Hey, everybody, Dando here and welcome to the Movie Guide.

Now you may have noticed from the title that you will not be getting your regular programming this week.

No, we're not going to be doing a MIV review.

Well we are and we aren't, because this week you're going to be getting a sneak peek at our unaired pilot, our exclusive Patreon exclusive review of Jaws, which was recorded way back before the show even actually kicked off.

Now you may be sitting there wondering why are they doing this this week?

You may have noticed on social media.

Unfortunately our main man, the Leonard Moulton, has been a bit under the weather lately.

He's doing better now, but unfortunately the show can't be recorded this week, so we thought, rather than give you nothing, we will give you this little sneak peek at our exclusive Jaws review, which is available inc and tidy with our ads on our Patreon right now.

Now.

We hope to return next week with the show, but if we don't, don't worry, we will not be far away because, as I said, our main men, you cannot hold him down for long.

The Leondard Moulton is feeling a lot better than he was and hopefully the show can kick off sooner rather than later.

But for now, if you do enjoy everything we do here add Movie Guide and you want to support Leonard, you can't support us on Patreon the link that is a description of this podcast, where you can find exclusive reviews of classic movies as well as early and ad free access to the show each and every week.

Plus you just support lionon and why would you not want to do that?

But for now, thank you guys so much for all of you support here that you give us at the Movie Guy with Malton and Davis, and we'll catch you all in the next episode.

Cheers.

It is the very first official demo pilot this you can call it of the Movie Guide podcast.

Yes, the Movie Guide has returned, everybody, the famous, the iconic Movie Guide in podcast form.

We of course joined by the legendary the man himself, mister leted Moulton, Leonard.

How you doing very well?

Thank you, and of course the man one half here of fourfing a discount network.

It is Guy Davis.

I must have met.

I thought you were talking me up before you before you gave Leonard Malton his much deserved respect and props.

But I'll take what I can get.

I'm very happy to be talking movies with the man that myth, the legend, the man I actually grew up watching On Entertainment Tonight and thumbing through his legendary and comprehensive movie guide.

So it's a great pleasure to be here.

Now, I'm not gonna lie this this pilot here.

We threw it out to Lennard.

We said, Leonard, this is your show.

What movie do you want to review first as a demo?

And you went with Jaws.

So the first question is Leonard, why Jaws?

Well, first off, why not?

And second off, well, it's a great movie that sort of goes without saying, although I just said it.

Just a couple of years ago, we went to a friend's house for July fourth barbecue and he had a huge DVD and Blu Ray collection, and we're trying to figure out a film that we were all in the mood for that we would all enjoy watching together, nothing too long, nothing too heavy or deep.

And Alan pulled Jaws off his shelf and showed it to cover to us and we said, yes, absolutely, the perfect film.

And that's exactly what it is, not only for July fourth, which is our American Independence Day holiday.

But for any time, anytime you're in the mood to see something really good, something that will involve you and absorb you, but not abuse you or insult you.

Jaws and fits the bill, that's right.

It'll put you through the ring in a lot of ways, but not in a way that feels necessarily grueling or upsetting or disturbing or anything like that.

You'll come out of it.

I think the term thrill rod gets used a lot when you're talking about the films of Steven Spielberg, and this is a really good example of that.

You come away feeling invigorated and energized in a lot of ways.

I think when you watched it exactly now.

My wife came away with a black and blue form arm when we first saw it at the Riveley Theater on Broadway in the New York no longer there.

New York is still there, but the Ridley Theater.

I'm the biggest sucker for jump scares in the world.

I'm just a patsy, and so that film, having pretty full compliment of jump scares, had me, you know, grabbing at her the whole time.

And I think she's forgiven me by now, but it took a while.

It took a while.

It's also a film that was the backstory of Jaws is almost as interesting as the movie itself.

In fact, I bought a copy of Carl Gottlieb's book The Jaws Lot when it was new, and it's that rare book about a movie that was very, very popular.

It wasn't just for film nerds.

I think it became a best seller.

And Carl Gottlieb was the co writer of the screenplay of Jaws and was there to I witness all of the shenanig and misadventures that caused a film with a fifty day shooting schedule to allude to one hundred and fifty days.

And I don't know what the budget went from or two, but commensurate with the time is money when you're talking about movie making.

And when we think back, Steven Spielberg was not really known.

He was not far from a household word when he was making this, and so in fact, this became his make or break movie, was you might say.

