Required Viewing 04: Jaws

We're in Wayne Media. We're in Wayne Media. None of man's fantasies of evil can compare with the reality of Jaws. But I'll catch him. I'll kill him.

Did you hear your father? Out of the water now! This shark? Swallow you whole. From the best-selling novel, Jaws, rated PG.

Maybe too intense for younger children. We're having a George Lucas. Wouldn't it be nice to know? He just never existed. Where are they now?

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Required Viewing, a sub-feed podcast within the CultureCast feed. I am the host of the CultureCast, Chris Tashew, and I am joined by my good friend, all the way from Amityville. It means friend. No, he's actually all the way from West Texas. Your friend and mine. the professor, Dr.

David Perlmutter. Howdy, Chris. Well, Dr. Perlmutter, we're here. We're finally talking about a movie that we theoretically, it's one of those films where it's like, what do we have to say about a film like Jaws, a film that's been talked about since it came out in 1975?

Well, I feel like we're going to have a lot to talk about with Jaws because Jaws is a film that more or less meets exactly all the requirements of a required viewing film. If you have clicked on this episode, but you do not know what required viewing is, required viewing is a 360 degree look at film. It is a 360 degree film analysis from all angles because most films are multifaceted. If not, all films are multifaceted and not every film's success is based on whether or not it made money at the box office. We, uh, We tend to have a different opinion on success and failure and what you can learn from either of those things.

And hey, what better of a film to learn from than one of the greatest films ever made? 1975's Steven Spielberg directed Jaws. So the film is directed by Steven Spielberg on a screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb. Peter Benchley's name might seem familiar because he's also the one who wrote the book Jaws. So he is one half of the screenplay writing credit.

Film stars Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gray, and Murray Hamilton. Scheider, Shaw, and Dreyfuss make up the three main characters, Brody, Quint, and Hooper. three men tasked with hunting a shark off of, well, let's just call it what it is. I guess it's Martha's Vineyard, fake Martha's Vineyard. In the summer of the 1970s, they're tasked with hunting a great white shark that has taken up residence in Amityville, which is a place where great white sharks normally are not. It is a film that is plagued by lots of issues, problems, a whole host of things that I'm sure we will bring up and talk about.

But it is a film that spawned oh so many sequels, no prequels, and no modern day reboots, surprisingly. But it is a film that has dictated what one might consider to be the summer blockbuster well since this film came out. This film more or less invented the summer blockbuster. So Dr. Perlmutter, I am so curious.

Your thoughts on Jaws, a film that no one has ever talked about critically up until this point ever before. Well, thank you, Chris. And I feel that part of our required viewing is to explain why do we look at movies that are older than maybe 90% of the audience and that have been talked about many times before? Well, there's a famous saying that is attributed to a Chinese leader in 1968 that probably he didn't say, but it's a great little observation. he was asked about the French Revolution. And of course, the French Revolution starts back in 1792.

So he's asked in 1968 about 1792, and he says, it's too early to tell. And to some extent, it's good to have these many, many years since 1975, because you can look at a film, and you can not only say what is its place in terms of its content, and its effect on future content. I'm right now watching a television series on Apple called Widow's Bay. It's Jaws adjacent. It's making little Jaws references.

There's a mayor of a town trying to keep the tourist industry alive, trying to build a tourist industry when horrible things are happening and people are being killed. But in this spin, the mayor is sort of the hero of Trying to defeat the problem. But it was definitely, definitely. And there's a beach scene. There's several beach scenes.

There are several scenes taken right out of Jaws. It's a Stephen King tribute. It's a Lovecraft tribute. It's a Parks and Rec writer. Katie Dippel won the Emmy for putting this together.

But like Jaws was there. If you watch Jaws, you were going like, oh, this is partly a tribute to Jaws. So that says something. That in 2026, we're still talking about Jaws. We're still showing Jaws on the screen in different ways.

So I have been preparing for this podcast since 1975 when a friend of mine came back. And I don't know why I did not watch Jaws for the first time, like when it first came out. But he said, you got to go see this movie. It's the greatest movie ever made. Now, I heard that, by the way, as we've talked about, like Star Wars, my friend said it's the greatest movie ever made.

And we all agreed. And Alien, we all agreed. Raiders of the Lost Ark, we all agreed, greatest movie ever made. We were really quick to declare something the greatest movie ever made. But it's good to look back.

And I want to start out by just saying, in terms of 360, we look at the film as an event, not just as a pool of content. And I'm a professor, so I'm going to say all these things with the usual caveats of, like, it's not 100%. It's not 100%. One film did all of this. But Jaws, you look up the history of this, and I remember watching it happen because I was alive.

Jaws was one of the first movies to be pushed through advertising on television. We always saw movie posters. We saw ads in newspapers back then. Maybe we have to explain what a newspaper is to some of our younger viewers. members of our audience, but magazines we read, but I saw ads on TV, which was a relatively new thing. There'd always been a little bit of tension, a lot of tension between television and movies in the fifties, like movies blame television for taking away part of their audience.

So that was, that was a big thing was that Jaws was sold through TV. Then Jaws can be credited, along with other films, just as not quite the inventor of the summer blockbuster. But like the summer wasn't necessarily what it is thought of today. It's like, well, let's let's throw out the big MCU, the big DCU, the big films that, you know, supposed to get a gigantic audience. The kids are out for the summer.

People have time to go see. But Jaws really, let's put it this way, established that if you want a gigantic film that's going to get possibly the younger audience in there, summer is a really great time to release it. Then there was also Jaws didn't quite invent, did not invent word of mouth, but invented, I think, the sort of passionate evangelical word of mouth that then became part of what blockbusters are supposed to do until the present era. Because my friend said, you must go see this movie. He even said, I'll pay for it.

I want you to see this movie so much. Well, we did go see the movie. We sat through the movie. All of us agreed this was the greatest movie ever made. I'll talk about my present verdict later.

But it was the greatest movie ever made. And we went to the bathroom and stayed there until it played again. And we could go into the theater so we wouldn't have to pay twice. That's the only time I've ever done that in my life. I felt guilty about it afterwards.

But that's how enthusiastic we were. And I think I did see it in theaters maybe eight or nine times. Just crazy today where, again, movie studios are very happy that a film doesn't decline 20, 30, 40, 50%. on its second week there, jaws went up every week for, for many weeks. Uh, it, it also was a film that really established this primacy of a film being an event, uh, Because that's what that television advertising sold. And that's what they said.

It's an event. It's not just like, hey, there's a really good movie. Go watch the movie. But you want to be there with lots of people. In fact, I remember television news doing stories and newspaper and magazine news doing stories about the audience, like people talking in the line. about like, oh my God, we're getting to see Jaws in the theater.

This is so exciting. And of course, this is a hope for many movies today. So Jaws sort of established a lot of things that we consider to be either peak blockbuster, peak Hollywood spectacular. It changed the movie industry. Of course, some of the films that were coming soon, like Star Wars and Readers of the Lost Ark and others did the same.

But I was there at the beginning and it was it was just this magical moment. And I don't credit Jaws with the fact that I'm still excited about going to movies and seeing movies today. But like it cemented the idea that going to a movie could be a magical experience. You mentioned that you had these moments with your friends where it's like these were This movie's amazing. This is the greatest movie ever made.

You mention movies that are not outside of the conversation for business. being the case for that qualifier. Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the greatest movies ever made. Star Wars is one of the greatest movies ever made. Like, those original films are. They just are.

And I would go as far as to say, and I don't think you would disagree with me, I think Jaws is one of the greatest movies ever made. I think that qualifier still holds up to this day. And every time I rewatch this movie, I'm reminded of why... That is the case. It checks every single box in terms of telling a compelling story with compelling characters.

