Jaws LD mono track

[crissrudd4554]

I'm having a slight problem since the LD track is about 6 seconds longer than the video I'm working with.

[jerryshadoe]

Is it that it doesn't sync or is it just that there is 6 more seconds of silence at the end of the track?

[crissrudd4554]

Lemme test and get back

[crissrudd4554]

Nevermind. I got a video with the correct runtime and from what I see so far the track syncs up right!

[crissrudd4554]

Well I burnt the video to a DVD-5 and strangely the quality was reduced. My video was 3.39gb and my additional audio track was about 200 something mb. I checked the properties of the disc and only 3.07gb was used. Strange. Hmm tomorrow I'll try again with a DVD-9.

[crissrudd4554]

I'll give more details and hopefully some samples at a later date but Im considering creating a hybrid mono of Jaws, using the 2005 DVD mono track since its IMO the best sounding version of the original mono, but restores the bits that were present on the LD track but missing from the 2005 mono mix as well as the mono track included on the BD. Anyways just an idea. If anyone is interested and would like to assist, give a shout out. Thanks guys.

[crissrudd4554]

A video I made recently comparing the differences among the various mono tracks for Jaws although the surround mix is used in a few examples.

https://vimeo.com/166704816

[SilverWook]

There's a 16mm print on Ebay at the moment.

[FrankT]

As far as I know Jaws was never Rated R. They even discuss in the making of documentary that they were keen on getting a PG rating so kids could see the film. Whether if that was their way of rewriting history 20 some years later I dont know but I remember they mentioned that.

It might have been an R rating in the UK, since there was a good number of Britons remembering a more gorey autopsy scene. The TV broadcast though was American, on ABC.

I don't think so; as far as I'm aware, it's always been a PG, except for the theatrical reissue, which was a 12A.

[TServo2049]

Update on the morgue scene: I went back and watched the original ABC premiere airing (complete, with ads) that's available on the Spleen, and yep, I was right - same abrupt edit after "This is what happens". In fact, the pan and scan for the shot of the severed arm seems to have been deliberately done to hide the gore - it rather quickly pans away as Hooper's lifting the arm up, and is completely moved over to Brody before we can actually see the severed part. It would make even less sense for the supposed additional graphic footage of the corpse to have suddenly shown up in a later broadcast (especially considering that ABC in particular had a habit of rerunning their old, fuzzy, smeary movie transfers well into the latter half of the decade), so I now consider the myth that the autopsy scene was ever extended on ABC to be conclusively debunked.

The UK prints story makes no sense to me either; the BBFC has historically tended to be *more* conservative than the MPAA, I can't imagine that a gorier autopsy would have shown up exclusively in the UK, even if it did release with an A certificate (I looked at images of posters online, they say A, not PG). And when Spielberg was interviewed by Bryan Singer for Empire magazine, he made no reference to having to cut anything graphic; he said that he and Verna Fields shortened the scene for pacing reasons, dropped in the insert of Hooper holding the arm to cover over the edit, assembled "This is what happens" from other bits of dialogue in the scene (I'm not sure what exactly that means, it doesn't *sound* like they cut together individual words from different lines, at least not to my ear) and dubbed it in over the arm shot.

Spielberg's exact quote (emphasis added by me):

I remember this very well. I had cut out a line of dialogue and inside the line of dialogue I manufactured artificially a new line: ‘This is what happens.’ Originally, he said more than that. I can’t remember what he said exactly. (Editor) Verna Fields and I pieced together, ‘This is what happens,’ from other words he was saying because the scene was too long. I was able to cut a huge — maybe 30-second — part of the scene out, simply by cutting to the insert of the arm coming up and putting the words, ‘This is what happens,’ over it.

Watching the scene again (from the same ABC airing, so it's the original mono mix) I see no abrupt cut in the picture going from the arm back to Hooper, and the only abrupt cut I hear in the sound is that "--indicates the non-frenzied feeding..." is joined in progress and there's an audible jump/dropout at the beginning of "indicates". And that's just on the dialogue element; while to my ear there may be a jump cut in the effects track, if there is it's much less abrupt, and it occurs in sync with the clean-looking picture edit, almost an entire second before Hooper's dialogue abruptly cuts back in.

Also notice that the cut to the severed arm shot, after "Do not smoke in here, thank you very much!", is just as sudden, and that both shots at opposite ends of the severed arm insert have the same camera angle - and I mean exact. I took two screenshots from that one video clip I found, one from "Do not smoke" and one from "indicates", and while at first they seemed to be at slightly different angles relative to each other, I repositioned them so that the various objects in the frame matched up even if the edges of the video frame didn't, and discovered that the lamp, the freezer, the window, etc., are all exactly in the same places and at the same angle. To my eyes, it looks like everything from "The left arm..." to "...the enormous amount of tissue loss..." was one single take, only interrupted by the cutaway to the arm. Then it sounds like the reverb/ambiance on Dreyfuss' voice changes between "the enormous amount of tissue loss" and "prevents any detailed analysis", though that doesn't sound like any dialogue is missing, it's probably just a cut between two different takes.

