THIS ONE'S GOT TEETH! 30 THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT `JAWS'.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Writer

``Courage and stupidity.'' Those are the words that come to mind when Steven Spielberg thinks about ``Jaws,'' his landmark thriller that changed the way people looked at the water (at least for one summer) and the way studios looked at release patterns, marketing and box-office.

`` `Jaws' technically didn't have anything to do with innovation, but it was the first movie to take all the techniques that were lying around - marketing, merchandising, saturation - and put them with a director of Steven Spielberg's talents,'' says Tom Shone, author of ``Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer.''

And - presto - ``Jaws'' became the first movie to gross $100 million.

``But that's not why it's remembered so fondly. Thirty years after its release, ``Jaws'' remains the greatest summer blockbuster, a movie that to this day inspires hesitation when some people consider wading out into the ocean.

On its 30th anniversary, we give you 30 things you might not know about ``Jaws,'' culled from our own interviews and from the great two-hour documentary on the newly released special-edition DVD. Enjoy - or as the ``seafarin' '' Quint (Robert Shaw) would put it: ``Here's to swimmin' with bow-legged women.''

1. Spielberg didn't particularly like the Peter Benchley book. Although Benchley is credited with Carl Gottlieb on the screenplay, Gottlieb and Spielberg kept the shark, the characters and a basic plot outline and ditched almost everything else.

2. Among the changes: In the novel, oceanographer Matt Hooper has an affair with Police Chief Martin Brody's wife, creating a tense love triangle. For his trouble, Hooper is later killed by the shark. Spielberg thought Quint's death - much more gruesome in the movie (in the book, he gets caught in a harpoon line a la Moby Dick's Capt. Ahab and is dragged down to sea) - was enough. He wanted a brighter ending.

3. Producers Daryl Zanuck and David Brown were best known for working with Paul Newman and Robert Redford in ``Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'' and ``The Sting.'' For ``Jaws,'' they went the opposite way, believing big-name stars would distract audiences from the story's escalating tension.

4. Roy Scheider was the only main actor who was Spielberg's first choice. Spielberg liked the way he portrayed cops in ``The French Connection'' and ``The Seven-Ups.''

5. Those considered before Richard Dreyfuss for the Hooper role: Jon Voight (he passed), Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges (Spielberg had a thing for ``The Last Picture Show''). Dreyfuss himself initially demurred, prophetically telling Spielberg that he'd ``rather watch this movie than shoot it.''

6. Lee Marvin was Spielberg's first choice for Quint. Marvin told Spielberg he'd rather go fishing for real.

7. Sterling Hayden (so memorable for playing Gen. Jack D. Ripper in ``Dr. Strangelove'' and the corrupt police captain in ``The Godfather'') wanted to play Quint, but couldn't. He owed the IRS a fortune in back taxes and couldn't enter the United States without being presented with a big bill. At the time, Hayden was living on a barge in Paris.

8. Spielberg shot ``Jaws'' at Martha's Vineyard for one simple reason: He could go 12 miles out to sea and still have a sandy bottom 30 feet below the surface, crucial for allowing the mechanical shark to function.

9. Spielberg's biggest fear (well, in addition to wondering if the mechanical shark would ever work) was that cameras would catch sight of land in the background of a shot. ``The minute that happens, people would say, 'Well, why don't they just take the boat back home?' ''

10. For the movie's opening attack, Spielberg just wanted to see the victim and the water - no shark. ``It's more primal that way,'' Spielberg says.

11. And, no, the stuntwoman playing that unfortunate skinny-dipper, Susan Backlinie, did not break a rib, as rumored, while being pulled back and forth in the water. ``People think the pain is real because they were pulling these weights that were attached to me,'' Backlinie says. ``Fact is, it's easy to make it look terrifying because you're in the water. You throw your arms around, splash a lot and scream at the top of your lungs.''

12. The only red in the movie is blood. Spielberg wanted the color to stand out. ``We did have red wine, but that was symbolic,'' he said.

13. Quint was originally going to be introduced with a scene of him inside a movie theater laughing hysterically (and causing everyone else to leave) while watching John Huston's ``Moby Dick.'' But Spielberg couldn't get the rights to the footage because Gregory Peck wasn't exactly proud of his performance as Capt. Ahab.

14. Spielberg himself wrote the scene featuring the two fishermen putting a pot roast on a hook and throwing it off a pier to lure the shark. The beast takes the bait - and the pier - creating the shot Spielberg wanted in the movie, ``seeing the pier going off, then stopping and turning and coming back for the swimmer.''

15. Brody's line, ``You're gonna need a bigger boat''? Scheider ad- libbed it.

16. Quint's famous ``USS Indianapolis'' speech was conceived by playwright Howard Sackler, lengthened by screenwriter John Milius and then rewritten by Robert Shaw, an accomplished playwright himself. Shaw thought the Milius version sounded too much like something John Huston would write. The final version, says screenwriter Gottlieb, belongs to Shaw.