There is some friction both within the narrative and both outside of the narrative in terms of the things that are going on within the narrative, i.e. there's a shark, but there's also the idiot mayor of the town. So there's multiple directions that the narrative is coming at the kind of conflict from. You then have, again, great acting. You have what I would consider to be the one and only time anyone has ever really attempted to make a film like this with an underwater animatronic. that actually doesn't work but it does work at the same time that it doesn't work it does work i guess is how i would put it if you watch jaws you'll see exactly what i mean it does not look like a real shark but steven spielberg and benchley and gottlieb do such a good job with the storytelling and the just everything the entire film that you kind of forget that it's a fake shark and it seems like a real shark even in those slight moments where the shark breaches onto the boat and eats Richard or Robert Shaw and tries to eat Richard Dreyfuss in the cage underwater, which is just, you know, cutaway shots to literal real people with smaller sharks in cages.

Like there's a lot of stuff in this movie that is what now would be considered a hodgepodge of things being cut together to try and make the best of a, in a lot of ways, bad situation. The making of this movie is notorious in terms of how much trouble the shark puppet was to get working and to be consistently working. I mean, this is the film that this is the film that almost broke Steven Spielberg. And it was like, you know, it was so early on in his career, the fact that this is the film that almost broke Steven Spielberg, that I think speaks to the level of dedication that someone like Steven Spielberg has as a filmmaker. Because if this was your first film, for most people, this would have been their last film. given the amount of kind of strife and just everything surrounding the release and creation of this film.

And a lot of it is self, you know, a lot of it is self-involved. Like they, you know, you make a movie about a shark in the water, you gotta have a shark in the water. But they make the best of a bad situation where you don't see the shark at all. And that ends up becoming yet another part of the mythos and mystique of this film is don't show, by not showing the shark, we make the shark scarier. and way scarier than it ever could have been by showing it over and over again because, again, they get so much mileage out of the first two-thirds of this movie not really showing the shark that by the time they show the shark at the end of the movie, you kind of give the film a pass because it's done such a good job of making the most out of what most other filmmakers would consider to be a bad situation, if not the worst situation.

That the movie, again, it succeeds like gangbusters where other movies would have failed. Because I think, again, the dedication to the craft of Steven Spielberg. And I think, again, there is a reputation that this movie carries with it. That it was a movie that was deeply flawed getting to the screen. And it was a deeply problematic production.

And that was, again, not anyone's specific fault. This is not like a Herzog-Kinsky situation. where one of the people on set was just the biggest diva known to man and was hard to wrangle in. This is the diva was a giant shark that the entire movie is based around, and you can't avoid it. You can't avoid it. It'd be like Star Wars.

It'd be like in Star Wars, well, we're not doing any of the exterior shots with the models. What? Like, we're not doing that. Like, that's not realistic. And that's the thing with Jaws is when you signed up to make this film, Steven Spielberg, you accepted the risk of, The Jaws puppet not, you know, the shark puppet possibly not working.

And he dealt with so much of that that, again, this movie should not have worked. And yet it did work. And the fact that it works as well as it does is the most surprising part. Because, again, for me, I watched this movie earlier this year when I was putting together, of all things, the Lego Jaws set that I was given for Christmas last year by my family. Which is a real.

Thing you can buy, and I think that that speaks to the level of pop culture influence that this film has. It is a Lego set of the orca with Quint, Brady, and Hooper, and a shark breaching onto the back of the boat. That's iconic imagery that has not gone away and will not go away, and again, it's a plastic shark it is a giant plastic shark jumping onto the back of a boat but it is so compelling that you forget it's a plastic shark and I think that like I said just as the opening salvo here like this is this is I think for me pure cinema like I would say like pure cinema like technique on top of just well written story and and fantastic acting. There is so much technique in this film and so much, I guess, early prowess in filmmaking that if you watch this film, you would not think this is the director's effectively first Hollywood film. which is insanity on top of everything else.

This is not a film by someone who you would think that's their first film, but effectively Jaws is really Spielberg's first film on top of everything else. You would be lucky if you made this film and this was the only film you ever made. And it was the last film you made as a director because it's the culmination of your ability as a director. But it's the first film that Steven Spielberg makes. We've already mentioned several of the other films that he makes that are in conversation for best films of all time.

Most directors don't even have one, let alone one or two or possibly three or four. And Spielberg, I think, sits somewhere in the ballpark of like three or four, at least maybe even more than that in terms of greatest movies ever made or perfect films. And I think, you know, if you if you can't tell by any of the things I just mentioned as to why we're talking about this movie, the other reason we're talking about this movie is there are shockingly few well done shark movies. On top of even now, that's not a thing that's well done. Like there are shockingly few good shark movies.

And we will go even further to say there are shockingly few well done shark movies with practical effects, because that's the other kind of big stumbling block of this film, once again, is the practical effects of it all. Like now you just do this with CGI and say we're not dealing with a giant shark puppet. But 1975 was such a different time. I I'm glad this was made in 75 when they were like, well, we have to make a giant shark puppet. Okay.

On a gimbal arm. And everything like, all right, like this is never going to work, but we'll do it anyways. Like, you know, I can see the strings, but yet I don't care, I guess is the way is the right way of putting it. Yeah. There's so much to unpack here, especially since so much time has passed and you can see the waves, the ripples of jaws affecting, as I said, TV series are on the air toys.

There are people are still buying, you know, You didn't go see the movie in 1975. You weren't around then, but you're still putting together a Jaws toy. When we say jointly that there's a really strong case to be made this the greatest movie ever made or among the greatest movies ever made. We want to be clear that it's okay to have, and this is something I emphasize to my students, it's okay to have categories, right? So if you said to me, what is the best cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare?

I would say, you know, for me, just judging on all my categories, that would be Akira Kurosawa, Throne of Blood, or Akira Kurosawa, Ran. OK, and I wouldn't say, well, let's compare Jaws to Rands. I would say they're in different categories of achievement. It's to me, even though they technically consist of like they are motion pictures. When I say movie, I mean sort of the big, fun spectacle where we're not supposed to get any any deep life lessons or anything. messages.

Although I think that there are some really heartfelt, intelligent, thoughtful moments in this film. It's not like it's just an empty bubblegum machine of chewing sugar. But today, Hollywood is struggling to produce a film that has what? First of all, the entire family can see the film. Honestly, there's nothing in this movie that grandma, except for a few seconds, maybe, you know, I mean, If you recall the poster, the poster of the film and the trailer was a little bit risque trying to attract, I think, the younger boy crowd.

But there's nothing really, really here compared to modern movies that would make any member of a family walk out in disgust. So it was family accessible. Maybe grandma didn't go back to watch the film eight times, but like grandma could have taken some younger kids there and maybe covered their eyes for like, 30 seconds and they would have just as much enjoyed the film and then you mentioned the troika now i in 1975 i was also watching reruns of a television show which i loved called star trek and one of the great strengths of star trek was a plots but also b they had this troika of kirk spock and mccoy who sort of embodied different parts of the human psyche and mind you know sort of Action, decisiveness, logic and reason and empathy and sympathy and humanity.

And I even remember in my very unadvanced film critical stance of 1975 going like, wow, these three characters played by these three actors, they play off against each other so well. Like the one plus one plus one equals sixty three. in terms of resonance with like I understand the motivation of this character and everybody gets their little speech of course famous Quint's speech there but everybody gets their Dustin Hoffman's character comes off as a jerk at first but you realize he's just a really super focused scientist and like The police chief has his own worries, like is the town going to go bankrupt, but he's responsible for people. You don't get a huge backstory. Quint is really the only backstory you get only for five minutes, probably the most famous five minutes of exposition maybe in the history of movies, right?

