Building a Better Bruce : In the Belly of Universal’s Newest Beast

BRUCE IS BACK,and he’s smaller than ever. Yes, it’s Jaws season again this summer, but the shark shrank. Universal Pictures, which has made more than $382.5 million domestically so far on the original “Jaws,” is banking this time around on ultra-realism. The strategy of Sidney J. Sheinberg--president of MCA Inc., parent company of Universal Pictures--goes something like this: The original “Jaws” was a smash because it was frighteningly believable--almost too believable, psychologists tell us; “Jaws 2” was so-so because the monster grew and became just another hokey fish; “Jaws 3” (yes, there was a “Jaws 3,” although it was not produced by Universal) was a 3-D dog that deserved extinction. The experts agreed that the allure of the first “Jaws” was its realism, and they set out to create a great white shark even more frightening and true-to-life.

Last fall, producer / director Joseph Sargent, associate producer Frank Baur and writer Michael De Guzman visited the Steinhart Aquarium, a division of the cavernous California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, where they were given a cram course in sharks. They were aware of the BBC-TV and PBS-TV documentaries that cinematographer Al Giddings and I had created titled “Jaws: the True Story,” and they were suitably impressed that Carcharodon carcharias , the largest flesh-eating fish on our planet, requires no hyperbole. They were equally fascinated by the trivia of science and scientific data gathering--shark-stomach temperatures, palatoquadrate extensions, eyeball rotations, crystal-coded diodes and transmitters, and even how one gets grants; in brief, the not-so-pretty side of shark science. Sargent wanted it all to be reflected in the screenplay, and writer De Guzman soaked up the nuances and refined the script until it read like a PBS-TV special with teeth. At the same time, mechanical-shark makers were carefully analyzing the films and photographs of living white sharks so as to capture every articulation and postural detail of the swimming and attacking shark. They examined shark carcasses in the academy’s research collections with the attentiveness of a Noguchi necropsy. No detail was ignored--save one, the sex of the shark. Bruce (named, incidentally, for Spielberg’s attorney on the original “Jaws”), like his--actually her--predecessors, lacks claspers, the pair of five-foot-long intromittent organs used by male sharks to inseminate their mates. The majority of the views in the film will not allow one to look from beneath and behind, but elasmobranchologists (ichthyologists who study sharks and rays) with a keen eye might catch that detail. Still other anatomical details, such as the size of the shark, are frighteningly accurate. Bruce 1 was close to 40 feet long, and clumsy. The new, improved model is 25.5 feet long, only four feet longer than the Cuban specimen caught in 1945 that weighed 7,302 pounds. White sharks larger than that have been seen but none yet captured. In the film, such details as the size and precise number of the teeth, the movement of the lips and jaws, the rotation of the eyes, and the speed and behavior of the attacking shark are all accurate and credible.

Ichthyologists will have the most difficulty with the title: “Jaws The Revenge.” Such a title might suggest that Bruce is enraged; I prefer to think that Universal is merely exacting revenge upon the box office with this thriller.

Without divulging too much of the plot, I will say that the animal’s behavior on screen does not imitate that of a chain-saw murderer with fins. Bruce didn’t necessarily follow the Brody family to the Bahamas. That just happens to be where Michael Caine’s character, a laid-back bush pilot, hangs out. What the shark does in the film is what Carcharodon carcharias does in the sea. What Michael Caine does is what Robert Shaw did in the original film, only better.

Sargent wanted realism not only in the shark but also in the actors in the film. Scientists doing undersea research play an important part in this version, so it was critical that the purported divers have more rustic, and therefore realistic, equipment in the field. (You might recall the young ichthyologist, played by Richard Dreyfuss, motoring through “Jaws” in a personal research yacht the equivalent of an aquatic Rolls-Royce.) To avoid such oversights, Universal turned to Dick Anderson, a hard-bitten hard-hat diver, treasure-hunter and salvage operator from Bell Canyon, Calif. Anderson signed on as “special-effects divemaster” and joined the crew at a production meeting last December at Universal City Studios. Anderson has 40 years of underwater experience under his weight belt, the wit of Will Rogers and the appearance of Willie Nelson. As consultants to this project, Anderson and I wanted to get even with Peter Benchley for having made the book’s ichthyologist, in his one romantic escapade, a failure in the sack. Anyway, seated around a long table, in a scene akin to an upstate New York Mafiosi convention, were representatives of various aspects of the film: topside stunt men, underwater stunt men, special-effects types, small-plane pilots, accountants, controllers, lawyers, the writer, cameramen, wardrobe, makeup men, blood specialists, standards-and-practices (good taste) detailers, a shark consultant (me), a special-effects divemaster (Anderson) and, at the head of the table, director Joseph Sargent, who called me “Doc” and everyone else “baby.”

