After making the Jaws rip-off Piranha in 1978, future Gremlins director Joe Dante got an unexpected offer from Universal Pictures. Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, who produced the first two Jaws movies, were looking to have Dante helm the next sequel in the series. There was a catch, though: This wasn’t going to be your typical, run-of-the-mill horror movie retread. The plan this time was to do a follow-up that also parodied the previous films.
Jaws 3, People 0, as it was called in the script, was to be a collaboration between Universal and the people at National Lampoon magazine. Lampoon publisher Matty Simmons conceived the idea as a gag during a meeting with Zanuck and Brown one day. The producers expressed interest in working with him following the success of Animal House, and he jokingly pitched them a scene in which Jaws author Peter Benchley gets eaten by a shark in his home swimming pool. “I love it, I love it,” Brown told him. “We’re going to make this movie.”
From there, Simmons enlisted two young writers from National Lampoon to write a script: Tom Carroll and a relatively unknown John Hughes. The screenplay centers around the production of a fictional Jaws movie, with a real great white going after the filmmakers. In one scene, a shark is cut open, and a variety of items are removed from its stomach, including McDonald’s hamburgers, a lawn mower, a violin, and a bag of weed. Simmons also intended for the R-rated comedy to show Bo Derek “nude from the waist up through a good deal of the picture.”
Zanuck and Brown were looking for something more family-friendly and didn’t end up going for the script. “I think the project died because they couldn’t agree on what movie they were making,” Dante suggested. “And you can’t go into a movie with two entities as powerful as National Lampoon was at that time and Zanuck and Brown and have them fighting constantly through the entire movie. It’s just a bad idea and I think they just pulled the plug.”
Universal ultimately opted to produce a totally different sequel in 1983 called Jaws 3-D, which, in a way, could qualify as a comedy when you think about it…
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