Jaws (1975) vs. Jurassic Park (1993): Part 1

<v Speaker 1>Well, everybody, welcome back to the Shirley You Can't Be
<v Speaker 1>Serious podcast. Jason, I was thinking, instead of doing something
<v Speaker 1>from our past, maybe what we should do is do
<v Speaker 1>like the movies that are number one and number two
<v Speaker 1>in the box office right now.
<v Speaker 2>What do you think that sounds fantastic?
<v Speaker 1>What are they? What's just tell me look it up,
<v Speaker 1>google it, whatever you need to do. Tell me what
<v Speaker 1>number one and number two in the box office right now.
<v Speaker 2>Are number one and number two? Right eye? It's kind
<v Speaker 2>of neck and neck. Uh, different week.
<v Speaker 1>Is it a Marvel movie?
<v Speaker 3>No?
<v Speaker 1>Okay? Is it in one of the new James Bond movies? No?
<v Speaker 1>Start trenk.
<v Speaker 2>No. Basically every movie theater in the country is shut
<v Speaker 2>down except for drive ins, and so the number one
<v Speaker 2>and number two movies at the box office this week,
<v Speaker 2>coinciding with this podcast that we recorded over a month ago,
<v Speaker 2>Jaws and Jurassic Park. That is no joke. What that
<v Speaker 2>is no freakin joke.
<v Speaker 1>What a great coincidence.
<v Speaker 2>I love it crazy, So I really hope you guys
<v Speaker 2>enjoy what we have already recorded. It just so happens
<v Speaker 2>it coincides with this crazy event due to COVID nineteen,
<v Speaker 2>which we will no longer talk about all.
<v Speaker 1>Right without further ado.
<v Speaker 4>Hello everybody, and welcome to the Surely You Can't Be
<v Speaker 4>Serious Podcast, discussing and debating the iconic and the forgotten
<v Speaker 4>of eighties and nineties pop culture with your co hosts
<v Speaker 4>James D. Graves and Jason Colivin.
<v Speaker 1>Just when you thought it was safe to go back into.
<v Speaker 2>The podcast, hold on to your butts.
<v Speaker 1>Welcome back, everybody. We are here for our Jaws versus
<v Speaker 1>Jurassic Park episode of the Shirley You Can't Be Serious Podcast.
<v Speaker 1>I'm here with my co host and best friend Jason Colvin.
<v Speaker 4>Up D.
<v Speaker 1>How you doing, man, Man, I'm good.
<v Speaker 2>This is gonna be fun today. I really really, I
<v Speaker 2>know I say this every time, but these movies get
<v Speaker 2>me fired up to talk about.
<v Speaker 1>These movies change the course of movie history twenty years apart.
<v Speaker 2>They really did.
<v Speaker 1>It's crazy, and I'm excited about one of them being
<v Speaker 1>the movie that came out the year I was born.
<v Speaker 1>You know, Jaws came out in nineteen seventy five, just
<v Speaker 1>a few months before I was born, and it is
<v Speaker 1>monumental in the history of movies, and it is such
<v Speaker 1>a great movie.
<v Speaker 2>Both of these movies were so impactful and imaginative and
<v Speaker 2>fun and scary, and I mean they're just pure summer
<v Speaker 2>popcorn gold. I just love both of these shows. Do
<v Speaker 2>you remember when you saw these movies for the first time.
<v Speaker 1>I remember seeing Jurassic Park in the theater and being
<v Speaker 1>amazed and going back in the memory banks. I would
<v Speaker 1>have had a girlfriend at the time, so I'm sure
<v Speaker 1>I went and saw it with her, But all I
<v Speaker 1>can remember is the emotion with Jaws. I can't say
<v Speaker 1>when I saw it for the first time, because you know,
<v Speaker 1>like I said, it came out before, just just before
<v Speaker 1>I was born. Yeah, but it was. It was one
<v Speaker 1>of those movies that was a big factor of my childhood.
<v Speaker 1>My dad was very into show. We would watch all
<v Speaker 1>the shark documentaries long before Shark Week ever was a thing, right,
<v Speaker 1>and we you know, I learned to scuba dive with
<v Speaker 1>him whenever I was in grade school, and so I
<v Speaker 1>had all kinds of education about deep sea diving and sharks,
<v Speaker 1>and we went shark fishing when I was a kid.
<v Speaker 1>We'd go to Florida and deep sea fish for all
<v Speaker 1>kinds of things, including sharks. Saw a huge one. One
<v Speaker 1>of the times that we saw one that was Jaws
<v Speaker 1>proportioned shark like he was going by the boat and
<v Speaker 1>you're like, holy crap, this guy is as big as
<v Speaker 1>the boat. We weren't trying to catch those Yeah, we
<v Speaker 1>weren't trying to catch those guys. We were just trying
<v Speaker 1>to catch the little ones, which were funn as can
<v Speaker 1>be to catch. But I've always been a shark guy.
<v Speaker 1>That's about you, do you remember?
<v Speaker 2>Well, So for Jaws, you know we've talked before. You
<v Speaker 2>and I have a little bit of an age difference.
<v Speaker 2>So I was two when the movie came out, but
<v Speaker 2>I mean shark mania took over the world in the
<v Speaker 2>late seventies, and so even though I was too young
<v Speaker 2>to see the movie or appreciate the movie or any
<v Speaker 2>of that stuff, I do recall the idea of you know,
<v Speaker 2>sharks and being scared in the swimming pool. And even
<v Speaker 2>though I lived in a landlocked state for some reason,
<v Speaker 2>you know, sharks were kind of on my mind, you know, right,
<v Speaker 2>I had a toy it's like a shark set, and
<v Speaker 2>the shark would open up and you have all this
<v Speaker 2>crap in his mouth and you had to fish out
<v Speaker 2>like wheels and stuff like that. So sharks were part
<v Speaker 2>of my imagination because of this movie now, Jurassic Park.
<v Speaker 2>I saw an opening night. I had a roommate in college.
<v Speaker 2>His name is Craig Parrish, good friend of mine, friend
<v Speaker 2>of the show. It was like the perfect roommate for
<v Speaker 2>a summer roommate, because every dime that we earned that
<v Speaker 2>summer we spent on entertainment and doing stuff and blowing
<v Speaker 2>it on stuff. So the weekend that it came out
<v Speaker 2>the Friday, I believe it was Friday, June eleventh, nineteen
<v Speaker 2>ninety three, we saw it in Norman, So we were
<v Speaker 2>blown away. We were like, man, that is unbelievable what
<v Speaker 2>we just saw. Right next day we drove to a
<v Speaker 2>Texas Ranger baseball game, came home the next day when
<v Speaker 2>saw Durst Park again. So it was a killer weekend.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I can still I can. I can remember the
<v Speaker 1>moment in the theater where you see the brachiosaurus for
<v Speaker 1>the first time and you're just like, whole crap, how
<v Speaker 1>do they do that?
<v Speaker 2>It really was amazing.
