a summer blockbuster? Universal was very, very focused in their strategy.

This was a brilliantly executed release outside of Spielberg or whatever. Universal

invented a new kind of release. They did unprecedented national TV spends for advertising.
That had never been done before. There is.

toys, sort of like beach towels, blankets, board games, things like that. For the listener, David dismissively gestured in Griffin's direction.

You probably could hear that, but I just want to say it.

The film made $100 million, which no movie had ever done.

The Godfather was the record holder at $86 million. Jaws beat it.

What was the Jaws budget?

The listed budget, I think, is like $9 million. It may have been gone over that.

I think I read that Jaws 2 ended up costing $30 million, which was the most expensive movie by a significant margin at that point in time.

But Jaws 2 Reads like almost had an even more disastrous production. But yes, it does feel like

Robert Evans was sort of using Godfather as this guinea pig of like, is there a different way to release movies?

Is there a way to like maximize the money by like doing it front-loaded rather than the long-tail word-of-mouth thing?

And I think it was also tied to both of these things being based off of best-selling books and having some like, it is kind of a starting built-in IP culture and like this sort of shit.

But it did feel like Universal saw the Godfather thing, which happened in a much smaller way and was like, what if we committed all the fucking way to this?

And it also makes like the summer movie a thing, which obviously for this, it was tied into like, we should release this in the summer. It's a beach movie.
Right.

This is, this might just be ignorance on my end. Were all movies at that point released in the way that we see like movies like Oscar plays?

They would just be like, release them in a city, word of mouth, and they would bring it to Cleveland.

And that's like road shows, exactly, but much smaller releases and right, like a very slow spreading over weeks.

Yes. Yes.
Yeah. Well, and like, you know, the movies would have their big premiere in New York, but the premiere would be a thing that people could buy tickets to.

That was sort of like what we now think of as like a roadshow screening where there was like a pamphlet and you had, there's a dress code, but you're seeing it at one of the big grand Broadway single screen movie palaces along with the stars.

And that would be the press of like, this movie is premiering. And then you read it in your Wichita paper and you're like, I wonder when it's coming here, you know?

And it was less of a coordinated, oh, it's slowly expanding market to market, and more like, when is your local theater negotiating to get a print of this movie?

There was not the same sort of set intentionality. Godfather started to build in the intentionality, but it wasn't opening weekend.
It was building a little bit.

And then when are we going to go super wide and tell people Godfather is everywhere? Film opened June 20th, 1975.

Number one at at the box office. Wow.
Number two at the box office is a sequel, Griffin. Number two at the box office.
It's a comedy sequel. It's in 1975.
It's a comedy sequel.

Yes, it is the fourth in a series. It is the fourth.
In a long, unwieldy series. In a long, unwieldy series.
How many did they make in total? God damn it.

New Year's Eve of this year.

It will no longer be the year.

This is a weird series, Griffin. It's hard to explain, but I think it's nine, technically.
You think it's nine, but it's

not always the same star. It's not always the same.
Oh, it's a fucking Clouseo movie. Yes.
It's just the fourth. Is it the Pink Panther Strikes Again? No, it is the return of the Pink Panther.

The Pink Panther Strikes Again is the fifth. Out, oh, only four.
And this is the one with Sellers returning because he wasn't in the film.

Despite playing that character,

this film was a major commercial hit

and had been number one for, I think, several weeks. Big franchise.
Yes.

So that's number two. Number three is a new Hollywood film.
We mentioned it. It got an Oscar nomination for two

or two, but not one of the best picture nominees. No, it was not a best picture nominee.

Very, like, just a prototypical new Hollywood movie. Got acting nominations? Yeah.
Yeah. Shampoo.
Shampoo. Shampoo.
Right.

That's just like the most new Hollywood movie where you're like, what's it about? And it's like, I don't know. Warren Beatty fucks people and it's like kind of about Richard Nixon.
Right.

It's like, but really, it's like about a horny hairdresser. And you're like, what's it based on? You're like, kind of John Peters, but also just Beatty fucking the actresses in the movie.

Warren Beatty. It's like an Orosporos.

Number four at the box office is a roadie drama, Rode drama. A road drama.
Never seen it, but starring a famous sort of road actor, I would say.

