Raman Mangat

In Jaws, you don’t see the shark until 1 hour and 21 minutes into the movie. That wasn’t the plan. According to the script, the mechanical shark, “Bruce,” was supposed to get way more screen time. But Bruce was built for and tested in a North Hollywood freshwater tank. Oops: Jaws was to be the first major motion picture shot in the Atlantic Ocean. The first time the mechanical shark got into the ocean, the electrical substructure was destroyed by the salt water. So director Steven Spielberg had to film the movie without his main character. This, Spielberg said, “torqued up the suspension of the movie…Rather than seeing the shark in every scene, I played a lot of the fear from the people in the water, from seeing their legs kicking, from the point of view of the camera moving along the surface of the water. That’s what turned the movie into more of an exercise in suspense than just a horror film.” “So if you had the shark when you wanted it,” Spielberg was asked, “you probably would have had a different movie?” “I probably would have made a movie that wouldn’t have been as successful,” Spielberg said. “I think the film would have made half the money had the shark worked.” Jaws had a record-setting $7 million opening weekend and grossed $100 million in its first 59 days, passing “The Godfather” as the highest-grossing film in history. Takeaway 1: The iconic POV scenes in Jaws were forced out of necessity. Innovations are often forced by limitations. Tony Hawk, for example, is credited with being the first skateboarder to ollie into his aerials. "It wasn’t like I was trying to create movement," he said. Hawk was too small and skinny "to get the inertia to get in the air like other skaters." Because of his limitations, Hawk changed skateboarding forever... Takeaway 2: In Jaws, you don’t see the shark until 1 hour and 21 minutes into the movie. “This goes to show,” @_coleschafer writes, "that anticipation is scarier than confrontation." The Stoic philosopher Seneca famously wrote, "We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” --- "If you break the human struggle down to one word," Jerry Seinfeld says, "it's CONFRONT. And so, I approach everything that way." Confront the reality that the shark is broken. Confront the problem you're putting off. Confront the hardest task on your to-do list. Confront the workout. Confront the blank page. Anticipation is scarier than confrontation. Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!