Yeah. of why I'm here. I would agree with that. I mean, there's so many directions that this movie has been aped and influences drawn from, and that scene is one of them. I can think of at least two or three movies just offhand that have done a version of that scene. And not in another movie where it's people hunting after sharks.

I mean, one of the ones I always think of is Kevin Smith in Chasing Amy. literally has a scene where it's people comparing scars, but it's from sexual encounters as opposed to encounters with wild animals. And it's like, again, like you can see where people look at one aspect of this movie and take away from it. It's, that's not even the whole movie. That's just like you said, like, One scene taken out of complete context, but the understanding of, like you said, if you want to humanize characters very quickly, here's an easy way to do it. And it humanizes everyone immediately.

I mean, genuinely, characters that might have seemed unsavory beforehand, after that scene, you are rooting for them more or less the rest. Of the film. Yes, it's also a reminder, and this is why looking at it 50 plus years later is interesting, because it's hard to do it right. I mean, you can take script writing 101 and, okay, yeah, you know, in order to give the audience a sense of who the character is and sort of sympathy for the character, even though they're sort of gruff and tough and maybe don't come off as sympathetic right away, I'll give them... a sad backstory. And how many hundred films have we watched?

What really felt like a forced backstory, you know, like, and yeah, I was orphaned because something happened or whatever. It just, maybe it's the writing. Maybe it's the acting. Maybe it's the backdrop, but like that moment there where Quint is talking about a real life event. I feel as a historian, I have to, we'll talk about this more.

There's so many problems with that as history. As a historian once said, the only thing historically correct in that speech is the ship did sink. Yeah, that's about it, folks. But it makes for fun storytelling out of context, right? It works.

And this goes back to this idea of like a movie, a complete movie. And my sort of starter position of required viewing is like, okay, we say, hey, Tom– Stitchu is the best boy and Daryl Stimp is the grip. And boy, the grip in this film and the best boy did a fantastic job, right? And then we can move on to the director and the screenwriter's But like everybody, I have not over the years, I've read, it's funny, at the time I went back and I tried to find like Time Magazine, New York Times, things like that. I don't think there was a completely negative review, like this is a bad movie.

I think there were some people who, you know, there were some people who just at that time just couldn't accept it. Like any violence in a movie or child being hurt in a movie. I don't think any negative point about this film has sustained itself after all these years. Nobody still says, well, yeah, it was a perfect movie except for the performance of so-and-so. And even the one flaw that's talked, I put it in your quotes, the flaw that's talked about, this goes to this idea of, like, do we really care, except as interesting backstory about the production of art, or do we only care what's in the gallery, right?

So, like, if I go to a museum, as we did with the movie A Care of Carol's House Dreams, which we also reviewed, and a character goes to an art museum, and sees a Van Gogh painting, they may have heard stories like, oh, Van Gogh, you know, he was so troubled, and he eventually probably killed himself, and things like that. And that does affect our viewing to some extent. But the art is still the art. And our review of Waterworld, does being troubled actually mean anything? Because we know so much great art in the history of the world, whether it's great novels, or great paintings was not produced by happy people working nine to five, enjoying themselves and just doing the art without any difficulties or stress or strain.

Great art is often the result of crisis. And Why can't filmmaking be like that? Why can't we just say, oh, yeah, it was the effect. Maybe the word he troubled should be banned. It should be just like, yeah, it was a tough gig trying to make that film.

But look what's on the screen. I mean, at the end of the day, that's what we should be doing. Right. Look what's on the screen. Well, and that's I think you're to your point, like at the end of the day, there are so many films that we can talk about that are troubled and then they come out and they're amazing.

And it didn't matter that there was a troubled production and there are troubled anything. And I don't I don't disagree with you. I think the word troubled ultimately serves no purpose in terms of making art. Because I think, you know, I think it's more surprising if there isn't anything troubling about it. Because then it's like, well, what was the motivator then for making art in that capacity?

Because like you said, I have always heard and I've always kind of assumed, based on just my lifetime as a 36-year-old, good art comes from bad times. The best art comes from bad times. When things are good, I don't know what people really have to complain about. Broadly, I mean, again, you know, it's hard because again, like, Time's good and bad is so subjective now, but in a broad sentiment, look at post-9-11. A lot of really interesting, exciting art came out that was coming out because of the time and place that it was coming out in, and I don't know if some of those things would have existed the way that they did if not for the... time and place that this country was dealing with then in in the early 2000s and i think that that's you know i think that's unfair for a film like jaws to have a you know it was troubled being part of its explanation for why it may not have been good but it also again like you said if we're going to have to talk about it then we have to talk about the fact that it being troubled doesn't matter in this case.

It actually seems more of a further justification or qualification of the quality of the film. Because this film, like I said, it's not one of those things where it's like, well, it was in development hell for 15 years and it had 300 screenwriters attached to it and four different directors and three different leads and it finally came out and it ended up being pretty good. But Look at how many people were involved. And, you know, I've had that conversation before where it's the too many cooks in the kitchen conversation. And we've all, we can talk about movies that are like that, that have like eight names on the script.

And they're just a complete mess. I think it's something like you spoke about Stephen King, that Dark Tower film that came out a couple of years ago that was supposed to be directed by Ron Howard. And then it wasn't directed by Ron Howard. And it was supposed to have somebody else in it. And then Ed Idris Elba.

And it's just like, Jesus, like, you know... The movie came out and it was awful and nobody was surprised because it took like 10 years for the movie to be made and there were like 8 million different people involved. And that's a that's a different kind of trouble. Like the kind of troubled with Jaws is the kind of trouble that I would say is more akin to like an apocalypse now where it's like what they were doing to make the film was the stressor point. And it wasn't the kind of behind the scenes shenanigans, which does happen from time to time.

This was a kind of in front of the camera. Everybody was seeing this happening. This wasn't like a unknown quantity. And that's, oh, we don't understand what was going on. Like there was, you know, behind the scenes trouble and tension between people.

No, the shark wasn't working in the film. The shark was notoriously not working. And it was working. It was not working to a capacity where they had to, like we've already talked about, work around. around it and use it as somewhat of a limitation for the shark. the filmmaking. I, you know, it's funny.

I, I've been watching a lot of Godzilla films and next month, uh, I'm going to be covering Godzilla minus one and minus zero for October and 2014's Godzilla actually takes a lot from Jaws, which is very funny because that film has a massive budget. There's no reason or need to not show Godzilla, but yet that movie takes takes the Jaws route and doesn't show Godzilla for like the first hour of the movie. And it's funny, like I have mixed feelings about that movie because I don't think that movie there's a lot of problems with that movie. I'm not a big fan, honestly, of Aaron Taylor Johnson, and I don't really like the American version of Godzilla. But what's very funny to me is the reason Jaws did that is because of a limitation that existed organically within the creation of this movie.

Not because it was a choice that Steven Spielberg made. It was because we can't get the shark to work as much as we want it. So we just kind of have to work around it. And what's funny is you look at that Godzilla film from 2014. It's like, well, we're inspired by Jaws.

We're inspired by Jaws. So that's why we're not showing Godzilla. You have like a $ 200 million budget. Show Godzilla. I appreciate that you're inspired by Jaws, but Jaws was doing that not by choice, but by organic creation.

And it's stuff like that where it's like we have lionized and kind of canonized these things that have happened in these movies from the 70s and 80s. that have now become kind of filmic shorthand in terms of having a discussion about a monster movie. Well, they're not going to show the monster for two-thirds of the film. That's just like Jaws. But Jaws doing that was organic. It wasn't intentional.

