Tied to the movie’s 35th anniversary, Jaws: The Inside Story provides an exhaustive look at the summer blockbuster that turned Steven Spielberg into a brand name and rewrote the rules for summer movies. Drawn in part from an earlier doc, The Shark Is Still Working, as well as fresh interviews, it’s a fascinating account that could easily have had a few bites taken out of its two hours in the editing suite without losing much. Even so, fans will find much to feast upon, hearing from cast and crew in addition to inhaling rare clips from the difficult, five-month production.
Spielberg reveals the definitive word on the JAWS USS Indianapolis speech:
I owe three people a lot for this speech. You’ve heard all this, but you’ve probably never heard it from me. There’s a lot of apocryphal reporting about who did what on Jaws and I’ve heard it for the last three decades, but the fact is the speech was conceived by Howard Sackler, who was an uncredited writer, didn’t want a credit and didn’t arbitrate for one, but he’s the guy that broke the back of the script before we ever got to Martha’s Vineyard to shoot the movie. I hired later Carl Gottlieb to come onto the island, who was a friend of mine, to punch up the script, but Howard conceived of the Indianapolis speech. I had never heard of the Indianapolis before Howard, who wrote the script at the Bel Air Hotel and I was with him a couple times a week reading pages and discussing them. Howard one day said, “Quint needs some motivation to show all of us what made him the way he is and I think it’s this Indianapolis incident.”
I said, “Howard, what’s that?” And he explained the whole incident of the Indianapolis and the Atomic Bomb being delivered and on its way back it was sunk by a submarine and sharks surrounded the helpless sailors who had been cast adrift and it was just a horrendous piece of World War II history. Howard didn’t write a long speech, he probably wrote about three-quarters of a page. But then, when I showed the script to my friend John Milius, John said “Can I take a crack at this speech?” and John wrote a 10 page monologue, that was absolutely brilliant, but out-sized for the Jaws I was making! (laughs) But it was brilliant and then Robert Shaw took the speech and Robert did the cut down. Robert himself was a fine writer, who had written the play The Man in the Glass Booth. Robert took a crack at the speech and he brought it down to five pages. So, that was sort of the evolution just of that speech. —Steven Spielberg
Screenwriter Carl Gottlieb.
![Close Encounters of the Third Kind screenplay by Steven Spielberg [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only). The screenplay, which was finished by Spielberg from an original script by Paul Schrader was based upon the book, The UFO Experience by Dr. J. Allen Hynek. Hynek also served as the film’s technical advisor.
Spielberg brought Paul Schrader to write the script in December 1973 with principal photography to begin in late-1974. However, Spielberg started work on Jaws in 1974, pushing Watch the Skies back. With the financial and critical success of Jaws, Spielberg earned a vast amount of creative control from Columbia, including the right to make the film any way he wanted. Schrader turned in his script, which Spielberg called, “one of the most embarrassing screenplays ever professionally turned in to a major film studio or director. It was a terribly guilt-ridden story not about UFOs at all.” Titled Kingdom Come, the script’s protagonist was a 45-year-old Air Force Officer named Paul Van Owen who worked with Project Blue Book. “[His] job for the government is to ridicule and debunk flying saucers.” Schrader continued. “One day he has an encounter. He goes to the government, threatening to blow the lid off to the public. Instead, he and the government spend 15 years trying to make contact.” Spielberg and Schrader experienced creative differences, hiring John Hill to rewrite. At one point the main character was a police officer. Spielberg [found] it hard to identify with men in uniform. “I wanted to have Mr. Everyday Regular Fella.” Spielberg rejected the Schrader/Hill script during post-production on Jaws. He reflected, “they wanted to make it like a James Bond adventure.”David Giler performed a rewrite; Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, friends of Spielberg, suggested the plot device of a kidnapped child. Spielberg then began to write the script. The song “When You Wish upon a Star” from Pinocchio influenced Spielberg’s writing style. “I hung my story on the mood the song created, the way it affected me personally.” Jerry Belson and Spielberg wrote the shooting script together. In the end, Spielberg was given solo writing credit. During pre-production, the title was changed from Kingdom Come to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. J. Allen Hynek, who worked with the United States Air Force on Project Blue Book, was hired as a scientific consultant. Hynek felt “even though the film is fiction, it’s based for the most part on the known facts of the UFO mystery, and it certainly catches the flavor of the phenomenon. Spielberg was under enormous pressure to make another blockbuster after Jaws, but he decided to make a UFO movie. He put his career on the line. USAF and NASA declined to cooperate on the film. [source]
Rolling Stone Interviews 1977-1978
Warren CLOSE ENCOUNTERS (1977) Official Magazine
Steven Spielberg on location in India with François Truffaut.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/50d500a74050ef89814bad4ef219cae6/tumblr_mkj3q5ZmC51rovfcgo1_1280.png)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind screenplay by Steven Spielberg [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only). The screenplay, which was finished by Spielberg from an original script by Paul Schrader was based upon the book, The UFO Experience by Dr. J. Allen Hynek. Hynek also served as the film’s technical advisor.