<v Speaker 1>The other thing and I'll just throw this out there.
<v Speaker 1>I hadn't really thought about it until just this moment,
<v Speaker 1>But when you were talking about the sharks, the poster
<v Speaker 1>for Jaws is so iconic, and I can as you
<v Speaker 1>were talking, I'm like, I can remember drawing that shark
<v Speaker 1>over and over again, drawing that shark coming up to
<v Speaker 1>get the girl.
<v Speaker 2>Oh man, you're absolutely right, one of the best movie
<v Speaker 2>posters of all time.
<v Speaker 1>And then you go to Jurassic Park and again it's
<v Speaker 1>it's totally iconic poster. That's the perfect color combination. You
<v Speaker 1>get the black skeleton on the gold background with kind
<v Speaker 1>of the tropical lettering on it. It's just both of them
<v Speaker 1>are masterpieces in movie poster history. So you want to
<v Speaker 1>talk about a little bit about the history of how
<v Speaker 1>these movies came to be? Is that where we want
<v Speaker 1>to start.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I'd say let's start just on the development of
<v Speaker 2>these two movies.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, So I'll start with Jaws since it came out first.
<v Speaker 1>The book was written by a guy named Peter Benchley
<v Speaker 1>now Peter Benchley. He had been a journalist. He ended
<v Speaker 1>up being a speech writer for LBJ, and then lbj's
<v Speaker 1>term ended in nineteen sixty nine and he spent the
<v Speaker 1>next few years struggling to make it as a freelance writer.
<v Speaker 1>And he's sitting on the beach kind of going through
<v Speaker 1>what he's going to do with his life. He thought
<v Speaker 1>back to a time where he had read a story
<v Speaker 1>back in the sixties about this fisherman who had caught
<v Speaker 1>this forty five one hundred pound great white shark, and
<v Speaker 1>he's like, I think that would be a great idea
<v Speaker 1>for a story, have a man eating shark that terrorizes
<v Speaker 1>the town. So he goes home and he tells his
<v Speaker 1>wife about it, and she says, I don't think that's
<v Speaker 1>a good idea. I think you should probably think of
<v Speaker 1>something else. But he doesn't listen to her. His wife right,
<v Speaker 1>And so every time his literary agent gets him in
<v Speaker 1>front of a publisher, he proposes two ideas. The first
<v Speaker 1>idea is a nonfiction book about pirates, and the second
<v Speaker 1>idea is man eating shark terrorizes town, and everybody goes, no,
<v Speaker 1>thank you, No, I don't think that anybody wanted to
<v Speaker 1>read that. Now. Interestingly, the other movie that came out
<v Speaker 1>very close at the same time that he was involved
<v Speaker 1>in was called The Deep. You familiar with this movie,
<v Speaker 1>I am, yeah, right, yeah, and it is about pirates,
<v Speaker 1>and yes, Jack limbsset google search, Google Search. So interestingly,
<v Speaker 1>at the same time that he's making these pitches. There
<v Speaker 1>happens to be a documentary that comes out called Blue
<v Speaker 1>Water White Death. So this morning I called my dad
<v Speaker 1>and I was like, hey, you know we're doing this thing.
<v Speaker 1>I remember Sharks is a big part of me growing up.
<v Speaker 1>Tell me what happened when you went and saw Jaws.
<v Speaker 1>And there's this long pause and I'm like, it was
<v Speaker 1>a few months before I was born, and that helps.
<v Speaker 1>He's like, oh, okay, let's see we'd have been in
<v Speaker 1>Georgia that I'm uh, yeah, I really know. I don't remember.
<v Speaker 1>And I'm like, what, Okay, I can remember as a
<v Speaker 1>kid watching TV and seeing Ron and Valerie Taylor and
<v Speaker 1>you telling me things. And he's like, oh, yeah, well
<v Speaker 1>I saw a blue Water White Death back in seventy
<v Speaker 1>one that was in Little Rock, Arkansas, and yeah that
<v Speaker 1>was crazy. And so apparently it wasn't Jaws that was
<v Speaker 1>the big movie for him. It was this Blue Water
<v Speaker 1>White Death, which was a Ron and Valerie Taylor documentary
<v Speaker 1>where they're going and trying to film sharks. They were
<v Speaker 1>a couple of spearfishers who were champion spearfishers, and then
<v Speaker 1>they realized, hey, we're killing all the fish. Maybe we
<v Speaker 1>should just photograph them instead, and so they start shooting
<v Speaker 1>videos and they decided, let's try to video a great
<v Speaker 1>white shark because nobody else is doing it. Why not,
<v Speaker 1>right right, right? Well, why not? It's because they eat you,
<v Speaker 1>That's why not. Dad said that it was just looking
<v Speaker 1>at the idiotic stuff that they would try to do
<v Speaker 1>just to get near a great white shark, Like they'd
<v Speaker 1>find dead whales and just wait for the sharks to
<v Speaker 1>come and start eating the whale so that they could
<v Speaker 1>try to film them. He said they were absolutely insane.
<v Speaker 1>He was saying, you know, cage goes in the water
<v Speaker 1>as are going to die, and the chain mail swimsuit,
<v Speaker 1>all of that stuff. Those are all things that were
<v Speaker 1>impactful for him. And so that's why sharks were such
<v Speaker 1>a big deal. And then so of course they put
<v Speaker 1>out this documentary. It's interesting to folks. So Peter Benchley
<v Speaker 1>gets his funding to write the book of Jaws.
<v Speaker 2>So Peter Binchley, when he was doing his research for
<v Speaker 2>this book, came across a story of a shark that
<v Speaker 2>was just off the coast of the Jersey Beach in
<v Speaker 2>nineteen sixteen. It attacked a swimmer, it ate a dog,
<v Speaker 2>it ate a boy. Actually, if you watch Jaws, like
<v Speaker 2>sort of sequentially, it's the same type of attacks. Wow,
<v Speaker 2>and Hooper actually mentions it in the film. The titles
<v Speaker 2>that were originally considered for the novel A Stillness in
<v Speaker 2>the Water that it was like, h nah, it's like, okay,
<v Speaker 2>how about this one Leviathan Rising? No, all right, how
<v Speaker 2>about Jaws of Death. No, that's no good either. So
<v Speaker 2>they sat and they kind of went round and round
<v Speaker 2>and round, and basically the only word that Peter Benchley
<v Speaker 2>and his editor liked was the word jaws. And Peter
<v Speaker 2>Benchley was like, look, I just call it Jaws. And
<v Speaker 2>they're like, well, we don't even really know what that means.
<v Speaker 2>He's like, yeah, but it looked great on a book.
<v Speaker 2>So that's how they got the title.
<v Speaker 1>Jaws is right. I don't even know if they say
<v Speaker 1>the word at all in the movie. I definitely don't
<v Speaker 1>know if they say it in the book. It is
<v Speaker 1>just a word that looks good.
<v Speaker 2>Four letters, and it scares the crab out of.