It really did.

It's something I wanted to ask you about, Lenna, because I mean, you were in your twenties when Jews was relaced back in seventy five, and I'm guessing not a budding film nerve, but certainly you had an interest in not just the stuff that was on the screen, but the stuff that was going on behind the scenes.

You mentioned that Spielberg wasn't really a name brand at the stage, but were you aware of him because he had Duel to his credit and he had sugar Land Express.

Did you think this is a guy on the come up, this is someone that I should be maybe paying attention to.

Yes.

Yes, it was just just as you describe it, somebody who was a rising, budding star in the movie world.

And I like the Sugarland Express very much.

I don't know if I put his name together with that episode of Night Gallery that he directed with Joan Crawford or some of his other television work, I might not have gone that far down the road with him, but I certainly knew that he was somebody to pay attention to.

And Jaws being a best selling novel first by Peter Benchley, there was some level of expectation.

It was didn't come out of the blue.

This promised to be a good summertime escape or escapism movie.

Escapist entertainment gets a bad name.

I think because there's so many cheesy and crummy examples, escapists fair.

But I think when it's well done.

Is there really nothing like it?

No thing like it, and there's nothing to be snobbish about.

Guy, I don't know if you agree with me, But if you can take an audience away from themselves, out of their everyday lives and take them on a journey, either an emotional journey or a literal journey, and make them forget their thoughts of the daily routine, I think that's a very high form of art.

Oh, it really is.

I mean, if you can make mainstream entertainment with for want of a bet, attempt like a high thread count stuff that's clearly put together with craft and love and appreciation and yes, also respect that the audience's intelligence, because I think the audience is going to go into and they they'll know if someone is putting this together with real dedication and real appreciation for the craft, as opposed to just I'm gonna blow some things up and it'll distract it for maybe two hours and then you can then you can leave.

Yeah, accept it at that time.

And I don't know if this is the film that did it I've been trying to get a straight answer for years.

At that time, it was not commonplace to clear the auditorium and require separate admission to watch a film a second time through.

Okay, I grew up in the fifties and sixties where if I liked the movie a lot, I just sat still and watched the whole program again.

When I was twelve, I went to see Doctor Strangelove at my neighborhood movie theater in TEENick, New Jersey, and with it was a hilarious three minutes short called The Critic, which was my introduction to mel Brooks.

And it's three minutes of abstract art and baroque music, with commentary by a little old Jewish man saying, what the hell is this?

If you've never seen it, it's just magnificent.

And it won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject that year.

But all I knew was I had to sit through Doctor Strangelove a second time, no great chore, no even for a twelve year old kid, in order to see the short again.

So I was I was an expert at taking advantage of you know what they used to call continuous showings, And it was literally that continuous showing.

But Jaws came along at a time when some genius in the accounting department or the marketing department decided, wait a minute, we're missing the sure bet here.

Get them out of the cinema, make him buy another ticket.

Exactly why are we giving this away for free?

And thus broke a seventy five year tradition.

Poof Overnight, you talked about how Jaws was already a best selling Peter Benchley's novel was topping the chats in that regard.

It's got this iconic poster that pays tribute to the paperback cover.

Well, these aspects that drew you in, I mean when you first started seeing posts or hearing or yeah, hearing radio ads or seeing television ads or trailers for it.

What made you think, oh, yeah, this is on the right of this is something that I'm king to check out.

Well, it was the big release from Universal, Big Studio.

I can't remember exactly, guy.

I can remember going to the theater.

I can remember what theater I was in, and I can remember who was with me because it was my brand new wife.

Actually we were married in March of nineteen seventy five.

But I don't remember when and how I first heard about it.

As I recall, you would have had to have been living in a cave or a very deep piece of chunk of ice at the North Pole or South Pole not to be aware that there was a movie coming called Jaws based on this runaway bestseller written by the grandson of one of my lifelong heroes, Robert Benchley, the great American humorist and character actor, So that had additional resonance for me, though this book bears no relation to anything Robert Benchley ever did.

I was bad to say.

I kind of imagine the guys of the Algonquin roundtable sort of saying, work on the story about a shark.

Yeah, exactly exactly.

So it had everything I needed to get me to go to see it, though it must be said the stars of the film were not stars with the capitals at that time.

It's something I did want to talk about with you because I think it's really interesting and savvy casting on Spielberg's partner, Universal's part, that you've got names who are recognized and who were part of big films prior to this, but not the leads of those films.