And it's not like this is even the only abrupt edit in the scene, notice that earlier in the scene, after Hooper says "May I have a glass of water, please?" it abruptly cuts to him saying "--right arm has been severed", and I can just barely hear what sounds like the very end of the word "the" before "right". I'm not sure if this was just a ragged edit between the two angles, or if they also snipped out a second or so to quicken the pacing, but either way, it's something I noticed while going over and over this scene.

Also, I just found an old discussion on DVDtalk that ran on and off for several years, where one poster made the observation that the reverb on "This is what happens..." doesn't match the rest of Hooper's dialogue in the scene, and it may have been borrowed not from a different part of that scene, but from a different scene entirely. While this poster said there was more reverb over that line, just watching that ABC airing I heard less on that one line. Then, I listened to the LD PCM preservation available here, and there "This is what happens..." sounds considerably more "dry" than Hooper's lines before and after it. (I did find a clip online which looks to come from DVD, where "This is what happens..." does seem to have more reverb than the adjacent lines, and "indicates" sounds to have less of an audible dropout at the beginning - I assume that's the 5.1 remix?)

Either way, what I see/hear watching the scene does seem to point to "This is what happens..." having been dubbed into the severed arm insert shot to further smooth over the removal of whatever originally came between "Do not smoke in here, thank you very much!" and "--indicates the non-frenzied feeding...", and not being the beginning of a line that was always meant to go with that scene and continued into whatever was cut leading up to "--indicates...". Also, whatever was cut wouldn't even necessarily have been some graphic shot of Chrissie's remains. I'd be more inclined to believe that it was just some additional dialogue that Spielberg and Fields felt to be dragging down the scene - especially considering that the camera is in the same place before and after the insert, an angle where you can't see what's in the tray anyways. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that prosthetic arm was all that was actually made of Chrissie's corpse - notice that for most of the scene outside of that shot of the severed arm, the uncovered tray is out of frame, and that even in the shot with the arm, we only have a side view of the tray so we can't see what else is in there.)

The fact that all these vivid anecdotal memories of what exactly came after "This is what happens" don't match up with each other (e.g., what exactly we see of Chrissy's mutilated corpse, and more specifically, the rest of Hooper's line) indicates to me that everyone just filled in the blanks in their own mind. The scene was shocking enough on its own in 1975, is it too much of a stretch to suggest that in those pre-video days it became more graphic in people's memories as time wore on, and then when they finally got the opportunity to see it again on the next network rebroadcast, or cable, or video, it didn't match up with what they "remembered", so they assumed something extra was cut out that was intact in the version they had previously seen?

These incorrect memories can also spread from person to person from conversation about the movie in the interim; I once read a forum post from someone who not only swore that they saw Luke Skywalker's first missed grappling hook throw in the theater, but also insisted that it couldn't be a false memory from confusing it with the novelization because they never read it. Either they had read the novelization but no longer remembered doing so, or they absorbed the inaccurate memory from someone who had read it and consequently misremembered the scene. And I've read plenty of claims "I remember seeing (scene that was never in any released version of the film), and all my friends remember it too!"

People's memories are pliable through the power of suggestion, even if the "suggestor" genuinely believes what they are suggesting, and have no intent of implanting a false memory into the mind of the "suggestee." I know it sounds like I'm getting into amateur psychology here (and I admit I have never actually studied anything in that field), but I myself have had false memories about missing scenes from certain movies, and when I'd ask my younger brother if he remembered them too, he'd actually back me up on them.

For example, I used to have a vague memory of dialogue from Toy Story that turned out to only exist in my own mind, about some line referring to the "MADE IN TAIWAN" stamp on Buzz and deluded Buzz thinking Taiwan was a planet. It was obviously never in the movie, nor was it in any adaptation; it was my young brain taking Buzz discovering the "MADE IN TAIWAN" and the earlier "Where you from? Singapore? Hong Kong?" line and combining them into a false memory of another scene/line that didn't exist, possibly due to my dad making some kind of off-the-cuff joke to us along the lines of "Oh, he's from the planet Taiwan!" when we all saw it in the theater the first time - though even this is only a vague memory that resurfaced when I was trying to work out in my head how I could have conjured up a completely bogus scene in my own mind; this memory of my dad making a joke could even be a false memory too.

So anyway, the point of all this is that I'm still convinced that the familiar version of the morgue scene is what was in every released version of Jaws, and whatever else was in the scene (probably additional dialogue, not graphic footage of the rest of the mutilated corpse) never made it out of the cutting room. Someone has to track down the person who has that copy of the shooting script, that's probably the only way we'll find out where "This is what happens" originally was, and how the scene would have played out as filmed.