Friday marked the 50th anniversary of the opening of the movie “Jaws,” which was, of course, directed by Phoenix’s own Steven Spielberg.
The film made more than $477 million worldwide and is widely recognized as the first summer blockbuster.
But before Spielberg was filming in the waters off Martha’s Vineyard, he was shooting in the Valley.
Phil Boas, opinion columnist with The Arizona Republic, wrote about Spielberg's formative years in metro Phoenix, and joined The Show to talk more about it.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Phil, this anniversary seems like a pretty significant moment for a pretty famous Phoenix native.
PHIL BOAS: Well, it is. I mean, this is one of the very best stories in the history of Arizona. If you love Arizona and you care about this place and you enjoy the history of Arizona, this is our best story. And it is a story of a boy, who grew sort of an outsider, kind of pushed aside, sometimes teased by the kids.
And he used a little 8 millimeter camera to go out and make movies and to teach himself how to become a director. Self-taught. And he would grow up to become the most successful motion picture director in the history of movies, bar none. There’s nobody who matches his success as a filmmaker, and he did it all over our city, all over our town.
You know, places like Sky Harbor (Terminal) 1. He was filming at Papago Park. He was filming at the base of Camelback Mountain, little war films. And one of the things that I’ve always tried to press is every time we look at Camelback Mountain, we should think to ourselves, “That’s the place where a kid named Steven Spielberg taught himself how to make movies.”
BRODIE: So let’s talk specifically about “Jaws” — which of course very recently celebrated its 50th anniversary — and when you talk about Steven Spielberg filming at Sky Harbor and filming at Camelback Mountain, that’s one thing. But it seems like it was kind of a risk — and you wrote about this — to have a kid from the desert to direct a movie about a shark in the ocean.
BOAS: Spielberg, he didn’t start out in motion pictures. He started out in television, his first gigs in Hollywood. So he was making the “Columbo” series. He was doing some of that. And he also made a motion picture for TV called “Duel.”
And it was about how a truck driver — unseen throughout the whole movie — is stalking this businessman in his little red car. And Spielberg used to call it “Jaws” on wheels. And when the “Jaws” property became available, they were thinking about that film, that Spielberg had made it and what he had done with that and the suspense he had built, and thought that he might be good for this movie about a shark.
He had also gotten some tremendous reviews, one in particular from the dean of film critics, maybe the greatest film critic in history. Pauline Kael saw Spielberg’s first feature motion picture for the big screen, “The Sugarland Express,” and said “This is just a tremendous piece of work by a young filmmaker,” and that really launched his career after that.
So they gave him this assignment to make “Jaws,”one of the most anticipated motion pictures because it was preceded by a bestselling novel that just scared the bejesus out of everybody who read it. All of us kids had that book. It was dog-eared. Sharks were on the mind.
And I tell my kids, “You cannot know what it was like back then,” because we had no understanding of sharks. They were very mysterious. And to have that book and then movie, it just scared us to death.
BRODIE: Phil, I want to ask you because, for those of us who were not around 50 years ago. what was it like the anticipation of this movie coming out, waiting in lines and then seeing it? At the time, did you know that it was going to still be such a relevant, important movie five decades later?
BOAS: No. In fact, the movie has grown in importance because I think it’s the appreciation for the skill to make that movie has grown by the year. And it has held up really well and probably grows stronger in reputation by the year.
But I can remember being back at the theater in Arizona. First time I saw it was at Christown mall, and I have friends who saw it there too for the first time. And we remember the long lines, everybody waiting to get in. And remember, because this had been a bestselling novel, there were great expectations that the movie was going to meet the power of the novel. So there was a lot of pressure on Spielberg to do that.
They gave this assignment to a 27-year-old kid from Arizona, and he had to go out to Martha’s Vineyard and on location, try to make this movie on the ocean with a mechanical shark. They have three versions of this mechanical shark.
Well, they were not appreciating or understanding how difficult it is to make a movie trying to match the light and shadow and the background on the sea, from shot to shot to shot. It’s incredibly difficult to do.
And so things got bogged down. The expenses went up and the suits from Universal Studios and Hollywood flew out to Martha’s Vineyard to find out what the heck’s going on with our picture, why is it bogged down. And Spielberg as a kid had to walk them off the ledge, walk them back and reassure them that he was going to deliver this picture and that it was going to be a smash.
And in fact, he did that. And so at 27, Steven Spielberg made the the most successful picture in the history of movies, the biggest grossing box office in history at that time, beating “The Godfather.”
BRODIE: At that time. Was there a sense of pride here in Arizona that a local kid had made this movie?
BOAS: Arizonans scarcely know this story. A few years back, I went from Valley community to Valley community just telling this story with a PowerPoint. And people were blown away that this happened in their backyard, that Spielberg had done so much while he lived here.
He made his first full-length motion picture in 16 millimeter as a kid. And in 1964, they premiered it at Phoenix Little Theatre, and it was called “Firelight.” And it was really the beginnings of what would later become “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” He and the word used commonly is transmogrified — he reshaped the childhood picture into what became a sci-fi classic.
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