Soderbergh's Jaws Tribute App Lands 51 Years After Film
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- Steven Soderbergh launched the $24.99 app Production 02074 in the Apple Store on June 20, with all proceeds going to an animal charity, and an Android tablet version expected later the same week.
- Production 02074 lets users scroll through still images from each of Jaws's 143 production days alongside Spielberg's production-log observations and Soderbergh's analysis of why the 1975 film is a singular cinematic achievement.
- Soderbergh said seeing Jaws 31 times in theaters as a youth is what made him want to become a filmmaker, and he credits his father — a college professor specializing in education — with instilling the impulse to pass along knowledge.
- Steven Spielberg wrote an epilogue for the app reliving the famously troubled Jaws shoot, in which he is compared to the biblical Job for the sheer volume of production disasters he overcame.
- Soderbergh modeled the project's granular, image-driven approach on Taschen's making-of book for Kubrick's The Shining, and explicitly said the app could become a formula for dissecting other classics from The Godfather onward.
- The Hunt for Ben Solo, Soderbergh's planned Adam Driver film that Disney canceled, is what freed him to finish Production 02074 — Soderbergh said if that movie had gone forward, the app would never have been completed.
Why it matters: At $24.99 — which Soderbergh frames as roughly 50 cents per year of his 51 years of study — the app delivers the kind of production-breakdown that previously existed only in Taschen-style coffee-table books costing $2,500, with every dollar going to an animal charity rather than a publisher.
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