When "Jaws" swam its way into theaters in 1975, the titular shark — and its haunting theme — immediately became the stuff of beachgoers' nightmares. Chock-full of terrifying scenes that would scare even the most courageous ocean-lover back onto shore, Stephen Spielberg's iconic "sharksploitation" horror flick dazzled and disturbed viewers with its vision of an underwater menace lurking right beneath the water's surface. One of its most famous — or infamous — scenes depicted oceanographer Matt Hooper getting a little too close for comfort thanks to a less-than-shark-proof cage. Turns out, however, that the notorious cage scene in "Jaws" was more real than you realized!
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00:00 Going on 50 years later, director Steven Spielberg's Jaws continues to reign supreme as the champion
00:06 of shark-sploitation films. It's a movie full of truly iconic scenes that tap into our elemental
00:12 fear of the ocean, and the unknown terrors potentially lurking beneath its tranquil surface.
00:17 "You know the thing about a shark? He's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes, like a doll's eyes."
00:26 Out of the many unsettling moments in the film, there may be none more terrifying than
00:30 when lovable oceanographer Matt Hooper decides to bring the fight directly to the great white
00:35 shark by entering the water in a, theoretically, shark-proof metal cage.
00:39 "Try to keep him off me until I'm lower. Okay, okay, I'm ready."
00:47 What ensues is a downright terrifying scene in which the shark tears through the cage
00:52 and nearly rips him to shreds before getting tangled in the cage itself, giving Hooper
00:56 the opening he needs to swim away and hide behind the seabed. As you would expect, part
01:01 of this sequence was filmed in a water tank with a mechanical shark. But amazingly, the
01:06 part where the shark gets stuck in Hooper's cage and thrashes about is actually real-life
01:11 footage of a shark captured by Australian shark experts Ron and Valerie Taylor in the
01:16 ocean near Dangerous Reef in South Australia.
01:19 Valerie Taylor recounted the incident in an interview with Inside Hook in 2021, explaining,
01:25 "The shark in the movie was supposed to be 25 feet long, and the sharks on the reef were
01:30 closer to 15 or 16 feet long. So, to keep the appearance right, we went out on a very
01:35 small boat, built a smaller shark-proof cage, and hired a very short actor. We learned after
01:41 the fact that he really didn't know how to dive, and was worried about being around the
01:45 sharks."
01:46 At that moment, there were about three large great whites gliding around outside. Taylor
01:52 then explained how things nearly went terribly wrong, only to work out far better than expected.
01:57 "We didn't want to force anyone into the cage, and it was good that we didn't, because suddenly
02:03 a huge 16-foot great white got caught in the wench that was connected to the cage. The
02:08 shark started thrashing around, the wench broke off the side of the abalone boat, and
02:13 fell down into a frothing mess in the sea. The cage was destroyed. Clearly not as shark-proof
02:19 as we had thought."
02:20 Needless to say, the crew was shocked by the cage's lack of structural integrity. Even
02:25 more so, everyone was relieved they hadn't forced the actor to overcome his fear and
02:29 get in the cage. Taylor continued,
02:32 "If that actor had been in the cage when this happened, he would have died. We were fortunate
02:37 that he was so reluctant. We were even more fortunate that Ron was already in the water
02:41 and filming. I had run across the boat to grab our other camera and started filming
02:45 from above as well. It was some of the most incredible shark footage anyone had ever seen.
02:51 So of course, the studio was happy."
02:53 Spielberg was equally pleased with the footage and wanted to include it in the finished movie.
02:58 In order to do that, though, some changes had to be made to the film's story, which
03:02 originally had Hooper getting eaten by the shark during their cage battle. Seeing as
03:06 the cage was clearly empty in the shot of the real-life great white shark getting ensnared
03:10 and trying to break loose, the scene was altered so that Hooper escapes by swimming out the
03:15 top of the cage while the shark rips it apart. By the time he resurfaces, Amity Police Chief
03:21 Martin Brody has finally killed the shark by shooting and blowing up a scuba tank he
03:25 had tossed into its mouth earlier.
03:27 "Smile, you son of a b-"
03:34 The idea to have the shark chow down on Hooper came straight from the source material by
03:38 Peter Benchley, who also wrote the earlier script drafts for the film version of Jaws.
03:43 What's more, Benchley's novel featured a whole subplot that centered on Brody and Hooper
03:47 being at odds, and even clashing with one another during their shark hunt. Hooper meets
03:52 up with Brody's wife Ellen at a motel earlier in the book, leading Brody to suspect the
03:57 pair of having a tryst.
03:58 Ultimately, Spielberg's adaptation left out that story thread entirely, which resulted
04:03 in Brody and Hooper being on friendly terms for most of the movie. Instead, the tension
04:07 was between Hooper and Quint, the seasoned, working-class fisherman who Brody hires to
04:12 kill the shark, but doesn't take so well to Hooper, a younger man from a wealthy upbringing
04:16 who values his scientific knowledge over Quint's experience.
04:19 "Don't you tell me my business again. You get back on the bridge."
04:23 "That doesn't prove a damn thing."
04:24 "Well, it proves one thing, Mr. Hooper. It proves that you wealthy college boys don't
04:30 have the education enough to admit when you're wrong."
04:31 Naturally, Hooper's cage fight with the shark in Jaws has begun to show its age over time.
04:37 If you study it closely, it's fairly easy to tell which shots depict a real great white
04:42 shark and which ones feature a mechanical shark. Even so, it remains a skillfully constructed
04:47 sequence that still hits hard to this day.
04:49 [MUSIC PLAYING]
04:53 (upbeat music)