<v Speaker 1>People, right, and it becomes a best seller and it
<v Speaker 1>spends forty four weeks on the best seller list. Everybody's
<v Speaker 1>picking up this book and reading it. Back in nineteen
<v Speaker 1>seventy four, and two of the guys that happened to
<v Speaker 1>pick up the book are David Brown and Richard Zanok.
<v Speaker 1>Richard Zanuck and David Brown had just come out of
<v Speaker 1>the big studio production world. Richard Zanuck's dad, Darryl Zanik,
<v Speaker 1>was actually one of those cigar chomping studio guys, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like in the Three Amigos, one of those guys who
<v Speaker 1>he hired Richard to run his company. And then, like
<v Speaker 1>in Richard was like twenty six at the time, and
<v Speaker 1>then he goes off to Europe and starts having an
<v Speaker 1>affair with this twenty year old when he's sixty three,
<v Speaker 1>and she's like, Okay, you're gonna start writing new movies.
<v Speaker 1>He's like, okay, I'm gonna start writing new movies whatever
<v Speaker 1>you say, yes, yes, yeah. So Richard is this young guy,
<v Speaker 1>but he's making these great movies. He is involved with
<v Speaker 1>the sound of music, he's involved with hiring Francis Ford
<v Speaker 1>Coppola for writing patent, and he's involved with the plan
<v Speaker 1>of the apes. All these things are huge hits. And
<v Speaker 1>then after seven eight years he has a few flops.
<v Speaker 1>His dad is doing this stupid stuff with this girl,
<v Speaker 1>and he basically cancels the contract with his dad's mistress,
<v Speaker 1>and so his dad gets mad and he comes back
<v Speaker 1>and he fires him, and so Richard's like, hey, you
<v Speaker 1>know what, guess what you're going to be next. And
<v Speaker 1>as it turns out, his dad had been giving his
<v Speaker 1>mom these shares of the company as kind of a hey,
<v Speaker 1>I'm sorry, I'm having an affair right now, you have
<v Speaker 1>some more stock in the company. She takes all the stock,
<v Speaker 1>goes to the Border directors and they throw out Darryl.
<v Speaker 1>So he's the last of the cigar jumping It's awesome,
<v Speaker 1>it's deserving of a movie on its own. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>all through that process, David Brown becomes a head of
<v Speaker 1>the creative operations for twenty century Fox. When Richard leaves,
<v Speaker 1>David leaves with him. They go and spend a bit
<v Speaker 1>of time with Warner Brothers, and then they go out
<v Speaker 1>on their own form this production company. And one of
<v Speaker 1>the first movies that they produce is The Sting And
<v Speaker 1>the next movie they produce is Sugarland Express.
<v Speaker 2>Young director Steven Spielberg.
<v Speaker 1>So Steven Spielberg had been discovered by Sid Scheinberg, who
<v Speaker 1>is the CEO of Universal Pictures for about forty years,
<v Speaker 1>and whose wife is Lorraine Gary, who you might know
<v Speaker 1>better as Missus Brody. I can't remember Missus Brody. So
<v Speaker 1>they've got this book that they've read. They both excited
<v Speaker 1>about it. They talk to each other like, we want
<v Speaker 1>to make this a movie, and so they work with
<v Speaker 1>Peter Benchley. They get this script, they hire a director,
<v Speaker 1>and the director is not Steven Spielberg. That's right.
<v Speaker 2>Actually, when they made the deal for the screenplay, the
<v Speaker 2>director was part of the deal. When Peter eventually sold
<v Speaker 2>him the rights to make his story, he's like, well,
<v Speaker 2>this is the guy I want in charge. Well, then
<v Speaker 2>they bring him in. They had to sit down with
<v Speaker 2>him and they're like, okay, let's talk about what you
<v Speaker 2>got going and what do you think. He's like okay.
<v Speaker 2>So the whale pops up and scans the beach and
<v Speaker 2>they're like shark. He's like, right, right, right, right, shark.
<v Speaker 2>So anyway, when the whale comes up to the people,
<v Speaker 2>they're like, we can't hire this guy. He doesn't know
<v Speaker 2>the difference between a shark and a whale.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, And so just before they had that meeting, Steven
<v Speaker 1>Spielberg happened to have been walking through and saw the
<v Speaker 1>script and they're like, hey, you know, tell us what
<v Speaker 1>you think of this script. And he reads it and
<v Speaker 1>he comes back and he says, hey, if you guys
<v Speaker 1>don't end up going with the director you have in mind,
<v Speaker 1>I would love to direct this.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, this is an interesting story. That is a nice
<v Speaker 2>little story. But the version that I heard was he
<v Speaker 2>was in the dude's off, looked down, saw a thick
<v Speaker 2>manuscript that said Jaws on it, and he stole it
<v Speaker 2>and took it home and read it. Oh, he's trying
<v Speaker 2>to get a crack in, and he's like, Hm, this
<v Speaker 2>looks like a very important project. I'm going to take
<v Speaker 2>this home, figure this thing out, see what they're doing.
<v Speaker 2>I love that about Spielberg. I mean, he was doing
<v Speaker 2>whatever it takes to crack in, you know.
<v Speaker 1>And of course they end up offering it to him.
<v Speaker 1>But at the time, he's thinking about another script. He's
<v Speaker 1>thinking about directing another movie. You know about this? No, okay.
<v Speaker 1>So he had done Sugarland Express and critics raved about
<v Speaker 1>the quality of like the car chase scenes that they
<v Speaker 1>had had in Sugarland Express, but they had criticized him
<v Speaker 1>a bit for not developing the characters very well, and
<v Speaker 1>so he was considering the script called Lucky Lady, which
<v Speaker 1>did start Liza Minelli, Gene Hackman, and Burt Reynolds, and
<v Speaker 1>he's really thinking, Okay, this is a good way for
<v Speaker 1>me to develop some characters. I'll be able to put
<v Speaker 1>this on and I will have rounded myself out. So
<v Speaker 1>Sid Sheinberg, who was his mentor, who was the guy
<v Speaker 1>who had given the youngest director in history a long
<v Speaker 1>term contract of seven years, is like, don't direct that.
<v Speaker 1>Direct Jaws, and so he gives up. He says, all right,
<v Speaker 1>final direct Jaws. And at the time he's directing Jaws,
<v Speaker 1>he's thinking, oh my gosh, this was the worst thing.
<v Speaker 1>You've damned my existence. I'm going to get fired. I'm
<v Speaker 1>never going to work in Hollywood again. And Lady Luck
<v Speaker 1>has made Liza Minelli and Burt Reynolds into a star.
<v Speaker 2>So when he's out in Martha's vineyard watching a shark
<v Speaker 2>snk to the bottom of the ocean, Burt Reynolds and
<v Speaker 2>Liza Minelli are living it up, and he's like, what
<v Speaker 2>in the heck was I thinking? Yeah, one thing about
<v Speaker 2>this story, this movie. There was a writer strike looming
<v Speaker 2>and so they needed to make it fast.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. That was a huge deal because people went into
<v Speaker 1>the movie with some expectations that were misplaced. When whenever
<v Speaker 1>Xanak and Brown decided, hey, you know, we can do
<v Speaker 1>this shark movie. We'll just get a shark trainer to
<v Speaker 1>train the shark.
