SPIELBERG'S MONEY-MAKING MONSTERS.

• Position: Jaws, Jurassic Park, and The Lost World available in DVD - Brief Article

A perusal of the top-grossing movies of all time finds Steven Spielberg connected with a large number of them. He combined with George Lucas to bring the adventures of Indiana Jones to the screen, and Spielberg has filled theaters by appealing to audiences' primal fears. Now out in DVD, his three monster (in every sense of the word) films are a must for movie buffs' permanent collections.

Jaws (Universal Studios Home Video, 125 minutes, $26.98) is credited with being the daddy of summer blockbusters, the first motion picture to pack theaters for months on end, going on to gross more than $250,000,000 domestically. To commemorate the 25th anniversary of its 1975 release, a special DVD collector's edition is loaded with goodies. Besides the usual grab bag of trailers, outtakes, and deleted scenes, there is a documentary on sharks and humans' eternal fascination for the fierce creatures, well-seasoned by dread, and a trivia game. It is the "Making of ..." feature, ubiquitous on most DVDs today, that is the greatest fun, primarily because of the recounting of the myriad production woes encountered in constructing "Bruce" the shark. The film's scheduled opening was a touch-and-go proposition, with scenes being shot without Spielberg knowing if they ever would have a working creature, without which, of course, there would be no movie.

As for the picture itself, it holds up perfectly a quarter-century later, thanks to John Williams' ominous score; superb performances by the three leads--Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfus, and, especially, Robert Shaw as the grizzled, profane, shark-hunting captain; and the fact that "Bruce" managed to send such fear through viewers that swimming seemed an unattractive proposition for many summers to come. Moreover, creating the shark was a mere appetizer for Spielberg, leading to far-bigger things 18 years later.

Jurassic Park (Universal Studios Home Video, 127 minutes, $26.98) proved that, if building a man-eating shark was daunting, the challenge of resurrecting an entire prehistoric world was surprisingly simpler. Within less than two decades after "Jaws," Spielberg would stun the world with the breathtakingly lifelike dinosaurs created by the magic of computer graphics and animatics. Their interaction...