If it's true that most of our adult hang-ups and predilections can be traced back to childhood, then I think I know the moment I became someone who loves to talk back to the television. I was twelve years old, watching an episode of my favorite show, Charlie's Angels, in my family's living room in Holbrook, Arizona, when I turned to my father and said, "Dad, what's prostitution?"

How I could enjoy that show week after week and not know what prostitution is seems absurd to me looking back, because wasn't every episode about prostitution? What did I think the ratty-haired day players in fishnets were being arrested for, money laundering? In any event, I asked the question and here's what my father replied.

"       ."

That's right, folks. Absolutely nothing. Silence. Crickets. This could have been the jumping off point for the birds and the bees talk I never got and really could have used, but no. He didn't even bother to make up a lie.

Since that fateful day, I've tried to populate my world with people who like to say things about what they see on television; who ask questions, make observations, offer fashion commentary and occasionally crack wise. The MVP in this department is my roommate for the last seven years and best friend for ten, Tony Tripoli. From his end of the Comedy Couch (our friend Marcus's nickname for the well-traveled forest green sofa that faces our 26-inch screen), Tony can make sense of any confounding image or sound byte that might emanate forth from our beloved idiot box, except for maybe Caroline in the City. He's not a miracle worker.

At the moment, Tony and I are on our way to my favorite movie rental place, Video Master in Studio City. I love it for its colorful movie categorization system, the divisor of which, I figure, is either gay or seriously bi-curious. Who else would give John Waters and Gregg Araki their own kiosks? Or bother to stock multiple copies of Ab Fab? And then there's the colorful categorization system. Say you wanted to rent All About Eve, you wouldn't find it under Drama, Comedy or even Classics. You'd find it on the Legend of Bette Davis shelf, which is just above the shelf dedicated to The Scares of Stephen King. Think you'll find Driving Miss Daisy in drama? Think again. It's under Oscar Winners You Never Want To See Again As Long As You Live, right between Unforgiven and Ghandi. Okay, I made that last one up, but you get the idea.

"Why don't you just go to Blockbuster?" wonders Tony, who makes his living as a singer-who-moves in theme parks, on cruise ships, and, for a brief time in the mid-'90s, on ice in a Las Vegas casino. "It's closer to the house and they let you keep the tapes longer."

"I'm trying to give it up to the mom and pops," I say, turning into the parking lot.

Once inside, I head straight to the counter to ask directions, hoping to forego the usual goose chase I go on when I try to find a movie here on my own. The clerk, Ross Fowler, according to his nametag, is a 35-ish, bushy-headed, tattooed fellow in Daria glasses and a seriously distressed Sex Pistols T-shirt. He's in the middle of a hushed but heated phone conversation that clearly has nothing to do with the fine art of video clerking. "Look, I can't talk about this now," he says. "I'll call you later."

He hangs up and gives me a 'This better be good' look. I try to think of an obscure movie to ask for, something that would have been worth interrupting his important phone call, but the obscure movies that I'm trying to think of are so obscure that I can't think of them. What is it about my personality that makes me want to apologize to people for simply wanting them to do their job?

"Where would I find Jaws?" I ask as cheerfully as possible. "The original."

"Horror," Ross says dryly, his subtext clearly smacking of "Duh."

"Well, I don't know," I say playfully. "You guys have so many special categories. For all I know, Joan Crawford was the voice of the shark which would put it in the Mad About Joan section."

This gets a laugh out of Ross. Thank God.

"Here it is," says Tony, arriving at the horror aisle before me. He grabs the tape from the shelf and meets me back at the counter.

"I'm sorry I was rude to you just then," Ross says, before taking my membership card and scanning it into the computer. "Girl trouble," he adds, gesturing to the phone.

"It's cool," I say.

Tony, uninterested in girl trouble in general, and Ross's in particular, turns to me and says, "So, Dennis, do we have to be nice or can we be mean?"

"I want you to be whatever you feel," I say, "but from what I understand, Jaws is pretty great."

"Just wait till we do The Bodyguard!" Tony says menacingly. If Tony were the type to sport a long curly mustache, he'd be twirling it right now.

"One opus at a time," I say. "We gotta make sure they like the first one."

"You guys doing some kind of show or something?" asks Ross.

"An article," I say. "For my job, I write for magazines and my editor at British Premier wants me to write something about Jaws for it's 25th anniversary."

