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.

I have taken this opportunity to close the chapter, as it were, because people have asked me to and because I'd like some of what really happened on the record.  In 2010, I was notified by FedEx in a letter from Mark Masters that his company, TRN, was picking up the option on my show for another three years. I was thrown into a depression that almost brought me to tears. The preceeding three years with TRN had been a nightmare. They had not effectively sold the show, affiliated it or, most glaring of all, supported the show properly from a technical standpoint. Masters, after promising me phone meetings and follow up calls, was MIA. I wanted out of his company and away from him. It was a joyless, uninspiring and unprofitable hell. I had to take work during the day, voice-over and acting gigs, to make ends meet and of course we pumped up our on line business. I was, in short, in emergency mode. And working a late night show from 10-1 pacific made work during the day debilitating and exhausting. I wound up in the hospital in December of 09. I emailed Masters and put it to him directly. Picking up my option for three more years was pointless as I didn't like his company nor him personally. I articulated why and asked him why he would want to be in business with someone who had a professional and personal distaste for him. I received no answer and wound up angry and even more miserable. I had no choice. I had to put my head down and push on. And I did. Through horrid tech support, a lazy sales effort, no communication with the powers that be who had purposefully cut me off and money so insubstantial it's shocking Masters could call himself a salesman. By the end of the run, true to form, Masters released his laughable statement that he had decided to end the relationship. Amusing. As amusing as him claiming he actually had something to do with rolling my show out in 2007 on 75 stations, a rollout that was the result of my name, not any effort of his. That was borne out in the ensuing years. And as amusing as his claim that he helped build our on-line presence. Mark Masters knows absolutely nothing about the digital business or new media. In fact when I visited his operation in 2008, he proudly showed me 1980's photocopy technology that he'd used to print school books. Mark used to say that TRN 'under promised and over delivered.' In my case it was exactly the opposite.  Today, we see clearly in the industry news coming out of Medford, DC and elsewhere that what I suffered through was only a part of the unfolding TRN story. That company is now a shell of the already disintegrating entity it was. Mark Masters always impressed me as a man with a baffling inability to read events. Sounding cocksure, he put a horrid, straight out of the 70's  all-news format on the air, sued everyone in radio thus hastening the very disunion and infighting he complained about and alienated his talent, the hosts as he called us, the very people he needed to insure success. I am blessed that I survived that experienice and that today I have a thriving online business. Our brand was almost destroyed by TRN, something I knew was happening, but we're bringing it back. I hope this statement clarifies some things. It's all completely true.

Episode 3 of the Free Phil Hendrie Podcast, "The Disneyland Remote" Is Posted! Download the shit out of it! Click Here!

LAST FEW HOURS FOR BSP's TO E-MAIL THEIR PICKS FOR "TED'S BEST'!Us the BSP E-Mail  Deadline midnight PDT!                                                         

Tonights show featured the insights of Dr. Jim Sadler as he dealt with the topic of earthquakes and peoples fear of them. Dr. Sadler said that when he was in Alaska he was having a beer while wearing a fur hat and a large fur coat. The outfit covered up how really "ripped" he is and caused at least one man to look at him as if he were "an insect." But Dr. Sadler had it all over the guy when he told him he came from California and "had the guts to face an earthquake."   Dean Wheeler and friends "sweat it out."Dean Wheeler defended the producers of HBO's "Game Of Thrones" for including in one of their episodes a prosthetic head on a lance that was a replica of George Bush. Dean felt it was an "artistic freedom" issue. When Larry Grover's mother brings up an article in the local Mill Valley weekly that reported on Dean drunkenly simulating sex with a "yoga dummy" Dean retires to his sweat lodge to do "penance."