Before you read this, it must be said that the following does not mean the The Shark is Still Working is available yet. We wish more than anything that this article could be featuring good tidings of the imminent release of the doc; that at long last a distribution agreement has been made and it is coming your way very soon.

Unfortunately, we still have to save that news for another day, but today's news is pretty cool too. We now have a new official trailer to share with you! It's not just something that we reworked simply for the sake of having something new to throw out there however. There is a uniqueness to it that we can add to the long list of poetic fortunes that have graced our project every step of the way. You'll see what we mean as you read on.

One of the great honors we've been afforded on The Shark is Still Working, is having been able to introduce many an islander and summer dink to two huge contributors to the Jaws phenomenon for the very first time. The first was Jaws poster artist Roger Kastel who we mentioned in an article several months back. The other was the Jaws theatrical trailer voice artist finally putting a face to the threatening voice that made us all hear the phrase, "There is a creature alive today?" in our sleep.

We at The Shark is Still Working had actually heard over the years that many Jaws fans sincerely believed that that voice was Orson Welles. None of us knew who it was, we just knew it definitely was not Orson Welles!

It turns out that voice belongs to a chap named Percy Rodrigues. Percy's voice work is not only legendary, but he was also all over the place as a TV actor in the 60's and 70's. You may not know the name, but if you name a hit TV show of that era, chances are that Percy appeared in it at some point and you would know his face.

At one point late in the life of TSISW, Michael A. Smith, a journalist friend of ours in Kansas, asked if we had considered interviewing Percy Rodrigues. Since we weren't familiar with the name, Michael gladly filled us in, and the story goes that within an hour of learning of him for the first time, we were on the phone with Percy's representation in Los Angeles. Shortly after that, we were on the on the phone with Percy himself. His voice was as unmistakable as ever. Percy sounded great, and in that immortal voice, he enthusiastically agreed to be interviewed for The Shark is Still Working. Three weeks later, we descended upon his digs in Palm Springs to chat about his role in making the word "Jaws" a part of the contemporary vernacular.

So far in this early season of fielding reviews for The Shark is Still Working, there have been certain areas we've come to expect to be complimented on simply because it's been happening with such regularity. Of the reviews from anyone considering themselves even a moderate Jaws fan, Percy's presence has been one of those areas that gets most lavish praise without exception. This stems from the fact that true enthusiasts know it wasn't just the Spielbergs, Scheiders, and Shaws of the world who made the Jaws mystique what it is.

Fast forward to the total completion of TSISW and we can look back on our experience of making this documentary, and realize that we've really lived any Jaws fan's dream. We've spent time with virtually every surviving personality who significantly contributed to Jaws. We've visited every imaginable location where Jaws was shot including all the spots where inserts were done in Los Angeles. We've been in the very room where the Jaws poster was painted. We've signed our names on the very easel where that famous image was created. We've been in the room where Jaws was edited, and even looked through the moviola that editor Verna Fields used. We scoured the Universal vault and uncovered over a hundred photos that had never seen the light of day. We lived for a week in the log cabin that Steven Spielberg lived in while making Jaws. After all of that it just seemed like our Jaws geekery had finally hit a ceiling and there would be nothing left for us to experience. Then came an opportunity just about as ultimate as any of them.

For some time, we had been considering making a new TSISW trailer for our website. When contemplating what we should do to make it better and different, we would often bring up the idea of having Percy Rodrigues do voiceover work for it. We'd often stop in our tracks considering that to be just way too unattainable, but then we'd think, "Why not? After all, we got Roy Scheider to narrate the documentary itself and once upon a time, that seemed impossible." All we had to do was ask, and Percy was ecstatic about the idea of doing the voice for our new trailer even though he'd been retired for years. So just a few weeks later, Percy was making the voyage from Palm Springs back into Los Angeles just to lay down narration for this new TSISW trailer.

You may want to dig up your Jaws DVD and review the original theatrical trailer. We had fun taking the unforgettable dialogue from that trailer and coming up with an adapted version of it that would suit TSISW. It's amazing how much Percy sounds just like he did thirty years ago. He was so great!

As an added bonus, it's certainly worth mentioning that he recorded it in the same studio where he recorded the Jaws trailer in 1975. Can't beat that with a compressed air tank, can you?