Woman Caught ‘Jaws’ Then Tried To Fix The Damage


Steven Spielberg needed a real shark. Before the young director started shooting his famous movie “Jaws” faulty animatronic monster He hired two underwater cinematographers to shoot great white sharks off the coast of South Australia at Martha’s Vineyard.

Australian couple Ron and Valerie Taylor set out to capture footage that would be used as skilled divers well known in their homeland. culminating 1975 scene Richard Dreyfuss’ Hooper, who seems safe in a shark cage, confronts the monster that terrifies beachgoers.

However, as Valerie Taylor, the subject of a new documentary, said in a recent video interview from her Sydney home, “You can manage a dog, a human, or a horse, but you can’t manage a shark. ”

It soon became clear that the Taylors were battling two unwilling sides: the shark and professional stuntman Carl Rizzo, who didn’t know how to dive and panicked when he was lowered into the cage. As the boat swayed on deck, the shark approached, entangled in the wires supporting the cage, and eventually freed the empty container from the crane, causing it to fall into the depths.

While Ron was filming the whole thing underwater, Valerie grabbed an onboard camera and fired from above. Spielberg was so fascinated by the footage of the unexpected events that he rewrote the script to fit it, and changed Hooper’s fate from shark bait to survivor.

Valerie’s work on “Jaws” is just one chapter in her incredible life that saw her transition from deadly spearfishing to filmmaker and pioneering environmentalist. “He was like a Marvel superhero to me,” said Australian producer Bettina Dalton. “It influenced everything about my career and my passion for the natural world.”

This respect prompted Dalton to work with director Sally Aitken for the National Geographic documentary.Playing With Sharks” Following Taylor’s career and now available on Disney+.

Born in Australia and raised mostly in New Zealand, Valerie, now 85, grew up poor. At the age of 12 he was hospitalized for polio and had to drop out of school while relearning to walk. He started working as a comics artist, then dabbled in theater acting, but hated being tied to the same place every day.

“I had a good mom. She said do whatever you want. Try what you like. It can’t hurt you and you’ll learn,” Valerie said emphatically to me, her expressive earrings dangling under her silver hair. But when he started diving and spearfishing professionally, his mother was “terrified”. Valerie added, “I so called getting married and having children.”

She eventually married Ron, a spearfishing champion who was also gifted with an underwater camera, and together they began making films documenting marine life. With her glamorous “Bond girl” look, Valerie was the focus as they could bring in more money if she appeared on screen. They were together until Ron died of leukemia in 2012.

“Here is this incredible front-line character and here is an incredible technical magician,” Aitken said. “Together, they realized it was a winning combination.”

Not only did Valerie have a magnetic on-camera presence, she also had a rare ability to connect with animals, including menacing sharks that were poorly understood at the time.

“They all have different personalities. Some are shy, some are overbearing, some are brave,” said Valerie. “When you get to know a school of sharks, you get to know them as individuals.”

After killing a shark while shooting a movie in the 1960s, the Taylors had a realization: Sharks needed to be studied and understood rather than killed. They abandoned spearfishing altogether, and Aitken compared their journey from hunters to environmentalists to those of sailors. John James Audubon.

“I have the kind of personality I’m not afraid of. I’m angry,” said Valerie. “Even when I was bitten, I stood still and waited for him to let go – because they made a mistake.”

Still, she said, “I don’t expect others to act like me.”

Her distinctive look, such as her pink wetsuit and brightly colored hair ribbon, could be seen as a defiant embrace of her femininity in a male-dominated industry, but it was also a simple way for her to stand out in underwater shots. “Ron wanted color in a blue world,” Valerie said. ‘Cousteau has a red cap, you can have a red ribbon,’ he said. That’s it.”

When asked, she shrugged at the idea that she faced additional challenges as the only woman on boats filled with men for much of her life, especially in the 50s and 60s, when women were still expected to stick to traditional roles.

“I was just as good as they were, so here you go. It’s okay,” he said. “And although I didn’t realize it, I was probably that harsh.”

Examining decades of media news and archive footage, the filmmakers of “Sharks With Sharks” described Valerie as someone who faced a tough challenge on many levels but was also seen as an intriguing novelty.

“Of course he had to fight to be taken seriously,” Aitken said. “He was in the working class. He was indeed a man with very little education. I think the culture saw him as extraordinary. That in itself can be a liberating path, because you are singular.”

When “Jaws” unexpectedly became a blockbuster in 1975, the Taylors realized that the film was doing harm they never thought possible: Recreational shark fishing gained popularity, and audiences feared that bloodthirsty sharks were stalking humans just below the surface. In reality, there are hundreds of shark species, and only a few are known to bite humans. Those who usually mistake people for their natural prey such as sea lions.

“For some reason, moviegoers believed it. “There is no such living shark in the world today,” said Valerie. “Ron had a saying: ‘You don’t expect to go to New York and see King Kong at the Empire State Building. And don’t go into the water hoping to see Jaws.’

In an effort to quell public fears, Universal flew the Taylors to the United States for a talk show tour educating the public about sharks, and Valerie said, “I was fighting for poor old, very vicious sharks and the marine world.” , in general, since then. ”

In 1984, he helped campaign for the gray nurse shark to become the world’s first protected shark species. Nature photography published in National Geographic. The area where he and Ron filmed “Jaws” is now a marine park named in their honor. And still posting trials defend animals with passion.

Still, shark populations smashed Valerie said that many of the underwater scenes she witnessed in her early days no longer exist.

“I hate being old, but at least that means I’m in the ocean while it’s clean,” he said, and today, it’s like going to where the rainforest is and seeing a cornfield.

Despite everything “Playing With Sharks” covered, Valerie said, “it’s by no means my whole life story.” She had once been at sea and saved herself by tying her hair ribbons to a piece of coral until another boat hit her. Or the day he taught Mick Jagger to scuba dive on a whim. (It was a quick workout, despite the weight belt slipping down her narrow hips.) She is also a breast cancer survivor.

While she’s still diving, her arthritis makes it hard to be in colder Australian waters, and she’s dying to return to Fiji, where swimming feels like “taking a bath.”

“I can’t jump anymore, not because I particularly want to jump,” he said. “But if I go to the ocean, I can fly.”



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