Initially billed as a book, Steven Soderbergh’s Production 02074 is an exhaustive look at the making of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. The app is now on Apple Store. Created by Steven Soderbergh, Production 02074 may prove to be the most exhaustive dissection of Jaws released to date. Originally envisioned as a book, it’s now an app, ... Jaws | Steven Soderbergh’s app Production 02074, about the making of Spielberg’s classic, is available now
Initially billed as a book, Steven Soderbergh’s Production 02074 is an exhaustive look at the making of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. The app is now on Apple Store.
Created by Steven Soderbergh, Production 02074 may prove to be the most exhaustive dissection of Jaws released to date. Originally envisioned as a book, it’s now an app, taking users on an interactive timeline of Steven Spielberg’s classic.
Day by day, it follows the film’s infamously troubled production, relating the story through still images and commentary written by Soderbergh himself.
Soderbergh says he’s spent some 19 years writing the book, off and on, and it sounds fascinating: a detailed account of the pressures Spielberg was under during that vast 143-day production, in which the mechanical shark refused to function and entire days were lost. It’s not just remarkable that Spielberg came back with an unassailable classic; it’s remarkable that the film was finished at all.
Production 02074 is available now on the Apple Store for $24.99, and an Android version is expected to follow this week. It might not sound cheap, but the proceeds go to an animal charity, and Soderbergh argues that it’s far cheaper than if the project had emerged as a fancy coffee table book.
“I had some discussions with people that make those kinds of books, and the cost was prohibitive, say, for somebody who’s an aspiring filmmaker,” he told Deadline. “The whole idea is to pass my experience, my analysis along to people in a way that’s really accessible. Making a giant coffee table book that costs $2,500 felt counter to the impulse that made me want to do it in the first place. I want anybody to be able to buy this and get whatever they are going to get from it.”
That whole interview is well worth reading in full, by the way; Soderbergh’s enthusiasm for Jaws, even after spending years writing about it, is clearly undimmed. The filmmaker may have hopped on the AI train recently (much to our disappointment, for whatever that’s worth), but this nevertheless sounds like a fascinating new insight into one of the most celebrated mainstream films of the 20th century.