"It fucking rocks, dude," says Ross.

"So I hear," I say. "I've never seen it."

Ross looks at me as though I have three heads, two of which are connected by a long strand of earwax. "You don't know how bizarre that is to even imagine," he says, incredulously.

"I know, I suck," I admit.

"Jaws is number three on my all-time top 10," says Ross.

I can tell by the look on his face that Ross is dying for me to inquire as to what 1 and 2 are, but I resist the temptation. "So because I've never seen it," I continue, "I said to my editor, 'How 'bout I invite some mouthy friends over and watch it for the first time and write about that?' And he said to go for it, believe it or not." I grab the worse-for-wear Jaws video box from the counter and stick it under my arm. "So now I have to do it," I say.

"You gonna put something in there about how Jaws wasn't the original title?" Ross inquires.

"I don't know," I say. "I didn't know that."

"It was a last-minute decision of the part of the novelist, Peter Benchley, and his book editor," he says, his tone shifting smoothly away from Cheech and Chong land into Siskel and Ebert territory. "Benchley was considering titles like A Stillness in the Water, Jaws of Leviathan and Jaws of Death, and he decided with his editor, like twenty minutes before the thing went to press, that the only word they even thought worked at all was 'jaws' so they were like, 'Fuck it, dude. Let's just call the thing Jaws.'"

"Really?" says Tony teasingly. "They said, 'Fuck it, dude?'"

"Or words to that effect," says Ross.

I pull one of the half dozen Uni-ball pens I carry everywhere out of my pocket, ask Ross to repeat the passed-on titles and scribble them on my receipt. "Thanks, man," I say, tucking the receipt into my wallet. "I guess you get to know a lot about movies working here."

"I guess," says Ross. "But I've always been obsessed with movies, and I know that Jaws story because someone was talking about it at school. I used to go to UCLA. Film school."

"I always thought it would be so cool to go to film school," I say.

"Since when?" wonders Tony.

"When I was in high school," I say defensively. "I still think it would be cool."

"Get a DVD player," says Ross. "Same difference."

"I've been telling him we should get a DVD player," says Tony, finally finding a common ground with our friend in the camouflage pants.

"It's a cash-flow thing," I say.

"I said I'd split it with you," says Tony.

"You're unemployed," I say. Tony hasn't worked since his last cruise ship gig ended two months ago. Though he managed to save a good deal of money over the six-month stint, it's going fast and now, Tony's starting to feel pressure to find the next source of income. What's more, he's burnt out on performing and determined to and stay in L.A. this time. So if you hear of anything...

"They're not that expensive," says Ross. "You can get a DVD player for like $300 now."

"Next big assignment I get, I'll buy one," I vow, before following Tony to the exit. I turn back to Ross and thank him for his help. "Have fun at your little screening party," he says.

"We'll try," I reply, just as the door closes behind me. Tony and I climb into my Toyota 4Runner but I don't close my door all the way. "What?" questions Tony.

"He seems cool," I say. "And it seemed like he kind of wanted us to invite him to join us. Did you get that?"

"He's creepy, Dennis," says Tony. "Those tattoos looked homemade. He's going to want to do beer bongs and shit and I'm going to be making cracks about people's hair and stuff and I don't want to worry about alienating the straight guy."

"Please, he works at the gayest video store ever," I say. "Besides, you heard him. Jaws is number three on his all-time top ten. I could use someone that actually knows stuff about the movie. We can't just make fun of people's hair."

"You haven't seen these people's hair," says Tony.

"He's probably going to say, 'No' anyway."

"It's your article. It's just that no one likes a know-it-all, Dennis. That's all I'm saying."

"I'll be right back," I say and get out of the truck.

"Just remember, if he ends up being crazy, you're going to have to start going to Blockbuster and you know what that means. No porn."

I dash back inside and wait while Ross finishes with another customer. Why does it suddenly seem like I'm asking the prettiest girl in the whole eighth grade to slow dance? I stammer through my invitation then write the directions on a piece of scrap paper. Ross actually seems less enthused about the prospect than I thought he would be, either that or he's playing hard to get. Still, he shoves the directions into his pocket and says he'll do his best.

Two hours later, with fifteen minutes to go before our guests are to arrive, Tony and I return to our North Hollywood condo from the grocery store to find Ross waiting at our doorstep.

"Oh, great," says Tony under his breath. "He's already stalking us."

