JAWS At 50: "Rycke's Personal JAWStory"

Rycke’s Personal JAWStory

By Rycke Foreman

Rycke Foreman is an author, filmmaker and longtime friend of Free Kittens. He was kind enough to share his own experience seeing Jaws for the first time…

I saw it for the first time when I was about 5 years old. We lived in Forth Worth, Texas, and I'm pretty sure we saw it in a second-run theater. I was as fascinated as I was scared; afterwards, I was afraid "Jaws" (as I'd call the shark) was going to break up through my bathtub and get me while I was bathing.

When it made its TV debut a year or two later, I made sure to watch it again, and that inspired me to make my first attempt at writing a story. It was awful and totally plagiarized the movie. I had forgotten it, but my mother sent a photocopied version to me at some point, so I was able to re-read it. It was hard to follow what was going on, exactly, but it was all dialog, no action. "Roy" and "Richard" had fallen into the water, and were screaming to each other how they needed to get back on the boat, fast, because they were scared that Jaws was going to eat them.

During Junior High School, I watched it more than 100 times. Years later, I eventually wrote a Jaws spoof as a novel, with a lead character named Roy. I don't really pay attention, but I think it is my best selling book. (Maybe a hundred copies out there.) Also, to this day, I have a hard time setting foot in the ocean--step past the knee and quietly, subtly, the first "dun dun" echoes through the back of my mind. Which is all a roundabout way of saying that Jaws is by and far the most influential film in my life.