Easy Riders Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind

Author:Peter Biskind
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Nine:

The Revenge of the Nerd

1975

• How Steven Spielberg’s Jaws made the world safe for blockbusters, BBS enjoyed its last hurrah, while Bogdanovich’s bubble burst, and Paramount and Warners turned over, slamming the door on the New Hollywood.

“Jaws was devastating to making artistic, smaller films. They forgot how to do it. They’re no longer interested.”

—PETER BOGDANOVICH

Steven Spielberg had taken his friends Scorsese, Lucas, and Milius to see the shark in the hangar in North Hollywood where it was being built. When he agreed to do Jaws, Spielberg thought he could just hire a shark wrangler to make a great white do a few pirouettes in the water, like a dolphin jumping through hoops. That proved to be wishful thinking, to say the least, and the result was in front of them, dubbed “Bruce,” after Spielberg’s lawyer, Bruce Ramer. There was nobody around. The polyethylene cast was half done, unpainted, just a gray, submarine-sized phallic thing with patches on the side, about twenty-five feet long. It was so large that Milius said, “They’re overdoing it.” Steven replied, “No, they aren’t, the ichthyologist said this is exactly what it would look like.” Milius got excited, said Steven was making the ultimate aquatic samurai film. Lucas regarded the storyboard, looked up at the big shark, and said to Spielberg, “If you can get half of this on film you’re gonna have the biggest hit of all time.” Spielberg, meanwhile, grabbed the controls, made the enormous mouth open and shut with a grinding noise, like an outsized bear trap. Lucas climbed the ladder, waited for the jaws to part, and stuck his head inside to see how it worked. Spielberg closed it on him. Milius thought, My God, we’re like human tacos compared to that thing. Spielberg tried to open the mouth, but it was stuck, a premonition of things to come. After Lucas managed to extricate himself, the filmmakers jumped into the car and split. They knew they had broken something that had cost a lot of money.

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