"Sorry, I'm early, dude," Ross says, as we greet him on the sidewalk. Interesting. He said 'dude' singular. He didn't say 'dudes' plural so I'm choosing to think that I'm the dude and Tony's just some non-dude with the dude who wouldn't know true dude-ness if it bit him in the ass. "I came straight from work," Ross explains, before pulling a green and white box from behind his back and adding, "via Krispy Kreme."

"Rock on!" shouts Tony. Apparently, my roommate is only leery of people who are different from him when they don't show up with donuts.

"So who else is coming?" wonders Ross. "Any, you know, straight chicks?"

"Two actually," I say, unlocking the front door. "But I thought you were seeing someone. The girl on the phone."

"That's pretty much over," says Ross. "So are you two, like, together?" he asks, gesturing to the wannabe-artsy black and white pictures of Tony and I over the couch.

"No," I say. "That's why we're still roommates after seven years."

I hear a car door slam outside and look out the window to see our friend Lauren O'Donovan trudging up the sidewalk, a bottle of Vodka in one hand, a bottle of Cranberry juice in the other. Quite an unusual cocktail herself, Ms. O'Donovan is a half-Irish, half-Chinese, raised-in-Australia aerobic teacher and aspiring stand-up comic, the only one that I know of in captivity.

"What's with the booze?" I ask, after she enters.

"They've found that it really comes in handy when you want to get drunk," she replies.

"Barry?" I ask. Barry's her boyfriend of five years who, much to Lauren's dismay, seems to have taken up permanent residence on the square of linoleum that falls halfway between shitting and getting off the pot.

Lauren doesn't respond so I ask the question again. "Barry?"

"No, Rick Shroeder," she snaps. "Of course, Barry. But it's the same old story."

Before I even have time to introduce her to Ross, Lauren is in the kitchen mixing her first drink. Just as she returns, there's a knock on the front door followed by the words, "Land shark."

"Marcus is here," says Tony.

I open the door to greet Marcus Goldin, a junior entertainment lawyer and closet Betty Crocker I met doing the AIDS Ride in 1995. Our friendship was born when I, fed up with the official Ride lunchables, made a detour to Taco Bell. Marcus was waiting in line at the next register and when the song "Dancing Queen" came on over the Muzak, we simultaneously began tapping our bike shoes. "I've made Rice Krispie treats in the shape of severed limbs," he announces, holding up a plate covered in tin foil. "Help yourself."

"Is this everyone?" asks Lauren impatiently.

"Almost," I say, before climbing onto the couch and knocking three times on the ceiling.

"Who are we missing, Tony Orlando?" asks Marcus.

"My neighbor," I explain. "I didn't think she'd say yes when I invited her. I just didn't want her to complain if we get loud and unruly, but she said yes so here we go. She's a psychiatrist or psychologist, whatever Bob Newhart was, I think. She has a practice in Sherman Oaks and teaches part-time I think, too, at one of those schools-without-walls places. Anyway, if her comments at the yearly condo association meeting are any indication, she should have some interesting things to say."

"Sorry, I'm late, kids. I had to catch the end of Poison: Behind the Music," says Dr Beaverman, when I open the door.

While the rest of us figured jeans and T-shirts would suffice, my forty-something neighbor with the unnatural blonde bob decided to dress for the occasion in a fitted charcoal coat and skirt that's either Chanel or wishes it was. A pair of black-framed half-glasses hang from her neck atop enough gold chains to dress all the background actors in A Night at the Roxbury.

"Everyone, this is Dr. Beverly Beaverman," I say, resting a hand on her left shoulder pad. "She'll be giving us lots of psychological insights today."

"But just about the movie," she clarifies. "I don't want to hear about your fucked up lives." With that, she plops down on the end of the couch that's closest to the door. "I'm kidding," she says patting Ross's thigh playfully. "Okay, I'm not really."

While I try to track down the various remotes we'll be needing, my guests settle into the viewing positions that they'll eventually make their own. Lauren, Ross and Dr. Beaverman occupy, from left to right, our larger couch while Marcus sprawls on the floor. Tony brings a chair in from the kitchen and sits backward on it like Chachi used to do on Happy Days, which leaves the loveseat for me. Before I take my place on it, I slide Jaws into the VCR, position my mini-cassette recorder on the coffee table between the donuts and the goldfish crackers and press, 'record.'

