On this day in 1975, Universal Studios released the scariest horror film of my youth: Jaws. Speaking of which, while I was in graduate school, my closest friend had a summer house in the Hamptons. We used to spend a fair amount of time there, as you might imagine. Because that’s how we rolled. Anyway, the nicest and closest beach was at East Hampton. And nearly every time we went there, no matter the day or time, we’d see this wiry, George-Hamilton-bronzed older dude in a black banana hammock stretched out on the sand. Although he was often the only other person there, we never paid much attention to him. Until, that is, this one day, when the guy got up, stretched, and turned toward us. It was Roy Scheider! In all the times we saw him there, he never once went in the water. True story.
[Update: Here’s Roy Scheider’s obit. And another one.]
25 comments
June 20, 2008 at 11:02 pm
bitchphd
Funny, we went to the beach tonight at dusk, after dinner, and I was thinking that I’m going to have to basically forbid PK from ever seeing Jaws, so as to prevent him from developing the fear of deep water that everyone who sees that film has.
June 20, 2008 at 11:07 pm
ari
After seeing Jaws when I was ten or eleven, I didn’t even go in a pool for months.
June 21, 2008 at 6:16 am
Ben Alpers
Jaws is very scary, no question about it.
But scarier than The Exorcist? Or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?
I guess it depends on which primal fears push your buttons.
But Jaws may win for exactly the reason that bitchphd and ari point out: for a while, at least, it actually changed the behavior of nearly everyone of roughly our age.
June 21, 2008 at 6:27 am
Jonathan Rees
Ari:
Would Poltergeist count as a film of your youth (because I thought that was much scarier)? After all, you always heard that music whenever the shark was about to attack.
June 21, 2008 at 6:32 am
drip
My generation stopped showering. Yes, Psycho caused dirty fecking hippies.
Jaws was foreshadowing ari’s primal fear of Roy Scheider in a banana hammock in East Hampton.
June 21, 2008 at 8:07 am
eric
Robert Shaw was awesome, by the way, in The Sting, The Taking of Pelham 123, and Jaws. Not so much in The Man for All Seasons, but that was a crummy role.
June 21, 2008 at 8:24 am
Charlieford
Jaws was to movies what Frampton Comes Alive was to music: a blockbuster of such unprecedented, mind-altering proportions they changed their respective industries forever. The sleeper, the critic-acclaimed, the slow-word-of-mouth-building hit, etc., no longer mattered. No one had patience for any of that anymore. They wanted huge bucks and they wanted them fast. Pretty soon, even the consumer would become a near-total consumer, ie, scanning the news for the opening-week takes of the latest movies. Peter Biskind’s book (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls http://www.amazon.com/Riders-Raging-Bulls-Sex-Drugs-Rock/dp/0684857081 ) shows that the one director of that generation to make the transition of the 1970s most easily was, in fact, Spielberg, who never had any ambitions beyond making blockbusters in the first place. For a similar dissection of the music industry’s travails, Fred Goodwin’s Mansion on the Hill is quite good: http://www.amazon.com/Mansion-Hill-Springsteen-Head-Collision/dp/0679743774 .
June 21, 2008 at 9:32 am
Ben Alpers
One of the incredible things about Frampton Comes Alive is how quickly it became passé. Since it’s made a pretty bid comeback in the last decade or so, it’s hard to remember how completely out the album was in the 1980s.
I once knew someone who had worked in a used record store in the early ’80s that used to sell big wooden crates to hold LPs. They had so many copies of Frampton Comes Alive that at one point they had a special on a crate filled with copies of the album that was priced at less than an empty crate.
June 21, 2008 at 9:50 am
andrew
After seeing Jaws, I never wanted to hang out with drunken fishermen ever again.
June 21, 2008 at 10:07 am
Charlieford
“One of the incredible things about Frampton Comes Alive is how quickly it became passé.” Not too surprising, maybe. That was one of those records that became the “Christmas gift from a well-meaning but clueless relative.” The first of those that I recall was “Sweet Baby James” by James Taylor. People of a certain age sometimes got multiple copies of those records. And of course, there’s a kind of algebraic inevitability going on there: anything THAT popular with youngish teens (not to be prejudiced, but hey . . .) simply can’t also be deep or complex or nuanced enough to sustain interest even among those who think they like it. (I’m reminded of Robert Park’s 1924 essay on the sociology of the newspaper, where he quotes an editor of a New York paper in the 1880’s who knew something was wrong with his paper when the circulation went above a certain level–15,000 I think it was–because he knew there weren’t more than 15,000 people in the city who could appreciate a quality paper.)
June 21, 2008 at 3:46 pm
bitchphd
Jaws is way scarier than The Exorcist or TCM. I honestly believe that it is the scariest movie I have ever seen, probably b/c it actually deals with a real potential danger, y’know? I mean, everyone swims, and sharks really *do* sometimes eat people.
June 21, 2008 at 3:51 pm
ari
I mean, everyone swims, and sharks really *do* sometimes eat people.
They eat people whenever they can. Any fool knows that. Whereas only Bobby Jindal is afraid of demon possession, Ben. That said, I suppose it’s more likely than not that one would be massacred by chainsaws if one spent time in Texas. But that’s a problem easily solved. And as a kid, I was never really afraid of ghosts, Jonathon. Peter Frampton, on the other hand, absolutely terrified me. Anyone who can make a guitar talk can *not* be trusted.
June 21, 2008 at 4:32 pm
andrew
I must be the only person who found that movie dreadfully boring. They’re on that boat forever. Every time the shark showed up I was cheered because it meant something might happen. I did not see it when I was young; the movie is older than I am, anyway.
June 21, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Ben Alpers
Dude, Bobby Jindal has mad exorcism skillz. He’s the last person to be afraid of demon possession. This ought to make McCain’s VP choice pretty easy: Can we afford not to have a Vice President who can rid his fellow Americans of demons?
June 21, 2008 at 4:39 pm
andrew
He could be nominated to the president’s council on physical fitness.
June 21, 2008 at 5:41 pm
bitchphd
Every time the shark showed up I was cheered because it meant something might happen.
Well yes. It went from dreadfully dull to terrifying. Probably that’s how it made such a lasting impression.
June 21, 2008 at 5:44 pm
urbino
Can we afford not to have a Vice President who can rid his fellow Americans of demons?
Can we insist that he prove his mettle by starting with the current holder of that office?
June 21, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Brad
Well yes. It went from dreadfully dull to terrifying. Probably that’s how it made such a lasting impression.
The first time I saw was only a couple of years ago. The pacing of it is really weird compared to modern movies. A remake of Jaws today would have sharks jumping out of body of water to eat people every five minutes.
Though, despite the fact that I never saw the movie, it is so deeply entrenched in our American psyche that I was always afraid of sharks while swimming in deep water, even when I was in fresh water lakes in the middle of the continent.
June 21, 2008 at 6:41 pm
ben wolfson
Jaws is way scarier than The Exorcist or TCM.
Turner Classic Movies isn’t scary at all.
June 21, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Jonathan Rees
So I should take away from this conversation that Frampton Comes Alive was, in fact, the scariest album ever made?
June 21, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Fontana Labs
I note for the record the existence of “Frampton Comes Alive II.” Make of that what you will.
June 21, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Fontana Labs
The other thing that makes Jaws annoying: it renders the opening of the last movement of the New World symphony ridiculous.
June 21, 2008 at 7:51 pm
ac
My generation stopped showering
And Bambi caused the environmental movement.
June 21, 2008 at 8:43 pm
urbino
My generation stopped having sex because of Halloween.
June 25, 2008 at 3:42 am
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