Shudder will soon be releasing the documentary feature “Sharksploitation,” a feature that explores the long history of shark movies and how Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” in 1975 led to an explosion in films in the genre.
However, it also tackles that films that didn’t quite get made, including a straight-up spoof film titled “Jaws 3, People 0” which was seeking “Gremlins” and “The Burbs” director Joe Dante to helm it.
EW has posted a clip from the documentary going into the scrapped satire which began life after Dante was coming off the success of his “Piranha” movie in 1978 which he made with the help of Roger Corman. At around the same time, “Jaws 2” had also hit cinemas.
Dante says Universal apparently threatened an injunction and later discovered Spielberg himself intervened as he was well aware “Piranha” was a spoof. Because of “Piranha,” Dante was then offered “Jaws 3, People 0” which hailed from “Animal House” producer Matty Simmons. Simmons explains how the project came about:
“I was over at Universal. My next-door neighbors were [Jaws producers] Dick Zanuck and David Brown. First thing [Brown] said to me was, ‘Dick and I would love to make a movie with you guys.’
So, out of the blue – I just started kidding around – I just said, ‘Jaws 3, People Nothing.’ I said, ‘Peter Benchley (who wrote the original Jaws book) walks out of his house in a bathing suit, jumps into his pool, and disappears. And the next thing we see a fin floating around in the pool.’… He said, ‘I love it, I love it, I’ll call you tomorrow. We’re going to make this movie.'”
Simmons then recruited then-rising filmmaker John Hughes and National Lampoon’s writer Tod Carroll to come up with the script. The trouble is the tone was never settled on. Dante says:
“The National Lampoon people wanted to make an R-rated comedy, like Animal House, and the more conservative Zanuck and Brown team wanted to make a PG and have it be a wide-release family picture. I think the project died because they just couldn’t agree on what movie they were making.
And you can’t go into a movie with two entities as powerful as National Lampoon was at that time and Zanuck and Brown and have them fighting constantly through the entire movie. It’s just a bad idea and I think they just pulled the plug.”
Corman and “Jaws” screenwriter Carl Gottlieb also appear in the “Sharksploitation” documentary which premieres today on Shudder.
