25 magnificent penguin photos
Whether it's an emperor penguin launching from the sea, a playful Adélie penguin or a colony of king penguins, these globe-spanning seabirds inspire awe and conservation.
Learn more about penguins in National Geographic's three-part documentary series ' Secrets of the Penguins .'
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18 hours ago
Nat Geo documentary explores cultural phenomenon of "Jaws" 50 years after its debut
Ginger Zee shares how the film changed movies and beach visits forever with National Geographic's upcoming documentary "Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story."
Yahoo
18 hours ago
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Steven Spielberg Thought ‘Jaws' 'Would Be the Last Movie I Would Ever Be Given to Direct'
Steven Spielberg can laugh now, but he has the proverbial bite marks to show for it after directing Jaws just over 50 years ago. Filming the classic was a disaster-plagued adventure for Spielberg, whose 1975 shark thriller created Hollywood's playbook for the summer blockbuster. 'In most circumstances, summer in the Vineyard is a dream. But when you are over budget and over schedule and when I am over my head, that summer of 1974 was a bad dream before it ever became the dream of a lifetime,' Spielberg said in a video message to an audience in Martha's Vineyard attending a National Geographic world premiere for the Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story making-of film on Friday. Watch the message, which is exclusive to The Hollywood Reporter, below. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Jaws': The Prototype Summer Blockbuster Turns 50, Losing None of Its Bite The 50th Anniversary of 'Jaws' Brings a Wave of Brand Collabs and Collectibles 'Jaws' Gets Its Streaming Debut for the 50th Anniversary: Where to Watch All 4 Films Online Spielberg, then a 27-year-old, hot-shot director, chose Martha's Vineyard as a location for Jaws because he wanted his mechanized shark with terrifyingly sharp teeth to swim in real waters. The filmmaker says the new doc captures the tough environment surrounding the adaptation of Peter Benchley's novel. 'It details how young and unprepared all of us were for the challenges of shooting in the Atlantic Ocean with a mechanical shark that was more temperamental than any movie star I have ever worked with since, and how in the wake of running over schedule and budget, I truly believed that Jaws would be the last movie I would ever be given to direct,' Spielberg revealed about Jaws @ 50, directed by Laurent Bouzereau, to the world premiere audience. It also turns out, however, the disaster-plagued Jaws shoot (with a movie budget tripling to $9 million and a schedule stretching from 55 to 159 days) was nothing like the screams Spielberg and Universal ultimately scared up in theaters worldwide with the shark thriller's theatrical release in 1975. Spielberg added global theatrical audiences threw him a 'life preserver' in 1975 to restore his Hollywood fortunes after they almost ran aground on the shores of Martha's Vineyard. He was also helped by film composer John Williams' memorable two-note motif in the Jaws soundtrack that fed into primal fears about unseen predators being afoot and approaching. 'Fifty years after its initial release, making Jaws remains a seminal experience for every single one of us, and five decades has done nothing to dim the memories of what remains one of the most overwhelming, exciting, terrifying and rewarding experiences of my entire career,' Spielberg insisted. The legendary director's Amblin Documentaries and Nedland Media are behind the doc Jaws @ 50 that will bow on National Geographic on July 10, before launching a day later on Disney+ and Hulu. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Wes Anderson's Movies Ranked From Worst to Best 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT
Forbes
a day ago
- Forbes
‘Jaws @ 50' Gives Longtime Spielberg Historian Laurent Bouzereau Final Word On The Original Summer Blockbuster
Steven Spielberg, Director of Jaws and Director Laurent Bouzereau are pictured during an interview ... More for National Geographic's Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story. What can be said about Jaws that hasn't been said over the last 50 years? That was the big question for longtime Steven Spielberg documentarian Laurent Bouzereau (Faye, Music By John Williams) once he teamed up with Amblin and National Geographic to make Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story, a star-studded look back at the original summer blockbuster, featuring brand-new interviews with Spielberg, screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, production designer Joe Alves, and many more. 'When we set it up at NatGeo I was like, 'Oh my God, there are so many documentaries on Jaws!' [There are so many] books. [Even] I've done a book! What is left to say about Jaws?'' Bouzereau remembers over Zoom. A valid fear. As one of the most iconic and influential movies of all time, the big screen adaptation of Peter Benchley's bestselling novel has endlessly been picked over and analyzed since it first took a bite out of the big screen on June 20, 1975. But if anyone could pull off a new angle, it was Bouzereau, who is not only chummy with Spielberg (no pun intended), but also brings a uniquely international perspective to the topic. 'I grew up in France, and we didn't have summer blockbusters,' he explains. 'It's changed now, but essentially, big movies came out in the fall or the early fall. So I didn't really grow up with that concept of the summer blockbuster.' He wouldn't become familiar with the idea until arriving in the United States for the first time in 1977, the year of a certain game-changing space opera. One of the first things Bouzereau saw upon entering the airport in Athens, Georgia was an issue of People with R2-D2 and C-3PO on the front cover. 