The Sequel That Never Was: JAWS 3, PEOPLE 0

Note: the below article was originally written by myself in 2006 and published on the long-defunct movie blog The Fake Life. The article has only been altered for formatting and capitalisation, the words are the same.

Okay. Now you’ve just produced the sequel to what, up until the release of the original STAR WARS, was the biggest movie in history. The sequel itself is well on its way to the $100m mark. The studio and audiences are at your feet, screaming out for another instalment. What do you do?

If you’re Richard Zanuck and David Brown, you tell them you’re going to make a spoof of the first two movies and explore everything that’s about Hollywood, its incessant need for money and especially its love for sequels. And everyone else goes ‘Huh?’

JAWS 3, PEOPLE 0 was the brainchild of Zanuck, Brown and Matty Simmons, the editor of National Lampoon magazine who had recently produced Animal House and would go on to oversee the Chevy Chase Vacation flicks. The story goes that Zanuck and Brown decided that a second sequel was just too much, and in a remarkable foresight, wanted to, as Brown put it on the JAWS 2 DVD, “foul the nest.” So they brought in a young John Hughes as writer as well as Tod Carroll – who would go on to write NATIONAL LAMPOON’S GOING TO THE MOVIES and the Michael Keaton drama CLEAN AND SOBER – and hired a young director who had already taken a crack at spoofing JAWS in 1978’s PIRANHA – Joe Dante. Ironically, while the film never materialized, Dante would have the chance to spoof sequels and the resulting merchandising in his incredible and underrated 1990 movie GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH.

The film would be based around the meta-concept of an angry shark trying to stop the production of a third Jaws movie, with an opening showing original Jaws novelist Peter Benchley writing a draft for the film, before going into his pool, only to be eaten by the shark. The film had many sketch ideas, for example, one scene would have had a writer who was obsessed with Star Wars dreaming about sharks in space, as well as lots of cracks at Hollywood and its own obsession with sequelling.

Once the behind the scenes work had started, the producers enlisted the help of several actors, including Vaudeville comedian George Jessel – one of the inspirations for Futurama’s Dr. Zoidberg – and the then hot beauty of the day, Bo Derek, who from what I can gather would spend the entire running time naked, which is by no means a bad thing.

By all accounts, whether it had been a huge success or crashed and burned, JAWS 3, PEOPLE 0 would have been spectacular. But it all ended, reportedly thanks to the man who had begun the franchise in the first place – Steven Spielberg. Spielberg, who was under contract to Universal at the time, found out about what Zanuck, Brown and Simmons were doing and put his foot down, and Universal relented. On one hand, it makes me sad, but on the other hand, I can’t really blame them. After all, when you have a director who had at that time just made two hugely critically and commercially successful hits – JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND – you’re not going to say no. That decision proved to be correct when Spielberg delivered E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL to Universal in 1982, cementing his place in Hollywood legend and providing the studio with a boatload of cash.

I remember reading a story about the actual event, which apparently had the then head of Universal Ned Tanen – infamously known as the person who tried to get Spielberg to change the title of BACK TO THE FUTURE to SPACEMAN FROM PLUTO – in his office crying about having to pull the plug on the project. And that was it. JAWS 3, PEOPLE 0 was officially dead, and Zanuck and Brown swiftly left Universal soon after, their last project ironically being another Benchley adaptation, The Island.

So that was the end of that, but not the end of the third Jaws film, as we now know. But the story of that film is equally fascinating, and hasn’t really been told very often. With Universal still wanting to further capitalize on the Jaws brand name, but being without anyone to make it, they quickly gave the project to Alan Landsburg, a TV producer known mostly for films such as TARANTULAS: THE DEADLY CARGO. Known then as JAWS ’81, Landsburg set around finding a story for his fishy tale, with the concept coming from a writer with the spectacular name of Guerdon Trueblood, who had worked with Landsburg on TARANTULAS, as well as THE SAVAGE BEES, and the period piece THE BASTARD, which had starred Tom Bosley as Benjamin Franklin.

Trueblood’s idea was a simple one, which almost had its roots in history. His tale of a great white shark that had managed to swim upstream into a river complex doesn’t sound incredibly realistic, especially since great whites are only ever found in saltwater, but it sounds remarkably similar to the historical accounts that inspired the first Jaws. In 1916, a series of attacks occurred in a very short space of time along the Jersey shore, which were followed soon after by several more attacks in Matewan Creek, a small village inland. Soon after, a great white was caught near the beach which had remnants of human flesh inside, so the general consensus was that the animal had fed at the shore, then headed up an inlet into Matewan. However, since then, with our shark knowledge much greater, experts have theorized that it was most likely either two different sharks – a great white and a freshwater kind – or a Bull Shark, one of the only man-eating sharks which can survive in both freshwater and saltwater.