"I grew up in Massachusetts, about a 100 miles from where this movie was filmed," says Marcus just as Ross grabs the remote and starts the movie. "I was swimming in the ocean when I was nine, and I got, like, bumped or something by a shark. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever experienced up until then and I was hysterical about it for days. A few months later this movie came out and I watched the whole thing with my mouth hanging open. It was like it had been made solely to fuck with me. I swear to God, I wasn't able to go into the bathroom in the dark until that rolling blackout a few months ago."

"It's hard for me to remember what happens in Jaws," admits Tony, "because the first porno film I ever saw was called Gums, which was about a mermaid who sucked off guys in the ocean until their dicks fell off. My best friend's older brother had a tape of it. Every once in a while, an image will pop into my head and I won't know if it's Jaws or Gums."

"I saw it first-run in the theatre," recalls Dr. Beaverman, the lone baby boomer of our posse, "and all I remember is that I was wearing a halter top."

While we wait for the FBI warning to pass, I shove a donut into my mouth and listen intently as Ross dispenses more background info. "This movie was like the Waterworld of its day," he reports. "It was way over-budget and way over-schedule and getting badmouthed around Hollywood like crazy. And the mechanical shark never worked right.  tells this story about how all you could hear coming over the walkie-talkies was, 'The shark isn't working... the shark isn't working.'"

If Lauren's glazed expression is any indication, the rest of the gang are not nearly as captivated by today's free film history lesson as I hoped they'd be. "I thought the red food coloring on these would keep me from indulging," says Lauren, polishing off her first Rice Krispie foot. "Guess I was wrong."

At last, the film begins, with a tracking shot of a gaggle of hormonally-charged teens carrying on at a late night beach party.

"Everyone's making out," I say, taken aback by the blatant promiscuity. "Not very Speilbergian."

"It was the '70s," says Dr. Beaverman wistfully. "The sexual revolution was in full swing."

"Without us," carps Tony.

I shush my friends so that we can watch in silence as Chrissy, a leggy and carefree babe, who even has '70s breasts, bounds off from the party for a moonlight swim.

"I skinny-dipped in the '70s," reveals Dr. Beaverman, "but I didn't have a shark after my white ass, just a bellhop." We all look at her. This wasn't necessarily the kind of commentary I was expecting from my esteemed condo association secretary, but what the hell, bring it on. "It was at a Holiday Inn in Monterey," she adds.

"Did he catch you?" I ask.

"I don't remember," she says though she clearly does.

Just then, John Williams' indelible 'Impending Shark Attack' music kicks in, signaling the fact that little Miss Chrissy is about to be punished: for her wanton ways, her underage boozing, and most unforgivably, those tacky gold hoop earrings.

"Are we seeing her private parts?" I wonder, surprised by what looks to me like an underwater two-shot of Chrissy and The Beav.

"You're allowed to show bush as long as she dies a painful death," says Marcus.

"Why didn't that rule apply to Showgirls?" wonders Lauren.

"No rules applied to Showgirls," I whine, as if Lauren should know better than to ask such a question in this house. "That's what makes it such heaven."

Chrissy does indeed die a painful death, but not before being dragged about the Atlantic, grabbing a buoy with one of her remaining extremities and stating the obvious: "It hurts."

"That first moment when she gets pulled underwater..." says Ross, "...Speilberg actually did the pulling himself. Chrissy was hooked up to some kind of cable and he was the one who yanked it."

"Well, if you want something done right..." I say.

We laugh and scream through Chrissy's brutal final moments, but are soon brought to silence by the gruesome sight of Chrissy's crab-covered fingers poking out of the sand like the table centerpiece at a hand model convention.

"Not the first case of crabs to be contracted on that beach," says Lauren.

"There was a moment just like this in Gums," recalls Tony, "but the guy was still hard which I always thought was weird."

Soon, Roy Scheider is introduced, as Amity's new sheriff, Martin Brody, who is deathly afraid of the water even though he has never seen Jaws or even read the book.

"I don't like Roy Schneider," Tony decides after the actor has been on screen for maybe six seconds. "He looks like a wife beater."

"I think he's sort of hot," I admit, "in a leathery sort of way."

"Who thinks he's scary?" asks Dr. Beaverman requesting a show of hands. Tony, Dr. Beaverman, Marcus and Lauren all reach for the sky. Ross pretends to be preoccupied with breaking a toe off a piece of Rice Krispie foot so he doesn't have to vote. "It's four against one for scary," says Dr. Beaverman. "The tribe has spoken."

