At one point, the production team filmed the scene in which the boat the Orca gets tipped to the side after the shark slams into it multiple times underwater. However, when everything was ready for the scene to be filmed with everyone aboard, the boat suddenly began to sink – one of the restraints on the boat had come off, leaving a hole in the side. "Someone shouts, 'She's going over!' and everyone starts to bail out," Gottlieb writes. "Jim Contner, Peter Salem, and Michael Chapman are trying to save the cameras with their priceless film inside. [Richard Dreyfuss] and Robert [Shaw] jump into the ocean, and the rest of the crew is right behind them. Roy Scheider is trapped in the cabin, since that's where he's supposed to be for that part of the shot, only now he's really trapped in the cabin, but he manages to fight his way clear. In another minute, the boat capsizes and sinks, and the sea is full of swimming men, small boats maneuvering to effect rescues, and a lot of debris and parts of tripods, slates, scripts, coffee cups, lights, cameras, and action." (The film in the camera was saved.)
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
