Saw this in Chicago
Saturday, September 19th the Music Box theater had a midnight showing of the film. Apparently they had an earlier show that wasn't announced in the newspaper because when we got in the theater the director and producer were doing a Q&A with the audience. Once it was over the crowd left and perhaps 8 or 10 of us remained for the midnight show but the two men were gracious enough to stay and take questions before the screening.
As for the film itself... it is quite good but hoped it would be even better. I have read on here about run times of over 3 hours or 2.5 hours but the cut I saw was 1 hour and 54 minutes which seemed tight enough. The film includes interviews with many of the towns folk who appeared (the boy who played Sean Brody, Alex Kintner, Mrs. Kintner) plus extras and we even see the real gravesite of the dog Pipit who was chasing the stick in the water.
A good portion of the footage I had seen before but there were some terrific new things including a shot of how they originally intended to make the attack on young Alex look (a literal explosion of blood) but changed their minds because it looked bad. There are many outtakes and shots of the shark not working and some very interesting stories told - some I had heard before and some I hadn't.
The filmmakers cover a lot of ground but I wanted more thorough information. I could have done without Peter Benchley's musings on writing the book in favor of Steven Spielberg perhaps talking about the hell he and the studio went through trying to cast the lead actors. That is never mentioned. Also Robert Shaw is given short shrift in the film and that's a shame. While Spielberg talks about how Shaw helped write the Indianapolis speech and Dreyfuss and Scheider talk about how difficult Shaw was (and, in a surprising confession, Dreyfuss admits he hated Shaw but also loved him) on Dreyfuss. I would have loved to have seen any of Shaw's kids (of which I believe he had more then 10) comment. Surely Shaw shared feelings of making the film or made notes or something. OR they could have just spoke of the man himself. And I should stress that since the cut I saw is obviously well over an hour shorter then the original cut, then the information I was hoping for might be there somewhere. If that is the case then they should have cut other things. Still in all it's a very good film.