He's on other like Rode movies. He's an other road movie.

no i'm not sure how hell full of a clue that is huh it's not a burt reynolds no no no it's not that famous okay huh is it dennis hopper no no jeez it's not steve mcqueen less famous less famous less famous lesson he's in movies we've covered he's in movies we've covered like car movies is it paul lamat paul lamat it's a lamatte picture yes and it's a roadie drama am i not gonna know the title i don't know i sort of know the title i've never seen the film what's it called aloha bobby and road don't know the title yeah i just know that title because it's kind of a famous title, the weird-sounding title.

But I don't think it's like a well-liked movie. Sure.
Number five at the box office is a classic like Quentin Tarantino-y movie,

like a crazy sort of exploitation film that people forgot about. And he sort of references it, Rolling Thunder.
No, that's probably one of the most famous versions of that.

Can you give me a sub-genre of exploitation? It's like a historical.

It's not the original In Glorious Bastard. No.

It's historic. He's referencing it more in Django.
He's referencing it more in Django. It's not Mandingo.
It's Mandingo. It's Mando.
It's Mandingo.

Yeah.

Yeah, I would say he's referencing that film mostly. Quite a lot.
Django Unchained. Quite a lot in Django.
If I'm thinking across his film on the show. You weren't going to get it otherwise.

No, no, no, no.

David, I wasn't critiquing the hint. Now, other movies, you've got the Tony Curtis movie Lepke, which I've never seen, where he plays this famous Jewish-American gangster.

Sort of a forgotten movie directed by Minahem Golan, the film producer. Oh, weird.
Never seen it. Yeah.
You've got Woody Allen's Love and Death,

which is

one of his early funny ones, if you guys have ever heard that phrase before. Yes.

You've got Torso.

What is that? Huh?

What is that?

It's the top part of your body. Okay.
It looks like an Italian Jallo movie. Yeah, sort of like top part, sort of like waist to chest.

Yeah, you've got torso is an early Jallo that's like a slasher movie. Okay.
You've got The Wind and the Lion.

What is that?

John Milius movie. Oh, yeah.
Yes, Sean Connery movie. I've never seen that.
That's the prequel to the

Killian Murphy movie. The Barley.

We all had a version. Yeah.
And then you have...

Jesus.

I was also going to do The Lion, The Witch of the Wardrobe.

And then number 10 is a movie called The Groove Tube, which is like a low-budget comedy with Chevy Chase. Absolutely.
Yeah. Never seen that.
And Bells, the Bells is in it. Yeah.
Bells are.

That's his first movie, Chevy.

Right, because this is a crazy

4

type of thing.

Well, SNL 75.

1975. Yeah.
Right. Of course.
SNL 75, right? Yeah.

But yeah, like, I mean, a fun mix of stuff. Not exactly a bunch of masterpieces, I will say.
No. Jaws kind of bursting into, I guess, a sleepier time of year.

And this is sort of inventing the summer movie, too. Yeah.
Now,

what does it ultimately make, Jaws? It's sort of hard. I think it's like 130 in the initial run.
It's had many re-releases and stuff. It's like total now is it would get re-released every year.
Right.

But it holds the record until Star Wars. Holds the record until Star Wars, which and Star Wars is beaten by E.T.
and then they kind of trade off for years with re-releases until Jurassic Park. Yes.

Yes. And then Titanic.
Yes. Well, and then Star Wars re-release sneaks back up there for six months before Titanic knocks it off.
Yeah. Bit silly.
And now it's currently First Avatar or Second Avatar?

Isn't it now, once again, the First Avatar Avengers End game? Had it for a while, but then Avatar took it back? Yes, but domestically it's still Force Awakens. Okay.
I'm going to pee.

I'm going to have to run out of here. Before you pee.
Yes. Saturday, May 11th, letterboxed the group chat.
Tim Simons. Which is the name of our chat with the wonderful Tim Simons.

There's a separate chat we have with Sean Fantasy called News and Deals. Which I always laugh when you talk about every time we text on that thread, I have had one less sex.

You said that on Fair Show. Very, very good.

Tim Simons. Who has a recommendation for a movie that is like National Treasure, but isn't National Treasure? David, like a family adventure film?