<v Speaker 2>Let's just train the sharks is no problem.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. So I went and I asked a buddy of
<v Speaker 1>mine who's a scuba diving instructor and he dives with
<v Speaker 1>sharks all the time. And I'm like, you know, so
<v Speaker 1>what do you want to dive? And when I'm asking
<v Speaker 1>these questions and he's like, well, you know, as long
<v Speaker 1>as you're with the shark trainer, it's okay. And I'm like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>can you train sharks? He goes, no, the shark trainer
<v Speaker 1>trains the people. I'm like, oh, okay, he's training the
<v Speaker 1>people how to be You can't train a shark. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>So they found that out the hard way. You're not
<v Speaker 1>going to be able to train a shark. So that
<v Speaker 1>meant they had to build one. In addition to that,
<v Speaker 1>Steven Spielberg, in a moment of artistic foolery, I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>he demanded that they film on the actual ocean. Any
<v Speaker 1>other director would have said, all right, we'll go to
<v Speaker 1>the back lot, or we'll go over to a lake
<v Speaker 1>or whatever. But Spielberg was like, Nope, it's not going
<v Speaker 1>to look like the ocean. I don't want to use it.
<v Speaker 1>We have to go and film in the actual ocean.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder how many times he went to sleep at
<v Speaker 1>night going why the heck did I say that?
<v Speaker 2>Every step along the way during the making of this movie,
<v Speaker 2>it could have either been complete disaster or genius. Right,
<v Speaker 2>and he makes the right step every step of the way,
<v Speaker 2>even though he is precariously on the edge of falling
<v Speaker 2>and dying and never working again.
<v Speaker 1>It's the right step that he regrets every single time.
<v Speaker 1>It's the right step that looks like the wrong step
<v Speaker 1>every single time.
<v Speaker 2>Let's flip over to Jurassic Park and talk about the
<v Speaker 2>development of Jurassic Park.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, sure, this sounds great.
<v Speaker 2>So here we catch Steven Spielberg about eighteen years down
<v Speaker 2>the road. By the time he gets to Jurassic Park,
<v Speaker 2>he has directed Jaws, Close Encounters, et Raiders of the
<v Speaker 2>Lost Ark, Empire of the Sun, Nina Jones, and The
<v Speaker 2>Temple of Doom. Last Crusade, Last Crusade, and now he
<v Speaker 2>gets to Jurassic Park.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>This is based on a nineteen ninety book by Michael Crichton.
<v Speaker 1>Right now, Michael Crichton writes this story about these guys
<v Speaker 1>who go to an amusement park and suddenly the attractions
<v Speaker 1>at the amusement park turn on the guests and start
<v Speaker 1>killing them. And the name of that movie is West
<v Speaker 1>Worlds World.
<v Speaker 2>You know, it's funny because as he was developing this
<v Speaker 2>story Jurassic Park, He's like, I can't make it a
<v Speaker 2>theme park again. I've already done that.
<v Speaker 1>Right. He had come up with the idea of dinosaurs
<v Speaker 1>and come up with the kind of science behind it,
<v Speaker 1>but he couldn't figure out why why would we bring
<v Speaker 1>dinosaurs back to life? What would be the motivation? And honestly,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, the only one that really does make sense
<v Speaker 1>is an amusement park. I mean there's got to be
<v Speaker 1>a profit motive, right, That's right.
<v Speaker 2>He mentions. In nineteen eighty one, he had a screenplay
<v Speaker 2>that he was working on where it was like a
<v Speaker 2>Frankenstein type of thing where some guy figures it out,
<v Speaker 2>resurrects a dinosaur, and then it terrorizes people. But yeah,
<v Speaker 2>the only thing that made sense was entertainment purposes. Who
<v Speaker 2>would pay for this. There's no real scientific reason to
<v Speaker 2>do it, and it costs billions of dollars, so it
<v Speaker 2>has to be for entertainment purposes.
<v Speaker 1>Right, And his book idea got to turn down in
<v Speaker 1>his mind. He wanted it was interesting to him that
<v Speaker 1>kind of universally kids are fascinated by dinosaurs, so he
<v Speaker 1>always wrote the book from the perspective of a kid.
<v Speaker 1>He wrote it from a perspective a kid who was
<v Speaker 1>at Jurassic Park, and he kept pushing this book on
<v Speaker 1>the publishers and nobody was interested, nobody wanted to publish it,
<v Speaker 1>and finally one of them said, I want a book
<v Speaker 1>that is for me, an adult, not a book that's
<v Speaker 1>from the kid's perspective. And it was that rewrite that
<v Speaker 1>led to the story that became Jurassic Park.
<v Speaker 2>That's interesting. That's really interesting because Steven Spielberg, when he
<v Speaker 2>later gets the directorial job, decides that he's going to
<v Speaker 2>shoot the movie with the awe of a child, which
<v Speaker 2>I think was genius. So you needed that adult story,
<v Speaker 2>but maybe from a kid's perspective and the awe and
<v Speaker 2>the fascination that goes with it. So, as he's writing
<v Speaker 2>this book, he's working on a TV show called Er
<v Speaker 2>with Steven Spielberg.
<v Speaker 1>Right, it just to be a movie, is that right? Okay? Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>stuff was a movie idea.
<v Speaker 2>So they're sitting around one day and Spielberg's like, well,
<v Speaker 2>what are you doing. And he's like, well, I'm working
<v Speaker 2>on this story about dinosaurs, and Steven's like, well, tell
<v Speaker 2>me about it. He's like, well, you know amber and mosquitoes,
<v Speaker 2>and you know dinosaurs, DNA dinosaurs and so and bingo,
<v Speaker 2>mister DNA. And so Spielberg's like, man, I'd love to
<v Speaker 2>direct that. He said, well, when I get done with it,
<v Speaker 2>you're going to have a crack at it, right, And
<v Speaker 2>so they had this kind of informal discussion and sort
<v Speaker 2>of agreement which the lawyers later get involved in the
<v Speaker 2>blood sucking lawyers get involved and they have to work
<v Speaker 2>out the details. But the studios were bidding on this
<v Speaker 2>before it was even complete. Yeah, just the idea of
<v Speaker 2>this story, right, Which that's how you know your big
<v Speaker 2>time in Hollywood, right.
<v Speaker 1>Well, I mean that they were all major studios, but
<v Speaker 1>they all had their own director associated with the idea.
<v Speaker 2>This is the type of stuff that really I get
<v Speaker 2>fired up about, Like, we have this movie already in
<v Speaker 2>our history of Steven Spielberg, but this is what we
<v Speaker 2>could have got. You ready for this?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>So Warner Brothers wanted it for Tim Burton.