Joseph Sargent had been given the unenviable task of getting the film out by the Fourth of July, a back-breaking assignment that he nearly achieved. Sargent--with his tan good looks, open shirt, and ebullient personality--lacks only the ever-lit cigar to complete the central casting model of a Hollywood producer. But his casual appearance belies the dynamo that lives within. Sargent is driven and well-known in the industry for his ability to move a project on schedule and nearly on budget. Spielberg needed 155 days to shoot “Jaws.” Sargent was given 54. Final details of the hurried shooting schedule were worked out at the meeting in a scene-by-scene analysis that he orchestrated. Typical of the rapid-fired questions were: “Doc, would the shark in scene 9 take off the guy’s arm at the shoulder or the elbow?”; “Terry (a studio vice president concerned with standards and practices), do we lose our PG 13 (rating) if the shark bites above the knee?”; “Henry (the special-effects magnate), can you make the shark eyes roll when it bites off the arm?”; “ ‘Suits’ (Sargent’s name for the lawyers, easily the best-dressed of the lot), what’s our liability if the kid gets bit by the rubber shark?”; followed by, “Nancy (casting), get me a midget double!” Things went smoothly until Scene 116, when the big moray eel swims out to frighten the scuba-diving star, played by handsome and youthful Lance Guest. Anderson could bear it no longer and from the corner blurted out: “I’d like to make an observation.” The startled dons turned to the lanky, commercial diver / cowboy. “Who’s that guy?” Sargent bellowed. Anderson made the point that experienced divers don’t flee large morays but in fact “play with ‘em,” a point well made. Sargent liked the suggestion and made corrections. Then came the ending scenes. Now buoyant and undaunted, Anderson spoke again. “I don’t feel comfortable about it. It gives me a mental picture of an elephant trying to mate with a kangaroo.” Anderson soon learned that the ending was carefully conceived, analyzed, argued and ultimately achieved after lots of consternation, and that’s how it would stand. After the bogus shark explosion in “Jaws,” the shark electrocution in “Jaws 2,” and the unmentionable end of “Jaws 3,” “Jaws 4” achieves a mano a mano ending that is both terrifying and satisfying and will do little to assist the scuba-instruction or pleasure-boating industries.

ON TO CORAL HARBOR, Bahamas, the secret site of the shark construction and assembly yard. Location shooting was done in Martha’s Vineyard and finished in and around Nassau. The Bahamas was chosen for its water clarity and the relative ease of trucking the enormous shark assemblage to Florida and barging it across the Caribbean, rather than shipping everything to the shark waters of South Australia. Engineers maneuvered Bruce with a rotating, 45-ton steel underwater shark carriage, manipulating the monster by means of a complex maze of hydraulics operated from a remote-control panel on a floating shark nerve center. The models were catapulted along tracks on the carriage at speeds up to 10 m.p.h. Altogether, there were six Bruces, including two entire sharks, a half-shark, two jumpers, one rammer, shark heads, shark fins and a submersible device that towed Anderson, with a shark fin attached, at breakneck speed. The fully articulated shark had 22 sections and movable jaws covered by a flexible latex skin; it weighed in at 2500 pounds.

The shark carriage was to be submerged in 40 feet of water off Goulding Cay, but the wind came up, and “Jaws The Revenge” became “Jaws The Repair.” In heavy seas, the barge’s anchors slipped, tearing wiring, hoses and cables. The carriage’s huge steel legs bent like straws, and the sturdy main hydraulic ram--a solid steel cylinder two inches in diameter and six feet long--snapped, nearly causing the first fatality by a non-living shark. “Christ, were we lucky,” Sargent was heard to mutter, followed by something akin to “. . . if only we could have got that on film.”

In weeks to come there would be tropical storms, more breaks, and several minor disasters, but all were overcome without loss of life or limb. The film’s opening was moved to July 17, just two weeks behind schedule. Natural selection required nearly four billion years to evolve Carcharodon carcharias from the primordial ooze. Joseph Sargent, assisted by a few fishy consultants, model makers and a raft of Universal film makers, accomplished the impossible in less than a year. This summer the show will go on. And, like the Jaws that preceded it, likely on and on and on.