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Jaws (25th Anniversary Full-Screen Collector's Edition) (1975)
Starring: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw Director: Steven Spielberg
In the 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging
Bulls, author Peter Biskind puts the blame for Hollywood's blockbuster mentality at least partially on Steven Spielberg's box-office success with this adaptation of Peter Benchley's bestselling
novel, Jaws
(DVD).
Jaws (25th Anniversary Full-Screen Collector's Edition)
- But you can't blame Spielberg for making a terrific movie, which Jaws definitely is.
The story of a Long Island town whose summer tourist business is suddenly threatened by great-white-shark attacks on humans bypasses the
pot-boiler trappings of Benchley's book and goes straight for the jugular with beautifully crafted, crowd-pleasing sequences of action and suspense supported by a trio of terrific performances by Roy Scheider (as the local sheriff), Richard Dreyfuss (as a shark specialist), and particularly Robert Shaw (as the old fisherman who offers to hunt the shark down).
The sequences on Shaw's boat -- as the three of them realize that in fact the shark is hunting
them -- are what entertaining moviemaking is all about.
Jaws (25th Anniversary Full-Screen Collector's Edition) (1975)
Encoding: Region 1 (US and Canada only)
Format: Color, Closed-captioned
Studio: Universal Studios
DVD Features:
Theatrical trailer(s)
- Deleted Footage
- Making Of
- Production Stills
- Trivia Game
- Storyboards & Production Drawings
- Documentary on Sharks
- Montage of Steven Spielberg Films
- Outtakes
Full-screen format
Other Formats: VHS, DVD, DVD with DTS Stereo
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
by Peter Biskind
Not only is Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls the best book in recent memory on turn-of-the-'70s film, it is beyond question the best book we'll ever get on the subject. Why? Because once the big names who spilled the beans to Biskind find out that other people spilled an equally piquant quantity of beans, nobody will dare speak to another writer with such candor, humor, and venom again.
Biskind did hundreds of interviews with people who make the president look accessible: Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Geffen, Beatty, Kael, Towne, Altman.
He also spoke with countless spurned spouses and burned partners, alleged victims of assault by knife, pistol, and bodily fluids.
Rather more responsible than some of his sources, Biskind always carefully notes the denials as well as the astounding stories he has compiled.
He tells you about Scorsese running naked down Mulholland Drive after his girlfriend, crying, "Don't leave me!"; grave robbing on the set of Apocalypse Now; Faye Dunaway apparently flinging urine in Roman Polanski's face while filming Chinatown; Michael O'Donoghue's LSD-fueled swan dive onto a patio; Coppola's mad plan for a 10-hour film of Goethe's Elective Affinities in 3-D; the ocean suicide attempt Hal "Captain Wacky" Ashby gave up when he couldn't find a swimsuit that pleased him; countless dalliances with porn stars; Russian roulette games and psychotherapy sessions in hot tubs. But he also soberly gives both sides ample chance to testify.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is also more than a fistful of dazzling anecdotes. Methodically, as thrillingly as a movie attorney, Biskind builds the case that Hollywood was revived by wild ones who then betrayed their own dreams, slit their own throats, and destroyed an art form by producing that mindless, inhuman modern behemoth, the blockbuster.
When Spielberg was making the first true blockbuster, Jaws, he sneaked Lucas in one day when nobody was around, got him to put his head in the shark's mechanical mouth, and closed the shark's mouth on him. The gizmo broke and got stuck, but the two young men somehow extricated Lucas's head and hightailed it like Tom and Huck. As Peter Biskind's scathing, funny, wise book demonstrates, they only thought they had escaped.
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