To expand on Trueblood’s idea, Landsburg brought in Michael Kane, who had written Universal’s SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT II and would soon after write Walter Hill’s SOUTHERN COMFORT, Carl Gottlieb, one of the scribes on the first two Jaws movies, and famed sci-fi author Richard Matheson, whose name was already inscribed in the history books for such novels as I Am Legend andThe Incredible Shrinking Man. You’d have thought Gottlieb and Matheson might have been able to create a fine and interesting script together, but apparently not, as you’ll no doubt know from having seen the finished film.

But the person who moved it forward even further was Joe Alves. Production designer on Jaws, and once-touted as a co-director for JAWS 2 (with editing sensation Verna Fields), Alves came aboard as director of the film and also introduced a unique concept, at least for the Jaws series: the idea of filming in 3-D. While 3-D had been long known as a gimmick which had died out in the 50s after movies like CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and HOUSE OF WAX, the process had recently had a minor comeback with the cowboy hit COMIN’ AT YA!, and was again seen as a viable – but risky – theatrical format. Ironically, JAWS 3-D would be one of the films that killed the 3-D process once again, with it yet to really rear its head in the mainstream outside of IMAX, despite rumblings from people like James Cameron, Peter Jackson and George Lucas, who seem intent on bringing it to the masses.

But if the film was going to be successful, the 3-D effects would have to be good, especially with the way Hollywood was advancing technology-wise, with movies like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and ALIEN pushing the bar higher with each year. Landsburg turned to a company called Private Stock Effects, who at that time had only worked on John Frankenheimer’s Toshiro Mifune vehicle THE CHALLENGE. With a relatively short time to work on the effects that would bring Jaws out of the theater and into the lap of the audience, PSE set upon working with a brand new electronic compositing system that would make it easier to work with the 3-D process, while providing even more realistic visual effects.

Of course, we now have digital compositing, but back then, computers were known only for controlling the motion-control cameras that were used in model work, back then the only real process that could realistically do some of the things filmmakers wanted to do, such as controlling the spaceships in STAR WARS. The early word on PSE’s effects was very good, and the test effects were known to be astonishing, at least for 1982, although legend has it the initial test shots were in a fishtank with a Barbie doll.

So the flick was on course, and apparently looking good. But it wouldn’t stay that way. According to the admittedly somewhat murky history of the flick, PSE’s chance at a breakout success were sabotaged, apparently by another special effects company known as Praxis Filmworks. Head of Praxis Robert Blalack, who had won an Oscar for working on STAR WARS, allegedly went to Landsburg and told him that he thought PSE’s work was sloppy and inferior to what could be achieved with the standard compositing technology, or more accurately what his company could do. Unfortunately for PSE, Blalack convinced Landsburg, and the producer ordered the effects to be completely redone, using what was left of the budget. This resulted in the terrible effects we see in the film today.

But the real story was apparently a far shadier one. Legend has it that Blalack was scared of the possible revolution PSE’s computer-fuelled effects might have and the effects it might have on the effects industry as a whole, and like many industry workers who have been faced with having to deal with the evolution of technology, instead of embracing the future, stifled it. Thus, JAWS 3-D apparently suffered heavily because of people being frightened of the future.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to say that JAWS 3-D had the potential to be some classic, but it’s kind of a sad afternote to a film that could have had a hand in advancing the technology, as opposed to letting it die in favour of not disturbing the equilibrium.

With a young Dennis Quaid in the lead and Oscar-winner Louis Gossett, Jr amongst the cast, JAWS 3-D opened on the 22nd of July, 1983, to terrible reviews and a middling box office response, eventually grossing just $45 million, $57m less than JAWS 2’s overall gross. While not killing the franchise outright (1987’s JAWS THE REVENGE did that), JAWS 3-D was a noticeably huge stepdown in quality from the first two movies, and rightly has its place in the yearly list of bad sequels, leaving us to wonder what we might have had, had Spielberg not nixed JAWS 3, PEOPLE 0 before it had a chance to show us what it could have done. But, c’est la vie.