A few minutes later, when Brody returns to his office to do some typing, Tony initiates another survey. "Who in the room really believes he can type?" he asks. Crickets. "It's like Demi Moore in Disclosure going on about the computer chips and megabytes. Uh-huh, right."

"I miss Demi," says Marcus with a faraway look in his eye. "I mean, how great could Idaho be?"

I'm this close to copping to my own Demi-related feelings of abandonment when a more worthy object of my concern appears on screen for the first time, Lorraine Gary, as Brody's dutiful blonde wife, Ellen.

"What is she wearing?" I want to know.

"Bell-bottom sleeves," says Dr. Beaverman dryly. "I used to have a shirt just like that and I'd always end up losing my keys."

"Lorraine Gary was married to Sid Scheinberg, the head of the studio," Ross informs us. "She could probably wear whatever she wanted."

"Why don't they just stick her head in the water?" wonders Tony. "That shark would swim for Bermuda."

"Okay, I have a theory," Dr. Beaverman announces, clasping her French-manicured hands together for effect. "Can we pause for a second, Dennis?" I oblige. "It is quite clear to me at this point that Scheider has a castration complex," she says, taking on a more academic tone than before. "This would explain not only his fear of the shark, but the fact that he all-but-cowers in terror every time Lorraine Gary enters the room."

"Anything else before I unpause?" I ask her.

"No," she says. "Oh wait, there is something else: Jaws is Mommy."

We all nod dutifully at this unusual declaration though none of us really now why. Before I restart the movie, I steal a glance at Ross to see how he's holding up. He catches me and grins, like a person who's actually enjoying himself. All right, then.

A few scenes later, we're granted an audience with the town's mayor, a husky good ol' boy and shark skeptic who belches out lines like, "The beaches will be open this weekend!" I have to say, it's the first time the movie loses me.

"He just seems like a small-town, dim-witted, Boss Hogg cliché in a tacky blazer," I say. "Like he was supposed to be in Smokey and the Bandit and he wandered onto the wrong set."

"It's because we've seen so many people imitate this movie," reasons Ross. "In the mid '70s, the mayor wasn't considered over-the-top."

The question of how-much-is-too-much segues us smoothly into the next scene, which opens with a shot of a gigantic female extra in a straining-to-keep-it-all-in bathing suit walking along the beach.

"Jaws should just eat her," says Tony. "He wouldn't be hungry again until the sequel."

"Now, who says the fitness craze of the '80s and '90s didn't do any good?" poses Lauren, who makes her living whipping such women into shape.

"It's certainly no Baywatch," I concur. "I mean, where's Yasmine Bleeth when you need her?"

"Fred Segal, I imagine," says Lauren.

"I was going to say Promises Malibu," says Tony.

"If you only have room for one of those lines, Dennis, go with Promises Malibu," says Lauren graciously. "It's edgier."

"May I remind you all that this is Massachusetts," asserts Marcus, our East Coast expert. "There's nothing there but fat white people. Trust me, I've lived it."

"Brody's son has a pretty hot body," I inexplicably say out loud.

"For a 12-year-old," chides Lauren.

Suddenly, the 'ISA' music is pumping again and Jaws is swimming around under a young boy on a raft named Alex who was warned by his mother just minutes before to get out of the water because he was turning into a prune and who, for the record, doesn't have near as tight a body as Brody's kid. Around this same time, another beachgoer notices that his playful pup Pippin is missing in action.

"You know it's a bad sign when the dog disappears" says Lauren.

"And you knew Alex was a goner as soon as he was given a name and a couple of lines," figures Ross. "Jaws won't eat extras, but day players might just as well have 'Lunch' tattooed on their rafts."

"What I love is that Jaws eats dogs," I say. "And kids! Kids and dogs never get eaten anymore at the movies because our culture can't handle it."

"I know I couldn't handle seeing a kid get eaten on screen," says Dr. Beaverman. "It'd spoil me. I'd think, 'Why not take 'em all?.'"

"Didn't a kid get eaten in Jurassic Park 2," asks Tony, "by all those yappy little motherfuckers?"

"Yes," says Ross. "But they didn't show it."

"The next Jurassic movie, every person in it should get eaten," I proclaim as though I'm running for mayor of Hollywood. "Kids, girls, blondes, everybody."

