As a lifelong fan of Jaws, you can imagine what a treat it was for me to recently conduct an in-depth interview with the four producers of the forthcoming Jaws documentary, The Shark is Still Working. Jake Gove, who is the founder of the popular Jaws website Jawsmovie.com is one of those producers, and the others are Michael Roddy, Eric Hollander, James Gelet. Our interview covered a wide range of Jaws-related subjects, touching not only on the content of the documentary itself -- it's currently seeking distribution, but we got an advance copy, and you can read Cinematical's review, which is up today -- but also on the impact of the film in general and legacy that it has left to future generations of moviegoers. We talked about the film's legendary special effects problems, the personality conflicts between the cast members, the film's sequels, and most importantly, the fact that this documentary owes much of its existence to the online movie world, which has a rabid Jaws contingent.

James: That was Eric and myself. We've been making documentaries for quite a few years, and we were just sitting down and watching another documentary that somebody else had done -- it was somebody that we had known. These people had never done one before at all. They decided they wanted to do it, and they had the wherewithal to finish it, and Eric and I really admired them for that. Right around the same time, and completely unrelated to that, we had been invited to participate in Jawsfest, because we owned some props from the movie and Eric turned to me when we were watching a documentary and said 'what would be a fun documentary we could do?' and doing one on Jaws just seemed like such a no-brainer, because we were going to be going to that Jaws fest festival and we're big fans of the movie anyway. So that was kind of it.

The original idea was that it was just going to be about the festival, period. It was going to be much more literally, a Trekkies for Jaws fans. Pretty quickly after that, we were talking to Michael about the project. He was very interested in participating as well, and because of his connections to Universal, he was able to start talking to some of the heavy hitters involved with Jaws, and just kind of hit the pavement and get us some big interviews. Once that happened, obviously the vision grew and it went from being a documentary on Jawsfest into being 'hey, we can do the ultimate retrospective and talk about anything and everything Jaws, if we want to and if we work hard enough, so that's what happened.'

Jaws is not a perfect film, like some say -- I tend to agree with Peter Benchley that any dummy should know that a compressed air tank will not explode like an oil refinery if punctured by a bullet -- but flaws aside, Spielberg's masterpiece is, I believe, a rather important and uniquely American work of art. The idea of a small-town flatfoot realizing that his duty requires him to step on a boat and head off to sea is a metaphor that not only resonated with WWII veterans in the 70s, but still resonates today with anyone who's had to leave the comforts of home to go confront a threat. Also, with its entire story circling down to that amazing moment when the grizzled old seadog Quint has gotten a look at the beast he's going to be confronting and decides to unpack and assemble a fearsome harpoon, the film strongly echoes Melville, as well as all the other literature and art that's been inspired by America's centuries-long quest to tame the Atlantic ocean. This is one of our touchstone movies that won't go out of style until people have lost their fear of sharks, the ocean, drowning and the unknown in general -- in other words, never.

Respect for Jaws from the opinion makers in film academia has not come easily, however. The AFI's list of the Top 100 American Films, compiled in 1998, gave Jaws the questionable ranking of #48, behind such titles as the dated anti-war film The Best Years of our Lives and the entertaining but not exactly earth-shaking Bogey-Hepburn adventure The African Queen. Since then, the astronomical growth of the Internet and the general democratizing of cultural taste-making that it brought has allowed for a rebellion of sorts against Jaws' place of relatively low esteem in film theory. Case in point: the website Jawsmovie.com, which went live in 1995, and has since grown into a sophisticated forum for legions of Jaws fans of all stripes to come and express their love and admiration for the film. Now, the creator of Jawsmovie.com, together with three other producers, has taken things to another level, producing The Shark is Still Working, an epic documentary about all things Jaws -- the making of, the fan community, the legacy, the whole damn thing.