Margeret Grey’s ‘A Little Bird Told Me’
‘Jaws’ Shark Hunted Down
June 4, 2010
The star of “Jaws” has been found resting in a Los Angeles garbage dump. No not Robert Shaw…he of the spine-tingling and bone-jarring ‘Indianapolis’ monologue half-way through the film and the only real acting that’s done in the film…..I’m talking about the mechanical shark they used, which today looks laughable on re-runs and on the DVD anniversary special that the studio is hyping in conjunction with the 35th anniversary of the movie just around the corner. How do I know? I went and found it…and risked picking through old tampons and milk cartons to do it.
In order to maximize their control over the creature, the “Jaws” filmmakers built three sharks for their 1975 movie. All created from the same cheap looking mold, the sharks were dubbed “Bruce” after Spielberg’s lawyer, Bruce Ramer, who is or was…don’t know his whereabouts…a real prick. The gigantic metal creatures were 25-feet long and weighed hundreds of pounds. The heads alone came in at 400 lbs. apiece, but with jaws the size of a small human. What the F? Hundreds of pounds but the jaws were the size of, well Gary Colemans. He’s not around now. He won’t mind the comparison. And I’ll bet Gary would have liked to have done to a TV executive what Jaws finally did to that Quint bastard that Shaw played.
When I set out to track down Bruce’s whereabouts, I went straight to the source –Spielberg. I woke Stephen one morning and told him I was on deadline, I didn’t want to f about and I wanted to know where that bag of garbage shark was before any other reporters started getting bright ideas. Speels (what his friends call him) explained that the original Bruces had all been destroyed, as no one had thought to save them.
I told him I thought he was lying. There were theories circulated on a Facebook that another Bruce might be out there. I told Speilberg to quit lying and find out where that shark or any of the robot sharks he used might be. After stalling awhile, I finally called in Lloyd Bonafide who had been in the car just in case. Lloyd brought out T-Bone, a pet name he has for a cattle-prod he usually only breaks out on Halloween. It didn’t take long and that lying motherlover finally says…surprise!…a fourth shark had indeed been cast from the original mold, just months after its brothers were constructed. The baby of the Bruce family was created for display at Universal Studios Theme Park, where it hung by its tail for fifteen years.
In 1990, it was taken down and shipped out to some garbage pit. I had Spielberg, with Lloyd standing over him, make some calls to junkyards and garbage dumps all over the LA area. He finally found it in a Sun Valley dump — just minutes away from Universal. I then had Spielberg send the team who built the piece of shit — Joe Alves and Roy Arbogast—-over to the pit to verify the shark’s authenticity.
“It’s the real one,” Arbogast told me after examining the creature. “It’s just kinda’ nice to see….”
“Shut your sewer,” I stopped him. “I’m not interested in your memory lane stories. I just want to know if it’s the shark. And it is isn’t it?” He burped a weak “yes.”
As the sun crept over the rooftops of the San Fernando Valley, I had Lloyd untie Spielberg. “Bye Speels.” I blew him a kiss. The discovery of “Bruce” (gay) came at a good time. There’s talk that Universal might be considering a “Jaws 3-d remake– with comedian Tracy Morgan in the shark-hunter role. In case anyone is actually serious about making this floater, I’ve got video of Lloyd and Speels that…oh, they don’t wanna let the press see it. No way, no way, no way.