<v Speaker 1>Right, that's the one that I'm just like. That would
<v Speaker 1>have been such a different movie. I mean it would
<v Speaker 1>have been It would have been Claymation dinosaurs, It's true,
<v Speaker 1>and probably claymation archaeologists and probably clamation kids.
<v Speaker 2>That Beatlejews would have shown up and it had been
<v Speaker 2>weird Columbia.
<v Speaker 1>Michael Keaton would have played the t Rex.
<v Speaker 2>What what are you talking about? Yeah, Columbia. They wanted Richard.
<v Speaker 1>Donner and Joe Dante. Is that the other one?
<v Speaker 2>Twentieth Century Fox wanted Joe Dante, who did Grimlins? Who
<v Speaker 2>did Grimlins?
<v Speaker 1>So that could have been interesting.
<v Speaker 2>Richard Donner, Leith, the Weapon, Goonies, Superman makes good movies, right,
<v Speaker 2>But here's the one that caught my attention to the most.
<v Speaker 2>You ready for this one?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>He didn't have the vacuum any specific studio, but James
<v Speaker 2>Cameron wanted to make Jurassic Park.
<v Speaker 1>I can see the way that capture your attention. You're
<v Speaker 1>the James Cameron.
<v Speaker 2>I love James Cameron's work. Yeah, this is what he
<v Speaker 2>wanted to.
<v Speaker 1>Do with it.
<v Speaker 2>You ready for this?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>And you can see this coming right? You know who
<v Speaker 2>he wanted to play doctor Grant, Right, Arnold Schwitzendega n
<v Speaker 2>uh yes, And he wanted Bill Paxton his Malcolm okay,
<v Speaker 2>and Charlton Heston as mister.
<v Speaker 1>Hammond that a can kind of see. Yeah. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>But when Michael Crichton set the rights to the novel
<v Speaker 2>out for movies to bid on, he set the price
<v Speaker 2>really low. His price was one point five million dollars.
<v Speaker 2>So when the bidding war went out for Michael Crichton's
<v Speaker 2>novel to be made into a movie, he set the
<v Speaker 2>price low on purpose. The price was set at one
<v Speaker 2>point five million dollars because he wanted to guarantee that
<v Speaker 2>this movie was made. When he auctioned off the rights
<v Speaker 2>for a movie called Congo, it sat in development hell
<v Speaker 2>until after Jurassic Park, basically, so he got a chunk
<v Speaker 2>of money for it, but it didn't ever seem to
<v Speaker 2>get made, and he was frustrated with that process, and
<v Speaker 2>so he wanted to ensure that this movie was going
<v Speaker 2>to get made.
<v Speaker 1>All right. We will be right back after these messages.
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<v Speaker 1>Nuthouse, and the mates's too many Captains on this island.
<v Speaker 2>All right, So let's flip it back to pre production
<v Speaker 2>for jows.
<v Speaker 1>All right, so Xanak and Brown were wrong about the
<v Speaker 1>idea that you can train a shark, so they then
<v Speaker 1>have to build one. They hired Joe Alves to design
<v Speaker 1>the shark. He did the model of New York and
<v Speaker 1>Escape from New York, and later on he was the
<v Speaker 1>director of Jaws three and three D. I don't know
<v Speaker 1>if that's something he should be proud of or not,
<v Speaker 1>but he was that guy. Not too bad going from
<v Speaker 1>the guy who made the shark to the guy who
<v Speaker 1>makes the movie.
<v Speaker 2>But that's a pretty big jump right there.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so this is just a bit of trivia. But
<v Speaker 1>when they were doing Jaws two, they fired their initial director,
<v Speaker 1>They fired John D. Hancock and it was suggested at
<v Speaker 1>the time that Joe Alps come in and co direct
<v Speaker 1>with Verna Fields, who was the one who had edited
<v Speaker 1>Jaws and she's an amazing editor and amazing person all around.
<v Speaker 1>But they decided not to do that. They went with
<v Speaker 1>Jenos Bizarre to finish up Jaws two.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, side note, real quick, go ahead, what do you
<v Speaker 2>think about Jaws two?
<v Speaker 1>Many?
<v Speaker 2>What do you think about just three?
<v Speaker 1>Horrible?
<v Speaker 2>What do you think about just four?
<v Speaker 1>You know, I talked about Jaws movies and my dad.
<v Speaker 1>That is one specific memory I have from my childhood.
<v Speaker 1>We went to go see Jaws three in three D
<v Speaker 1>in the theater. I'm wearing the glasses and three quarters
<v Speaker 1>in the movie. My dad turns to me and says,
<v Speaker 1>this is the most awful movie I've ever seen in
<v Speaker 1>my life. We're leaving. What that the movie's not over? Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I'm not going to watch the rest of this.
<v Speaker 2>I an option.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I really didn't. I thought, man, once you're here,
<v Speaker 1>you got to go to the end. That's just what happened.
<v Speaker 1>So I didn't. I didn't. I never got the experience
<v Speaker 1>of the exploding shark pieces coming at you in three D.
<v Speaker 1>We were gone before that moment in the movie because
<v Speaker 1>it was so bad, and Jaws four was worse.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, Jaws two pretty good. Jaws three. For a ten
<v Speaker 2>year old me with three D glasses on inside the theater,
<v Speaker 2>I was entertained. I thought it was great when the
<v Speaker 2>shark broke the glass and three D nearly wet my
<v Speaker 2>pants in the movie theater. All right, Jaws four was
<v Speaker 2>the biggest steaming pile of crap in nineteen eighty seven,
<v Speaker 2>with maybe the exception of Superman four Quest for Peace.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>Ooh, that's a hard one. I don't know that I
<v Speaker 1>can give a judge McCall on which one of those
<v Speaker 1>is worse.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, you have to talk about that later.
<v Speaker 1>Okay. So the shark that Joe Alves built was named Bruce. Bruce.
<v Speaker 1>Do you know why it was named Bruce.
<v Speaker 2>Steven Spielberg's lawyer was named Bruce.
<v Speaker 1>Blood sucking lawyer. Yeah, so he named the mechanical shark
<v Speaker 1>after his lawyer, which they built in Sun Valley, California,
<v Speaker 1>but never tested in the water.
<v Speaker 2>This is what I was talking about. These decisions that
<v Speaker 2>they made along the way could have been absolute train
<v Speaker 2>wreck disasters, and in some cases really were, and they
<v Speaker 2>skillfully or luckily figured it out of way around it.
<v Speaker 1>I really think that Verna Fields is such a major
<v Speaker 1>part of this movie being what it became because you
<v Speaker 1>had to I mean, in the script it called for
<v Speaker 1>a shark and then shark and then shark, and there
<v Speaker 1>was no shark to be had, and so you had
<v Speaker 1>to do stuff, and they had to come up with
<v Speaker 1>ways to give you the shark without showing you the shark.
<v Speaker 1>But as it turns out, that's the perfect thing to do,
<v Speaker 1>because you're more scared of what you can't see than
<v Speaker 1>what you can't see.
