Teeth of the Sea

I was in my gym Saturday morning when I saw the chyron running across one of the TV screens.

The words “Woman injured in apparent shark attack” floated over my head, and immediately I heard John Williams’ famous movie theme playing in my head.

“Here we go again,” I thought.

Of course, I had recently seen Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s epic shark attack movie for the first time in 50 years, so that might explain my frame of mind.

Yes, let’s pause for a minute and acknowledge the mind-numbing passage of time.

Fifty years, a half-century, since the film credited with creating the summer blockbuster came bursting into movie theaters.

I was 18 freaking years when I first saw this water-logged monster movie, back when Gerald Ford was president, eggs were going for 61 cents a dozen, a gallon of gas cost 57 cents and the median home price was $39,300.

Jesus, I gotta lay down…

My sister and I had gone to see a VHS screening of Jaws at Hi-fi Provisions, a funky record store located at Industry City, an historic shipping, warehouse and manufacturing complex in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn.

This location, also known as Bush Terminal, dates back to the early 20th Century, and was in serious decline by the time Jaws hit the movie screens, as manufacturing and shipping slowed down and moved out.

It’s thrilling to see the property today, filled with restaurants, shops, and, most of all, people. And it’s only a few subway stops from my home.

As we took our seats and I heard those two simple but ominous notes – E and F--I thought of my first go-round with Bruce, the mechanical shark named after Steven Spielberg’s lawyer.

I was a freshman at Hunter College, and I was taking a theater class that required us to see three plays during the semester. One of my classmates and I decided to see an evening performance of Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular.

That left us with a lot of time to kill after school, so we decided to take in a movie before the show.

Jaws, which had been released a few months earlier, was at playing a theater nearby, so these two young idiots went to see a movie in 1970’s Times Square, which was a long way off from the family-friendly tourist playground it is today.

Back then, the area was full of hookers, drug dealers and three card monte players who brazenly plied their trades out in the open.

Many of the locals apparently were in the theater and we quickly realized that a bloodthirsty shark was the least of our worries.

The audience was loud, probably stoned, and had a penchant for laughing at the mayhem. If you were standing outside, you would've thought we were watching a comedy. However, the shot of a severed head floating out of a sunken ship even freaked out these freaks.

Show and Hell

But the highlight of the evening was the famous scar scene where the shark hunter Quint, portrayed by Robert Shaw, and Hooper, the oceanographer played by Richard Dreyfuss, display their various scars.

It’s kind of bonding moment between the two characters—Shaw and Dreyfuss butted heads on the set, as well—before the climactic battle with the shark.

The scene certainly an impact on the man sitting next to me, who rose half out of his seat, pulled up his shirt to show his own vicious scar.

“Hey, everybody,” he said, pointing to his ribs. “Look at this.”

The audience promptly jeered, shouted and strongly encouraged him to shut the fuck up. Hey, this was New York, after all.

The crowd settled down after that, Quint was eaten for lunch, Bruce got blown to kingdom come, and my classmate and I headed for the exits as soon as the credits started rolling.

And now after all this time, I can say that I still enjoyed Jaws.

Spielberg supposedly despised how phony the shark prop looked, so he shot it from awkward angles, beneath the water, for only moments at a time to keep people from getting a good look at the damn thing.

Bruce’s worst moment, of course, comes at the end, when the critter belly flops on the deck of the sinking ship and looks so incredibly fake.

It’s a sharp contrast to Spielberg’s earlier ingenuity of making us believe in a Great White that we really didn’t see.

But it’s a minor complaint, and I prefer this to the CGI that dominates today’s films. And at least this time I didn’t have to race out of the theater in fear of my life.

I think of the person I was back in 1975, so naïve, so full of dreams, convinced I’d be the next Steven Spielberg.

Yeah, that hasn’t panned out, but I think I’m going to be the regret and self-pity on hold for a moment and give thanks for the great time I had with my sister at this cool location on this beautiful summer night.

“What did you think?” I asked a young man after the film ended.

“It was a little long,” he replied.

I was all set to tell him of my Times Square adventure from yesteryear, but I got a strong vibe that he didn’t want to hear any boomer stories.

And time is such a funny thing, where two hours seem so long, but 50 years fly by in a flash.