Happy 40th Birthday "JAWS"!

Oh Jaws.  It's been 40 years since we last met in a darkened theater.  I've changed, but you have remained so beautifully the same.  Your sparkling white serrated teeth still shine with promise. And shredded bits of Captain Quint. Our first summer together was filled with hope and youth.  I was a teenager, heading off to college....most likely to major in English lit or Marine Biology. I thought I would be the next Jacques Cousteau, or at the very least a best selling hack writer. But you changed my life, didn't you.  You changed everything.  Your impossibly young director Steven Spielberg invented the monster summer blockbuster and delivered it to the world on your gleaming gray 25 foot back.  

Today I went to the 40th Anniversary for the movie Jaws (thanks very much TCM for being a host along with Universal).  At today's screening, there were only three things the same as they were in 1975.  The theater was packed.  Everybody screamed.  And when Chief Brody said, "We're gonna need a bigger boat", it got the biggest laugh. Absolutely everything else is different.  We sit here in our smart phone buzzing, soul crushing, digital world.  We're stunned by our climate changed, middle class evaporating, dystopian reality.  In 1975 we had just finished multiple landings on the moon.  Today we don't even have a space shuttle anymore.  But hey, it's still awesome, right.  We've got Twitter and stuff.  And Fitbits.  And our theaters now remind us on a big sign that a junior popcorn has 550 calories and 15 grams of fat.

That's why movies like Jaws are so important.  For two hours we can sit in the dark and forget about everything except for that special 4th of July weekend on Amity Island. 

And we cringe in terror at the brilliant opening scene, all the more terrifying because we never actually SEE the giant shark.

And we see the early talent of the great director who has always been so exceptionally gifted with child actors.

And we laugh at the ever present humor that gave us "bad hat Harry", and the best tracking zoom of all time.

And we hear Captain Quint (the magnificent Robert Shaw) give his absolutely riveting soliloquy about surviving the U.S. Indianapolis sinking during WWII ("well anyway...we delivered the bomb")

 

The whole movie is stuffed to the gills with groundbreaking cinema innovation.  John Williams' Oscar winning score.  The great Verna Field's heart attack inducing editing (she won the Academy Award for Best Editing too...one of the rare times it has gone to a female).   

But most of all, Jaws has a special place in my heart because it is 100% responsible for my career spent in media.  Because the day I saw it for the first time, I watched an audience become completely unhinged. A little theater in upstate N.Y. was the venue for an audience losing their shit at a movie for the very first time. They were shrieking.  They were running for the lobby.  One little 12 year old girl stood on her seat during Quint's bloody demise and screamed over and over, "He's eating him...he's eating him...Oh dear God he's eating that man!"  An usher had to lead her away.

I've never been so transfixed in my whole life, before or since.  A little epiphany explosion went off like a roman candle over the head of Jane K. Collins.  I decided right then and there to go into a business that can make people go off their rockers. Coolest thing I ever witnessed.  Buh bye biology major.  So long literary dreams and pretensions.  Hollywood, here I come.

So thank you Steven Spielberg.  For my 35+ years spent working in television and social media and music and the Internet.  For decades in a business where I've been able to get into the brains of an audience and figure out why entertainment makes them go crazy.  For a career that gave me the chance to meet media giants like Rupert Murdoch and Leonard Goldenson and Bob Iger and Gene Autry.

It would have been cool to swim with dolphins, but I've got no regrets. I got to swim with the sharks in Hollywood instead.  Thank you Steven Spielberg.  Thanks for the memories.

The Sky is Falling: Coming Soon to TNT

It has never been a secret that Flaming Nose founders Jane and Lisa are quite partial to the Sci-Fi genre. So it would be extremely out of character for us to neglect a few mentions for (Falling Skies on TNT) making its debut about a week from now.

I've seen an extended promo for Falling Skies On Demand, so I've had enough of a taste to make a few comments.

The premise is as well worn as an old VHS cassette tape of the original 1953 War of the Worlds. Aliens have landed on earth, and they are not friendly. They've pretty much blown every major city to smithereens, and sent a pulse that has destroyed all electronic communications. Inevitably they are going to get hungry and guess who's gonna be on the menu? Just once I wish somebody would make an alien that wants to eat NY pizza or Sprinkles cupcakes.

Nevertheless, there is nothing more exciting than aliens coming to visit, although I must say I prefer the versions that like us (ET, Close Encounters, Avatar when we are not killing their trees of life) to the ones that want to have us for dinner. These aliens look like big spiders, which is both derivative and icky. They've been given a clever nickname (Skitters) by the surviving earthlings. Steven Spielberg is the Executive Producer, and although he has weirdly not had much success on the small screen his name brings cache to any effort and you can triple that when the story is a sci-fi adventure.

The bad news? Other than Noah Wyle, who plays the resistance militia leader Tom Mason, the cast is not familiar. If they were at least interesting (like Sawyer or Hurley or John on LOST) that wouldn't be a problem. But from what I've seen so far, Falling Skies suffers from forgettable attractive cookie cutter TV cast syndrome. They all look like hot models from an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. Apparently the Skitters already ate all the fat and ugly people. It's so tiresome when everybody in a post apocalyptic world looks like they just fell off the cat walk. For contrast, I offer up the cast from Super 8, which I just had the pleasure of viewing yesterday. J.J. Abram's science fiction love poem to Steven Spielberg (who also executive produced) features kids who look and act exceptionally real. You can practically smell their sneakers, and that makes it all the more poignant when they are in peril.

Bland cast aside, I'll still be there with bells on for the first few episodes of Falling Skies. I'm drawn to sci-fi like a moth to flame, and until I know otherwise, I'll hope that this is a summer series that will grow stronger as the days get hotter.

Back to WW II in "The Pacific" on HBO Tonight

Prepare to be shocked and awed. HBO follows up their acclaimed 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers with The Pacific, the new production from the company headed up by big-names Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. This time they're doing for the Pacific theater of war what they did for the battlefields of Europe last time out. The ten-part miniseries unfolds beginning tonight at 9pm, and it's clearly a do-not-miss event.

The Pacific follows four Marines through their time in the field, and the characters are based closely on real Marines: Leckie (played by the intense James Badge Dale), Basilone (played by the interesting Jon Ceda), Sledge (played by Joe Mazzello, who was the little boy in Jurassic Park!), and Phillips (played by Ashton Holmes). Their lives and missions bring them together in historic wartime locales that most of us know only about from history books -- Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa -- and neither they -- nor we the viewers -- will ever be quite the same again.

From the looks of the comments on the HBO Message Boards for the program, many Americans feel it's high time this important part of WW II history, and the men and women who endured it, were honored with this miniseries. I'm certain many of us will wish our fathers were still alive to see this amazing story that they lived through brought to life like this. I know I do.

In many ways this part of the War has always seemed more real to me, perhaps because my dad Harry (that handsome swabby to the left) was in the Navy on the West Coast in Long Beach, CA, during the war, and also because I've always loved the movies about the Pacific theater. (So Proudly We Hail, anyone? Or Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison? Or even South Pacific...)

We're going to post a selection of trailers for The Pacific here so you can get a good overview of what's in store for you. They are terrific, and will surely get you securely settled in front of your TV come 9pm for tonight's premiere. We also highly recommend that you check out HBO's website for The Pacific, as well as join their Facebook fan page, if that's your thing. You also might like to visit Marines of the Pacific's website, where you can find more info on the real men behind the miniseries.

The Pacific will undoubtedly be the most powerful programs on TV this season, and you've just got to watch it. It's the history of your country and the men who defended it, and we owe it to them to watch. Thanks, Hanks, Spielberg, et al...