There is a creature alive on this Earth today who has stalked the oceans, terrorising millions. His name is Joe Alves, and his work on the first three Jaws films is legendary. But it’s time to go deep with the Hollywood legend and reassess the sequel he directed: Jaws 3D…
This article originally appeared in Film Stories issue 43 in May 2023.
There are many books about the making of films. If you look hard enough, there’s even a book about the making of the Jaws theme park ride. It’s enough to make even the most casual Jaws fans embark upon a long and strange journey. It’s probably simpler, though, to just meet Joe Alves.
Essentially a living, breathing ‘Making of Jaws’ book, Joe’s history is incredible. He designed Bruce the shark and location-scouted Martha’s Vineyard. He rolled the cameras while Jaws 2 ate a helicopter, and sat in on John Williams composing his scores. After working as production designer and second unit director, he finally became the director of Jaws 3D. And it’s this latter film – this wonderful and slightly crazy film – that we are here to discuss.
Reputation
Jaws 3D has a simple story. It tells of a small shark that gets trapped in a SeaWorld theme park, causing mild peril before it is caught by professionals and sadly unable to survive in captivity. There’s just one problem: its 35ft mother is also in the park – and she is pissed.
As a concept for a summer blockbuster it’s perfect, and yet Jaws 3D was mauled by the press and the franchise would never recover – limping its way to the cinema exit with 1987’s Jaws The Revenge. As for Alves’ career, the film’s huge box office success did little to protect him against its reputation – and he found himself in limbo.
Today though, Joe Alves is chirpy. A warmly smiling older man in a sunny American home, he clearly relishes his memories as we settle down to redeem the reputation of his 3D masterpiece. And the story begins at the end of the film that started it all.
“By the end of filming [the original] Jaws, the crew were really tired,” says Alves. “We were over budget and over schedule. When we got back to the studio, we were not heroes.
“At the first screening that we had, in Texas, I really thought the audience were going to laugh at it. Because on location the shark always made this weird sound, so whenever Steven would say ‘cut’, the crew would all burst out laughing. And at the screening, I just thought ‘Oh my God, they’re gonna laugh.’ But then, as the shark came up out of the water, there was suddenly screaming. The executives in the theatre looked at each other and said ‘We’d better release this big!’ ”
Jaws swam from cinema to cinema, chewing up tickets until it became the highest-grossing film of all time. Barely a month down the line, Alves was canoeing with a girlfriend in the mountains when they came upon a little town with a big line of people stretching down its middle. “I followed the line around and saw it was a theatre showing Jaws. I said ‘Oh my God.’ ”
Sequels
Alves was working with Spielberg on Close Encounters Of The Third Kind when the phone call came about a second shark feature. When he told Spielberg the news, the legendary director smiled and said “you don’t wanna do Jaws 2!” – but the film’s producers Richard D Zanuck and David Brown had other ideas to sweeten the deal.
“They said: ‘Okay Joe, we’ll make you associate producer. You could direct the second unit, and do the production design.’ ”
Spielberg’s deal for his next film was taking time to come to fruition, so Alves agreed to return to Amity. However, despite the crew’s previous sea-faring experience, Jaws 2 wasn’t an easy shoot.
“I had my own effects people, but the studio had their people too – and they wanted a lot more shark,” he says. “They wanted it to do a lot more things: attack a helicopter, come through the transom of the boat – all this stuff. So it was as difficult as the first film, and in some ways more difficult.”
When the second Jaws film proved another box office smash, Universal began developing a third Jaws film – and this time it was intended to be a spoof. Directed by Joe Dante and co-written by John Hughes, ‘Jaws 3 People 0’ would send up the franchise with the filmmaking team behind Animal House. This shark, however, hit the beach.
“It was making fun of the people that did [Universal’s] most successful movie,” explains Alves, “and I think Spielberg may have said ‘this is pretty disgusting’ [to them]. So I think they got the idea it wasn’t too good.”
It wasn’t too good indeed, and news on Jaws 3 went quiet for a while. Then one day, Alves was hanging out in the office of legendary editor Verna Fields, who had won an Oscar for her work on the first film. She told him that a TV producer named Alan Landsburg had signed up to produce the next movie for Universal.
“You should go talk to him,” she said. “Maybe you could direct it!”
3D
Alves’ initial impressions of Landsburg were not at all promising, however.
“To start with, Landsburg didn’t want to build any sharks,” recalls Joe. “He said ‘you know Joe, there’s a lot of stock shark footage we could use…’. I said ‘are you serious? There’s no stock footage of BIG sharks!’ ”
At the beginning, Alves was asked to scout ocean parks with screenwriter Richard Matheson. It was while watching an underwater 3D tour film that he hit upon an idea.
“I made a drawing. I had this shark coming at you and it said ‘Jaws, 3-D… 3-D… 3-D…’. So we went and showed it to Sidney Sheinberg [the president of Universal]. He looked at it, and he said ‘can I have this, Joe?’ I said ‘of course you can – you’re the president!’ So that got me the directing gig, basically.”
With SeaWorld Orlando booked for Jaws to terrorise, Joe started attending drama workshops helmed by Jeff Corey (coach to Jane Fonda) to learn about working with actors.
“People told me, ‘Joe, leave the art department alone. You’re the director now. You’ve got to work with the actors!’ ”
Unfortunately for Alves, a certain someone was hovering in the background.