"Starting with Tea Leoni," says Ross, holding up his beer bottle as if to toast. As he lowers it, Tony gives me a look as if to say, 'Okay, he can stay.'

With Amity now in a panic, Scheider calls for back up and soon we're introduced to a pair of spirited great white aficionados; rich kid-turned Oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and been-there, harpooned-that shark hunter, Quint (Robert Shaw). The mismatched pair may disagree on how best to properly deter the man-eating beast, but they're of one mind when it comes to sporting painfully unsightly facial hair.

"Dreyfuss looks so young," I marvel, "like a little elf with those muttonchops. I bet he lives in a hollow tree."

"What do you mean little elf?" bellows Tony. "He looks like a homeless person. If they had a freeway overpass on Nantucket, he'd be living under it in a cardboard box."

Tony's distaste for Dreyfuss prompts Ross to let loose with another little known fact about Jaws. In the novel, he explains, there's a sex scene between Dreyfuss' hotshot oceanographer and Lorraine Gary's frustrated wife that didn't make the movie. "Speilberg must have taken one look at his cast and thought, 'There are limits to what an audience can take,'" says Dr. Beaverman.

"I can either have Robert Shaw getting eaten alive or those to getting it on," says Tony speaking for Speilberg, "but I can't have both."

Meanwhile, back in Amity, Alex's grieving mother puts a bounty on Jaws' head, causing every yahoo with a fishing pole and some unused sick days to head to the ocean and try to bring him down. It seems an effective ploy for soon, a shark is killed, but Dreyfuss suspects that it's actually a Jaws Mini-Me. His hunch is that that Jaws Proper is still at large and getting hungrier by the second. So he heads to Brody's house to try and convince the sheriff to let him cut the fucker open.

"Lorraine Gary is so emasculating in this scene," observes Dr. Beaverman as Dreyfuss gets hammered while sitting with the Brody's at their dinner table. "I'm surprised she doesn't turn to Dreyfuss and say, 'Last night, Martin couldn't get aroused. More wine, Matt?'"

"I think my mother was up for her part," says Marcus.

After enduring all manner of marital woe subtext, Hooper finally gets Brody drunk enough to let him slice the dead shark open. The impromptu autopsy nets the pair a tin can, a license plate and a bunch of shark guts, but, alas, no ten year-old boy parts. "Wouldn't it be cool if they found one of those Farrah Fawcett makeup heads?" I say.

"Or that tacky necklace from Titanic," says Tony.

"Or a six pack of Billy beer," says Ross.

As long as we're turning Mini-Jaws into a Lost and Found / time capsule, the ladies have a few requests as well. "Maybe my fucking prom date that never showed is in there," says Lauren before heading into the kitchen to refresh her drink.

"My twenties and thirties might be in there too," says Dr. Beaverman.

"Marcus?" I ask.

"It can be anything?" he says contemplatively. After about ten seconds of careful consideration, he says, "Okay, either a bunch of lost episodes of Falcon Crest or an effective and inexpensive AIDS vaccine."

"Glad to see you've got your priorities in order," says Dr. Beaverman.

"Can I change mine to world peace?" calls Lauren from the kitchen.

"What is this, Miss Teen USA?" wonders Ross.

"No, that's next week," I say, "but you're welcome to come over. We'll all be here."

"It's a national holiday in this house," says Tony, "like the running of the bulls in Pamplona."

Just then, something on the screen catches both the light and my attention. "Hold on a second," I say. "Is Lorraine Gary wearing the same gold hoop earrings that Chrissy got eaten in?"

"Looks like it," says Marcus.

"Did she nick her husband's keys and sneak into the morgue or what?" I ask. "No wonder she's not very freaked out about the shark attacks; she's pilfering accessories from the dead."

Then, out of the clear blue sky, Ross lets out groans as though he's just smashed his hand in a car door. "This fucking tape blows!" he carps. "I wasn't going to say anything, Dennis, but this pan and scan is bullshit. Why didn't you get the letterboxed copy?"

"You rented it to me," I remind him then pass the buck to Tony, "and he picked it out."

"Oh no, I got the wrong tape," Tony says dryly. "How will I ever be able to live with myself?"

"Okay, next time I'm in charge of the tape," declares Ross.

"So you'll be our special Video Master?" Tony says, teasingly.

"Sure, why not?" says Ross tentatively.

