In his acceptance speech he tried to calm the fears of the other 65.3 percent. “No one has to be afraid of the Best Party,” he said, “because it is the best party. If it wasn’t, it would be called the Worst Party or the Bad Party. We would never work with a party like that.”
One angry father wrote to the brilliant director, saying his daughter had not bathed since viewing a bathtub drowning in the 1954 French film "Les Diaboliques," and now she was refusing to shower after seeing Janet Leigh’s character slashed to death in "Psycho." Hitchcock responded, "Send her to the dry cleaners."
The Bowler from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.
An American man armed with a pistol and a 40-inch sword was detained in northern Pakistan as he tried to cross the border into Afghanistan on a mission to avenge the 9-11 attacks and kill Osama bin Laden, police said Tuesday.
"There are 35 guys in a room there," he says. "They don't have beds, they go to the bathroom on the floor and the showers run once a week for 15 minutes. Fifty percent of the inmates have AIDS or tuberculosis, and you can die from eating the food."
The film's art director, Joe Alves, was hired to create the shark, and he remembers very clearly how he decided on those 25 feet. He made two life-size paper drawings of Bruce — one 20 feet long, the other 30 feet. He took the two to a parking garage on the Universal Studios back lot and put them side by side for studio executives. In a classic Goldilocks moment, the bigger shark seemed too big and the little shark too little. So Alves took the middle road.
Thirty years later, Jeff Pirtle, NBC Universal's manager of archives and collections, invited me to his office on the Universal Studios lot and showed me a number of Alves' original schematics for the shark. The width of those famous jaws: nearly 5 feet. The head alone, according to one schematic, weighed 400 pounds.How pumped would you be just to have a portion of the original drawings?
Jaws was a trailblazer here, as in so many things. Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) begins the movie as the epitome of American manhood, almost to the point of cliche. He’s a loving husband, a devoted father, and a solitary lawman protecting his community. When confronted by the shark, however, everything spirals out of control. He watches a little boy get chewed up in front of his eyes, and is publicly berated by the grieving mother. Then the shark strikes again, despite the security measures he puts in place… and this time, his own child is nearly taken. If the first two-thirds of the movie is about anything, it’s revealing the impotence of male stereotypes.
