Jaws Re-Release

Photo: The iconic movie poster, from the movie's Wikipedia page.

I saw the re-release of Jaws at a local Showcase Cinema today--the kind where there's a waitress and you can order from a menu.  Nice, but weird.  Very few people ordered anything; but two who did were, of course, sitting beside me, and had the poor waitress running up and down the aisle in front of me all night.  Grrrrrrrr...

But the movie was worth it.  The film holds up very well after all these years--40 of them!!!  And, no, I didn't see this movie when it first came out, as that was a bit before my movie-going time.

And so a few quick thoughts:

--I'm not sure Jaws could be made today, and I mean that as a slap to today's movie-going public.  It has too few shocks, and they're built up with very solid character-building and reality-defining that unfortunately take quite a bit of time.

--The running time of about 2.5 hours is just a bit too long for a horror movie today.  Fantasy / sci-fi pics--Yes, those can still be long, especially if there's a lot of special effects.

--A character-sketch horror movie just wouldn't fly today.  The Exorcist could be thrown in here, too.

--Jaws the shark (or Bruce, if you're in the know) was effectively handled as Stoker handled Dracula: More scary the less you see him.  If you read the original Dracula, you'll notice you see the Count frequently in the beginning and in the end, and only fleetingly in the middle.

--I remembered that Hooper's heart was broken my Mary Ellen Moffat, because I'm messed up like that.  I also knew the shark's name was Bruce, and that the book's author--Peter Benchley--was the reporter on the beach.  But those last two are common.  But Mary Ellen Moffat?  That's messed up.

--Roger Ebert loved it in 1975.  Gene Siskel didn't.  Like, at all.

--I have the autograph of Susan Backlinie, who was Chrissie, the famous blonde attack victim in the opening.  And so when I had a conversation with someone about it, I said, "That's Susan Backlinie," and I got a weird look.  She was at a recent convention in Providence.  You can see a lot of props from Jaws at one of my past blog entries about the convention:

  http://stevenebelanger.blogspot.com/2014/07/jaws-and-me.html

--I read today that Quint's place was the only set made for the film.  Everything else was on location.

--Mostly in Martha's Vineyard, of course.

--Spielberg returned to this area to shoot Amistad in Newport.  I know---I was an extra.

--I spoke to him a little bit.  Fascinating guy.  Wore a super-heavy winter jacket in the super-hot Newport courthouse, with all the lights, cameras, and everything else generating even more heat.

--Robert Shaw was the fourth actor offered the role.  He and Richard Dreyfuss apparently did not get along.

--Shaw's Indianapolis monologue was improvised, as was Orson Welles's famous "Cuckoo Clock" monologue from The Third Man.  I wouldn't be surprised if Marlon Brando's in Apocalypse Now was, too.

--Peter Benchley wrote some articles a few years after Jaws came out, explaining how harmless great whites really are, and how most of their attacks are accidents.  I'm gonna guess he cashed all the book and movie royalty checks first.  I'm so young, yet so cynical.

--3 Biggest Differences Between Book and Film: In the book, Hooper's character gets killed by the shark, gets an arrow through the neck while in the shark's mouth, and sleeps with Brody's wife.

Night Shift by Stephen King

Photo: First edition hardcover, from the book's Wikipedia site.


Very successful collection of short stories that spawned some (really bad) movies.  I'd read this book as a much younger guy, but had forgotten most of the stories, so I went back to it and appreciated it all over again.  I've lost somewhere my original copy--the one shown here--and so I've had to make do with the "Children of the Corn," movie tie-in version I have here now.  Somebody, probably me, had switched copies over the years, and I can't tell you why.  Odd.  And I want the original one back.

The ones I remembered from (literally) my youth were: "The Last Rung on the Ladder" (still my favorite here), "Jerusalem's Lot," "Graveyard Shift," "Strawberry Spring," "The Bogeyman," "Gray Matter," and, because of the incredibly bad movies, "Children of the Corn" and "Lawnmower Man."

"The Last Rung on the Ladder" and "The Woman in the Room" work especially well because there's nothing supernatural in them.  Both stories--especially the former--read well because they are of the "Nothing's More Scary than Real Life" genre--which should be a genre if it isn't.

All of the stories are either good or very good, but I was pleased to discover a couple more.  "One for the Road" works really well, and is one of the scarier ones here.  If "Jerusalem's Lot" was originally a chapter in Salem's Lot--I think I got this right from King, who said it opened his book and was taken out just like Stoker's "Dracula's Guest" opened up Dracula and was taken out--then "One for the Road" takes place after Salem's Lot ends.  It's mentioned in the story that Ben Mears had burned the town down.  I would've put this story last in the collection, rather than second-to-last.  "Jerusalem's Lot" opens it up, so it would've been nice book-ending to have "One for the Road" end it.  Or perhaps that's too-slick serendipity, like the similar paths taken by Stoker's and King's vampire stories.

"One for the Road," "Strawberry Spring" and "The Last Rung on the Ladder" are the best-written stories here.  Almost all of these stories, by the way, were originally published in Cavalier magazine, a now-defunct magazine of a certain sort, if you know what I mean.  I wonder what men of the 70s made out of these well-written, and sometimes philosophically-bent, ruminations next to those explicitly explicit pictures of...well, you know.  It'd be a little jolting, I'd imagine.  He also got paid a few hundred bucks, per story, by that magazine, which is really good money for short stories, especially in the 70s.  My guess is that the magazine was trying to become the next glossy picture and literary high-end magazine of one of its bunny-themed competitors, and failing miserably.  (That bunny magazine, by the way, still pays a few thousand dollars for a short story, and always has.  So the lie could also be "I was reading the stories!" instead of "I buy it for the articles!")

Anyway, what I've learned here is that King has an idea and he writes it.  The simplicity of that is sort of shocking to me.  So here we have a story about a possessed laundry-pressing machine; a story about monstrous and blind rats; a story about trucks taking over the world; a story of a company that hurts those you love to help you quit smoking; a story about a hitman done in by the toys sent by the mother of his latest victim...and they all work, in varying degrees.

Think it, write it; think it, write it; think it, write it.  And why not?

Musings--Heart of Darkness

Photo: Man Who Laughs, Conrad Veidt


A few quick snippets that occurred to me today about this seminal work:

1.  I was wondering today why so many works circa 1890-1900 centered around the mask we wear to keep apart the good and bad parts of our nature--or, rather, that we all wear to separate the good and bad parts of human nature.  Take a look at all the works published between 1890-1900 about this theme:

Heart of Darkness (1899)--Joseph Conrad
Dracula (1897)--Bram Stoker
Phantom of the Opera (1909)--Gaston Leroux (vastly different plot than its films)
The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890)--Oscar Wilde
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)--Robert Louis Stevenson
Many works by Freud (1897 to The Ego and the Id in 1923)

The list could go on.  Was this always the case, that works about the mask of civilization upon our primitive nature have always been with us?  I don't know.  Rousseau certainly railed against much of this; his works and beliefs, still very strong with us, certainly had an effect on the French and American Revolutions, and still created heated debate in the 1890s, if not today.  He was very popular in 1890s Europe and America.

But I think it was Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, and Freud's massive popularity starting in the 1880s, that re-ignited this debate.  And at the end of the Victorian Era, maybe many artists realized how supposedly suppressed they were, but yet weren't, and a lot of works and thoughts erupted from that.  It continues today, but in an interesting reversal--

(to be continued)