Spielberg brought Paul Schrader to write the script in December 1973 with principal photography to begin in late-1974. However, Spielberg started work on Jaws in 1974, pushing Watch the Skies back. With the financial and critical success of Jaws, Spielberg earned a vast amount of creative control from Columbia, including the right to make the film any way he wanted. Schrader turned in his script, which Spielberg called, “one of the most embarrassing screenplays ever professionally turned in to a major film studio or director. It was a terribly guilt-ridden story not about UFOs at all.” Titled Kingdom Come, the script’s protagonist was a 45-year-old Air Force Officer named Paul Van Owen who worked with Project Blue Book. “[His] job for the government is to ridicule and debunk flying saucers.” Schrader continued. “One day he has an encounter. He goes to the government, threatening to blow the lid off to the public. Instead, he and the government spend 15 years trying to make contact.” Spielberg and Schrader experienced creative differences, hiring John Hill to rewrite. At one point the main character was a police officer. Spielberg [found] it hard to identify with men in uniform. “I wanted to have Mr. Everyday Regular Fella.” Spielberg rejected the Schrader/Hill script during post-production on Jaws. He reflected, “they wanted to make it like a James Bond adventure.”
David Giler performed a rewrite; Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, friends of Spielberg, suggested the plot device of a kidnapped child. Spielberg then began to write the script. The song “When You Wish upon a Star” from Pinocchio influenced Spielberg’s writing style. “I hung my story on the mood the song created, the way it affected me personally.” Jerry Belson and Spielberg wrote the shooting script together. In the end, Spielberg was given solo writing credit. During pre-production, the title was changed from Kingdom Come to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. J. Allen Hynek, who worked with the United States Air Force on Project Blue Book, was hired as a scientific consultant. Hynek felt “even though the film is fiction, it’s based for the most part on the known facts of the UFO mystery, and it certainly catches the flavor of the phenomenon. Spielberg was under enormous pressure to make another blockbuster after Jaws, but he decided to make a UFO movie. He put his career on the line. USAF and NASA declined to cooperate on the film. [source]
Rolling Stone Interviews 1977-1978
Warren CLOSE ENCOUNTERS (1977) Official Magazine
Steven Spielberg on location in India with François Truffaut.
Source: scifiscripts.com
This exceedingly rare original Schindler’s List is the only one to ever be on the market. It emanates from the family of Itzhak Stern, Schindler’s accountant and right hand man (played in the movie by Ben Kingsley). The provenance is ironclad. There are 3 others known, two in Yad Vashem, one in the U.S. Holocaust Museum. This version of the list (there are seven all told) is the penultimate, being 14 pages in length and listing 801 names, dated April 18, 1945. A more poignant and historic World War 2 relic cannot be imagined.
Read Schindler’s List screenplay by Steven Zaillian. Based on the novel by Thomas Keneally. Directed by Steven Spielberg. (NOTE: For educational purposes only)
I would like to dedicate this post to Branko Lustig, my fellow Croatian.
Lustig began his film career in 1955 as an assistant director at Jadran Film, a state-owned Zagreb-based film production company. In 1956 he worked as a unit production manager on Branko Bauer’s World War II drama Ne okreći se sine, winner of three Golden Arena awards at the 1956 Pula Film Festival. In the 1980s Lustig worked on the miniseries The Winds of War (1983) and its sequel War and Remembrance (1988). He moved to the United States in 1988.
