The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Jaws, Episode I?

"Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte... just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, Chief? You tell by looking from the dorsal to the tail."

Everybody should know that quote, being that it's from Robert Shaw's monologue in the perfect Jaws when he talks about the doomed USS Indianapolis and its mission to deliver the Hiroshima bomb. For aeons there's been rumours about a movie being made about this, occasionally touted as an actual Jaws prequel/sequel. But now it looks like it's actually happening, thanks to Open Water director Chris Kentis and Warner Bros. who will produce Indianapolis.

In case you don't know, or you haven't seen Jaws (if not, buy it now or suffer the consequences), the USS Indianapolis was the ship that delivered the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima, before getting downed by a Japanese submarine. The ship went down, and the 900 or so of the crew that survived the initial attack were left floating in the water, much to the delight of the various sharks indigenous to the area. 321 men survived to be rescued, and the commander, Charles McVay, was controversially court-martialled and eventually killed himself. However, he was exonerated in 2000 of any blame for the accident.

Kentis himself said "Being a diver and a WWII buff, this is a story that long haunted me," and apparently his movie Open Water (which provides a similar, if scaled down, concept to Indianapolis) was a testbed for what he could do with the film. I never saw it myself, so I have no idea if it's any good, although like many films I haven't seen, I do own the DVD.

Indianapolis is an adaptation of Douglas Stanton's book In Harm's Way, and will be produced by Laura Lau, Mark Gordon, Betsy Beers, and celebrated scriptwriter Akiva Goldsman. Oh fucking joy.