"Shouldn't that be Video Master master?" wonders Marcus.

"We don't expect monogamy," I assure Ross. "You can see other parties. We just don't want to hear about it."

Though I've never given much thought to such matters, I see Ross's point about the drawbacks of pan and scan during a confrontation scene between Dreyfuss and Shaw, which scaled down for video, looks like a spat between sideburns.

"Screw the letterboxing," says Dr. Beaverman. "What I need is subtitles. I can't understand a word Robert Shaw is saying. I think he's supposed to be Irish, but he sounds like he's got an entire mouthful of Lucky Charms."

Like the movie itself, my living room simmers down considerably when Dreyfuss, Scheider and Shaw head out on the shark hunt that makes up the final third of the film.

"Love triangle alert!" chirps Dr. Beaverman. "Dreyfuss and Scheider are clearly competing for Shaw's affections in this scene. They need validation from Daddy and you don't have to have a doctorate in psychology with an emphasis in Freudian theory to see that... although it helps."

Shaw adds fuel to Dr. Beaverman's theory by giving Dreyfuss and Scheider such innuendo-laden orders as, "Keep it steady, I've got something big here," and the ever-popular sex party favorite, "Get behind me."

Spent from an afternoon of shark chasing and double entendres, the trio head down to the hold to have some grub and get loaded. When Shaw and Dreyfuss start playing, "My scar's cooler than your scar," I realize what's missing from Jaws for me; someone to boff. "Where's Mel Gibson and Rene Russo when you need them?" I wonder, referring to the photogenic twosome who ripped off this scene in the considerably less-enduring Lethal Weapon 3.

"This movie would never get made like this today," laments Ross. "You'd have Charlize Theron in a wet suit and Ben Affleck in glasses as the shark expert."

"Swapping scar stories with Jackie Chan," adds Marcus.

"And it would suck!" concludes Lauren.

"I so want Dreyfuss to go, 'Speaking of scars, boys, when I was eight days old, the rabbi cut me right here in my bathing suit area,'" says Tony. "'You can touch it if you want.'"

"Now that you mention it, I have a question," says Marcus. "How many Jews do you know who hunt? I'm related to tons of them and they only hunt for things that can't outrun them, usually at outlet malls."

Then Shaw starts into his monologue about how he survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in WW2 but that scores of his comrades were eating by sharks. "This is one of the most incredible parts of the film for me," says Ross. "They actually give you character development in the middle of all this tension. You couldn't do that today because the producers would be going, 'The test audiences think this is boring. We can't have people talking. Someone needs to get eaten or laid every eight minutes.'"

"Starting with me," says Lauren, whose now on her third Absolut and cranberry.

Daylight comes and after some embarrassingly obvious foreshadowing involving compressed air canisters ("You screw around with these tanks and they're going to explode!"), the three sharkbusters get serious with the toothy title character to the strains of some John Williams music that seems downright happy.

"I don't mean to be cranky," Tony says, "but this shark has eaten like fourteen residents, and Pippin the dog, and they're giving us The Nutcracker? What is that?"

"They don't know whether to kill the shark or do a little ice dancing," says Lauren, who's starting to slur her words the way drunk people do in movies.

Which brings us to my favorite Jaws moment so far: when Brody is at the foot of the boat and Jaws, liberated for the first time from his theme music, just sort of pokes his head out at him as if to say, "Does this fin make me look fat?" and then disappears back under the water. I nearly choke on my Rice Krispie forearm.

"Spielberg can do those scare-the-shit-out-of-you moments like nobody else," maintains Ross. "In fact, remember that earlier scene where Dreyfuss goes underwater and finds that fisherman's boat, and that dead guy's head pops up in his face? Well, that moment was a reshoot. They had done a test screening without it and Speilberg realized he could get another scream out of the audience so he reshot that moment at his own expense in the swimming pool at his editor's house." Pleased with himself, Ross takes a swig of his beer, then adds, "Watching this makes me realize how on auto-pilot he was for Jurassic Park."

Then, for some reason, Dreyfuss decides to climb in a cage and go underwater for a little one-on-one time with Jaws. Jaws, however, doesn't want to hear his bullshit stories about the making of American Graffiti and makes quick business of destroying the cage. "A lot of this footage is actually a real shark," says Ross, as Jaws repeatedly tries to eat Dreyfuss through the bars, "but because the shark wasn't as big as Jaws is supposed to be, they used a smaller cage and stuck a midget in there, the same guy who doubled for Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet."