“The problem I had was Landsburg,” he recalls. “On the first day of shooting, we were at the dock with Dennis Quaid riding in on the water scooter. Landsburg comes up and says: ‘No no no – you got to do this first!’ And I said ‘what? Am I directing this film or are you?’ ”
Technology
For all its difficulties, Jaws 3D would prove to be a subtly revolutionary production. When the 3D cameras didn’t work, they had new camera technology built. When it came time to use blue-screen, Alves realised that the actors’ costumes were already blue – so green-screen was used for the first time. Progressively too, it was noticed that SeaWorld wasn’t hiring many black people in the 1980s – so Louis Gossett Jr was cast as president of the park.
When all was said and done, however, it was time for a giant shark to eat some tourists.
“We had the biggest shark, and then also the fastest fin,” says Alves. “By Jaws 3D we really had it down.”
For the first time ever, Jaws 3D would show what it was like to be eaten by a huge shark – by apparently placing the camera next to its tonsils while it ate the actor Simon MacCorkindale.
“During the first Jaws I did a lot of rough sketches, and I had a shot from inside the shark looking out, and Steven laughed. He said, ‘why would we ever need a shot like this?!’ I said ‘ah, I’ll get it eventually!’
“Obviously it was Simon’s point of view of the inside of the shark – if you were still alive, you could see out.”
Stunts
Another of the film’s most thrilling sequences comes as a triangle of human water skiers collapses after realising that the ‘damn shark’s mother’ is right behind them.
“When Lea Thompson climbed to the top of the waterskier pyramid, there was applause,” says Alves of working with the Back To The Future actor. “All the other skiers were young kids doing amazing things – they would fly, they would jump – and Lea just got in there with them.”
It wasn’t entirely good times on the shoot for the waterskiers, however.
“Roy Arbogast, the effects guy, came up with a really fast fin, and when it came to the skiers, the fin was just flying at them. And it hit the girl at the end. Everybody dropped and she was just laying there, not coming up. And I thought ‘holy shit!’ We rushed to get her out and she was taken away in an ambulance. This was the week that [actor] Vic Morrow had been killed on a movie. It was scary. When you’re working with stunts, people do get killed, you know?”
Most spectacularly of all, the film’s finale depicts the shark ramming an underwater control room, which immediately floods. Now trapped half inside the wreckage, the shark proceeds to eat as many humans as it can possibly manage.
“Roy Arbogast built all three sharks,” recalls Alves, “but in the scene where the shark attacks the underwater control room, we had to make it 35ft because MacCorkindale is stuck in [its mouth]. We didn’t build the whole thing, just the front half of it – but it had to be much bigger.”
The sequence required the set to be suspended in mid-air then gradually lowered into a giant water tank. The largest shark animatronic ever concocted would then attempt to eat everyone.
“It’s always a little dangerous underwater with something like that,” remembers Alves. “We tested it first with stunt people, and then it came time for the real actors to do their close-up. Lou Gossett watched the test, and then he leaned over to me and said, ‘Joe… this is my last day on the shoot. I don’t want it to be my last day.’ So we got a stunt double, a brilliant stunt double.”
Score
As the filming of Jaws 3D came to a head, it was time to consider the soundtrack to the film. Of course, Alves wanted to bring John Williams back for his instalment, but there was just one problem.
“Landsburg was in control! So in post-production, [he said] ‘I’m going to England to get the soundtrack.’ So I didn’t have any control over that.”
Luckily, the eventual score by Alan Parker would prove to be a perfect companion to a movie that marked a tonal split from its predecessors. It made sense: while Jaws 2 had been a solid film, it had also been an echo of the first. It’s arguable that Jaws 3D is the most creative of the sequels – almost a standalone adventure – and therefore deserved music with its own personality.
With the movie in the can, it was time to edit – but there was just one problem. Or rather, one TV producer.
“I’d cut the movie to exactly the same length as [Jaws] one and two. And then Landsburg cut out almost 25 minutes of it. 3D was becoming popular and he figured he could get five screenings shown a day instead of four,” Alves says. “He didn’t give a damn that he’d cut out the relationships and a lot of the stuff. He just cut to the action. So even though many people really liked it, one columnist said ‘what we miss is the emotional thing.’ And I wanted to scream at him because [with the final cut] a lot of personal things would have been in it.”
Jaws 3D was a massive box-office success, drawing in a whopping $50 million in a matter of weeks. It made like Star Wars – branching out into bubblegum cards, T-shirts and boxes of Shredded Wheat with 3D goggles inside. Yet much like the fate of a certain 35ft shark, Joe Alves’ career appeared to have blown up.
“I would have felt better about it had I been able to get another directing job. But the critics hit me so hard – so yeah, it hurt me a lot,” says Alves. “I had a number of projects in development [at the time] and then they just didn’t happen. You know, in the movie business, you get these highs and lows and it happens with actors, and with directors too sometimes.”
Alves wouldn’t be down for long. John Carpenter approached him to work on the Jeff Bridges classic Starman, and to this day he has fans all over the world who want to hear his stories, buy his storyboard artwork, and find out how he designed that very first mechanical shark in the summer of ’74.
To this day, you can walk into a supermarket and guarantee that 90% of its inhabitants will have their very own special memories of Bruce – and perhaps we can now begin to encourage them to reassess his 3D relative too.