It was intentional, but it wasn't a choice that they wanted to make. It was a choice they had to make. And that, again, I think goes back to why we're talking about this movie. This movie has multiple layers of kind of meta-influence, influence and meta-influence on the industry as a whole, because again, I just sat and talked for several minutes about the meta nature of introducing a shark in this movie that was then copied and aped by other creature feature movies that have come out in the subsequent 50 years since. That has nothing to do with more or less anything that the movie is talking about specifically, but more a thing that the movie has chosen to do because of the corner that Spielberg and the rest of the filmmaking team was backed into because a giant plastic shark wouldn't.

Yeah. And you mentioned earlier about how we really haven't had a successful shark movie since then. I mean, we've had some variations of it like Megalodon movie we've had there was a sort of unintentionally hilarious Richard Harris movie orca where they had a killer whale. Which I would love to talk about, by the way. I saw the preview for it a couple weeks ago, and I was like, what is this movie?

It looks insane. It is insane. Part of it is, and this is also something we can look back as the years go by there, our attitude has changed. And Peter Benchley, for example, has expressed tremendous regret because millions of sharks died needlessly. because of this movie. He was an appreciator of the natural world.

He didn't mean to say like, you know, everybody has to be terrified of sharks. This is something maybe we have to remind people is that like, wow, everybody was seeing a shark. I mean, people swimming everywhere were seeing a shark and suddenly shark attacks became massive news. I mean, there were shark attacks and and every year there are people killed by sharks, but gosh, how many people are killed by car accidents compared to how many people are killed by sharks and how many millions of sharks have been killed for no reason or for some delicacy food? I think part of what we need to address is that there's an attitude that has changed towards animals.

And the way you can see that is if you go back and look at the pulps, the pulp stories and pulp books of the 1920s and 30s. I'm thinking of like Robert E. Howard and Conan and that kind of genre. It's almost all the time, the moment your hero sees like a tiger or an ape or an elephant immediately gets into a battle to the death, right? And audiences back then saw it. the giant snake or the giant anything as like the enemy of man.

And yeah, I gave you go back in human history enough. And today, you know, there are people who are killed by wild tigers today in India. And there, there are people who are killed by sharks, but I think it looking back through the lens now, like, We're sympathetic for the animal. The animal is just doing what it's programmed to do. And so it was a film of its time.

I think you'd have to have some sort of alien monster, you know, or something like that, like came out of a spaceship. I don't remember my psyche. Maybe I was an animal lover at the time, too. In fact... There was one person in my friend group, and she said, why do they have to kill the shark?

Why can't they just keep everybody out of the water and let it wander away or something like that? Which actually is the recommendation, I believe, today. It's why you hear about very few shark attacks. So it was a film of its time, and this is not a flaw, but it It is an example of like it is a sub genre of one because, yeah, we have monster movies today. We've had over the years giant.

I mean, after Jaws, they tried everything right. The giant bear, the giant giant orca, you know, whatever rampaging this. Oh, my gosh. There was a film with Charles Bronson, The White Buffalo. You know, with like a ghost giant buffalo.

And they made how many more Jaws films after this one of, again, a giant shark menacing either Roy Scheider or other people in other films. And those films go over like a wet fart, like a literal wet fart in church. That is very interesting, isn't it? Like there are some films which have, I mean, for good or bad, I actually think for good, there were two more Star Wars movies. And then for me, there was actually only, you know, only Rogue One, which I hope we get a chance to talk about at some point, was the only thing that added.

And he said, and after that, the franchise faded away. For me, as a Star Wars early fan, for Jaws, I think Jaws was complete. And that's something else to say is that sometimes a piece of art is complete. Like they're, It was simply a cash grab to have Jaws 2 or Jaws 3 or Orca or the other variations thereof. There was nothing new to say or add.

I mean, I think, I don't know, somebody, maybe it wasn't me, made a joke in like after Jaws 4? Was it? Yeah. Was there a 4? I was about to say, you are forgetting that there was a fourth Jaws that featured Michael Caine in the Bahamas of all places.

Oh, right, right, right, in the Bahamas or something. Like, oh my God. Yeah. And I think I made a joke back then. I don't know where I did.

Maybe I made it in class that, yeah, what we need is an origin story, right? Like Quint and Hooper and those guys are like seven-year-olds and there's a baby shark. Did they get into a tussle with, I mean, it. Just, I mean, I'm kind of surprised given the glut of those origin story films we got in the early two thousands post something like phantom menace that we didn't get a jaws origin story. I mean, we got origin stories for practically everything else.

We got origin stories for Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter and it's like, I, we, every character that has ever lived, every villain of note does not need an origin story to, just to explain why they are the way that they are, the way that they are in some of these cases is completely just part of their nature. Like you said, in this movie, the shark is just doing what sharks do. Maybe it's being a tad more aggressive than a real life shark would be. And, you know, that's kind of up for debate, I guess. I mean, again, I think the shark in this movie is seemingly more aggressive than one might assume a shark would be.

Like you said, It's very easy. We know now with science how to avoid shark attacks with not like scientific precision, but it's easier now to understand how to avoid shark attacks in 1975. Again, like it's such a weird movie in a way, because like you said, it's it's a it's a film about man versus the natural world and man conquers the natural world in the end. But I feel like that's maybe like the one thing about this movie that I don't It's not that I would hold against it, but it's like that is the Spielberg of it all is there's no cynicism in this movie whatsoever. Like man conquers the natural world in the end.

And that's that. Like there's no complexity to that ending in Jaws. Like man conquers the natural world and puts the natural world in its place. And sure, he took one lick along the way, but ultimately two of the three characters survives, which means they came out on top. They blew the shark up.

The shark is now dead. Sure, does a shark come back in Jaws 2 and 3 and 4? Yeah. But like you said, Jaws is such a complete experience that there was no point at the at any point in Jaws where I was like, I want to know what happens after. Like, tell me about more about what happens like after after this film.

I'm like, I understand whatever. Like, there doesn't need to be anything else here. I understand what the film was getting. me to. And that's the other thing. Like, I think what makes this film such a success is that it's not that it's an uncomplex film, but it is a film that is existing for, I wouldn't say the lowest common denominator, but if we're going to use a mathematical term, It is trying to appeal to the broadest audience possible, which is what makes it the proto Hollywood blockbuster.

And and, you know, you mentioned and I wanted to circle back to this. You mentioned were there any negative reviews at the time? So there there weren't really. But the usual kind of people come to mind. Pauline Kael had a mixed review of the film.

Shocking. said no one. Because again, she was kind of lamenting the fact that this was setting the tone for future films, a.k.a. blockbusters. Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times said, quote, a coarse-grained and exploitative work which depends on excess for its impact. Quote, assure it is a bore, awkwardly staged and lumpily written. A lot of the criticism for the film that I could find really takes to task the human being. of the film and not really the shark parts.

The shark parts of the film are the interesting part. The parts on the island with the human drama is the least interesting part. William Pector of Commentary said, a mind-numbing riposte of sensated gluttons was his description of Jaws. Which, I mean, again, I feel like some of this is also just that I refuse to allow myself to be entertained notion that some critics just inhabit. It's like, I will...

I will deride a film for one of its goals being entertaining and it being successful at entertaining is something I can deride it for. Because somehow something's goal of being entertaining means it can't be heady or complex. And I'm not saying Jaws isn't heady or complex. I'm not sure it is. But I don't think being entertaining disqualifies something from being deep.

But I have seen that criticism by certain critics where it's like, well, this is a popcorn movie. And it's like, and if that was the intention of the film, why is that a failure? Yeah, it's funny. You're reading those reviews. And I was thinking about how We largely don't have the highbrow movie critic anymore as a phenomenon.

