Cold Spring fan hooked for decades
The blockbuster Jaws was released 50 years ago today (June 20), and although Cold Spring resident Courtney Clark wasn’t born until a decade later, it didn’t stop her from becoming a megafan of the ocean thriller.
“I’ve watched it at least 100 times,” she says. 
Based on a novel by Peter Benchley and directed by Stephen Spielberg, Jaws is set in the fictional New England island community of Amity, where a great white appears at peak tourist season, terrorizing residents and visitors. After the predator has claimed three victims, Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and shark hunter Capt. Quint (Robert Shaw) head out in the fishing boat Orca to confront the menace. The hunt does not go well.
Clark first watched Jaws when she was 10, in Pleasantville, when her family rented the video. “My mom finally decided I was old enough,” she recalls. “I was scared, but I didn’t appreciate all the nuances I’ve come to love about the film.”
Within a year, Clark saw it again, in a friend’s darker, scarier basement. By her mid-teens, she was hooked, watching it about three times a year. That habit continues four decades later. “I watch it as much as my husband Dan will tolerate,” she says with a laugh.
Clark says her favorite line in the 124-minute film is when Quint, aboard Orca, offers a toast to Hooper and Brody: “Here’s to swimming with bow-legged women.”
She can recite much of the movie’s dialogue from memory, except for Quint’s “Indianapolis” speech. In the monologue, one of the movie’s most gripping scenes, Quint recounts in grizzly detail the story of the USS Indianapolis, which was torpedoed by the Japanese near the Philippines in July 1945 during World War II and sank in 12 minutes. Only 316 of 890 sailors survived in the shark-infested waters.
Clark feels the movie, which cost $9 million (about $54 million today) to make and grossed $478 million worldwide ($2.9 billion), stands the test of time, even after half a century. “It’s always as exciting as the first time I watched it,” she says. “Even though I know every scene and what’s coming, it’s still shocking. I still find details I hadn’t noticed before.
“I love its style, the ’70s, the outfits; it’s a little slice of life of that time,” she says. “It’s so perfectly made; every shot is like a work of art.”
Her favorite scene is when the shark attacks young Alex Kintner in a rubber raft near the beach. “The camera pans, you see people walking by, and it keeps going back and forth between Brody’s face and the water. The feel of that scene is amazing.”
Her scariest scene: When they find fisherman Ben Gardner’s boat, badly damaged by the shark. Hooper goes into the water, and Gardner’s head pops out from a hole in the side of the boat.
Her favorite character: “Brody, Quint and Hooper are all incredible, but I relate most to Hooper; I appreciate that he’s a marine biologist.”
Events behind the scenes also captured Clark’s imagination. “The making of Jaws is as iconic as the film,” she said, adding that The Jaws Log, by Carl Gottlieb, the film’s screenwriter, details what went on during filming, most of which was on Martha’s Vineyard. Clark finds it especially amusing that producers toyed with trying to train a shark to play the central character, rather than building a mechanical double.
Gottlieb’s book describes how residents coped with a movie crew disrupting life on the island and how the filmmakers dealt with a fake shark that rarely functioned as planned.
Ironically, those difficulties may have contributed to the movie’s success. There were so many problems with the shark, nicknamed “Bruce” after Spielberg’s lawyer, that it appears on screen for only four minutes. “The fact that they had such limited footage makes it much more suspenseful when you actually see the shark,” Clark says.
Unlike many critics and fans, she enjoyed all three sequels: Jaws 2, Jaws 3 and Jaws: The Revenge, with Michael Caine, “although they don’t hold a candle to the original,” she says. “They’re like B-grade horror movies.”
Clark also has a collection of Jaws memorabilia, including an early drawing of the shark signed by production designer Joe Alves; a painting, “Drinking Buddies,” that shows Quint aboard Orca pouring a beer into the shark’s mouth; unworn special-edition Hooper denim sneakers, complete with a shark bite mark on the side; a 1,500-piece Lego set featuring the shark and the Orca; the 25th-anniversary VHS edition of the film and the Making of Jaws documentary; a 50th-anniversary T-shirt; and a movie poster acquired on Wednesday (June 18).
She says that on Friday (today), she may do “a full-day marathon, watching it as many times as I can. Then I’ll follow it up with the sequels.”
Asked if she is nervous swimming in the ocean, Clark says: “I think about Jaws every time — including just a week ago — especially knowing there are great white sharks where I swim.”
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