Shark Week 2012 - An Interview With Brooke Runnette, Discovery Channel’s Director of Special Projects

Shark Week 2012

An Interview With:
Brooke Runnette, Discovery Channel’s Director of Special Projects
by Abbie Bernstein

Sharks! Got your attention, right? Some people love them, some people are terrified by them, a lot of people feel both ways simultaneously, but there are few who find the toothy, water-bound creatures uninteresting.

Sharks, even the enormous Great Whites, are fish, not mammals. As a species, they have been around for tens of millions of years; the Great White is believed to have existed in something like its current form for at least two million. The Discovery Channel has been capitalizing on human fascination with sharks for decades with SHARK WEEK, which celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary on the air August 12-18. To celebrate this milestone, Discovery throws a party for the Television Critics Association poolside at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, complete with shark-shaped laser lights in the swimming pool and footage projected onto the side of the hotel. There is something undeniably impressive, not to mention surreal, about seeing a school of sharks swimming across an eight-story building.

Brooke Runnette, Discovery Channel’s Director of Special Projects, is the executive producer of SHARK WEEK, something she’s been doing since 2009. This year, she notes, there are a few extra SHARK WEEK specials. “We’re doing ten premieres this year, but usually, it’s more like six or seven.”

What are some of the new things we’ll see on SHARK WEEK this time around? Runnette says, Well, we’re going to see at least one shot that has never been done in the history of the world, and they almost didn’t make it. And there’s a great [special, HOW JAWS CHANGED THE WORLD] about things you might not know about what the movie JAWS did to actual sharks in the real world and people who wanted to become shark scientists. The movie JAWS first got a lot of sharks killed, and then got a lot of funding for scientists who wanted to go into shark science, which didn’t really exist [at the time of the film’s original 1975 release], because everybody was so interested, and then it became understanding of sharks and then conservation. So it’s a really good story.”

Unfortunately, Runnette adds, in addition to inspiring people to become scientists, JAWS also caused a lot of people to take up shark-hunting, a la the Robert Shaw character in the movie. “It incited people to become Quint. There’s a guy in there who’s like, ‘Yes, I’ve killed tens of thousands of sharks, and I’m going to keep doing it until I die.'” Runnette shakes her head in resignation.

Other fun shark facts Runnell provides: “One, that they have weird little things that hang onto their eyeballs - shark lice if it’s a Great White. Two, that a lot of them have individual [personalities]. We’ve got Colossus and FIghthead and Scargirl and everything. They are individuals who act in totally individual ways. And we will find out just how big a megalodon was and how hard it could bite.”

Tory Belleci is a regular on the series MYTHBUSTERS, who is part of SHARK WEEK in his capacity as cohost of two of the SHARK WEEK premiere presentations, SHARKZILLA and THE MYTHBUSTERS JAWSOME SHARK SPECIAL, both airing Monday night.

Belleci quickly explains that, no, SHARKZILLA is not an escapee from Syfy Channel’s Saturday night movie offerings. Instead, it deals with the megalodon (named for the Greek words for “big” and “tooth”), a shark that swam the Earth’s oceans during the Cenozoic Era, from 28 to 1.5 million years ago. Depending on which scientist’s research one is reading, the megalodon was estimated to be between fifty-two feet (the lowest estimate) to eighty feet in length.

In SHARKZILLA, Belleci explains, “Basically, these guys re-created this giant magalodon. It had a bite power of twenty thousand pounds and we literally were sticking small boats, jet skis, anything that would fit in its mouth, and this thing would crush it.”

Belleci’s fellow SHARKZILLA hosts are his MYTHBUSTERS colleagues Kari Byron and Grant Imahara. Belleci relates, “We came down to L.A. for a few days and watched these guys as they built this shark, and then we fed it a whole bunch of stuff. And people can actually vote on what they want the shark to eat.” When asked, Belleci laughs and adds, “Nothing live!”

The program, and the synthetic megalodon, were both created specifically for SHARK WEEK. The builders created the scale of their model based on a real megalodon tooth. “This one I think was two million years old,” Belleci relates. “They had a tooth and the thing was six inches long. The thing was giant. And the shark itself is humongous and they actually recreated a full-scale shark. His jaws are made of steel, but the rest of his body is like - it’s like a blow-up blimp. It’s like this vinyl blow-up doll with steel jaws.”

As for how long it is, Runnette offers, “It was like a Greyhound bus.”

“I want to say sixty feet long,” Belleci estimates. “They found a [prehistoric] whale with its head missing. And so what they think is that this megalodon actually bit the head of the whale off. This whole documentary is to find out, is that what killed this whale? It’s kind of like a C.S.I. They actually recreated a chunk of whale to feed to this giant shark.”

“We’re going to see what a megalodon really looks like if you build one,” Runnette says. “We really enjoyed that. It’s different than CGI. We were talking about just doing it CGI - not the same as seeing it in front of you. It’s really great.”

Runnette’s job entails both coming up with SHARK WEEK programming ideas like SHARKZILLA and receiving pitches from documentary filmmakers who produce footage of sharks. “Both of those things. Basically, because it’s kind of a beat,” she refers to the fact that there’s a fairly set community of people who document sharks, “I know all the producers who do this kind of thing, I know a lot of the scientists, I know a lot of the conservation organizations, so it’s actually a combination. Sometimes it’ll be a producer who comes, sometimes I’ll find out something through what scientists are doing and say, ‘Okay, I need you.'”

So what got Runnette interested in sharks in the first place? “You know, I was not necessarily a ‘sharkie,'” she replies. “I started doing this, and the one thing about it is, it’s continued to be interesting for twenty-five years to everybody. It’s fascinating. They are fascinating creatures and really, the cool thing about this show and this series and all the shows is, the shark is a great star. Excellent charisma, mystery, power. So it makes it good. It’s fun to do.”

What did Belleci know about sharks prior to his SHARKZILLA experience? “I knew they were scary before. Now I’m terrified of them,” he reports. “Even the regular ones. A few years ago, we did a [previous] SHARK WEEK episode of MYTHBUSTERS. We went down to the Bahamas and we [investigated] some myths about sharks. Like one was, if you’re night-diving and you use a flashlight, will sharks be attracted to you? And so we did a night dive with sharks. It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done in my life. The light actually does [attract sharks]. In fact, I had to push one away, because it came right up into my face. I had to push it away with the flashlight.”

Belleci continues, “Some of the other myths we did were, is it better to play dead or thrash around? If you play dead, you’ll have a better chance of surviving a shark attack. Because if they see you thrashing around, they think you’re a wounded animal and they’ll go for you.”

Asked what sharks he’s seen while diving, Belleci replies, “We saw a tiger shark. At that point, we all had to get out of the water, because they’re very vicious. We saw a lot of reef sharks. They’re like six feet long, they’ve got the black tip on their fin. They’re scary. Not as scary as a Great White, but they’re still scary.”

Belleci says he’s never seen a Great White up close in the water. “Just in the movies.” This doesn’t stop him from being terrified of the huge sharks. “Thanks, Spielberg, for ruining in my life!”

Interview By Abbie Bernstein