Trivia / Jaws 3-D

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: The young white shark dies from the stress of being moved into a display tank while it's still recovering from its capture. In Real Life, no aquarium has yet kept a juvenile great white for longer than a few months, but it's because they're seldom willing to eat in captivity and have to be released before they starve.
• Channel Hop: Technically the case, as this is the only Jaws movie not actually made by Universal (it was produced by Alan Landsburg Productions - who also gave us In Search of...,Gimme a Break! and Kate & Allie).^note the film's copyright notice lists MCA Theatricals
• Creator Backlash:
  • Richard Matheson didn't like to talk about his experience being one of the screenwriters. He felt the idea of focusing on the Brody boys was dumb.
  I'm a good storyteller and I wrote a good outline and a good script. And if they had done it right and if it had been directed by somebody who knew how to direct, I think it would have been an excellent movie. Jaws 3-D was the only thing Joe Alves ever directed; the man is a very skilled production designer, but as a director, no. And the so-called 3D just made the film look murky – it had no effect whatsoever. It was a waste of time.
  • In a later interview, Dennis Quaid referred to this movie as "I was in Jaws what?" He even claimed he was high on cocaine in every frame of the movie he appeared in.
• Creator Killer: Newcomer director (and original Jaws production designer) Joe Alves never directed another film after this one.
• Dolled-Up Installment: Guerdon Trueblood's original storyline was not pitched as a Jaws sequel, but was turned into one after the original concept was rejected by the studio. His story was about a white shark swimming upstream and becoming trapped in a lake.
• Hostility on the Set: While filming the bar scene, Dennis Quaid reportedly tried to pick a fight with an extra for asking Lea Thompson for her autograph, claiming that the extra was allegedly harassing her.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: The movie was originally intended as a spoof, "National Lampoon's Jaws 3, People 0". Ironically, what came out is widely considered a really effective unintentional comedy. More about what that project could have turned out can be read here. Also when it was to be a parody, Rodger Bumpass (best known as Squidward Tentacles from SpongeBob SquarePants) was going to be the lead.
• Money, Dear Boy: Considering that Louis Gossett Jr., appeared in this almost immediately after his Oscar-winning turn in An Officer and a Gentleman, it's not hard to imagine that this was his main motive for appearing in the film.
• No Stunt Double: Bess Armstrong did most of her water stunts herself.
• Romance on the Set: Dennis Quaid (Mike Brody) and Lea Thompson (Kelly Ann Bukowski) became engaged after working together on the movie. They broke up after three years together.
• Spared by the Cut: Kelly is eaten by the shark in the script but is only wounded in the finished film.
• Star-Derailing Role: This was Simon MacCorkindale's last major film role. He later found his niche on television.
• Troubled Production: Filming proved less troublesome than the two prior films, but still had its share of problems.
  • David Brown and Richard Zanuck, who had produced the first two films, originally pitched it as a National Lampoon spoof named Jaws 3, People 0. John Hughes was attached as writer and Joe Dante as director, but Steven Spielberg vocally denounced the idea as disrespectful and Universal nixed it before it got to production. The 3D film resurgence in the early 1980s convinced Universal to revisit the film to take advantage of the trend.
  • The script was a messy affair. Richard Matheson was asked to write the script, but while he was given a co-credit in the final film, Matheson said that a slew of uncredited script doctors had their way with the script and his contributions were rewritten under murky circumstances, and he would disapprove of the final film. The story was credited to Guerdon Trueblood, who had reportedly written an outline for a different film about a shark that was bought out and refitted for this film.
  • Most of filming was a fairly smooth process, aside from Dennis Quaid's behavior where he tried to pick a fight with an extra and later claimed he was strung out on cocaine during the shoot. The first days of shooting were done using obsolete 3D cameras from the 1950s, though director Joe Alves had anticipated this and stuck to filming shots that could easily be redone. The 3D shots proved to be complicated even with modern technology, with some scenes like the shark's death requiring many reshoots to get right.
  • It took a turn for the worse in post-production, however, as the initial effects company had tried creating all the 3D effects shots using video. The results were so poor that the producers to hired another company to hastily redo the effects in the then-traditional manner... only for the new shots to turn out hardly any better, if not worse, than the originals. By this point they had no choice but to release the film as it was, resulting in the film being heavily derided for its clunky 3D effects and general Special Effect Failure.
• What Could Have Been: Takes a bite out of a page here.

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