Jaws (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Jaws, the 1975 thriller directed by Steven Spielberg, begins with a simple and terrifying image: a young woman swimming alone at night, and then something pulling her under. In the morning, only part of her remains washes ashore. That opening set in motion one of the most consequential films ever made. It was not just a movie about a shark. It was the film that invented the summer blockbuster, reshaped how Hollywood releases and markets pictures, and frightened a generation out of the ocean. A Gallup poll taken in September 1975 found that 18 percent of respondents called it the most frightening movie they had ever seen. Thirty-five percent said it increased their fear of swimming in the ocean. The questions worth asking are how a production plagued by mechanical failures, budget overruns, and near-mutiny from the crew produced something so precisely terrifying. And what did it actually take to shoot the first major motion picture ever made on the ocean?

• 2. The Deal That Almost Did Not Happen

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  Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown first encountered Peter Benchley's novel Jaws through a brief card in Cosmopolitan magazine, where Brown's wife Helen Gurley Brown was then editor. The card, written by the magazine's book editor, described the plot and concluded with the note "might make a good movie". Both men read the book in a single night and agreed the next morning it was "the most exciting thing that they had ever read". They purchased the film rights in 1973, before the book was even published, for approximately $175,000. Brown later admitted that had they read it a second time, they never would have made the purchase, because they would have understood how difficult certain sequences would be to execute.

  The job of directing was first offered to veteran filmmaker John Sturges, whose credits included another maritime story, The Old Man and the Sea. The producers then turned to Dick Richards, whose debut feature The Culpepper Cattle Co. had just come out. They dropped Richards after growing irritated by his habit of calling the shark a whale. Steven Spielberg, then 26 years old, had just directed his first theatrical film, The Sugarland Express, for Zanuck and Brown. He noticed their copy of the unpublished Benchley novel during a meeting in their office, read it, and immediately wanted the job. He later observed it was similar to his 1971 television film Duel, in that both deal with "these leviathans targeting everymen". The producers signed Spielberg to direct in June 1973, before The Sugarland Express had even been released.

  Spielberg soon grew reluctant to proceed. He feared being typecast as the "truck and shark director" and wanted to move to 20th Century Fox's Lucky Lady instead. Universal exercised its contractual right to veto his departure. Brown persuaded him to stay by telling him that after Jaws, he could make any films he wanted. The picture was given an estimated budget of $3.5 million and a shooting schedule of 55 days.

• 3. Writing on the Run

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  Benchley wrote three drafts of the screenplay before it was handed to other writers, telling Spielberg upon delivery of his final version: "I'm written out on this, and that's the best I can do." Benchley later described his contribution as "the storyline and the ocean stuff, basically the mechanics", acknowledging he did not know how to put character texture into a screenplay. Spielberg removed a subplot from the novel involving an adulterous affair between Ellen Brody and Matt Hooper, fearing it would undermine the camaraderie among the men on the boat.

  Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Howard Sackler was in Los Angeles when the filmmakers began searching for another writer and offered to do an uncredited rewrite. It was Sackler who invented the backstory of Quint as a survivor of a World War II naval disaster. Spielberg then turned to his friend Carl Gottlieb, a comedy writer-actor then working on the sitcom The Odd Couple, asking him for a dialogue polish and possibly a role. Gottlieb sent Spielberg three pages of notes and was cast as Harry Meadows, the newspaper editor. What started as a one-week dialogue job turned into Gottlieb becoming the primary screenwriter, rewriting nearly the entire script over nine weeks of principal photography. The script for each scene was typically finished the night before it was shot, often over dinner with Spielberg and members of the cast and crew.

  The question of who deserves credit for Quint's monologue about the World War II naval disaster became the subject of lasting controversy. Spielberg described it as a collaboration between Sackler, John Milius, and actor Robert Shaw, who was himself a playwright. According to Spielberg, Milius expanded Sackler's three-quarters of a page into a full monologue, which Shaw then partially rewrote. Gottlieb assigns primary credit to Shaw and downplays Milius's contribution. Spielberg also called for a specific change to the shark's death: the novel had it dying from extensive wounds, but he wanted it destroyed by a scuba tank explosion because he believed audiences would respond better to "a big rousing ending". The director later estimated the final script contained 27 scenes not in the book.

