Trailer
Plot summary
On vacation near Bermuda, David Sanders and Gail Berke scuba dive among old shipwrecks and bring up a gold medallion stamped with a woman's image, the letters S.C.O.P.N. and the date 1714, along with a glass ampoule holding an amber liquid. When Gail probes a crevice, something in the wreck seizes her wooden baton and shreds its end before she tears free. The couple asks Romer Treece, a historian and treasure hunter, about the medallion, and he identifies it as Spanish. A dive-shop clerk spots the ampoule, and the drug kingpin Henri "Cloche" Bondurant, for whom the clerk works, tries to buy it, then begins terrorizing the couple.
Cast
- Lee McClainas Johnson
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Deep (1977)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Robert Shaw's treasure hunter character was based on real Bermudian explorer Teddy Tucker, who has a cameo as the harbor master; Tucker's own boat played the film's Corsair, and Peter Benchley had partly written Jaws aboard that same real boat.
- The plot grew out of the real 1942 sinking of the Bermuda freighter Constellation, which was carrying morphine ampoules and may have gone down after striking the wreck of the American Civil War blockade runner Montana.
- At Robert Shaw's suggestion that underwater filming would look more realistic, the entire cast and crew were taught to scuba dive; some scenes were shot in the open ocean at depths of 80 feet, but many were ultimately filmed in built underwater sets to avoid decompression stops.
- The crew dug what was billed as the world's biggest underwater set into a Bermuda hillside and pioneered technical firsts for the shoot, including Al Giddings' Petermar underwater camera system and specially modified 5,000-watt lighting rigs.
- A photo of Jacqueline Bisset in character, taken underwater by the wreck of RMS Rhone, was used to target the men's lifestyle market without her approval. Producer Peter Guber claimed it helped make the film a box office success, saying: “That T-shirt made me a rich man!”
- The Deep's opening weekend broke the box-office record previously set by Jaws, though it did so while playing on almost double the number of screens Jaws had used.
