Since the Biography Channel is showing “Jaws: The Inside Story” I thought I would repost one of my favorite examples of working with what you got and sometime creating things better than you thought due to bad circumstances.
Steven Spielberg has always been a director I have admired. His ability to craft a film has few if any equals. But one of the most famous Hollywood failures sent him skyrocketing from “talented young director” to “master of the art.”
No, it’s not 1941.
It was in fact Jaws.
Jaws? The movie that made almost $470 million worldwide is a failure? The movie that invented the “blockbuster”, an utter disaster? Uh…no.
But multiple failures during the production of the movie made it even better than planned. Who is the main culprit of this failure? A shark named Bruce.
See, Bruce the Mechanical Shark is not unlike many Hollywood megastars. Moody, uncooperative, demanding of attention. But it is the fact that Bruce the Mechanical Shark failed continuously that led to the changes that made Jaws such a special movie.
From Wikipedia:
To some degree, the delays in the production proved serendipitous. The script was refined during production, and the unreliable mechanical sharks forced Spielberg to shoot most of the scenes with the shark only hinted at. For example, for much of the shark hunt its location is represented by the floating yellow barrels. This forced restraint is widely thought to have increased the suspense of these scenes, giving it a Hitchcockian tone.[
And what a fortunate misfortune! By adapting and changing his goals to fit the reality of the situation in front of him, Spielberg was cornered into rethinking shot selections, other ways of telling the same story with the limited resources he had available to him.
So sometimes accept the failures as steering mechanisms. Look for alternatives to your goal.
There is rarely only one way to get something done.
