Universal City Studios From left, Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss in “Jaws.â€Jamie Benning may be both a movie fan’s greatest hero and a copyright lawyer’s worst nightmare.
Mr. Benning runs filmumentaries.com, a Web sit on which he posts self-described love letters to his favorite films. He calls the works filmumentaries, and they are essentially homemade, full-length DVD commentaries of beloved American films.
So far, Mr. Benning has covered “Star Wars,†“The Empire Strikes Back,†“Return of the Jedi†and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.†On June 20, the 38th anniversary of the release of “Jaws,†Mr. Benning posted “Inside Jaws,†a full-length inside peek at how the 1975 summer blockbuster â€" some say the first blockbuster â€" came to be.
Unlike most sleek, studio-produced official DVD commentaries, Mr. Benning’s works are meticulously crafted mashups, loaded with unusual facts and teeming with scraps of rare video and audio. Much of the material he finds by scouring the Internet, buying old VHS tapes off ebay and tapping the personal collections of knowledgeable fans. He also conducts his own interviews with extras and lesser-known production employees who would probably never be asked to tell their stories on most official movie documentaries.
Mr. Benning says “Inside Jaws†took more than a year and cost $500 to $1,000, not including his time, which he estimates in the hundreds of hours. By day, he is a London-based editor of live televised sporting events. He works on these project in his downtime, at night when his kids are in bed or during long-flights to jobs far from home.
The films have garnered a large and enthusiastic fan base, including, he says, employees at George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic and Nathan Hamill, the 34-year old son of Mark Hamill, the original Luke Skywalker.
He emailed with Erik Olsen about these labors of love. Here are edited excerpts from that exchange.
These are all films that seem to be of interest to a particular type of fan. I’m guessing you were born in the ’60s or ’70s.
I was born in 1976, a year after “Jaws†was released and a year before “Star Wars.†So by the time “The Empire Strikes Back†came out in 1980, I was fully immersed in the world of “Star Wars†along with all of my friends, with the action figures and the bed spreads and the curtains and the lunchbox and everything else.
We are part of the VHS generation. We grew up watching these movies maybe once in the cinema, and then acting them out in the playground at school and playing with our action figures and trying to recreate those scenes you know purely from memory.
Where did you get all the material for “Inside Jaws� There’s a wealth of stuff.
After I finished Raiding the Lost Ark James Beller, who runs JawsCollector.com, got in contact with me and said please can you make one on “Jaws� He basically sent me a list of what books I should read, what magazines I should read, and I went about trawling through all of this, picking out things that wouldn’t be a repetition of what we’ve heard on official documentaries and what’s on the documentary “The Shark Is Still Working.†And I ended up creating something that was about the local people rather than just the main players. We’ve all heard their stories before but what we haven’t heard is the stories of those people who fly by on the credits or weren’t on the credits.
So I got in contact with extras, with a laborer named Kevin Pike, who ended up having quite an illustrious career in film, working on “Return of the Jedi†and “Back to the Future,†building the DeLorean. And I spoke to a guy who snuck onto the set and ended up with a little part as an extra. In “Jaws,†if they wanted a doctor, they cast a local doctor, and that was an angle I’d never really seen exploited. We’d all heard about the shark not working and whilst I included some of that I also wanted to get this flip side from the local people involved.
Are there things that you regret you couldn’t use?
For the most part I’ve got the things in there that I want. I ended up dropping some chat between Spielberg and Williams about the how the music evolved, but we kind of heard that story before, so I took that out to put in some stories from lesser known people. A woman named Rita Schmidt, who was dating the prop master, told me that Richard Dreyfuss used to get so bored on set that he would go to the local knitting shop and play cards with the ladies in the shop. There are all these little bits, but it’s difficult to find somewhere to put that material within context.
What took you by surprise?
What has taken me by surprise after reading all the books and the magazines and journals and the documentaries, is finding some different perspective on a particular incident. For example, the line “We’re going to need a bigger boat.†Now, that line has always been attributed to Roy Scheider, that on the set he ad-libbed,
Carl Gottlieb the screenwriter, always gave him credit for that and said, “It’s a little disappointing i didn’t come up with it myself.†And then I found an interview with Scheider saying, “No no, Carl Gottlieb came up with that line.â€
Because they were writing the script on set, the night before for the next day’s shooting. So you’ve got all these different memories of the same incident.
How long did it take to produce “Inside Jaws�
Sixteen months from start to finish.
Don’t you have a full-time job?
I’m an editor in the TV industry in London. I do a lot of live productions, sports and music festivals. Mostly I work on Formula One motor racing, which takes me around the world.
I’ve got a lot of time on planes, on coaches and in hotel rooms. So where a lot of my friends are watching “Game of Thrones,†I’ll be reading or editing this.
Did you ever try to talk to Steven Spielberg?
I didn’t actually. Because these things are unofficial. I’ve not got the rights to them; I make no money out of these things. It’s purely a love letter to my favorite films. I’ve always felt I need a little bit of distance from those official channels.The thing about these films is the story behind the making of story is just as interesting to me. So hopefully I’ve not offended Mr. Lucas or Mr. Spielberg, and hopefully they see these films for what they are.
What’s next?
I’ve always got this mental list: “Superman,†“Ghostbusters,†“The Shining,†“Back to the Future,†“2001.†When somebody shoots a documentary and interviews the cast and crew for DVDs, there’s going to be stuff on shelves that they didn’t use in marketing and press releases, stuff just waiting for me to get a hold of. But I’m taking a break at the moment. I’m getting married in August so that’s the big project.
