Random Thursday

So we've reached the end of July and I have one final post of movie facts for you about Jaws!!

And like I said before, I got these facts from an article on Yahoo that was written by Brian Raftery. And as promised, here is the link to the full article.

• For the scene in which Hooper goes into the underwater cage, Spielberg needed footage of a real-life great white, so he secured documentarians Ron and Valerie Taylor to film the animals in the waters of Australia. But because the sharks there were only 14 feet long — about 10 feet smaller than the killer fish in Jaws — Spielberg came up with the idea of placing a dwarf in a miniature cage, giving the illusion that the shark was much bigger. He eventually hired Carl Rizzo, a 4-foot-9 stuntman who doubled for Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, but who had no diving experience. “We had to … dangle him into the Southern Ocean, and have big, huge, monstrous sharks swimming around him,” Valerie Taylor later said. “He was very much afraid, and we had a lot of difficulty getting him into the cage.” A dummy was also used for the underwater sequence.
• Dreyfuss wasn’t available to shoot the close-up of Hooper’s face when he spots the shark swimming toward the cage. Luckily, stunt-double Frank Sparks had a Dreyfuss-sized beard, and was able to complete filming the sequence.
• For the scene in which the shark plunges to the bottom of the ocean, Spielberg blended in the sound of a roaring dinosaur from an old B-movie — the exact same sound he’d used to score the cliff-tumbling truck from the end of 1972′s Duel.
• On the last day of shooting, Spielberg — who’d heard rumors that the crew was going to throw him into the water once the five-and-half-month shoot finally wrapped — wore leather and suede to the set, hoping it would convince the team not to attack. He then snuck away to a ferry and headed toward a waiting car, which would quickly whisk him to the airport. As his boat pulled away, the director could be heard yelling “I shall not return!” He suffered a panic attack almost immediately afterward.
• In order to secure the film’s PG rating — as opposed to an R, which would kill its chances for widespread success — Spielberg had to cut a few frames from the scene in which the boater’s leg is bitten off; the ratings board didn’t want audiences to see it linger as it hit the bottom of the sea. Brown further sealed the deal by pointing out to the MPAA, unlike other scary movies, no one should be worried about Jaws-inspired copycat crimes. After all, he noted, “nobody impersonates a shark.”