Lustig received his first Oscar in 1993 for the production of Schindler’s List, a film based on the novel of Thomas Keneally. He received his second Oscar for the epic movie Gladiator about a struggle for power in Imperial Rome, in 2001. Other major Hollywood films that Lustig has worked on as a producer or executive producer include The Peacemaker (1997), Hannibal (2001), Black Hawk Down (2001), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), A Good Year (2006), and American Gangster (2007). In 2008, Lustig helped establish an independent production company Six Point Films to produce “meaningful, thought-provoking independent films”.
During World War II, as a child he was imprisoned for two years in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Most members of his family perished in the death camps throughout Europe, including his grandmother who was killed in the gas chamber, while his father was killed in Čakovec by Hungarians on March 15, 1945. Lustig’s mother survived the Holocaust and was reunited with him after the war. On the day of the liberation Lustig weighted only 66 pounds. Lustig credited his survival in Auschwitz to a German officer that, coincidentally, was from the same Osijek suburb and knew Lustig’s father. He overheard Lustig crying in Croatian and asked him who his father was.
I can’t describe how proud we are of him. Strength and Honor.
Source: momentsintime.com
Background story: Ingmar Bergman and the shark from Jaws by John Bryson, 1975
Source: aphelis.net
As a result of winning a Student Academy Award at USC for his film, A Field of Honor, Robert Zemeckis came to the attention of Steven Spielberg. Spielberg said, “He barged right past my secretary, and sat me down and showed me this student film … and I thought it was spectacular, with police cars and a riot, all dubbed to Elmer Bernstein’s score for The Great Escape.”
With thanks to @digifruitella
Harrison Ford apparently used this script throughout filming. Notes range from single words to complete pages of writing and cover all aspects of the film making process, ranging from dialogue alterations and questions about the plot to suggestions and perspectives used to create the iconic character of “Indiana Jones”. —Daniel M Eckhart
Raiders of the Lost Ark (also known as Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark) is a 1981 American action-adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by George Lucas, and starring Harrison Ford. It is the first film in the Indiana Jones franchise; and it pits Indiana Jones (Ford) against the Nazis, who search for the Ark of the Covenant, because Adolf Hitler believes it will make their army invincible. The film originated with Lucas’ desire to create a modern version of the serials of the 1930s and 1940s. Production was based at Elstree Studios, England; but filming also took place in La Rochelle, Tunisia, Hawaii, and California from June to September 1980.
Released on June 12, 1981, Raiders of the Lost Ark became the top-grossing film of 1981; it remains one of the highest-grossing films ever made. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards in 1982, including Best Picture, and won four (Art Direction, Film Editing, Sound, Visual Effects) as well as winning a fifth Special Achievement Academy Award in Sound Effects Editing. In 1999, the film was included in the United States Library of Congress’ National Film Registry as having been deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Rolling Stone Interviews 1980-1981:
Original Medway Productions Script for Raiders of the Lost Ark. With page changes. Signed by Vic Armstrong, Harrison Ford’s stunt double, and Jim Steranko, who created the original concept art for Indiana Jones. Medway Productions is an oblique reference to the then-home of George and Marcia Lucas.
Raiders of the Lost Ark Screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan, revised third draft August 1979 [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only)
A holy grail of Indiana Jones artifacts: a 125-page transcript of the original story-conference meeting involving producer George Lucas, director Steven Spielberg, and writer Lawrence Kasdan. The blog, Mystery Man on Film, somehow got its hands on the alleged transcript, which features the filmmakers talking at great length in January 1978 about what would eventually become Raiders of the Lost Ark. The thing’s a pure joy to read. In it, you can find the genesis of everything from Indiana Jones’ name to his fear of snakes to his (possibly risque) romantic history with Marion Ravenwood.
Download the 125-page transcript [pdf].
Harrison Ford’s Original “Raiders of the Lost Ark” Script Notes #TooSoloishcinephilearchive.tumblr.com/post/418017434…
Source: moedred.livejournal.com
Steven Spielberg on location in India with François Truffaut.
Spielberg à propos de François Truffaut
Spielberg came to AFI in 1978 for a seminar with AFI Fellows. In this clip he talks about working with François Truffaut.
Source: moedred.livejournal.com
Empire of the Sun clapperboard.
Empire of the Sun screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Based on the Novel by J.G. Ballard [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only)
JG Ballard waited 40 years before writing about his experiences in a Japanese internment camp. Here he remembers how Hollywood hijacked his childhood memories to create a deeply moving film.
