Random Thursday

Continuing with the Jaws movie facts this week! Brian Raftery, the author of the article I'm borrowing these factoids from, really outdid himself! There were lots of little things that I learned in this one that I never knew before about the movie! I guess what I learned came from the first anniversary edition of the VHS we used to have. So that was maybe its 20th Anniversary? 

It's sad in a way, because here I think my niece will never know what a VHS is! I was 2 when I knew how to work the VCR to watch my movies, she was probably around that age when it came to working the DVD player, though that was a little more delicate and made us nervous when she handled things! Especially my Disney DVDs she borrowed and couldn't be replaced if something happened to them because of that #@%* &$*#%@ *%$^#!@ vault! (and yeah I got a little click happy with my characters there! LOL! Imagine whatever you want with what I'm saying!! ;) )

• When Spielberg approached Gregory Peck — the star of Moby-Dick, and also a producer — for permission to use footage from the film, the actor declined. “He just claimed that he wasn’t proud of Moby-Dick … he didn’t want us to make fun of it, or include it at all.” After the success of Jaws, Peck’s film was rereleased in 1976 with a new tagline: “Before the Shark there was the Whale.”
• Another Spielberg-scripted scene that didn’t make the cut depicted a harbormaster sitting in a shack at night, ignoring the nearby sailboats and instead watches his TV (which just happens to be playing the 1957 WWII adventure Don’t Go Near the Water). As he stares at the screen, the masts of the ships begin moving in the background — evidence that the shark is nearby — and the oblivious harbormaster is eventually attacked in the shack. Spielberg couldn’t afford the scene, so it was replaced in the film by the sequence in which two fishermen are almost gobbled up on a pier. 
• Spielberg originally wanted two characters from his 1974 comedy The Sugarland Express — an older couple whose car was stolen — to make an appearance among the Amity beachgoers. But by that point in the film’s preproduction, he said, the logistics were already too daunting: “[I thought], ‘I’ve got to stop making it harder on myself,’” he later remembered.
• Jon Voight was approached to play Hooper, but turned Spielberg down; the director also talked to Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges (“I was a big fan of the entire cast from The Last Picture Show,“ the director later explained). When he finally approached Dreyfuss — who’d been highly recommended by American Graffiti director George Lucas — the actor declined, saying, “I’d rather watch this movie than shoot it, because it’s gonna be a bitch to shoot.” Months later, Dreyfuss panicked after seeing his performance in the 1974 comedy The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; fearing he’d never get work again, he called Spielberg and asked if the part was still available. “I came crawling to Martha’s Vineyard for the part,” Dreyfuss later said.
• Spielberg hoped Lee Marvin would play Quint, but the actor wasn’t interested: “What I heard was, he wanted to go fishing for real … that [making a movie] wasn’t his idea of a vacation.” His next choice was The Killing star Sterling Hayden, who’d played a harpooner in 1958’s Terror in a Texas Town, but he was unavailable. His producers suggested Shaw, who’d just starred in The Sting.