<v Speaker 2>It's absolutely true, and they lucked into it. So there
<v Speaker 2>are three mechanical bruises that were made, each with specialized functions.
<v Speaker 2>One shark was open on the right side, one was
<v Speaker 2>open on the left side, and the third was fully skinned.
<v Speaker 2>I think each one of these ended up the bottom
<v Speaker 2>of the Atlantic at one point or another. But each
<v Speaker 2>shark costs two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You know,
<v Speaker 2>we didn't really talk about this, but the budget the
<v Speaker 2>initial budget of Jaws. Yeah, seven million bucks, not very much.
<v Speaker 2>And when you get ten percent of it into a shark,
<v Speaker 2>that doesn't work at all in a movie starring a shark, right,
<v Speaker 2>he is the star of the movie.
<v Speaker 1>Right, So the very first time that they are to
<v Speaker 1>have the shark, they put him in, they say action
<v Speaker 1>and the shark sinks to the bottom of Nantucket sound
<v Speaker 1>And as David Brown puts it, and we thought, so
<v Speaker 1>did our careers in the movie industry with it.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, when you get a bunch of twenty somethings working
<v Speaker 2>on this thing, I can just see the way it goes. Hey,
<v Speaker 2>we've built this shark. Great, did you test it? Oh? Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>work great in the garage. Sweet should we test it
<v Speaker 2>in the water before Now, we'll test it when we
<v Speaker 2>get out there. Oh mentioned that this is going to
<v Speaker 2>be saltwater. The whole time. I didn't realize that that
<v Speaker 2>was going to short out the shark.
<v Speaker 1>And talking about the twenty year old. So one of
<v Speaker 1>the guys who helped out with the script and specifically
<v Speaker 1>helped out with the monologue that Quinn does was a guy,
<v Speaker 1>John Millius. And he's a young guy. He's a friend
<v Speaker 1>of Steven Spielberg's. And one night George Lucas shows up
<v Speaker 1>and then they're probably I'm guessing, drinking or whatever, and
<v Speaker 1>they're like, hey, let's go look at the shark. And
<v Speaker 1>then so they go out and they're looking at the
<v Speaker 1>shark that doesn't work anyway, and then somebody gets the
<v Speaker 1>bright idea to climb into its mouth, and then all
<v Speaker 1>of a sudden, the jaw breaks. It's like a chunk,
<v Speaker 1>and John Milius is like, and we all scattered like
<v Speaker 1>children that's just been.
<v Speaker 2>Caught, including the director of the movie. I mean, this
<v Speaker 2>is not.
<v Speaker 1>The director of that movie, and the director of the
<v Speaker 1>future biggest blockbuster of the seventies.
<v Speaker 2>It was Lucas who got stuck in there by the way.
<v Speaker 2>It was So this is very interesting to me. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>the shark was untested, not all the roles were cast,
<v Speaker 2>and they were still waiting on a completed script, and
<v Speaker 2>they had started principal photography.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, holy crap, Great, let's get started. Yeah right, so yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and not only that, you have a deadline. You know,
<v Speaker 1>we're not only gonna get started, We're gonna get started
<v Speaker 1>with the deadline because they're supposed to be this strike
<v Speaker 1>and so they're doing everything to scramble to get done
<v Speaker 1>with this thing by June so that they don't run
<v Speaker 1>into trouble with that strike. Peter Benchley wrote three different
<v Speaker 1>versions of this script and finally told Spielberg, I am
<v Speaker 1>written out. I cannot write another bit of this, And
<v Speaker 1>so Xanak and Brown said, hey, Steven, go talked to
<v Speaker 1>Howard Sackler, and Spielberg's like, who's that. He's a playwright.
<v Speaker 1>He wrote this play called The Great White Hope. You're like, oh, perfect,
<v Speaker 1>great White Yeah, sounds good. So they worked on the
<v Speaker 1>script and kind of got the basic outline of the movie.
<v Speaker 1>Then Spielberg tried to write a script himself that didn't
<v Speaker 1>work out real well, and then he very wisely this
<v Speaker 1>is another one of those brilliant decisions, says, Okay, this
<v Speaker 1>is an intense, scary movie. We got to have some humor.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, what do I say. A movie is not
<v Speaker 1>going to be good unless there's at least a little
<v Speaker 1>bit of humor in there, right, So that's right. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>So he goes and he finds Carl Gottlieb, who is
<v Speaker 1>a friend of his, who is a fantastic comedy writer.
<v Speaker 1>He at the time is working on working on TV
<v Speaker 1>scripts for The Odd Couple. He was one of the
<v Speaker 1>guys in mash He does some acting and obviously script writing,
<v Speaker 1>and so every night they would shoot during the day
<v Speaker 1>and then at night they stayed in the same little
<v Speaker 1>cabin there on Martha's vineyard, and they would work on
<v Speaker 1>the script throughout the night.
<v Speaker 2>It's an incredibly stressful writing situation. I mean, basically, every
<v Speaker 2>hour of every day you're either shooting a movie, writing
<v Speaker 2>a movie, worrying about a movie, thinking about the movie.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, Steven Spielberg has talked publicly about how his
<v Speaker 2>nightmares about It's day one. I'm over budget, I need
<v Speaker 2>to get shots in and then Shark's not working and
<v Speaker 2>all that stuff.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, I can identify with that, Like I still
<v Speaker 1>have dreams to this day. I haven't been in a
<v Speaker 1>play in twenty years, and I still have dreams that
<v Speaker 1>suddenly I'm at the stage and I've not studied my lines.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know what the play is about, but I'm
<v Speaker 1>about to walk out on stage.
<v Speaker 2>And I'm in my underwear. Hey, I thought this was interesting.
<v Speaker 2>So Carl Gottlieb told Spielberg, if we managed to pull
<v Speaker 2>this off, people will feel about the ocean the way
<v Speaker 2>people felt about the shower after watching Psycho. And you
<v Speaker 2>know what, he is exactly right.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, he nailed it. It's funny, you know when he
<v Speaker 1>first when Spielberg first sent this script to Gottlieb, he
<v Speaker 1>just attached a note to it and said, ifiscerted. So
<v Speaker 1>things are going so badly at this point Steven's Fielberg
<v Speaker 1>decides to quit, he said. He said multiple times he
<v Speaker 1>just was waiting to get fired, and eventually he had
<v Speaker 1>just had so much of it that he was like,
<v Speaker 1>forget it, I can't I can't finish this. I'm going
<v Speaker 1>to quit. And so Richard Zanak heard he was coming,
<v Speaker 1>heard he was coming to quit, went and got his
<v Speaker 1>Jaws T shirt. They already had the merchandise made, right.
<v Speaker 1>He goes and puts his T shirt on before Steven
<v Speaker 1>can walk in, and when Steven walks in and sees
<v Speaker 1>him in the shirt, he cannot bring himself to quit.
