Alexandra (Alex) Schwartz

speaker

352 appearances 14 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 21 Aug

Alexandra (Alex) Schwartz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 7.

Appearances

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The New Yorker Radio Hour · From Critics at Large: Steve Spielberg's Blockbusters · 23 Jun 2026 podcast

They could not get these huge sharks to operate.

They couldn't do it.

And that failure led to the genius of Jaws because Spielberg came to realize, and Spielberg was only 26, which was really mind-blowing to me,

But he came to realize that not showing the shark would be more terrifying than showing these big animatronic sculptures of sharks that they kept trying and failing to operate.

He came to this Hitchcockian view of things.

And—

Nomi, I think you referred to the shower of psycho before.

I mean, that's it.

I think Spielberg quite literally said he wanted people to have that, to feel about going to the beach like people felt about going into the shower after psycho.

Totally.

So when we talk about Jaws inventing this form of the blockbuster, there are a few things we're talking about.

The first is promotion.

It seems obvious to us now, but at the time, $1.8 million was spent on promoting Jaws, which was huge because the studio was trying to ride the high of the successful film.

Novel and also because it figured out very quickly that people love this movie.

People were spilling their popcorn, screaming at this movie.

The studio was like, this is a thing.

Let's spend money to make it more of a thing.

There were television spots promoting the film.

All these things that seem super obvious to us now that were not so obvious at the time.

The summertime release.

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