"He must have figured if Liz didn't eat him, the shark wouldn't," says Tony.

"Actually, he was totally traumatized by the shark," says Ross.

"Who wouldn't be?" I ask. "Could you imagine? One day, you're singing The Oompa Loompa Song and snacking on M & Ms and the next, they're like, 'Okay, put on that wet suit, climb into this cage and try to look like a scared Jewish guy when the shark tries to eat you.'"

"Here's what I've always wondered about little people," mumbles Lauren. "If you don't want to go into show biz, does your family pressure you?"

Suddenly, the room gets dead quiet so that we can watch Robert Shaw get eaten alive. Four times, thanks to the magic of rewind. It's totally awesome and I can't get enough of it. Lauren, however, is another story. By the fourth regurgitation, she's so queasy she has to cover her mouth and dash to the bathroom. Tony chases after her. I stay put and glance over to Ross who's staring straight at the screen and trying not to look uncomfortable.

"She's actually very nice," I tell him. "It's very rare that she throws up the first time she meets someone."

Back on the screen, Dreyfuss is still underwater hiding so it becomes Jaws versus Scheider's Brody in the final showdown. Before the hydrophobic sheriff recalls what we all learned earlier about those air canisters, he tries everything he can think of to deter the peckish predator, at one point even poking the animal with some kind of stick, a ploy I compare to attacking an elephant with a crayon. "Roy Scheider," Dr. Beaverman proclaims. "Acupuncturist of the Sea."

Air tank at the ready, Scheider is seconds away from eliminating his foe but before he does, he first must deliver one of those crowd-pleasing, farewell fuck-you lines like, "Hasta la vista, baby," that has, in the years since this movie was released, become an adventure movie staple. "Smile, you son of a bitch," Scheider screams then blows Jaws up with the gas tank. Though it was probably in the script, I like to imagine Schneider nabbed that line from the photographer who did his last head shots.

"I heard that they blew a cow up for that shot," says Marcus, as shark guts rain down on the ocean, "but I don't know if that's true."

"They would never let that happen today," I say. "Alicia Silverstone wouldn't allow it."

"But if you were a cow, wouldn't you rather be blown up for Jaws than turned into a bunch of Big Macs and sandals?" poses Ross. "I mean, you'd live forever."

Tony returns from tending to Lauren just as Dreyfuss reemerges to join Scheider Titanic-style on a piece of floating boat. "How much you wanna bet that there's an alternate take where they kiss?" says Marcus. "Because it looks like they're dying to."

"Rent Gums," says Tony.

As the credits roll, I can't help but whine a bit about the fact that I wasn't part of the original Jaws phenomenon. Hell, I wasn't even part of the Gums phenomenon. Sure, I did buy the novelty record, "Mr. Jaws" by Dickie Goodman, on 45 but that's not the same as screaming my head off in a crowded theater and not showering for months on end out of sheer terror. "I missed out," I say despondently.

"But if you hadn't missed out, we wouldn't have had today," says Marcus, the king of the positive spin.

"And I would have had to get drunk and throw up all by myself," says Lauren emerging from the bathroom. We watch with a mixture of concern and disbelief as she staggers to the center of the room, drops to her knees then curls up on the floor in the fetal position. Ross literally has to step over her to retrieve the tape from the machine.

"I wonder if young people today will feel the same way about The Blair Witch Project in 25 years," I say, sitting down on the floor and rubbing Lauren's back.

"Hell, no," Ross replies. "Jaws is one of the greatest entertainments ever made. It took a knife and just etched images into your brain that would always be there."

"Well, thanks for coming, Ross," I say, getting up to walk him out, "and for all your little nuggets of information."

"And the donuts," says Tony.

"Anytime," says Ross. Maybe it's my imagination, but there seems to be a spring in his step as he walks to his car. Suddenly, I feel like the man who finally opened a bowling alley in the town where the world's most naturally gifted bowler had been living undiscovered for decades. It's a nice feeling.

The next time I see Ross, at our Miss Teen USA get-together a few days later, I confirm his knife etching theory. "I can't get the image of Lorraine Gary in bell-bottom sleeves out of my head," I confess, "but that's the only thing close to a nightmare I've had. I feel so robbed."

Ross just laughs and says, "Just wait 'till the next time you go to the beach."