What Jaws means to me
JAWS did not change the way I look at movies. But it ignited a movie buff’s passion that had been fuelled for years from my early primary school days when my dad started me on 007 films and Westerns. Later, my grandfather took me to watch Shaw Bros kung fu flicks. And there was that day I’ll always remember when my mum took me to the cinema one year- end school break to watch the jaw- dropping Ray Harryhausen epic The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad.
And there was that little Planet Of The Apes film series which kick- started my yearning to know more about the movies I was watching.
Then came Jaws. Back in the 1970s we usually had to wait about a year for a major movie to get here. Jaws made headlines as a 1975 summer box- office smash in the United States, but we only got to watch it in 1976. One whole year of waiting, in which I got to:
a) Read Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel on which the film was based;
b) Read JAW’D, the MAD Magazine satire of the film ( MAD taught me to laugh about spoilers!);
c) Read The Jaws Log, a hilarious and insightful making- of book written by Carl Gottlieb, a veteran TV writer who co- wrote the film’s screenplay with Benchley ( and two uncredited fellas, John Milius and Howard Sackler);
d) Play John Williams’ Jaws soundtrack over and over until the cassette was almost worn out before the movie arrived;
e) Semi- enlighten and completely annoy my schoolmates with my endless talk of sharks; and
f) Read everything I could get my hands on about sharks.
It helped that my dad ran a bookstore and had brought in a number of non- fiction books on the critters because of the novel’s huge success. It didn’t help ( though it was good for character- building) that he insisted I pay for my own books and magazines, no freebies or free reading.
That meant sacrificing the part of my allowance set aside for comics. A small sacrifice. I was hooked on sharks. They were the new dinosaurs in my life; Galeocerdo cuvier, Carcharodon carcharias, Isurus oxyrinchus ... I could rattle the names off effortlessly and their dietary habits and the fact that man was more dangerous to sharks than the other way around.
Then the movie finally arrived in our cinemas in 1976, and it was a lot different from the book.
For one thing, I actually cared about the characters ( a big minus for me in the novel, since they were mostly unlikeable and I didn’t care if all of them got eaten eventually), the shark scenes were convincing and scary ( a clever combination of actual shark footage and the notorious mechanical beast nicknamed Bruce), the film was disarmingly funny ( all the better to put us off guard) and oh, how the music score that I was so familiar with by then just meshed perfectly with everything on the screen.
It was a grand illusion that pulled you right in and took you along on an awfully big and perilous adventure, and it was hard to resist cheering along with Chief Brody when that beast went ka- blooey at the end. Sheer moviemaking magic from Steven Spielberg and the collaborators I knew so much about through The Jaws Log.
Internet search has become such a part of our lives today that we take the hunt for information for granted; yet back then, we could still find so much in libraries and bookstores and by just talking to people. ( Note that four out of my six Jaws- related pre- movie activities begin with “read”.)
As for the interaction part, my schoolmates’ annoyance at me continued as I dissected every scene and gave impromptu re- enactments.
Eventually, the enthusiasm died down as exam season neared, and soon, the sharks were borne away on the currents of school and teenage preoccupations. And then the very next year, word reached us about this little movie called Star Wars.
source: Florida Museum of natural history, university of Florida Graphic: Tribune news service
FORTY years after Jaws turned blood- thirsty sharks into the stuff of pop culture legend, Samuel “Doc” Gruber is all too happy to prove that it’s safe to go back in the water. From a motor boat in the warm turquoise waters of the Bahamas, Gruber – one of the world's top authorities on sharks – throws scraps of barracuda, ladyfish and other bait to a dozen circling reef sharks happy for a mid- morning snack.
Also in the water a similar number of humans in snorkelling gear, hanging from an anchor line, their initial galeophobia – fear of sharks – giving way to fascination at the feeding frenzy unfolding before their eyes.
“Kick it! Kick it!” shouts Gruber cheerfully whenever a curious shark gets too close to the snorkellers, prompting them to rattle their fins to shoo it away – a trick that never fails to work.
