Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day Is The Conclusion Of 49-Year Unofficial Sci-Fi Trilogy

✓ Correct! Bruce — named after Spielberg’s lawyer, Bruce Ramer. Three 25-foot hydraulic sharks were built for about $250,000 each, and they kept sinking, shorting, and rusting. The forced minimalism (Williams’ dun-dun cue, a bobbing barrel, a ripple on the water) is now credited with making Jaws scarier than any visible shark could have. Pixar later named the shark in Finding Nemo “Bruce” as a tribute.

✗ Cut! The answer is Bruce — after Spielberg’s lawyer Bruce Ramer. “The Orca” was Quint’s boat. “Moby” and “Chompers” are red herrings. The three real hydraulic sharks kept breaking down so badly that Spielberg hid the shark for most of the film, which paradoxically became the masterstroke that invented modern suspense cinema.

✓ Correct! Reese’s Pieces. Hershey’s paid roughly $1 million in promotional tie-ins (no upfront placement fee, but they agreed to run an E.T. marketing campaign) and watched sales explode as the film ran through summer 1982. It remains the textbook case taught in business schools for how screen placement can remake a product overnight. E.T. became the highest-grossing film of all time until Spielberg’s own Jurassic Park dethroned it in 1993.

✗ Cut! The answer is Reese’s Pieces. Mars Inc. turned down the M&M’s offer, reportedly because executives thought the alien was too ugly to associate with the brand — a decision they must have regretted all summer. Hershey’s took the deal, did about $1M in tie-in marketing, and saw Reese’s Pieces sales jump around 65%. It’s still the gold-standard case study in product placement.

✓ Correct! Tom Selleck — locked in by CBS for Magnum P.I., which the network refused to delay. To twist the knife, a writers’ strike then pushed Magnum’s start back anyway, meaning Selleck would have been free in time. Harrison Ford (already Han Solo for George Lucas) stepped in late, and the rest is cinema history. Selleck has joked about it on every late-night circuit for 40 years.

✗ Cut! The answer is Tom Selleck. He had the part and the test footage with Karen Allen still exists. CBS wouldn’t let him out of Magnum P.I. — a writers’ strike then delayed the TV show anyway, which is the great “what if” of his career. Lucas and Spielberg turned to Harrison Ford, already lined up for Empire Strikes Back, just three weeks before Raiders began principal photography.

✓ Correct! John Williams — Spielberg’s collaborator on nearly every film he’s made since The Sugarland Express in 1974. Williams reportedly tried hundreds of five-note combinations before Spielberg signed off on the Re-Mi-Do-Do-Sol sequence. Williams has five Oscars, 50-plus nominations, and his Spielberg credits include Jaws, E.T., Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List and more.

✗ Cut! The answer is John Williams — the only composer Spielberg has really used across his career. Jerry Goldsmith scored Alien and Poltergeist. Hans Zimmer is the Nolan guy. James Horner did Titanic and Avatar. Williams alone has scored nearly every Spielberg film since 1974 and personally wrote the five-note Close Encounters motif after trying hundreds of alternatives.

✓ Correct! Michael Crichton — the Harvard-trained physician-turned-novelist who also wrote The Andromeda Strain, Congo, Sphere, Disclosure and Rising Sun, and created ER. He sold Jurassic Park to Spielberg pre-publication. David Koepp rewrote Crichton’s draft into the film’s shooting script. The novel and film were such a phenomenon that Crichton wrote a sequel, The Lost World, explicitly because Spielberg asked for one.

✗ Cut! The answer is Michael Crichton. He wrote the novel in 1990, Spielberg bought the rights pre-publication for $1.5M, and Crichton did the first screenplay draft before David Koepp took it over. Crichton also created ER and wrote Andromeda Strain, Congo, Sphere, Disclosure and more. Stephen King, Clancy and Grisham are all bestsellers of the same era, but Jurassic Park is pure Crichton.

✓ Correct! Schindler’s List — which swept the 1994 Oscars with seven wins, including Best Picture and Spielberg’s first Best Director statue. He famously shot it in 72 days for about $22 million in parallel with prepping Jurassic Park, and took no salary. He’d later win a second Best Director for Saving Private Ryan (1998). The Color Purple went 0-for-11 at the Oscars in 1986 — one of the most notorious snubs ever.

✗ Cut! The answer is Schindler’s List. The Color Purple (1985) got 11 nominations and won zero. Empire of the Sun (1987) went home empty too. Amistad (1997) was respected but not a Best Director winner. Schindler’s List won seven Oscars in 1994 — Best Picture, Best Director and more — finally breaking Spielberg’s decade-long Academy drought.

✓ Correct! Omaha Beach — the bloodiest of the five D-Day sectors, where US forces took catastrophic casualties in the opening hours. Spielberg filmed the sequence on Curracloe Strand in Ireland with around 1,000 extras, desaturated the film stock, and removed the protective shutters from cameras to capture that signature jittery, hand-held look. The Ryan opening is routinely voted one of the greatest battle scenes in film history.

✗ Cut! The answer is Omaha Beach. Iwo Jima and Okinawa were Pacific, 1945. Sword Beach was the British D-Day sector. Omaha was the bloodiest of the Normandy landings, and it’s where Spielberg’s shaky-cam, desaturated, shutter-stripped sequence is set — shot on Curracloe Strand in Ireland with about 1,000 extras, many of them Irish Defence Forces reservists.

✓ Correct! The Fabelmans — co-written with his Lincoln and Munich collaborator Tony Kushner. Paul Dano plays the father (based on Spielberg’s engineer dad Arnold), Michelle Williams plays the mother (based on his artist mum Leah) and earned a Best Actress Oscar nom, Gabriel LaBelle plays young Sammy/Steven, and David Lynch cameos as John Ford in the film’s stunning final scene. Seven Oscar nominations in total, including Picture and Director.

✗ Cut! The answer is The Fabelmans. “Amblin” is the name of his 1968 short and his production company, not this film. The Fabelmans (2022), co-written with Tony Kushner, dramatises Spielberg’s New Jersey-to-Arizona-to-California childhood with the family name lightly fictionalised. It earned seven Oscar nominations including Picture, Director and a Best Actress nod for Michelle Williams.