Then, in 1987, like a jumbo jet crash-landing in a suburban park, a Hollywood film company came down from the sky. It disgorged an army of actors, makeup artists, set designers, costume specialists, cinematographers and a director, Steven Spielberg, all of whom had strong ideas of their own about wartime Shanghai. After 40 years my memories had shaped themselves into a novel, but only three years later they were mutating again.
Hazy figures now had names and personalities, smiles and glances that I had seen in a dozen other films: John Malkovich, Nigel Havers, Miranda Richardson. With them was a brilliant child actor, Christian Bale, who uncannily resembled my younger self. He came up to me on the set and said: “Hello, Mr Ballard. I’m you.” He was followed by an attractive young couple, Emily Richard and Rupert Frazer, who added: “And we’re your mum and dad.”
Coincidences were building strange bridges. Thanks to the film studios in Shepperton, many of my neighbours worked as extras, and now called out: “Mr Ballard, we’re going to Lunghua together.” Had some deep-cover assignment led me to Shepperton in 1960, knowing that one day I would write a novel about Shanghai, and that part of it would be filmed in Shepperton?
Spielberg, an intelligent and thoughtful man, generously gave me a small role as a guest at the opening fancy-dress party. Warners had rented three houses in Sunningdale to stand in for our Shanghai home. When I arrived at the location I found an armada of buses, vans and coaches that filled entire fields and resembled the evacuation of London. Bizarrely, it also reminded me of the day we were bussed into Lunghua from our assembly point at the American club near the Great Western Road. I can still see the huge crowd of Brits, many of the women in fur coats, sitting with their suitcases around the swimming pool, as if waiting for the water to part and lead them to safety.
The Sunningdale house where the fancy-dress party was filmed closely resembled our Amherst Avenue home, but this at least was no coincidence. The expat British architects in the 1930s who specialised in stockbroker’s Tudor took the Surrey golf course mansions as their model. Past and present were coming full circle. The Warners props department filled the house with period fittings - deco screens and lamps, copies of Time and Life, white telephones and radios the size of sideboards. In the drive outside the front door, uniformed Chinese chauffeurs stood beside authentic Buicks and Packards. A 12-year-old boy ran through the costumed guests, a model aircraft in one hand, racing across the lawn into a dream.
Surprisingly, it was the film premiere in Hollywood, the fount of most of our planet’s fantasies, that brought everything down to earth. A wonderful night for any novelist, and a reminder of the limits of the printed word. Sitting with the sober British contingent, surrounded by everyone from Dolly Parton to Sean Connery, I thought Spielberg’s film would be drowned by the shimmer of mink and the diamond glitter. But once the curtains parted the audience was gripped. Chevy Chase, sitting next to me, seemed to think he was watching a newsreel, crying: “Oh, oh … !” and leaping out of his seat as if ready to rush the screen in defence of young Bale.
I was deeply moved by the film but, like every novelist, couldn’t help feeling that my memories had been hijacked by someone else’s. As the battle of Britain fighter ace Douglas Bader said when introduced to the cast of Reach for the Sky: “But they’re actors.”
Actors of another kind play out our memories, performing on a stage inside our heads whenever we think of childhood, our first day at school, courtship and marriage. The longer we live - and it’s now 60 years since I reluctantly walked out of Lunghua camp - the more our repertory company emerges from the shadows and moves to the front of the stage. Spielberg’s film seems more truthful as the years pass. Christian Bale and John Malkovich join hands by the footlights with my real parents and my younger self, with the Japanese soldiers and American pilots, as a boy runs forever across a peaceful lawn towards the coming war. But perhaps, in the end, it’s all only a movie. —JG Ballard
This is why I love Steven Spielberg.
Directly from a camera crew member, one of the 3 clapperboards used in the movie. This one was used when a shot needed various cameras. As you can see is screenmatched with the one that appears behind the scenes in the iconic shot when ET and Elliot begin their famous flight. According to the crew member, was last used in one of the night shots in the forest from the begginning of the movie. —indignate
Previously on Cinephilia & Beyond:
“Melissa delivered this 107-page first draft to me and I read it in about an hour. I was just knocked out. It was a script I was willing to shoot the next day. It was so honest, and Melissa’s voice made a direct connection with my heart.” —Steven Spielberg
This is THE original clapperboard that Steven Spielberg is holding in this now famous photo of the behind scenes of the movie, the first summer blockbuster, Jaws.