'I said, 'What's that? I want to see that!' So that's summer blockbuster [for me], it's People magazine. I think it established a certain type of expectation of big films … [Jaws] certainly gave birth to a much bigger recognition of the impact that a film can have on an audience and how the audience wants to live it [with] merchandising, books, and knowing the secrets behind them. Building a whole mythology around a cinematic experience, down to having a [theme] park ride. Jaws is beginning of that movement, which, of course, explodes even bigger with Star Wars." Nevertheless, Jaws (or Les Dents de la Mer — aka The Teeth of the Sea — as it was titled in French) sparked a major cinematic 'awakening' in the future filmmaker, who was around 13-years-old in the summer of '75. 'It was such a phenomenon, that it immediately [drove home] the importance of the director for me,' Bouzereau says. 'From that day on, I wanted to see everything Steven Spielberg ever made, and that name became symbolic of a dream for me, much more than the film itself. It was the realization of the power of images in the hands of an incredible artist … I was mesmerized by the shots and, of course, the economy of the first scene where you never see the shark and [hear] the music by John Williams. So everything was sort of summarized in that one movie, not to mention that I collected all the lobby cards and poster. My bedroom was wall-to-wall Jaws. But it was not a fanatical thing. It was really an awakening for me as an appreciator and it never left me. Sometimes, I go back to that initiation I got from Jaws as a young kid and remember those feelings of the very first time [I saw it]. It's like a first of anything." Half a century later, and Bouzereau found himself sitting across from Spielberg, free to ask any and all questions about the movie that changed both their lives. Rather than focus on the making of Jaws, a topic that had been covered so extensively over the years, the former angled for a thematic exploration of the classic picture, viewing its turbulent production as a reflection of the plot itself. Like Brody (Roy Scheider), Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and Quint (Robert Shaw) searching for and battling the man-eating shark, principal photography 'became a story of survival," Bouzereau notes, later adding, 'I think it's about not giving up. It's the human experience, right?' He continues: "The first time I sat down with Steven, I felt the humanity that we know from anything he's done — before Jaws and after. He was so young then, that it was still forming in a sense. But it was so mature and so much of it was there, that you can look at Jaws and say, 'That's the man who did Schindler's List years later,' and not blink at that association because his humanity is just so obvious. Not only in the story and the way that he put it together, but in his own journey as an artist making it, what he's learned from it, and how it affected him. I felt that story had not been told.' Director Steven Spielberg on the set of Jaws with the mechanical shark in the background. (Courtesy ... More of Universal Studios Licensing LLC) While the film's runaway success skyrocketed the 26-year-old wunderkind to the top of Hollywood's A-list pretty much overnight, Spielberg understandably did not recover from the trauma of a production marked by one setback after another (the most notable obstacle being an animatronic shark that refused to cooperate in salty water) for years after. Such commitment to realism, a fierce desire to shoot on the Atlantic and work the local Martha's Vineyard populace into the frame, proved to be a double-edged sword. 'A few years before, Jaws would have been made on a soundstage with local background artists who were just coming off the set of another movie,' Bouzereau says. 'There would have been no sort of colorful characters like Craig Kingsbury [who played the ill-fated Ben Gardner] from Martha's Vineyard. Going there and realizing that Jaws is something that is passed on generation after generation on that particular island —that's a microcosm of what the impact of Jaws is.' But as Spielberg reveals in the documentary, he'd often sneak aboard the screen-used Orca on the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot tour and cry. 'Everybody knows it was a nightmare, but they all say it with laugh, because we can laugh at the fact that here is one of the best movies of all time,' Bouzereau adds. 'It could have been a disaster, but I think [Steven] said it with heart and humility in a truly inspiring way that I think feels relatable for anyone, especially young people who are starting a career in anything, and feel like, 'Wow, I just learned that from my own craft.'' Speaking of which, Jaws @ 50 devotes a good amount of attention to the acclaimed storytellers who, like Bouzereau, grew up to be directors after seeing Jaws: Guillermo del Toro, J.J. Abrams, Cameron Crowe, Jordan Peele, Steven Soderbergh, Robert Zemeckis, and James Cameron. 'To really see the impact it had on some of the most important filmmakers of our times, to see the the lessons that they got from Jaws, was was eye-opening to me," admits Bouzereau. 'Because it wasn't just, 'Oh, I love the movie. It scared me.' You know, the usual sound bites. It was a very profound and big discovery for me. I also think the other aspect of the film that I had not really known about, even though it was in plain sight, was how it affected the ocean and [led to] sharks being massacred … The fascination with this novel and this movie have changed the dialogue about the ocean. I don't know if there are many movies that have had that kind of social impact. "Very few works of art turn 50 and are relevant today. I don't have any children, but I have nieces and nephews, and I have forced them to watch Jaws, and now they're forcing their kids to watch it. So it's something that's passed on, and it's pretty extraordinary to see that 50 years later. Listen, I asked myself a lot of questions if I was still relevant when I turned 50. Jaws doesn't have that problem.' 'Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story' Jaws @ 50 premieres exclusively on Disney+ and Hulu Thursday, July 10
