2 May: Jaws

On this date in 1974 filming began on Jaws, a film about a Shark. Here are ten things you might not know about this movie:

1. Two notable people who had cameos in the film were Peter Benchley, author of the novel the film was based on, who appears as a newspaper reporter, and Steven Spielberg, who was the voice of the Amity Island dispatcher calling the Orca.
2. It was supposed to take 65 days to film but ended up taking 159 days for various reasons, including the 1.2 ton mechanical shark not working very well and sinking to the bottom of the sea. That’s also the reason the shark doesn’t appear on film until one hour and 21 minutes into the movie – over half way through. More delays were because the filming took place during the boating season and private boats kept sailing into what should have been shots of an empty sea.
3. The shark was nicknamed Bruce, after Spielberg’s lawyer, although when it kept malfunctioning, it got other nicknames – “the great white turd”, or “Flaws”. However, Spielberg turned it into an invisible threat to scare the audience as Alfred Hitchcock might have done.
4. The mechanical shark started breaking down even before filming started. One day a friend came to visit him on set and Spielberg decided to play a prank on him and close the shark’s jaws on him as he peered into its mouth. The controls jammed, and had to be pried open to get Spielberg’s friend out. The unfortunate friend was none other than George Lucas, future director of Star Wars.
5. The actors playing the three lead roles weren’t the ones the producers originally wanted. If they’d had their way we could have been watching Charlton Heston, Robert Duvall, Lee Marvin, Jeff Bridges or Jon Voight instead of Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss.
6. Steven Spielberg wasn’t the first choice of director, either. They hired someone else to begin with, but fired him because he kept referring to the shark as a whale. Spielberg himself nearly dropped out because he was afraid he would become typecast as a “truck and shark” director and arranged a meeting with the producers to tell them he was resigning. They all turned up to the meeting in Jaws crew t-shirts, everyone started laughing and Spielberg changed his mind. Even so the director feared every day that he was going to be fired. To soothe his nerves he slept with a stick of Celery under his pillow, because the smell of it calmed him.
7. Steven Spielberg attributes most of the film’s success to the theme music, even though the first time composer John Williams played it for him, he thought it was a joke.
8. Peter Benchley didn’t know what to call his book at first, and asked his father, also an author, for suggestions. Nathaniel Benchley came up with 200 possible titles, including Silence in the Deep, The Stillness in the Water, Leviathan Rising, The Jaws of Death and even Wha’s That Noshin’ On My Laig? The eventual title, Jaws, was the only one on the list Peter Benchley and his editors could agree on.
9. Roy Scheider got his role after overhearing Spielberg describe the scene where the shark leaps up on the boat, deciding he fancied a part in the film and walked right up and asked for one. He was responsible for the famous line, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” Scheider ad-libbed that line; Spielberg liked it and kept it in.
10. Peter Benchley complained so much about the fact that Spielberg decided to change the ending (from the shark bleeding to death to getting blown up) that he was thrown off the set. He later conceded it was a better way to end the movie.

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Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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