Small Details You May Have Missed In Jaws

Director Steven Spielberg made his reputation early not just for delivering meat-and-potatoes thrills but for producing some of the most technically sophisticated filmmaking to ever come out of Hollywood. You can see it all the way from his work on the first episode of "Columbo," where his joy at doing everything he possibly can with a crane shot is downright infectious, to the camerawork in "West Side Story" that seems to dance right along with the characters.

But what makes this entertaining instead of just insufferably show-offy? Well, for one thing, Spielberg's camera tricks are never there just for their own sake — they always serve the story and characters. For another, they have a way of sneaking up on you. It's hard to hard to call Spielberg a show-off when his technique is so unshowy you might miss it.

Take for instance the scene of Roy Scheider as Sheriff Richard Brody nervously watching the beach after trying and failing to get the mayor to shut it down after the first shark attack. It's a simple scene, just Brody's face and the bathers walking by in the foreground. But if you look closer, you'll find something much more complex. With the help of editor Verna Fields, Spielberg ratchets up the tension by pushing Brody closer and closer to us. But instead of showing off this bit of visual storytelling, he disguises it. Every time the camera cuts closer to Brody, it's obscured by a passing beachgoer, making the cuts almost invisible. Even in his 20s, Spielberg already knew one of the secrets of filmmaking: True mastery speaks for itself.

"Jaws" has returned to theaters in both IMAX and 3D formats. These upgrades make the movie more thrilling than ever — but they also reveal some seams that were easier to ignore before. Everyone knows the main shark looks fake. But the malfunctioning animatronic isn't the only weird-looking fish. We're talking about the tiger shark that's killed by some overeager fishermen. If you pay close attention to the animal, there are multiple moments where it looks off — too rubbery, too fake. So is this just another imposter?

Not exactly, but you're not wrong in thinking the shark looks weird. Believe it or not, that's a real tiger shark. "The Jaws Log" records how, with the art department busy with the main shark, the crew scrambled to get a real one to hang up on the dock. Universal's head of casting got ahold of some professional fishermen down in Florida who delivered a 13-footer. But then they started haggling on price, and even when the producers had that settled, there was still the matter of lugging the corpse to New England. Once they got it there, the shark started rotting fast. By the end of the four-day shoot, the makeup department had to touch it up heavily to keep it presentable — until the real shark looked faker than the fake shark.

Murray Hamilton as Mayor Larry Vaughn is the ultimate pushy politician and heartless capitalist all rolled up into one, stonewalling all of Brody's attempts to do his job and protect his neighbors from underwater dismemberment. He never comes out and says it, but the mayor seems to believe deep down that a few dead swimmers are a small price to pay for tourist dollars.

When a news crew shows up to cover Amity Island's big day on the 4th of July, the mayor shows just how badly skewed his priorities are and how much he's willing to delude himself and the public to maintain them. Listen carefully to what he tells the reporters, as he says, "I'm pleased and happy to repeat the news that we have, in fact, caught and killed a large predator that supposedly injured some bathers." 

Technically, being bitten in half counts as an injury, but Vaughn's careful not to admit anyone actually died. He can't even say that much outright — the most he'll admit is the shark was "supposedly" responsible. And then he immediately changes the subject to blather his usual tourist spiel and accidentally cop to the fatal error that will cost a man his life later that day. "But, as you see, it's a beautiful day, the beaches are open, and people are having a wonderful time. Amity, as you know, means 'friendship'"

Hooper and the Brodys are all outsiders in Amity, a community that maintains its idyllic image by ruthlessly excluding everyone from the mainland. One neighbor cheerfully tells Brody's wife, "You're not born here, you're not an islander, that's it."

Quint may or may not fit that definition of "islander" — Robert Shaw's thick British accent suggests he doesn't — but no matter what, he's an outsider in his own way. He represents a different side of Amity, far from the clean-cut middle-class characters who seem to dominate the island. Instead, he's what Hooper calls a "working-class hero," a remnant of a time when New England's economy was based on the dirty work of fishing instead of selling a sanitized version of itself to tourists. He says as much in his introduction. "Y'all know me. Know how I earn a livin'," he says, as if he's pre-empting their judgmental attitude. He pointedly continues that the islanders need him to kill the shark. "That'll bring back your tourists, put all your businesses on a payin' basis" — with the emphasis on "your," not "our."

But there's an even more vivid image of Quint's hardscrabble lifestyle when Hooper and Quint recruit him to hunt down the shark. The fisherman shows he's not afraid of getting his hands dirty, and we mean that literally. He's apparently in the middle of gutting a fish when the other two-thirds of his crew show up, and he doesn't even bother to wipe the blood off his hands and apron before handing Brody a drink.

Quint and Hooper are at each other's throats as soon as they meet, with the fisherman dismissing the scientist as a "city boy" and his fancy tools as useless. But if you're paying attention, you may notice that they're both fascinated with sharks for the same reason — trauma. 

If you're enough of a "Jaws" fan to get this far, you probably don't need us to summarize Quint's legendary USS Indianapolis monologue. But just in case, the most relevant part is that he watched his entire crew get eaten alive by sharks and spent days wondering if he'd be next. And yet he jumps at the opportunity to hunt down the shark, and that isn't even the first or 50th shark he's killed: His cabin is packed full of shark-tooth trophies.

It might be easier to miss, but Hooper has a similar backstory. When he visits the Brodys for dinner, he explains why he decided to study sharks, and it's the kind of experience that would keep most people far away from them. As a child, he'd hooked a baby shark on a fishing trip. Then he saw firsthand how vicious even the smallest sharks can be when, in his words, "[It] proceeded to eat my boat. ... he turned an inboard into an outboard, scared me to death, and I swam back to shore." Both men process their potentially traumatic experiences in different ways — Quint by killing sharks and Hooper by trying to understand them. But their fundamental motivation remains the same.

If there's one thing in "Jaws" that hasn't aged well, it's Bruce the animatronic shark. Fortunately, the beastie gets a couple of moments where he looks a lot more realistic — mainly because he's played by a real shark. Professional nature documentarians Ron and Valerie Taylor pitched in with some live shark footage, and we get our best look at their work in the scene where Hooper goes underwater in a cage to try and poison the killer shark with a drugged needle. 

One of those shots worked so well it saved Hooper's life. In Peter Benchley's original novel, the shark tears both Hooper and his cage apart. Joseph McBride's "Steven Spielberg: A Biography" reveals that one of the Taylors' shots was so good that Spielberg restructured the movie to fit it in. The book quotes producer William S. Gilmore's story of a phone call from Ron Taylor: "He [told] us he had just shot the best footage of his professional life. I said, 'Ron, that's great. Was the little guy in the cage?' He said no. My heart sank. 'Then it's unusable.'"

Spielberg disagreed, and the footage appeared in the final cut, with Hooper's reappearance at the end explaining he wasn't in the ruined cage because he escaped. The director even said, "The shark down in Australia rewrote the script and saved Dreyfuss' character."