Scunthorpe. Bite Me!

The summer of 1975 changed my life and perceptions for ever.

Prior to that watershed I was just a daft 12 year old kid, fairly normal I think amongst my peer group although a bit shy and introverted.

I was into football even though I was not that good and followed the trends of the time in the collecting of football cards (sold with or without bubble gum),playing Top Trumps, watching black and white TV and playing outside at every opportunity.

I would like to spin a great yarn about the specific thing that impacted on my very existence in that summer 40 years ago.

Was it that I left home and travelled the length and breadth of the nation in railway boxcars and communed with hobo's?
Alternatively I may have joined up with best pals for an epic wilderness adventure in a coming of age type scenario.
What about running away to join the circus or being kidnapped by pirates, that sounds plausible.

Well, the truth be told it was the release of the blockbuster movie "Jaws" that did it for me.

It was in retrospect one of the greatest releases of all time but more significantly for me as a sub-teenager it was my first proper cinema experience of a real life action film.

I vividly remember going to see it at the single screen venue in Scunthorpe which was the nearest larger town to where we lived at that time in North Lincolnshire. My Father took me as it must have been rated for children if accompanied by an adult.

The release of a mega film in the summer months was unheard of as traditionally the run up to the Christmas Holidays was regarded as the best time to capture the market. It was a clever ploy given that the theme of the movie, a man eating shark, was set in a summer season in the fictional small eastern US coastal town of Amity.

For the rest of the school vacation with the images and sounds of shark induced death very much in my thoughts I dare not even dip my toe in the sea at Cleethorpes or wider afield on a family fortnight to the west coast of Scotland. As for a trip to the local indoor heated leisure pool, well, this was also pretty traumatic.

I was not alone in my phobia as many who also saw the film could remember the lines in the script spoken by Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) about most attacks by sharks being in comparatively shallow water and quite close to the shore. It was irrational in the extreme but still a strong emotional influence nevertheless.

The whole idea of "Jaws" was that of Steven Spielberg based on a novel by Peter Benchley published in 1974 but even whilst the filming was underway using the natural beauty of Martha's Vineyard, Cape Cod, Massachusets the script was still being worked on by Carl Gottlieb and Spielberg.

This was not a typical Hollywood method but the main collaborators found the experience productive and ultimately successful. Writing was just keeping ahead of the on-location filming pushing the crew and cast to the limit but out of it came some very classic lines which not only captured the very tone of the killer great white shark but became infinitely quotable and memorable.

Best of all is "we're gonna need a bigger boat" which was improvised by Scheider's character  and has been applicable as a comic throwaway in many life and death situations subsequently.

The shark itself was, for the pre-CGi cinematic era, a mechanical wonder of a size and complexity not attempted before. The original schedule was for 55 days of filming but the production had to be continuously extended because of constant breakdowns by the quirky machine.

As for the soundtrack, it was a central part of the horror, suspense and action and yet was reputed to have been composed by John Williams in one sitting at Spielberg's house. The recording session involved the use of 12 bass violins in unison which caused the two theme  notes to resonate to the very core of my 12 year old bone marrow as I sat and cowered in my cinema seat.

The world to me, post 1975, would never be the same again.