I mean, I'm sure somebody still writes the reviews for The New York Times and The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal and things like that. But the cultural impact of a review by a major newspaper critic. is nil now compared to a youtuber who has three million people watching so we've sort of there's all this the french revolution occurred in 1975 you could say in that jaws was what you could argue was one of the first critic proof movies right i mean did any 12 year old boy go oh i see charles champlain of the los angeles times said oh well i i can't watch this movie i wouldn't be seen there with my school chums you know i'd be seen as uh declasse or something that as a category that that's that's what gets me is i think a lot of those people in paul and kill especially was had this problem where i don't think she recognized that there were things as genres or that they were movies aimed at different audiences which weren't her and her friends you know she's very famous for this comment that she made after Richard Nixon was, I forgot whether it was elected or reelected, and she said, I don't understand how Nixon won.

Nobody I know voted for Nixon. And to some extent, that was her problem as a film reviewer, is that it's not like she went to the movie theater and saw me and 12 of my friends there and said, hey, kids, I'm sort of curious, why did you like this movie? She just had her Friday tea, you know, with her New York Soho friends and, you know, tried to be as highbrow as possible. I don't mean to to slander the dead, but I don't think she was reviewing the movie as much as what she thought people wanted her to say about the movie. And maybe that's another development, is that we, and I think it's a positive one, is we're willing to accept that there are small art house movies that succeed in one way and we're willing to accept that there are large big screen movies that succeed in another way.

As I've said before, I don't think I want to watch the Minecraft movie, but I salute the Minecraft movie for being fabulously successful for the 12-year-old boy audience in a way that movies haven't been for quite some time and congratulations. Yeah. Well, I would say the same thing about, you know, to look at something like Five Nights at Freddy's, that the first film that came out a couple of years ago, critically panned into the ground. I don't think a single critic enjoyed it for the most part. It made so much money, they made a sequel.

And then they made another sequel that made a ton of money and wasn't any more well-reviewed than the first film. And they're going to make a third film because the second and the first film made a bunch of money. How can you say that that film is a failure? I used to sit and lament the Transformers films as lowbrow filmmaking. And I'm not saying they're highbrow filmmaking, but if the intention of the filmmaker is to make a film that's entertaining, that makes money, that appeals to the summer blockbuster crowd, I don't think at any point I could say that those films weren't successful until they just stopped making money, which was the intention of the filmmakers.

I'm not saying that a film whose intention is to make money is not art or doesn't have artistic value, but there are plenty of reasons why people make art and not every reason is The pursuit of artistic integrity. I can tell you that with absolute certainty that when we talked about Disclosure Day earlier this year, I was not trying to pursue artistic integrity by talking about that film. I knew that people would want to hear about it because it was a brand new movie. And I'm not a dingus. I know that a Steven Spielberg film that comes out in 2026 might have some people interested in hearing what I have to say about it.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend like there was any other reason that I wanted to cover Disclosure Day because it wasn't because I wanted to see it. That's for sure. And that's my point about something like Jaws or, again, other summer blockbusters. So many critics could not get out of their own way for summer blockbuster films because, again, you can't... I'm not saying...

And I think you kind of put it pretty well. I'm not saying that you can't critically review... a summer blockbuster but that kind of isn't the point like i guess for me a well-reviewed summer blockbuster probably has longer legs than a non-well-reviewed summer blockbuster does and especially of a certain time and place but a summer blockbuster being poorly reviewed does not mean it's not going to make money because a lot of those transformers films a lot of the marvel films Did not get good reviews and they still made a lot of money and that didn't stop people from showing up. Maybe it stopped some people, but those people are like swing voters. They were going to be on the fence anyways. The people that were going to see it are not influenced by the critics.

The people that weren't going to see it might use the critics review as an example for why they didn't go see it. But again, in this time and place, like that's that is less. I guess it's maybe more a thing now than it was then. I don't know. I don't know.

The space was so small. Then maybe it was a bigger deal. Then I feel now the reach is more that you as a critic can reach more people than those critics ever could. And so you do have more influence now. But back then, the pool was much smaller and pretty much the only people that were ever considered film critics were people that wrote for magazines or newspapers.

That was it. There was no other. course of recourse to be a film critic, that there was no movie podcasting. So it was a film critic for a magazine or a newspaper or a newsletter or something like that. And that's about it. Or you made your own zine, but there was no place to share your opinions about film in a back and forth capacity like this.

Even it was like you said, more or less a one sided conversation. And often with some critics, they They weren't looking to have a conversation as much as tell you what they thought. And that's that. They didn't want you to engage with their thinking at all. It's just this is how I feel.

And this is what you should think as well. And that's that. It's like, all right, Pauline Kael. or Vincent Canby for that matter. Those are the two examples I always think of when it's like they, Cale, and then Canby, but Cale more so, couldn't get out of their own way because it was more important, like you said, to share what it is I feel about the film more than what the film is trying to get me to feel on its terms. Yeah, and as I grew older and I sort of aspired to do this myself and ended up doing it, I appreciated a well-written, well-thought-out criticism But it's interesting, by the standards of today, you could say, and I'm remembering people like Gene Shalit and then, of course, Siskel and Ebert at the movies on television.

And I seem to remember there were some film reviewers on radio as well as magazine newspapers. To some extent, they were really limited. Whereas, like, for example, here, you and I are together. We can talk for two hours and cover a lot of subjects. You know, they only had, like, I don't know, 1,500 words at most.

That was a long review. Siskel and Ebert would review, I don't know, what was it, five to six movies for their half hour show and and which is a lot that's a lot of movies they have to sum up their thought i mean that's not really deep i mean you could say i mean again i respect them all of them did the again they had a genre right and they did what they felt they had to do within that genre uh. They were doing a certain thing by the end of their time as critics where people had an expectation of what they were doing and they were having to meet that expectation. There wasn't always an expectation with with Siskel and Ebert. But once the thumbs up, thumbs down started, that was the expectation.

And that I have found thumbs up, thumbs down to be extremely regressive in terms of a rating system. We have much longer. We also have I wrote a book in 2008 called Blog Wars about the rise of social media in politics. And I was talking about that. Yeah, there's there.

There are obviously many negatives and we see many of them today. But there it is something that before the only people who could speak on political issues. were people who owned the press or who were in government or running for office or worked for a political party, for good and ill, you know, pretty much anybody can post whatever the hell they want. Sorry for using that term. And that's good and ill. There's bad parts about that.

But we are supposed to be in a democracy. And so... people getting to speak their mind can't be all bad. And in terms of film, what I like is that, you know, if you watched one of those reviews, like if I, I, I remember watching Cisco and Ebert review John Carpenter's, the thing in 1982, 1982. Yeah. And they, they gave it a really searingly bad review.

Like they shredded that movie, as I recall, both of them. And I had seen it and I liked it. I was, I think, a college student at that. And I was taking film classes. And I wanted to write to them and say, well, you know, I think there's some things you missed in that movie.

And there wasn't really a venue to do that unless I wanted to write my own article and try to submit it to a paper or something like that. So I just, I feel to some extent we're at a time where people can go back and forth and, and somebody can, you know, in the wide world of podcasting or the wild world of YouTube reviews, people can make up their own mind. I do want to emphasize that JAWS created this template that to some extent we can't follow anymore because of the nature of the change of the industry. I go back to, yeah, they, Jaws was popular and was a blockbuster, but it did so in a way that the formula seems to have been lost. Like how many movies today, like I will go online and I'll see people like, or really love a big, big budget movie that came out that maybe I didn't.

But then I noticed when I look at each week, the box office, it's down 30, 40%. So what does that mean? That means that the people who say they love this movie, maybe, maybe went to see it once and then never saw it again, except maybe they waited for it to come out on streaming. So it's like the word love had a different meaning in 1975 than apparently it does today. And I've stood in front of a class of students And of course, we have students of all ages.

