Jaws: The Inside Story

Jaws: The Inside Story (2010)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Like so many other classics, JAWS has had countless documentaries, news stories, magazine articles and just about everything else done to it. If you're interested in the film there's so much research material out there that by the time you got done with it all you'd think that you had been on the set during the entire production. This installment in "The Inside Story" series has Richard Dreyfuss, Steven Spielberg, Sid Sheinberg, John Milius, Richard Zanuck and many others involved with the film telling their stories about its production. We start off learning how another director was going to do the picture but when he said "whale" instead of "shark" they knew they had to go elsewhere and this is how Spielberg got on board. There's a lot of discussion about the variety of issues with the production including a bit where Spielberg was going to quit the film. The shark, who they named Bruce, is also talked about quite a lot and especially considering it never worked and gave its director non-stop nightmares. The hiring of the cast is well-documented and we get some pretty good stories about the late Robert Shaw. This includes the USS Indianapolis sequence, which apparently he tried to do one day dead drunk and it didn't turn out too well. Real soldiers who were aboard the Indianapolis also get to talk about what they thought after seeing the scene. On the whole, if you're one of those who already knows everything about JAWS then it's doubtful that you're going to learn anything new here. If you're unfamiliar with the film then this is a very well-produced documentary that does a very good job at explaining everything about the film.