Jaws

In 1975, a plucky young director named Steven Spielberg saw his first big success with the release of Jaws, a movie about a shark eating a bunch of wealthy beachgoers in a resort town in New England. Paradoxically being the least “Spielberg” of his films while simultaneously being one of the most famous films ever made, Jaws presented a huge early challenge to the director in the form of an intensely difficult shoot due to a number of factors, not the least of which was the fact that most of the movie takes place on the open ocean and features a legendarily unreliable robotic shark. Despite its troubled production and media coverage all too ready to seize on what seemed to be shaping up to be a huge box office dud, Jaws went on to become the biggest movie of all time, creating the “summer blockbuster” genre and forever changing the kinds of films Hollywood bets big on to this day.

In this week’s episode, Tom and Abe are joined by comedian Brandie Posey as they discuss the grueling nightmare that was the production of Jaws, a series of calamities that almost derailed Spielberg’s career before it even began. Along the way, they discuss how the shark was basically an underwater RC car (only a fraction as reliable), how the Director of Photography had to invent a brand new piece of technology just to film this cursed picture, and whether a shark from New England would sound like Casey Affleck or Peter Griffin.