<v Speaker 1>And so Xana says, I think I might have saved
<v Speaker 1>the movie just by changing my clothes.
<v Speaker 2>That's awesome, what a great story that is.
<v Speaker 4>All right?
<v Speaker 2>Do we ready to go talk about pre production for
<v Speaker 2>Dressing Park?
<v Speaker 1>Right? So interestingly, these two, these two movies, nearly twenty
<v Speaker 1>years apart, end up having the same kind of trouble.
<v Speaker 1>They build a gigantic t Rex. They actually built several
<v Speaker 1>of them. It is animatronics, just like The Shark was
<v Speaker 1>supposed to be hydraulics and everything. But get it on.
<v Speaker 1>They've tested it all out. It works well. You know,
<v Speaker 1>we're not gonna be in the ocean, so no problem
<v Speaker 1>there until Steven Spielberg decides, hey, the t Rex scene
<v Speaker 1>needs to be in the rain.
<v Speaker 2>It needs to be pouring rain.
<v Speaker 1>And he's like, if I may, We've tested this for
<v Speaker 1>the weight that it has on it right now, and
<v Speaker 1>you're about to pour water on it and it's made
<v Speaker 1>out of foam rubber, and he's like, well, let's see
<v Speaker 1>if it works.
<v Speaker 2>Stevens is like, listen, dude, I've been through Jaws. Tests
<v Speaker 2>are overrated, Okay.
<v Speaker 1>And so the answer to the question was, no, it
<v Speaker 1>doesn't work. If you pour the rain on top of
<v Speaker 1>the foam rubber, it makes it very heavy and the
<v Speaker 1>hydraulics that were specifically precisely tuned to adjust to a
<v Speaker 1>certain amount of weight do not do it right. And
<v Speaker 1>the t rex started shivering in the rain.
<v Speaker 2>It looked like it had It was like having a
<v Speaker 2>seizure or something.
<v Speaker 1>It was.
<v Speaker 2>It was shaking, shake and shaken.
<v Speaker 1>They would take a break from time to time and
<v Speaker 1>suddenly the t rex, without anybody there, would just start moving.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so let's talk about that t rex for a minute.
<v Speaker 2>It took two years of prep to get the sets
<v Speaker 2>and all the dinosaurs ready to go for this movie.
<v Speaker 1>Two years, right, So they hired the guys that were
<v Speaker 1>the best in the businesses at Animatronics at this time.
<v Speaker 2>Right, So you're talking about guys like stan Winston, Field
<v Speaker 2>Tippet and Crash McCreery. Yes, they took on this project
<v Speaker 2>Steven Spielberg is like, okay, guys, I need dinosaurs on screen.
<v Speaker 2>So here's what I want to do. I'm wanna do
<v Speaker 2>as much animatronics as I can. I wanted to subsidize
<v Speaker 2>that with stop motion stuff, and then maybe we do
<v Speaker 2>a little bit of computer stuff here and there.
<v Speaker 1>If it works, what do you think, And.
<v Speaker 2>They're like, sounds good. Yeah, heck yeah, let's do it,
<v Speaker 2>without knowing whether they could actually do it or not.
<v Speaker 1>The animatronics that they have on this are amazing. They
<v Speaker 1>are amazing, they really are. They look realistic, and from
<v Speaker 1>what I understand, the boy who played Timmy, when he
<v Speaker 1>saw the animatronic Tricerah Cops for the first time, he
<v Speaker 1>started crying because it looks so amazing and real.
<v Speaker 2>It's really really good. When you say animatronics, I think
<v Speaker 2>Chuck E Cheese, you know what I'm talking about. You
<v Speaker 2>know the jug band Christmas whatever, where they're up there.
<v Speaker 1>And everybody's imagining the sharp robotic movements up and down
<v Speaker 1>and the heads turning sharply and scarily.
<v Speaker 2>It looked like robots. Yeah, but all this stuff was hydraulic,
<v Speaker 2>and so when the door shuts to the Explorer and
<v Speaker 2>the t rex is like sharply pulls his head around
<v Speaker 2>to look. You think it's real because it's it doesn't
<v Speaker 2>shake and it doesn't move like a robot, you.
<v Speaker 1>Know, right, They're they're filming a being that looks real,
<v Speaker 1>actually moving. Now you mentioned just a second ago stop motion.
<v Speaker 1>Do we want to go into that a little bit. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>let's talk about it. Okay, So stop motion. If you
<v Speaker 1>watch some of the older like Clash of the Titans,
<v Speaker 1>you can see that. You can see how stop motion looks,
<v Speaker 1>and there's a bit of jitteriness to it because with
<v Speaker 1>stop motion, what you're doing is you're taking a figurine
<v Speaker 1>of some kind, you are photographing a frame of film
<v Speaker 1>with the camera, and then you're moving it a little
<v Speaker 1>bit and then you're doing another one. Well, what that
<v Speaker 1>means is you have a series of still shots as
<v Speaker 1>opposed to a series of someone in motion, and so
<v Speaker 1>you get this jitter. And what they had developed was
<v Speaker 1>a thing called motion blur. And so they called the
<v Speaker 1>guys over at Industrial Lights and Magic, which was just
<v Speaker 1>i mean in a little warehouse at the time, and
<v Speaker 1>they said, hey, can you guys help us out and
<v Speaker 1>put some motion blur with this stop motion dinosaur stuff
<v Speaker 1>that we got going so that it looks more like
<v Speaker 1>it's in motion, and they said, yeah, or we could
<v Speaker 1>just do the whole dinosaur. And the head the head
<v Speaker 1>of ILM at the time was like, hey, guys, you know,
<v Speaker 1>shut up. You know, Stan is a friend of mine.
<v Speaker 1>He gets us jobs like this. You know, shut up.
<v Speaker 1>You're going to try to take his job away from him.
<v Speaker 1>That's not cool. And Spielberg was like, hey, you know,
<v Speaker 1>just to show me whatever, you got to guess. But
<v Speaker 1>the kind of director. The manager of ILM was like,
<v Speaker 1>you guys, don't do this all right, just leave it alone.
<v Speaker 1>But they weren't going to do that on their off time.
<v Speaker 1>They would come after hours and they developed a running
<v Speaker 1>t Rex skeleton. Yes, And so the manager was like,
<v Speaker 1>don't you dare show that to any of the Jurassic
<v Speaker 1>Park people. And so when Kathleen Kennedy came in, who
<v Speaker 1>was the producer of Jurassic Park, when she came in
<v Speaker 1>to see what their motion blurred looked like, he of
<v Speaker 1>course had it playing on a monitor and she was
<v Speaker 1>instantly like, oh my gosh, yeah, this is amazing. The
<v Speaker 1>world is about to change. Yep, yep.
<v Speaker 2>So I actually wrote down the date.
<v Speaker 1>I thought this was interesting.
<v Speaker 2>So we talked about when the match meets the gasoline, right,
<v Speaker 2>this is it?
<v Speaker 1>Right?