Roy Scheider is the support to Gene Hackman in The French Connection, Robert Shaw is the antagonist in The Sting, which was a huge hit, and Drepus is part of the ensemble of American Graffiti.

I mean, these are all people who have been part of big films, but have it didn't necessarily lead those films.

So you've got names you can trust, but not necessarily names that you are a guarantee you're going to make it to the end credits exactly.

And fortunately they did not surrender to the temptation of going after name value or what they call marquee value, marquee value being something that looks good on a marquee going to draw people in much discussion about it was almost this person.

It was almost that person, as there is with any successful film.

But gee, how sad if it hadn't been these three guys.

Absolutely not to mention.

Murray Hamilton as the mayor.

The MVP of the movie, as far as I'm concerned, just the sniveling.

Mayor.

He's got a point.

He does have a point.

It's a summer town.

I need some a business lined.

It's true, Like any good cliche, it's built on a kernel of truth.

Absolutely that you can relate to and Lorrange.

Gary is very good as the police chief's wife.

And the fact that you just happened to be married to the guy running Universal Pictures at the time.

Who cares?

She was good?

And besides, nepotism begins at home.

So here's Richard dreyf who stole a lot of scenes in American Graffiti and then gave a brilliant performance in a film that very few people saw, called The Apprenticeship of Dudy Kravitz.

He's just magnificent in that film, but it was not a hit.

So he was a fairly unknown quantity.

He had done television, he's in He's got a lot of credits when he was a teenager, you know, coming into adulthood.

Robert Shaw was known to theater goers more than moviegoers arguably at that time.

And Roy Scheider, as you say, was another working actor who got a big break in the French Connection.

But here's the thing.

If they if they get childon Histon as apparently was on the he was on the table or on the in discussions, or someone like Paul Newman for instance, Paul Newman VESU is the shock.

It's likely that these shocks going to come off second best.

But with these guys who are character actors, working actors, it's you can't tell.

You're not sure if they're going to if they're going to make it to the end.

No, exactly.

And this is what this is a case long before the the it's not a catchphrase, it's a piece of jargon IP intellectual property.

Now people talk all about the IP.

It's the mcguffin, it's it's the property.

Jaws was a property.

The Godfather was a property.

Done with the wind, a property.

They didn't sell The Godfather on its cast either.

They became stars because of The Godfather and Brando.

Of course, it was a star who had sort of fallen from grace whose reputation was restored by the Godfather, But nobody knew Al Pacino or James Kahn or Robert Tuval or Diane Keaton or Talia Shire or any of the people in that film.

They were selling that on the strength of its general appeal as the family as mob or the mob as family, and the fact that it was a really grabber of a page turning novel by Barnieobuzzo.

So that's what they were selling.

The Godfather thing that's true.

Here they were not selling Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw.

They were selling Jaws.

Who's on the post?

Yeah, But if you read the Jaws log as I did in nineteen seventy five, you'll get a belly full of wild stories about failure, failure to communicate, failure to produce on a regular basis, usable footage of weather, beaten footage because of rain, because of storms.

Anybody who knew anything, the people who made water worked in the test.

Don't shoot on the water.

Whatever you do, don't use kids or dogs or shoot out in the water.

Someone needs to tell Jen Cameron this.

Yeah, it's risky.

It sucks time out of the schedule every day.

And here was this poor director who only had one feature film under his belt and one, you know, popularly made for TV movie Duel, trying to prove himself and really with one person who believed in them one hundred percent, a fellow who was running Universal at the time, but he was three thousand miles away, and they were in Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts.

And all the reports that he's getting back in his office at Universal City in Hollywood.

It's not in Hollywood.

It's in Universal City.

Actually, it's like the Vatican.

It's an actual incorporated city.

All the reports coming back were disastrous, you know, delays after delays, actors battling each other, ego clashes, and an untried director in charge of it, as the budget kept creeping up or leaping up, I should say, up and up and up and up.

Leonard.

You, of course, the Soldier was in a cinema of Opponent's release, and I'm guessing you've seen it on the big screen more than a couple of times since then.

And also, as you mentioned earlier, sit with friends on the fourth of July.

What's the mood in the room like whenever you watch it?

I mean it's generally the same.

It's generally you're almost immediately died, and you're almost immediately hooked by it, and you're there for the duration.

Yes, you get no pun intended, but you get hooked.

You get hooked early and easily.