But for my 18-year-old students, I've said, what's the last movie that you really loved, that you just thought was amazing? And of course, they're happy to talk about that. And I said, how many times did you go back to the theater to watch that movie again? Or if you saw it on streaming, how many times did you watch it again right away after you saw it? And very few people did that.

I had a maximum of three or four And that was like five people out of 400. And even on streaming, people would say, I didn't watch it more than a couple of times. In fact, they were looking at me like, why would anybody re-watch that quickly? Over time, I've seen Jaws maybe 20 times now, because every four or five years, since the first time I saw it six or seven times, I've gone like, oh, let's see. I think I'll watch Jaws again.

But it's interesting to me how the engagement... definitions have changed over these long long time and you know. I i went and i i looked at a list of films that have come out uh since and i i went and did some research on the kind of blockbusters that have come out since and the ones that have kind of come out in that mold of jaws where They came out, they're well-reviewed critically, and they're immensely successful financially. And so what's funny is 1976, there isn't really anything. Outlaw Josie Wales, maybe. But then from 77 on, it is a literal who's who of some of the most, I wouldn't say important movies, in some cases important, but some of the most notable films of all time.

77, Star Wars. 78, Grease. 79, Alien. 80, Empire Strikes Back. Technically also Airplane.

81, Raiders of the Lost Ark. 82, E.T., 83, Return of the Jedi, 84, Ghostbust, 85, Back to the Future, 86, Aliens, 87, Untouchables, 88, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, 89, The Last Crusade, aka Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and then 1990, Total Recall and Ghost as well, technically. And that's just into the 90s. It goes even further than that. A lot of those movies I just mentioned, on top of the fact that they're directed by Steven Spielberg, which is the crazy part, are movies that are still talked about, referenced, and given a large birth today, especially something like Ghostbusters or Star Wars or Indiana Jones or the Alien franchise.

Those are still things that have a place in pop culture today, Which is crazy in and of itself because Jaws has no pop culture relevance in this day and age. Zero. Like, I mean, I'm not saying it's irrelevant, but it's a good movie. What relevancy does it have anymore is my question. That's the weird thing about Jaws.

It's kind of like Back to the Future or E.T. I'm not sure what it's influencing anymore other than maybe... filmmaking as a whole. But there's not another Jaws film coming out. There's not another E.T. film coming out. Jaws as a franchise is just it.

You know, you see some things from time to time, shark merchandise or other smaller things. But there's not Jaws Day every year like there is with Star Wars or Alien or all these other things like it's weird that Jaws in the pop culture conversation of 2026 doesn't really have a place for as successful and important as it is to filmmaking as a whole. It's not something that's mentioned now. And it's not because it's not a successful film or one that's not worth watching. It's just it seemingly doesn't have a place in the conversation anymore. because I think it's almost like it diffused into filmmaking and just kind of influences everything.

And so if you want to point at any one thing, that's kind of hard to do now, I guess. I don't know. I want your take on that, because Jaws isn't talked about the way some of these other franchises still are. Your last summing up of Jaws' influence, I think, is the one that I take. I mean, I can see on this hit series that won a whole bunch of Emmys, Jaws influence with it, with those Bay, you got a toy, you know, somebody bought you, you a 36 year old man, a toy for, for Jaws.

So you can see some like fit, you can see some influential elements in like plots that are adjacent or, or, referential, things like that. I think the last part of what you said is what's most important, especially in assessing, and we keep talking about, like, okay, what was the influence of the French Revolution, right? Essay question. That you may not be able to point and say, oh, you see in this movie, they're having, you know, Jason Bourne, and he's attacked by a giant shark. It isn't this sort of one-to-one thing. exemplar physical thing.

It's more what you said of like a general influence on, I think that If you make a movie where there are protagonists who have to defeat a monster or some threat, you really have to sweat the characters of your troika or your central group. And it's a big problem to me that so many movies have very indifferent, lackluster, often boring sets of main characters who are just what they do. There's Joe, the guy with explosives, and Cindy, who's an amazing knife expert, and you can't name them. You can't name who they are. I can still tell you who Dustin Hoffman was playing.

I can guess things about his character that we weren't told because the the delineation of the characters were so sharp. And likewise, the, the idea, like, I think even if a young filmmaker has never seen Jaws, the question of like, Hey, we, we have a monster. When should we show the monster? Should like the monster attack the teenagers in scene one? Or like, should we wait for 45 minutes and then reveal the monster?

I think they may not have seen Jaws. It goes back to this famous observation by Sir Terry Pratchett, the great, humor fantasy writer who did the Discworld series, 40 books or something. And he said this thing about how Tolkien was for the world of fantasy, like Mount Fuji was in Japanese art, where in Japanese art for a certain period, you either made a painting of Mount Fuji or you referred to Mount Fuji, or if the absence of Mount Fuji was in itself a commentary on Mount Fuji. And Jaws, I think in anything that falls into the, I don't even know how to call the, but the terror-threatening monster genre, the adventure thriller genre where there's something beyond other people that we're fighting, Jaws is still there.

And it may not be in the front of somebody's head creating, it may not even be in the back of their head, but it's in the water. That they're drinking and they're still responding to Jaws or rejecting Jaws, but it's still there. But you're absolutely right. It's not like in film class or... In a movie itself, they're saying in the foreground, hey, everybody, let's all remember Jaws.

Yeah, that would be Airplane 2 that does that at the beginning with the with the with the fin, with the with the fin of the I guess it's the the fin of the airplane is meant to mimic the fin of the shark and Jaws. I think it's like I always think of that great scene in Goodfellas where they talk about the cutting the garlic so thin that it just liquefies into the pan. That's what happened to Jaws. It just kind of it. It became one with filmmaking as as it were.

And I think that that I think for me is what makes this such an important film is it is become part of the filmic language as a whole. And if I'm a filmmaker, there are many ways to quantify my film as a success, but But I think an ultimate success as a filmmaker is making something that lives on long beyond your ability to make film as a filmmaker. or your importance as a filmmaker. And not everybody has the long tail of a career that Steven Spielberg does. There are so many filmmakers out there that make one film and that's it. And they never make anything else.

But their film has as much influence as Jaws does. But Steven Spielberg made a film that has essentially become part of just filmmaking as a whole. And if I'm a filmmaker, I don't know what's more successful than Jaws. Making a film that's so successful, other filmmakers are influenced by it forever without having to mention it specifically or reference it specifically. They're paying homage or being influenced by the choices that were made at a time where, again, it's not that they were or weren't being made intentionally, but they were being made out of necessity. is the more important thing.

And now those choices are being viewed as like, well, this is the way we do things. I was like, well, that was just being done out of necessity initially. Now it's being done as a choice. It's very interesting how things kind of changed post-Jaws. I mean, Jaws is an inflection point in filmmaking history.

It showed that a blockbuster could be a well-reviewed film. A blockbuster could be a film that had critical value, at least to the quote, film cognoscente as it were, which at the time I think was the critics. Like the critics kind of did hold the door open or closed in a way for films. And, you know, that's not the case so much anymore. Like I think the democratization of film analysis and criticism has been really bolstered by the internet.

And that's a good thing. It's taken the power away from the critics as a kind of group and put it back into the hands of the people, ourselves included. Because again, all I ever wanted to be growing up was either a filmmaker or a film critic. And most film critics are just really frustrated filmmakers or actors or writers or directors or what have you. Because most people that talk about film want to make film as well.

I've run into very few people who talk about film that don't want to make their own film or wouldn't want to be involved in the filmmaking process, more so than just talking about it. And... Something like Jaws took the power away from the critics because even if the critics had given it a bad review, which pretty much none did, I think to your point, it is one of those films that is just genuinely unimpeachable. Like, it's just, there's, yeah, there are maybe some issues that you could personally have with the film, but I think that in terms of it being a film that cost, by the way, the thing that I think is the craziest about this movie, the film cost $ 10 million. What?