An original pencil rendering of the iconic Jaws poster image, sketched by the poster artist himself, Roger Kastel.
The illustrated storyboards reproduced from Joe Alves personnal file. Joe Alves has also illustrated the storyboard by hand with an image of a Great White Shark.
Jaws
Hooper: You were on the Indianapolis?
Brody: What happened?
Quint: Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, chief. It was comin’ back, from the island of Tinian Delady, just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen footer. You know, you know that when you’re in the water, chief? You tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. Well, we didn’t know. `Cause our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Huh huh. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, chief. The sharks come cruisin’. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know it’s… kinda like `ol squares in battle like a, you see on a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo. And the idea was, the shark would go for nearest man and then he’d start poundin’ and hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes the shark would go away. Sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he’s got… lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch screamin’ and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin’ and the hollerin’ they all come in and rip you to pieces. Y’know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men! I don’t know how many sharks, maybe a thousand! I don’t know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin’ chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player, boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water, just like a kinda top. Up ended. Well… he’d been bitten in half below the waist. Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us. He’d a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper, anyway he saw us and come in low. And three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened? Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.
Tied to the movie’s 35th anniversary, “Jaws: The Inside Story” provides an exhaustive look at the summer blockbuster that turned Steven Spielberg into a brand name and rewrote the rules for summer movies. Drawn in part from an earlier doc, “The Shark Is Still Working,” as well as fresh interviews, it’s a fascinating account that could easily have had a few bites taken out of its two hours in the editing suite without losing much. Even so, fans will find much to feast upon, hearing from cast and crew in addition to inhaling rare clips from the difficult, five-month production.
DP/30: Jaws Blu-ray, screenwriter Carl Gottlieb.
Source: yourprops.com
Original Medway Productions Script for Raiders of the Lost Ark. With page changes. Signed by Vic Armstrong, Harrison Ford’s stunt double, and Jim Steranko, who created the original concept art for Indiana Jones. Medway Productions is an oblique reference to the then-home of George and Marcia Lucas.
Raiders of the Lost Ark Screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan, revised third draft August 1979 [pdf]. (NOTE: For educational purposes only)
A holy grail of Indiana Jones artifacts: a 125-page transcript of the original story-conference meeting involving producer George Lucas, director Steven Spielberg, and writer Lawrence Kasdan. The blog, Mystery Man on Film, somehow got its hands on the alleged transcript, which features the filmmakers talking at great length in January 1978 about what would eventually become Raiders of the Lost Ark. The thing’s a pure joy to read. In it, you can find the genesis of everything from Indiana Jones’ name to his fear of snakes to his (possibly risque) romantic history with Marion Ravenwood.
Download the 125-page transcript [pdf].
Jamie Benning is an outstanding human being. The man behind the fan-made video commentaries for the original Star Wars trilogy - ‘Star Wars Begins’, ‘Building Empire’ and ‘Returning To Jedi’ - he’s poured hours, days, weeks, months into collating and cutting together videos that illuminate and educate would-be Jedi knights about the ways of The Force. Well, the ways of the people who made A New Hope, Empire and Jedi, anyway.
Benning returns with another fantastic ‘filumentary’ in the form of ‘Raiding The Lost Ark’, doing the same thing for - you guessed it - Raiders Of The Lost Ark. As he explains in his exclusive blog below, the task was nowhere near as easy as it was for Star Wars, requiring him to get his dictaphone and find out the facts from the appropriate horses’ mouths.
So here’s your chance to have a read of how he did it, then take a look at the final product at the very end. And to find out more about Mr. Benning and the wonderful work he does, head to his website, filmumentaries.com, where you can see posters, stills, and much, much more. You can also follow him on Twitter (@jamieswb) and see more of his videos on his Vimeo page.
Wim Wenders - Room 666 (1982)
Directors in order of appearance:
Jean-Luc Godard
Paul Morrissey
Mike De Leon
Monte Hellman
Romain Goupil
Susan Seidelman
Noël Simsolo
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Werner Herzog
Robert Kramer
Ana Carolina
Maroun Bagdadi
Steven Spielberg
Michelangelo Antonioni
Wim Wenders
Yilmaz Güney
A beautiful pearl of a lost time!
