NEED TO KNOW
- The person who performed younger Sean Brody within the 1975 blockbuster Jaws is recounting his time on set
- Talking to ipromiseyoumedia in an unique interview, Jay Mello says Jaws was his solely film, however he remembers each little bit of it
- One in every of his most iconic scenes, he says, “wasn’t even written within the script”
Jay Mello was solely 6 years previous when his mother introduced him to an audition together with his brothers. She had heard concerning the open name via a kids’s theater program at her church in Massachusetts: a Hollywood movie crew was coming to city to movie a film a couple of shark. They wanted two younger kids to play the principle characters’ sons.
“My older brothers Tom and John have been truly those auditioning,” Mello tells ipromiseyoumedia in a current interview.
However when the 2 went into the audition room flanked by their mother and little brother, it was the youngest boy who caught the eye of an up-and-coming director named Steven Spielberg.
“I had a behavior of copying folks,” Mello remembers. “So when Steven Spielberg was interviewing them, I used to be copying him as he gave route. When the interview was over, he stated ‘You boys can go, we’re carried out. However the youngest can keep.’ ”
It was Mello, then, who was solid as Sean Brody, the youngest son of Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), the police chief of the fictional Amity Island, a seaside New England city that finds itself affected by a monstrous Nice White shark in the summertime of 1975.
Mello says that, regardless of his younger age, he remembers each second of filming on location in Martha’s Winery in 1974.
And certainly one of his most distinguished recollections, in fact, is of the shark itself.
“I do bear in mind the primary time I noticed it,” Mello says of one of many animatronic sharks dreamed up by manufacturing designer Joe Alves and cemented in movie historical past. “It was simply the top a part of the shark. I form of questioned Shari Rhodes, who was the casting director. I stated, ‘The place’s the remainder of the shark?’ ”
Mello’s character, Sean, serves as a reminder of the softer aspect of Chief Brody. In a single poignant scene, he mimics his dad – just like what he did to Spielberg within the audition.
“That wasn’t even written within the script,” he says. “We have been taking a break from a scene the place I used to be sitting in a swing set, and we got here inside and Roy Scheider was making humorous faces and I used to be attempting to imitate him. He known as Steven Spielberg in and stated, ‘We’ve bought so as to add this to the movie. That is going to be one thing.’ It actually touched folks’s hearts.”
Mello additionally remembers the older actors — like Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw — making him really feel at dwelling in between takes.
“There have been occasions the place the actors and Spielberg would collect on the lunch wagon and simply form of relax and welcome me and the youthful actors to sit down with them and eat with them and speak concerning the film,” he says. “It felt like one huge household.”
Mello had no concept that the movie would go on to turn into a field workplace juggernaut and propel Spielberg to family identify standing.
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After all the movie was additionally — particularly for a 6-year-old — slightly terrifying, although Mello was allowed to see elements of it when it was launched in theaters one 12 months after filming.
“It was unusual to see myself on display screen,” he says, admitting, “I did not get to see the entire thing as a result of my mother and pop saved ducking my head below the seats.”
The primary time he noticed the scene wherein native fisherman Ben Gardner’s head is present in a wrecked boat — making him the shark’s third sufferer — wasn’t till years later.
“That form of haunts me,” he says with amusing. “I did not return into the water for like two years after the film was made.”
Mello’s household initially thought he would possibly proceed taking part in Sean Brody within the follow-up movies — although, when it was introduced that filming for Jaws 2 would happen in Florida, they determined towards it.
However Mello saved up with the movies — and his character, who was finally killed off (in a shark assault, no much less) in 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge.
“I used to be very disenchanted in that,” Mello says. “I figured that Sean Brody would turn into a part of the Amity Island Police Division, like his dad, however I did not determine they might have killed him.”
Within the years since, Mello has stayed out of present enterprise, working at a maple syrup firm in Vermont and infrequently telling tales of his brush with essentially the most well-known shark in leisure historical past.
“I saved in contact with Roy Scheider earlier than he handed away, and in addition Jeffrey Voorhees,” Mello says of the ill-fated Alex Kitner, a boy who’s connected by the shark whereas taking part in on a raft. “I attempted to achieve out to Richard Dreyfuss however have gotten no response — identical for Steven Spielberg.”
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Nonetheless, Jaws is part of Mello — and he part of its now 50-year legacy.
“Now, once I inform folks I used to be in Jaws, they’re going to say, ‘There is no manner you may have been that little boy,’ ” he says. “Then they begin learning my face and it clicks.”
Fifty years after the movie first premiered, Mello remains to be a fan and makes it some extent to look at the unique film yearly.
“My children and my grandkids and I all collect across the tv round Christmastime and watch it,” he says. “Yearly, I choose one thing out one thing completely different to inform them. And I allow them to maintain their eyes extensive open.”