Like what? That's that's the but that's the budget of the catering for the dog stars, by the way. Right. Inflated, even inflated for today, it would still be a low budget movie. Yeah, it would be an indie film.

You know, we talked about that Ridley Scott, the dog stars film. And, you know, I joke that it's the catering budget of that film. But that film was like one hundred and ten million dollars, like ten times the budget of this film. And it will be remembered. It's not even remembered a month and a half after it came out.

And this film is still being talked about decades after it came out. And that's, you know, I think and that's a that's a filmmaker whose film I mentioned on the list of blockbusters that came out subsequent to Jaws coming out. that was influenced by Jaws. Because Alien exists in a post-Jaws universe. Alien exists as a film that cops from Jaws. How long into Alien does it take to see the alien?

Go watch that film and tell me. It takes quite some time. The alien is not hopping around in the first five minutes of the movie. Solution there, the solution they had was the alien changes, right? It's a different alien.

Right. We meet it. I think going back to the beginning here, I will stand by Jaws is one of the greatest movies, emphasis on the word movie, ever made. It's still, we can still watch it today. It's not an artifact.

It's not like a historical thing where you go back and you'd watch a movie and go like, ah, yeah, that's back then. That's how they made movies. It's still just as entertaining in 2026 as it was in 1975. The characterizations are still as finely etched, the tension, the music, everything is still there. And then after saying it's one of the great movies, yeah, I have no problem saying it belongs in the art museum because how do you, what's one criterion of great art is it's incredibly hard to replicate, right?

I mean, yes, you can go get a poster of the Sistine Chapel and you can go get a little poster sculpture of some famous sculpture Rodin's The Thinker or something like that and put it on your desk but it's not the same thing right and it's interesting in that list you had it wasn't like you listed 30 movies every year and even today we have entire years where there really wasn't a film that was first critically accepted generally by most critics as a great movie second that showed True love, which is going back and seeing it again and again and again and evangelizing the film. And third, that was accessible to the whole family. It wasn't divided by race or gender or demographic or ideology or something like that.

It was truly a general audience film. And like how many movies are made even today? I mean, we've had the formula for a long time. We can't make the soup. regularly, no matter how much money we spend. I think that goes back to just the sometimes sometimes the soup is just, you know, the recipe dies with the soup maker.

And I'm not saying Steven Spielberg's ability to make films died with him because he's still alive. But even he doesn't have it anymore. Disclosure Day came out and it was not well received. It's not going to live on as a Jaws-level film 10 years from now. I don't even know if 10 years from now anyone's going to be talking about Disclosure Day, genuinely.

But we're talking about Jaws 50 years later. That should speak volumes to the kind of film that Jaws is today. in terms of being able to create a lasting effect on audiences, the industry. I mean, you know, we didn't really talk about it, but you hear that, but that is part of the lasting effect, is just the two notes, the John Williams two notes of this film. I mean, again, to go back to another thing about this movie, John Williams, Steven Spielberg working together, another... group of people that would create some of the most well-known themes ever known to cinema in terms of Jurassic Park and Raiders of the Lost Ark. And then he would work with George Lucas on Star Wars.

There is so much that happens in this movie that goes on to affect what I would consider to be the pop culture makeup of our world now. We're living in a world of Steven Spielberg's creation in terms of pop culture. He has. affected so much at so many levels. And I think his resiliency as a filmmaker is really the thing that early on for me when I was becoming a student of film and watching film, Jaws was a film I watched a lot growing up. And that's because one of those stories that I always took away from Jaws is just the resiliency of Steven Spielberg as a filmmaker and as a director and as someone who was so motivated that it didn't matter if the shark kept breaking, he was going to get the film done.

And we barely even talked about that in terms of, what this movie is in terms of just a story of making the film, it kind of mirrors the film itself. The great white whale of this film is the shark that Quint is trying to kill, but the great white whale of making this movie was getting the shark to work. When they got the shark to work, they took advantage of it because the shark wasn't working all the time. And that is, again, just in and of itself, very ironic that the movie is about chasing after a massive shark and, you know, taking it down. But the movie also ends up being about, in a meta sense, trying to get the shark to cooperate to begin with because it's just not working.

And Steven Spielberg, as a director, I think it deserves a lot of credit and respect as someone who's able to weather the storm of a production that would cause most people to quiver in fear because you're having your ability to be a professional filmmaker criticized more or less on a daily basis because you can't get a mechanical shark to work and that is not a place that anybody wants to be in at the behest of mechanical pieces and parts underwater but yet that is what steven spielberg in his first directorial you know like big budget debut has to deal with and yet this film you would never know. You would never know that there were problems in the making of this movie with the technical aspects of it.

And that, again, is a testament to the quality of this movie that I'm not looking into why things are the way that they are. Everything seems intentional, even when things were just being done out of necessity. And that, again, I think for me, is another sign of a successful film, is that this film is able to weather all of those things and still create a film that is lasting. And not only lasting, but I would wager that 50 years from now, people will still be talking about Jaws. Yeah, I think earlier, did I say Dustin Hoffman instead of Richard Dreyfuss?

I think I did that. I think you did. Well, again, another measurement of film, which I see, gosh, I just saw one the other day, and I was going, I need to remember this, was the memization, where it becomes part of popular culture outside of the unit of film. And I was watching just like a TikTok reel, and somebody said, I think they said, we're going to need a bigger fork. because they saw some food that they liked. And I'm thinking, did you actually watch Jaws?

That just has survived in the culture. We're going to need it bigger. And these characters there, again, Roy Scheider, Roy Scheider went on to succeed. He never quite made it as like the super action hero that we think of today, but he still had a You know, successful career. Robert Shaw, unfortunately, died very young.

I think he was 48 or something like that. Richard Dreyfuss, of course, had a very successful career to this day. They were just so right. And just if you go down, like all the decisions they had to make, where do we put this film? Like physically, where do we put it?

And the town, the town was a character in the film, right? Because the mayor, my young boy self saw the mayor as an unalloyed, bad guy like why is he saying like you know we should go ahead with tourist season because like there's a shark out there and it might kill people and now I'm older and I'm going like yeah that guy is thinking we're all going to be on welfare every single person in this town is going to be on welfare if we don't have the summer season And you can sort of see the pressure that he was under. There's just nuances that... Another sign to me of art is that the sort of patina, as you get closer to the painting and you look at it again and again and again, you see things that maybe you didn't see the first time.

Part of it is your own maturation. And those three characters just represented so many different aspects of the human soul and I think at my young age, I was focusing on the action. But now, the last time I rewatched this film, which was about, I think about a month ago, I was paying more attention to the characterizations. And even if there hadn't been a shark, they were fascinating themselves, those people. I wanted them to keep talking, especially to each other.

No, I think you're right. Like you said, this film can be... Every time I watch it, I take away something different. Every time I watch it, I feel... like I've gotten something else from it, a little something else, a little new thing. And most recently, my takeaway was, like you said with Roy Scheider, he never really became an action star, but also his character in this movie is meant to be, in a lot of ways, John McClane in Die Hard.

Like he just finds himself in this situation and has to deal with it. He's not necessarily meant to be in this situation. It's somewhat Shakespearean that the guy who doesn't like water has to go out onto the water to to deal with a shark. Like that's that kind of the faded nature of Chief Brody is that he hates the water, but he has to then go out onto the water to kind of deal with his fears, as it were, of not being able to go out into the water, even though he works on an island. That, again, that put-upon-ness with Brody is what makes his character so interesting versus the man of action that is Quint or the man of science that is Hooper.

