What's Your Spielberg Moment?

Since doing this On The Lot thing, I’ve been pondering the films that had the most effect on me.  Steven Spielberg is a prolific filmmaker, but one of his first, JAWS, really sucker punched my imagination awake.

I love Spielberg’s films - from Saving Private Ryan to Close Encounters of The Third Kind - so many movies of visual brilliance and great content. But I have to say, Mr. Spielberg, you ruined the water for me.

I was a mere 5 years old when JAWS came out, in 1975. Remember the TV ad where there was just lot of black water and the “duh-dum” theme? Then at the last minute the shark jumped out? OH MY GOD…I was literally sitting inches away from the screen - as little kids did in those days - and nearly wet my pants. From that moment on, anything resembling a shark sent me into a tizzy. Forget about learning how to swim - the blue of the pool reminded me of sharks, and the fact that I couldn’t see 360 degrees around me in the water, along with the panic response of not being able to breathe - well, no hope was had for me becoming an Olympic swimmer. Or even a floater. Hahahaha…

And large bodies of water - NO WAY! I could barely step into a fresh water lake without imagining the shark jumping up on land and chomping me in half. To be near the ocean almost made me cry.

If you remember the late 70’s/early 80’s JAWS-A-THON - one after another - and all the marketing that went along with it, (you could not even buy a gumball at the skating rink without it having a JAWS image on it), there was no getting away from that damn shark. And given my overly active imagination, I could not get JAWS out of my psyche. It represented all that I feared, and then some.

My family had a running gag with this fear. First of all, I was born in LA but grew up in northern Ontario, Canada. NO CHANCE OF SHARKS THERE! So it was a bizarre phobia, in the land of ice and snow. My older brother kept me out of his bedroom by keeping the movie poster on the back of his door. My younger sister liked to put the JAWS trading cards under my pillow. My mother let me stay up late to watch SNL and would laugh when I covered my eyes during the “Land Shark” bits. It was out of control.

I ventured to watch it, through my fingers, several times during my teens. Sometimes I could take seeing the shark, most times I couldn’t. It was truly embarrassing. In my early twenties, I forced myself to watch it, and wow, that shark looked kinda fake. But it still scared the pants off me.

Then, in my thirties, (where I am now - 36), I watched a rental of Deep Blue Sea. THE WHOLE THING. Alone. Late at night. Somehow, it wasn’t nearly as scary to me as JAWS. Scary, but you saw the sharks too much. I could handle Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Even came to respect and love Great Whites for their jumping abilities and swimming power. I understood sharks don’t really like to eat people - they spit them out whenever they do take a chunk, thinking surfers look like seals. But JAWS…nah…

So I decided to go swimming with the sharks in the Bahamas. Stewart’s Cove, to be exact. Snorkeling above a frenzied gaggle of reef sharks. I was able to do it for 15 minutes. Not bad for a selachophobic.

But you know what finally got me over, mostly, my fear of JAWS? Being a filmmaker, specifically a shooter and editor. Because now, when I watch a film I’ve seen a couple of times, and I’ve seen JAWS about 30 times at least, I start to take it apart shot and editing-wise.

To Mr. Spielberg, I’m sure you’ve heard this a millions times, but I want to say thanks for scaring me so much I needed to know how it was all done. So thusly, JAWS became part of the reason I’m a filmmaker today. It fed into my vivid imagination and forced me to explore dark corners. I’m 95% selachophobia free, but don’t ask me to ride the Universal Studios JAWS boat thingy. Not gonna happen. I’d rather scuba dive with the real thing.

What’s your Spielberg moment?

Peace,
Melissa