Tim, yes, kind of grown-ups so they will feel like grown-ups, but not insane scary. David, Mask of Zorro.
David, oh, Tim, did I tell you my wife is pregnant with twin boys?

Tim, all caps. What? David, yeah, dude.
Tim, wait, is this true? Oh my God, congratulations. David sends picture for John Identical.
We don't know.

Tim says, oh my God, I can't wait to hear twin dad David in the second hour of a three and a half hour podcast about blue chips where Griffin is talking about the Wendy's soda cup tie-ins for some movie he hated when he was 11.

And David responds, the most devastatingly accurate text I have ever received. Griffin, that's beautifully done.

And it beautifully sets up me running out of the studio in five seconds when I'm about to go pee.

My man, good luck is what Tim says. See, that wasn't such a bad reaction though.
No idea. Other people have told me like, oh yeah, that'll ruin your life forever.
Yes. I was trying to be gentle.

Tim, anything you want to plug?

I would just, I've actually, like, so short answer is like, no, like, I always, like, whenever it comes time to plug things, I'm always just like, I don't know, like, follow me on Instagram because I don't do it a lot, but I usually put the stuff that's happening on there.

I kind of don't want to plug anything, but also I have heard it's good to plug a podcast when you are on a podcast. So I do a podcast with Matt Walsh called Second in Command.

We were a VBrewatch podcast, but we have completed that endeavor. And now we have moved on to doing movies that only have presidents or vice presidents in them because we enjoy each other's company.

And even though it is financially, well, largely unsuccessful, we still really enjoy doing it. So you can listen to that, which is a podcast.
There's a link in the episode description. Oh, thank you.

We're all going to be on it. Yeah, you guys will eventually.
You may have, by the time this comes out, you may have been on it. Maybe.
Maybe. Maybe.
Yes, we called our shots.

Yes, the president in Beavis and Butthead to America.

Probably. I don't know.

Bill Clinton.

That is the kind of thing that will fit the

bat. Yes, it's a broad purview.
Tim, thank you for being here. You're the best.
You guys are the best. I love you so much.
Love you so much, Tim. Next week on the show, let's see.

Steven Spielberg follows up Jaws with just kind of like a small kind of one for him. Oh, no, he makes close encounters.
Do do. Yeah.
Yeah. Right.
Yeah. Close encounters.
Yeah.

And coming up on the Patreon in a few days, we have, of course, the second installment in our Jelly miniseries. We have Mickey Blue Eyes.
That's wild. It's wild to think about a future.

We'll soon be in where that is happening. That's true.

Yeah. Stay tuned for that.

Thank you again for being here, Tim. And as always,

my pleasure. I'm fucking getting out of here.
I've got twins to get back home to.

Is that because you have to take two shits? Yeah.

All right. That was good.
I got to drop off twins. I was trying to figure out a steel book joke, but that's way better.

Can I just say, David,

I like to think about the years that, like around New Year's, like January 1st or January 2nd, I like to think about the thing that I will miss most about that particular year.

And

there was a like, there was one year where I saw a play called Wakey Wakey on Broadway that, or no, it was off Broadway that Will Eno wrote. And it was like a very profound experience.

And I've heard of it. Yeah.
And like, I think it was 2018.

And I remember at the end of 2018, I was like, I'm very sad that this year is ending because this will no longer be the year that I saw Wakey Wakey.

And I remember that the end of 2022, I thought to myself, I'm sad that this year is ending because it will no longer be the year that I saw David get so disappointed he had to do ad reads after we had talked about the shining for three hours.

The level. We're not doing ad reads today.

The level.

Not going to fucking happen.

The way you fell, your entire body, your entire voice was like, I can't believe I now have to keep talking. And it was like, it was a really beautiful, honest moment.

I'm just going to say something, though. I think Jaws, we will not talk for about Jaws as long, not because Jaws isn't a big movie,

just because it's,

you know, it doesn't go as deep as The Shining. Like, that's not an offense to Jaws.
Ben, you're already recording. Right.
Like, I feel like this is kind of a thing to consider. All right.

Do your own. Just keep all of this in at the end of the episode.

Yeah, okay. Three and a half hours.
No, no, no. I'm joking.
But definitely keep all that in at the end of the episode. Okay, right here.