And then you have just the man, the common man, the everyman that is Brody. And Again, it speaks to a different success of the film, which is you have a character that is the everyman that doesn't feel like the everyman that succeeded in doing something that a lot of other blockbusters would do, which is having the kind of eyes of the audience present in every scene through one of the characters. But at the same time. This film also knows that giving that character some characterization is important as well because they cannot afford to get lost in the shuffle. They cannot be a cipher.

That is the thing that I think gets lost in a lot of Hollywood blockbusters. Like you've alluded to is they don't give us characters to care about. These characters are just, you know, oh, they're the demolitions expert or they're this or they're that. And it's like that kind of filmmaking is not long lasting because you're not giving the audience anything. multiple things to hang on to multiple things to grab on multiple things to enjoy. And Jaws is so multifaceted that you could watch this movie 10 times.

And I think each time focus on something different and enjoy something different. And I think you would take away something different every time. Cause like you said, I watched this film once every couple of years, if not once, sometimes it's multiple times a year like this year, but I always walk away from it with something different. And it's not, I'm, not convinced it's always something that Steven Spielberg intended I walk away from the film with, but it is something where it now adds to the intentional or unintentional or meta nature of the success of the movie. And this is a movie that I genuinely love.

It is not often that we talk about things that I like or I resonate with or things that I am a fan of. But Jaws is a film that I can say is probably in my top 10 films of all time. Genuine. Because every time I watch it, I'm like, man, I'm not sure that there is a better three person cast in a film than the three of them on the boat together. And I know that this might sound crazy, but one of the few places if I could jump into a film would be onto the orca with the three of them.

Now, yes, I know that there's a big shark. And yes, I know that one of us might die. But the camaraderie and just kind of the weird chemistry between Shaw, Dreyfuss and Scheider is so kind of not infectious, but you want to be part of it. And you like you said, you just want to be with the characters doing what they're doing. And I think that that, again, is just another success of a movie that is multifaceted in what makes it a success and if you have never seen Jaws you should have watched it by now I would hope if nothing we've said to this point has convinced you to watch it But I would say it's very interesting because I would not, similarly to Jurassic Park, I would not condone watching anything further than this one because I'm not sure any of the other films have said anything more so than this movie already did.

And that I think is the sign of a good film is that it is unimpeachable from a bunch of different directions, including all the films that came out after this one that were named similarly to this one don't say anything more than this film had to say about Which is to say this film, like I said, stands alone and is somewhat there is nothing that this film says that any of the other films say that it didn't do better the first time around. And that, again, is very hard. There are film franchises where there are better films further down the road than the first one. this franchise is not one of them. And frankly, to call this a franchise is just to just pretend like it isn't in a lot of ways, really.

Like, I know that that's kind of dismissive, but there's not much to like beyond Jaws 1. There really is not. And that's unfortunate, but that's what makes this the secret sauce of a film is like, I don't know what it is, what one thing it is, because it's not just one. It's all of it together. And that's Rare, very rare.

Apparently Steven Spielberg figured it out, but it is still rare broadly as a film to be successful in multiple different avenues. Yeah, I guess my wrap-up comment, and I hope people have stopped at some point and go watch the movie. If they have not, it is quite an old movie, so I'm hoping most people have seen it at least once. I was sort of interested in how many students I had. Yeah, I have seen Jaws.

But the other part which I feel, again, it's some sort of recipe and formula that is just so hard to repeat. It's hard to repeat even for the people that made it. And that's it. The film had, and I wish the highbrow critics of the time had recognized this. And I want to talk about one particular scene.

And this is my sort of, my last statement, unless we do like a six part series on Jaws, because there's so much to talk about. The film had moral depth to call it just a popcorn film. Just the sort of cliche in the 70s and 80s was that the studio would always want somebody to say, it's the roller coaster ride of the summer, and they could use that quote on the advertising, right? But it's not just a popcorn film. And I want to talk about one particular scene, and it shows off the best of Roy Scheider and the best of Steven Spielberg and the best of the screenwriting team, the Peter Benchley and his novel.

Roy Scheider has to make a decision. And the decision, there's no way to spin it, cost the life of a young boy. And There's a scene there where the mother of the boy, this is done so well. It's not done with thundering music. It's not done with like commentary and lots of people talking about it.

She marches up and basically identifies Chief Brody, Roy Scheider's like, you know, you're the one that let my son into the water. And he was killed. And she slaps him and then walks away. And that was done so well. And I was thinking, how many movies today would they turn that into a massive production?

And then they'd have, you know, 12 scenes where Brody is trying to, you know, go to a psychologist. I don't know how to say it, but it was just, I remember sitting in the movie theater going like, oh, this is not just a shark, you know. attack adventure right there's there's actual i don't think i use the term moral depth at my age then but like there's something there and that's that's an element again that man it's not in the recipe book it has to be felt it has to be executed and it isn't that well but boy this film reminds us of what is achieved when it. Is I think that's what might be coined the Steven Spielberg effect. I think that he just understands and is able to tap into the human condition better than some directors are able to.

I mean, we always think about Steven Spielberg as a director who has created a lot of convincing and relatable family dynamics in films like E.T., like War of the Worlds. I mean, you could even say Disclosure Day if you really wanted to. or Meet the Fablemans. There's a lot of films that are about the family dynamic, Jurassic Park even, I would say. And this is a different kind of family, but it is a family dynamic that, again, I think Steven Spielberg is uniquely suited to telling stories about groups of people that have an interesting familial relationship or dynamic. And for whatever reason, Spielberg just gets that.

It's like David Lynch understood the surreal of Americana and the bizarre of Americana and Steven Spielberg, I think understands the kind of genuine humanity of, of kind of just the being of human existence. And, and his films are deeply humanistic. I feel like Steven Spielberg, even if it's a film about robots in the future that can tell when you're going to commit a crime or, I mean, again, any number of things like Steven Spielberg is able to create human characters that are lasting, that people feel a lot of affection and, uh, relate to or resonate with. And I think Jaws lives and dies by the three main leads. And I think that that's again, that's what Steven Spielberg brings to this, that, like you said, it's just the intangible quality of things that might not have existed if this had been a Cassavetes or a Peckinpah film.

If this had been any another director, we might not be having a conversation about this because it might have been like an orca. or something like that, where it's just kind of a weird footnote in film history, but it doesn't move the needle a substantial amount. And credit to Steven Spielberg and everybody involved with the film that this film has that lasting place in the conversation. Uh, this again, like we haven't, it's not that we haven't talked about amazing films yet on required viewing, but this, I think is kind of in a different league of films than what we've talked about in required viewing, because unlike Barry Lyndon, this film was well-received by everybody and wasn't being, you know, for the most part, it wasn't being called boring.

You know, Barry Lyndon, I think, has had a reappraisal as time has gone on. I think Jaws started at the high watermark and never came down. Barry Lyndon started at a different spot and has kind of gotten back up to that point in the years since its release. So this is the first film we've talked about on Required Viewing where it was like it just came out and worked like gangbusters and everybody was on board the moment it came out like that. That's a different kind of success, but it's a success worth kind of talking about and definitely appreciated.

So if you want to hear Dr. Perlmutter and I talking further about films that we consider to be required viewing for one reason or another, you got to come listen and find out why. Head on over to weirdingwaymedia.com where this show and so many other shows can be found. But more importantly, if you're looking for Dr. Perlmutter and I, the culture cast and required viewing are the two places that you can find myself and the professor.

Like, rate, and review the show over on iTunes, then Spotify, please, in that order. That's the order that it helps out the most. Patreon.com slash CultureCast is where you can go to kick a couple dollars my way. Every little bit helps, but I understand if you don't want to help out financially, just like, rate, and review the show on iTunes and Spotify. That's where it helps the most.

And yeah, come on back for the next episode of Required Viewing, where we're definitely not talking about a film that has a shark in. It. Thank you.