<v Speaker 2>So April twentieth, nineteen ninety two they called black Monday
<v Speaker 2>because that was the day that CGI was realized as
<v Speaker 2>being much better than stop motion, and Spielberg said, we're
<v Speaker 2>going with this, and they realized. I heard one guy
<v Speaker 2>who is the stop motion animator. He's like, you know,
<v Speaker 2>we knew that our job was going to end one day.
<v Speaker 2>It's kind of like when you have a dog. You
<v Speaker 2>know the dog's going to die, but when the dog
<v Speaker 2>actually dies, you still grieve like you weren't expecting to. Right,
<v Speaker 2>they didn't get fired. Spielberg kept them on.
<v Speaker 1>They were the experts in the motion of dinosaurs. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>they had done all kinds of work. They had a
<v Speaker 1>database of knowledge that was very useful.
<v Speaker 2>This is a huge moment in movie making history. I
<v Speaker 2>don't want to glaze over this real quick, but no,
<v Speaker 2>I mean.
<v Speaker 1>This is the most important thing that this did for
<v Speaker 1>movie history. I mean, you you move from we use
<v Speaker 1>computers to do a little bit of cleaning up to
<v Speaker 1>we make living breathing organisms with computers that you believe
<v Speaker 1>are real. Yeah, it's incredible, And I'm gonna I'm gonna
<v Speaker 1>point this out, and I'm somebody liable to throw something
<v Speaker 1>at me for this. This is interesting. So the idea
<v Speaker 1>of Jurassic Park is, of course that John Hammond's creates
<v Speaker 1>this thing that ends up the thing he creates destroys
<v Speaker 1>his own creation. Right, Yes, So Steven Spielberg had been
<v Speaker 1>the special effects guy for twenty years, right, he had been.
<v Speaker 1>He had he had done amazing things, or for a
<v Speaker 1>twenty year period, amazing effects. You've got Close Encounters, You've
<v Speaker 1>got et you've got Jaws, you get Jurassic Park. And
<v Speaker 1>then after Jurassic Park he doesn't make really any special
<v Speaker 1>effects movies anymore. Like he loses is his edge, and
<v Speaker 1>the thing that he was a part of creating ends
<v Speaker 1>up destroying who he was.
<v Speaker 2>Interesting, that's interesting. I do think it's funny that when
<v Speaker 2>the stop motion guys realized that the computer generated effects
<v Speaker 2>we're going to take over this project, one guy said
<v Speaker 2>to the other guy, he said, we're out of a job,
<v Speaker 2>and the other guy said, don't you mean extinct? And when
<v Speaker 2>Spielberg heard that, He's like, that's going in the movie.
<v Speaker 1>The Yeah, they so once it started and once it
<v Speaker 1>started rolling, they were literally creating new things every day
<v Speaker 1>and making it better every day. The guy said, we
<v Speaker 1>would do things that a week before we had no
<v Speaker 1>idea that we could do, just because we were given
<v Speaker 1>free reign on this, and we ended up amazing ourselves
<v Speaker 1>once it was all finished.
<v Speaker 2>We would do something that we thought was done, and
<v Speaker 2>we'd get better the next day. And then we didn't
<v Speaker 2>prove it. We couldn't believe how fast weare.
<v Speaker 4>Movie.
<v Speaker 1>And just so it's clear, in this movie, there's only
<v Speaker 1>about fifteen minutes worth of dinosaur footage in the movie itself,
<v Speaker 1>and nine of that is animatronics. I mean, we're talking
<v Speaker 1>about eight minutes of digital footage that changed the landscape
<v Speaker 1>of movies from that point on.
<v Speaker 2>And I'm just going to say from my personal perspective,
<v Speaker 2>in my opinion, the minimizing of computer generated effects is
<v Speaker 2>important because it grounds it in the real world. When
<v Speaker 2>I watch movies like I don't know, some of the
<v Speaker 2>later Star Wars movies where it's all CGI, Yeah, it
<v Speaker 2>just doesn't work for me. It's dead, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, So you know, we did Man of Steel, Zack
<v Speaker 1>Snyder says at one moment in the documentary that they did.
<v Speaker 1>He feels like that CGI can be useful, but if
<v Speaker 1>a character is putting his hands on something, it needs
<v Speaker 1>to be real. And I think that's a good line
<v Speaker 1>to draw, especially as far as it's come at this point.
<v Speaker 1>But there are a great many movies out there that
<v Speaker 1>they don't They don't hold fast to that rule, and
<v Speaker 1>some of the CGI is just an absolute distraction. And
<v Speaker 1>the thing that's springing to my mind is, of course
<v Speaker 1>jarge our Binks and I hope you want Goobi's inability
<v Speaker 1>to look him in the eye. And I think I
<v Speaker 1>said this before, but I'll say it again because it
<v Speaker 1>makes my point. I'm watching The Jedi Council with my
<v Speaker 1>boy who's eight at the time, who says, is this
<v Speaker 1>the car soon? No? Then why is Yoda animated? Yes,
<v Speaker 1>that's right. If it looks like it's animated, you shouldn't
<v Speaker 1>have it in the movie. You had something real before.
<v Speaker 2>So as a rule, anytime you're watching Jurassic Park and
<v Speaker 2>you see the full body of the dinosaur, that's a
<v Speaker 2>computer generated effect. Okay, So the t Rex at the
<v Speaker 2>pad when he's on top of the car up the
<v Speaker 2>you can actually tell when you see his full body,
<v Speaker 2>that's computerized. When all you see is his teeth, that's animatronic.
<v Speaker 2>The real famous footprint in the mud by the t Rex,
<v Speaker 2>that's animatronic. All that is is a pair of legs
<v Speaker 2>that they made a special animatronic for. Spielberg had this
<v Speaker 2>exposition problem, right, so we needed to explain how they
<v Speaker 2>got the dinosaurs and how they created it, and it's
<v Speaker 2>DNA and all.
<v Speaker 1>This weird DNA.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so he came up with the Mister DNA ride
<v Speaker 2>that the main characters go on and explains how this
<v Speaker 2>all happens. And they said that it took fifteen pages
<v Speaker 2>of script and cut it down to three.
<v Speaker 1>Genius move Yeah, and it's it's so very simplified but perfect,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, because it's a perfect exposition. It gives you
<v Speaker 1>what you need to know, and it's engaging. And there's
<v Speaker 1>a great little scene where they look like dig Doug.
<v Speaker 1>Is there? Crowd amber? All right, everybody? That we'll do
<v Speaker 1>it for this episode of the Shirley You Can't Be
<v Speaker 1>Serious Podcasts. Please join us next week as we take
<v Speaker 1>on part two of Jaws Versus Jurassic Park. Jason.
<v Speaker 2>Join us next week where you'll Get the Head, the Tail,
<v Speaker 2>and the whole damn podcast.
<v Speaker 1>All music images and movie clips are used for the
<v Speaker 1>purposes of commentary and education in conjunction with the fair
<v Speaker 1>Use agreement under the US copyright law.