Feeding done, braver souls are welcome to join the 77- year- old Gruber for an hour- long free dive with the sharks, who seem quite content just to cruise around casually for the entertainment of their land- dwelling visitors.
“You should watch them because they’re beautiful,” says the indefatigable American marine biologist who, in 1990, founded the Bimini Shark Lab in the Bahamas, a mandatory waypoint for shark scientists from around the world. “They’re not the death fish from hell.”
Few fatalities, but bad PR
Swimming with sharks is not without its risks – as apex predators, they do occupy the top of the marine food chain – but in the 20- plus years the Shark Lab has been hosting such outings, nothing has gone amiss.
“A lot of the sharks that we see here have been in this area for 10 or 15 years," said Tristan Guttridge, the Shark Lab’s Britishborn director and senior scientist. “They know exactly what to expect and they’re very easily trained.”
More than 500 species of sharks populate all the world's oceans, from the huge Greenland shark that lurks in Arctic waters to the dwarf lantern sharks off Colombia and Venezuela that fit in the palm of a hand. But with an estimated 100 million sharks killed every year – many for China's controversial high- value shark's fin soup trade – nearly 30% are at risk of extinction, and just over a quarter are close to becoming threatened in the near future, scientists say.
“Of all the marine vertebrate species, they have the highest level of threat,” said Imogen Zethoven, director of global shark conservation for the Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington.
They also have a nagging PR problem, even if shark fatalities are extremely few – about six a year worldwide, says the International Shark Attack File programme at the University of Florida, with surfers the most vulnerable.
“The fatalities rate has declined markedly over the last 110 years,” even with more and more people taking to the water recreationally, said the programme’s curator, George Burgess.
While Australia is best known for greatwhite shark fatalities, the Florida coast is the most likely place to be bitten, Burgess said. Even then, the chances of a shark attack at a US beach are one in 11.5 million.
Shark tourism
Some blame Jaws – Steven Spielberg's classic 1975 summer blockbuster about a New England resort town terrorised by a man- eating great white – for the enduring image of sharks as the most feared of all marine apex predators.
“If you don't know anything else about sharks and the only thing you saw was Jaws, then yeah, you're in trouble," said underwater cinematographer Andy Casagrande, best known for his work filming great white sharks off Australia.
But environmental campaigns and television specials like Discovery Channel's Shark Week, returning for a 28th season on July 5 in the United States, are credited with giving sharks a public relations fillip.
In the Bahamas, which in 2011 declared its waters a shark sanctuary with no shark fishing allowed, commercial or otherwise, scuba operators on Bimini and other islands active- ly promote shark diving expeditions.
In Mexico, “save the sharks by swimming with them” is the theme of an annual Whale Shark Festival at Isla Mujeres, near Cancun, that will host its eighth edition on July 18- 24.\
A 2013 study from the University of British Columbia in Canada called “shark tourism” an emerging industry that attracts 600,000 shark watchers a year, directly supports 10,000 jobs and generates US$ 314mil a year – a figure that could more than double to US$ 780mil in two decades.
“It is abundantly clear that leaving sharks in the ocean is worth much more than putting them on the menu,” said Andres Cisneros- Montemayor, lead author of the study published in the Oryx conservation journal.
Meanwhile, on social media, a great white named Mary Lee has become a Twitter celebrity as she roams the US East Coast with a pinger attached to her dorsal fin by the non- profit OCEARCH organisation.
Back at the Shark Lab, Gruber revels in taking guests out to another attraction – a shallow- water “shark pen” within wading distance from the beach that holds young lemon sharks for research.
Deftly, and with a big smile, he picks up a shark, turns it over and, with a bit of acupressure in the right spot, makes it fall asleep for a time, before letting it slip back into its proper habitat.
Overall, Gruber is optimistic for the future of sharks.
“Oh my God! There's been a huge change in perception, but we've still got a long way to go,” he says. – AFP Relaxnews