Film Production

From LoveToKnow Movies

There is much more to know about movies and film production than the average person may imagine. Film production is a lengthy and complicated process that can take as little as a few days or weeks for a low budget film to several years for a major release. From the time when an idea for a movie appears in the imagination of a writer, producer, or director to the time an audience finally gets to see it on the big screen, it may undergo countless changes in story, cast, and the content of certain scenes. Some of the biggest movies in history have film production stories that rival those of the films themselves.

Jaws: A Film Production Nightmare

The stories about the behind-the-scenes problems on the set of Jaws are now the stuff of Hollywood legend. Millions of tickets sold and umpteen movies later, director Steven Spielberg, who was all of twenty-six when he helmed the big shark movie, can look back at the experience and laugh, but at the time, he was running behind schedule and over budget and had little reason to laugh as he feared being replaced on a constant basis.

Perhaps the most infamous part of the seemingly doomed production was the continuous failure of "Bruce", the mechanical shark cast in the title role. Mechanical problems with Bruce set the production's schedule back by weeks and cost the studio thousands of dollars. Compounding the problems, the late actor Robert Shaw was on a very tight schedule due to US income tax reasons and threatened to walk off the set several times. As gritty and boisterous as Quint, the character he played, Shaw was given to fits of rage when faced with the multiple delays in the production. As if that wasn't enough, the script was also an issue as it can be in any film production. In his book The Jaws Log, screenwriter Carl Gottleib tells how the script was being constantly revised throughout the production. Actors were often given mimeographed pages just minutes before the cameras would roll because the script was revised so often.

In the end film fans were treated to a movie that would be remembered as the first true summer blockbuster, but when one examines the story behind the story it is a wonder that Jaws was ever released at all.

Film Production Problems Lead to Box Office Gold

Douglas Adams, the late author of the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio shows, books, and BBC TV series once wrote of the way he figured out how to get his characters out of a tough fix he'd written them into. He made the problem work for him rather than against him, not unlike the theory behind the martial art of Judo. A good film production example of this comes from another Spielberg film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. In a pivotal scene, Indiana Jones, as played by Harrison Ford, is supposed to engage in a grueling fight against a man with a sword. When it came time to shoot the scene, however, Ford was ill with a nasty cold and in no mood to shoot the multiple takes that the scene was sure to require. He suggested that Indy, who always wore a sidearm, could simply shoot the other man rather than fight him, and one of the most classic scenes in the movie was created.


 


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