For most fans, Quint's tale - the Indianapolis cruiser delivered the first A-bomb on a secret mission, was sunk and not reported missing, leaving its crewmen fighting to survive in shark-infested waters for several days - stands as the highlight of the movie. ``When Robert told that story, I couldn't keep my eyes off him,'' Dreyfuss says.

17. Dreyfuss and Shaw didn't particularly like each other and channeled those acrimonious feelings into the relationship between their characters.

``Shaw liked to (scare the daylights) out of you, and because Dreyfuss was young, intense and semi-neurotic, he was vulnerable,'' says Gottlieb, who chronicled the shoot in his well-known book, ``The Jaws Log.'' ``Dreyfuss eventually caught on to what Shaw was doing, and then he started giving him (a hard time). They were a couple of actors from different schools. It made for great chemistry.''

18. Spielberg shot 25 percent of the movie from water level to provide the same perspective people have when treading water.

19. The first time they tested the mechanical shark, it sank to the bottom of Nantucket Sound. ``We thought our careers went with it,'' producer Brown says. ``There were all these radio mikes all over the island,'' Dreyfuss recalls. ``So wherever you were on the island, you could hear these radio mikes. And they were always saying, (imitates static) 'The shark is not working.' (Static) 'The shark is not working.' No matter where you were and for months.''

20. The special-effects guys wanted Spielberg to shut down the movie so they could work on the shark. Producer Zanuck nixed the idea. ``You never stop because you don't know if they'll let you start again,'' he says.

21. The song ``Show Me the Way to Go Home,'' drunkenly sung by Quint, Hooper and Brody after the Indianapolis speech, was immediately adopted by the crew as the shoot stretched from two to 5 1/2 months. ``That had become their mantra,'' Spielberg recalls.

22. The footage of Hooper in the cage? For the most part, it's actually a midget or mannequin in a tiny shark cage, since the real sharks - filmed off the coast of Australia - were much smaller than the great white in the movie.

23. In the book, the shark simply drowns. Spielberg thought that was a downer and came up with a more dramatic ending that Benchley hated for its implausibility. The author later admitted that Spielberg knew what he was doing.

24. When the shark blows up, it makes the same sound as the possessed 18-wheeler in Spielberg's earlier telefilm, ``Duel.'' Spielberg culled the noise from an old Universal dinosaur monster movie.

25. After finishing ``Jaws,'' Spielberg left Martha's Vineyard for the first time in 7 1/2 months. He spent the first night on the mainland in a hotel room in Boston, where he suffered a panic attack while in bed. He called Dreyfuss, also staying in the hotel, and the two went down to the bar to help Spielberg calm down.

26. Composer John Williams' first comments upon seeing footage of the movie: ``This is like a pirate movie! We need pirate music!''

27. Spielberg says that without Williams' score - the relentless ``bump-bump'' device heard whenever the shark is on screen - ``the film would have been only half as successful.'' The movie launched Williams' superstar career and won him his first Oscar in the bargain.

28. After the first preview screening in Dallas, Spielberg says he ``got greedy'' and decided to go back and reshoot the underwater scene where the fisherman's head pops out of the boat. He shot the footage at editor Verna Fields' home in Van Nuys, paying the $3,000 it cost out of his own pocket. (He was later reimbursed.) ``I wanted one more scare,'' Spielberg says. He got it, but he also says the scene made the audience more defensive. ``They were looking for shadows after that,'' he says.

29. Craig Kingsbury, the local who played the ill-fated fisherman and also served as the inspiration for Quint, says he didn't much like the head-popping scene. ``How the hell is a shark supposed to eat someone and spit his head back into the inside of the boat?'' he complained.

30. The PG rating was no slam dunk. And this was before the PG-13 (a middle ground created for a later Spielberg movie, 1984's ``Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom''). Spielberg trimmed a few frames and avoided the R, which would have killed the movie at the box office. Says producer Brown: ``I don't recall any letters about kids having bad dreams. Parents, on the other hand ...''

And one for good measure: The second preview screening was held in Lakewood. Gottlieb recalls seeing Universal CEO Lew Wasserman and studio president Sid Sheinberg huddled with other Universal executives in the men's room - ``the only place you could hear yourself think,'' Gottlieb says. ``Right then and there, they decided to change the release pattern and open it simultaneously in hundreds of theaters,'' Gottlieb says. ``And I guess nothing's been the same since.''

Glenn Whipp, [phone]

glenn.whipp(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color -- cover) DIVE INTO `JAWS'

The facts, the fiction, the rumors behind the film that launched the summer blockbuster

(2) no caption (``Jaws'')

(3) Director Steven Spielberg, left, with ``Jaws'' co-producer David Brown on the movie's Martha's Vineyard set. Filming of the 1975 blockbuster took 5 1/2 months.

(4) Quint (Robert Shaw, left), Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) and Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) in ``Jaws.''