Failure is central to engineering. [Read this 2017 research paper on elementary teachers’ reflections on the use of fail words after teaching engineering by ASEE Fellows Pamela Lottero-Perdue and Elizabeth A. Parry.]

Flawed engineering also proved central to the creation of Jaws, which chomped through box-office records and spawned a new business model – the wide-release summer blockbuster – that changed Hollywood along with summer vacations forever, as this photo-laden Cinephilia & Beyond blog post  puts it.

Back in July 1974, Steven Spielberg was a young, virtually unknown director shooting on location in Martha’s Vineyard, a popular summer resort off the southern coast of Massachusetts. He’d been delayed  for several months while engineers worked the kinks out of the film’s $250,000 mechanical star. But the monster – actually there were three, collectively nicknamed Bruce after Spielberg’s lawyer, as this delightful 2010 NPR report describes – proved about as menacing as a guppy when it finally lurched into action.

The animatronic sharks had performed perfectly – on land. But once submerged, the first sank and had to be retrieved by divers. Seawater flooded the air-powered pneumatic systems, rendering the fake sharks hard if not impossible to command, and their neoprene foam skin absorbed water and bloated. Cross-eyed and with overly white teeth, the robotic shark couldn’t even close its jaws properly, let alone convincingly convey the bloodthirsty beast that Spielberg envisioned for his gory opening scene.

Spielberg’s quest for realism went beyond building a mechanical marauder, notes a 2015 Mental Floss article. Prior to Jaws, Hollywood studios didn’t shoot movies on the ocean; they filmed boats floating in a tank with scenery projected behind it. Spielberg took to the deep waters off the Vineyard, however, where heavy seas and wind complicated filming. Several cast and crew members nearly died in boating mishaps or near drownings, and at one point the Orca began sinking. Most days, noted Mental Floss, Spielberg had just two hours of afternoon light to shoot after setting up the gear and waiting for unwanted sailboats to clear from the horizon.

Spielberg reportedly felt like Captain Bligh as his $4 million budget and 65-day shooting schedule busted loose from its moorings. He feared the studio would pull the plug at any minute. The cast and crew threatened to mutiny. Angry locals left dead sharks on the production office’s porch and Hollywood’s rumor mill buzzed about Spielberg’s imminent demise. “We were in deep trouble,” production designer Joe Alves, who helped create the sharks, told NPR in 2016.

Mechanical malfunctions could have reduced Spielberg to tantrums or tears. Instead, he worked with his team to improvise, rewrite dialogue, and design workarounds for shark scenes – including abandoning his original vision for opening the movie with a gory shark attack. Indeed, jaws are rare in Jaws. Bruce makes his debut an hour and 20 minutes into the two-hour film.

Spielberg’s pivot – relying on creepy music and the unfeigned shock on the face of a swimmer as her legs and torso are yanked by a line to create one of the most suspenseful opening scenes in cinema history – snatched victory from the jaws of  engineering defeat and established a young director who would go on to make many more blockbusters.

“The shark not working was a godsend,” Spielberg reflected in a 2011 interview with Ain’t It Cool News, noting that it compelled him to “become more like Alfred Hitchcock,” building suspense by shooting from the predator’s viewpoint. “When I didn’t have control of my shark it made me kind of rewrite the whole script without the shark. Therefore, in many people’s opinions the film was more effective than the way the script actually offered up the shark in at least a dozen more scenes that today is history.”

Jaws broke box-office records when it was released in June 1975 and went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time, winning several Oscars and an Academy Award nomination for best picture. Jaws also created the summer-blockbuster formula of releasing big pictures in hundreds of theaters simultaneously – a strategy studios have copied ever since.

As for Bruce, a fourth replica that was cast but not hauled to the Vineyard ended up in a California junk yard, where it was hunted down by NPR’s Cory Turner in 2010. Its 25-foot-long fiberglass carcass was retrieved after more than a quarter century in 2016, according to a follow-up NPR report. Restored to menacing glory, Bruce now anchors a new Los Angeles museum devoted to motion picture history.

Filed under: Special Features

Tags: failure in engineering design, film making, Jaws, sharks, special effects, Steven Spielberg