• 4. Bruce and the Broken Machinery

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  Principal photography began on the 2nd of May 1974 on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. The island was chosen in part because the surrounding ocean had a sandy bottom that never dropped below 35 ft for 12 mi out from shore, allowing the mechanical sharks to operate while still out of sight of land. The production needed three full-size pneumatically powered prop sharks, which the crew nicknamed "Bruce" after Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce Ramer. They were designed by art director Joe Alves during the third quarter of 1973 and fabricated between November 1973 and April 1974 at Rolly Harper's Motion Picture and Equipment Rental in Sun Valley, California, by a team of as many as 40 effects technicians supervised by Bob Mattey, best known for creating the giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

  From the first water test, the problems began. The "non-absorbent" neoprene foam that made up the sharks' skin soaked up water, causing them to balloon. Pneumatic hoses took on salt water. Frames fractured from water resistance. Skin corroded. One platform model used to tow the side-view sharks capsized as it was being lowered to the ocean floor, and a team of divers had to retrieve it. That model required 14 operators to control all of its moving parts. Unwanted sailboats drifted into frame. Cameras got soaked. The Orca once began to sink with the actors on board. Gottlieb was nearly decapitated by the boat's propellers. Richard Dreyfuss was almost trapped inside the steel cage. The actors were frequently seasick. Robert Shaw fled to Canada whenever possible due to tax problems, engaged in binge drinking, and developed a grudge against Dreyfuss, who was receiving enthusiastic early reviews for his performance in another film. Spielberg later calculated that during 12-hour daily work schedules, on average only four hours were actually spent filming.

  Although principal photography had been scheduled to take 55 days, it did not wrap until the 6th of October 1974, after 159 days. The budget, initially $3.5 million with an estimated final cost of $4 million, wound up at $9 million according to David Brown, with effects costs alone reaching $3 million. Disgruntled crew members gave the production the nickname "Flaws". Spielberg said he believed his career as a filmmaker was over, having heard rumors that he would never work again because no one had ever taken a film 100 days over schedule.

• 5. The Invisible Monster

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  The constant mechanical failures forced Spielberg into a decision that transformed the film. Unable to show the shark, he had to suggest it. Floating yellow barrels indicated its location. A dorsal fin breaking the surface stood in for the creature itself. The opening attack on Chrissie was reshot so that actress Susan Backlinie was dragged and yanked by underwater cables rather than shown being devoured. Spielberg later described the evolution this way: "The film went from a Japanese Saturday matinee horror flick to more of a Hitchcock, the less-you-see-the-more-you-get thriller." In another interview he said: "The shark not working was a godsend. It made me become more like Alfred Hitchcock than like Ray Harryhausen."

  For footage of real sharks, the production hired Ron and Valerie Taylor to shoot in the waters off Dangerous Reef in South Australia. They used a short actor in a miniature shark cage to create the illusion that the sharks were enormous. During that shoot, a great white actually attacked the boat and cage. The footage was so striking that Spielberg wanted it in the film. The problem was that the script, following the novel, originally had the shark killing Hooper inside the cage. No one had been in the cage during the real attack. So the script was altered: Hooper would now escape from the cage, which allowed the Australian footage to be incorporated. As production executive Bill Gilmore put it, "The shark down in Australia rewrote the script and saved Dreyfuss's character."

  Spielberg was not present when the final scene, in which the shark explodes, was filmed. He believed the crew planned to throw him into the water once the shot was done. It has since become a tradition for Spielberg to be absent when the final scene of one of his films is being shot. Underwater scenes were later completed at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios water tank in Culver City and near Santa Catalina Island, California. The Ben Gardner underwater discovery scene was reshot in editor Verna Fields's swimming pool in Encino, with powdered milk poured into the pool and a tarpaulin covering it to simulate the murky waters of Martha's Vineyard. Spielberg paid $3,000 of his own money for that reshoot after Universal declined.

• 6. Two Notes That Changed Cinema

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  John Williams composed the film's score after Spielberg asked him to find a theme for the shark. What Williams arrived at was a simple alternating pattern of two notes, variously identified as E and F or F and F sharp, performed on tuba by Tommy Johnson. When asked by Johnson why such a high register rather than the more natural French horn, Williams said he wanted it to sound "a little more threatening". When Williams first played just those two notes on a piano for Spielberg, the director reportedly laughed, thinking it was a joke.

  Williams described the theme as "grinding away at you, just as a shark would do, instinctual, relentless, unstoppable." He also heard similarities between Jaws and pirate movies, so at other points in the score he drew on what he called "primal, but fun and entertaining" pirate music. The score contains echoes of Claude Debussy's La mer and Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Music scholar Joseph Cancellaro has proposed that the two-note expression mimics the shark's heartbeat. Alexandre Tylski has argued that the score's strongest motif is actually "the split, the rupture", the moment when the music dramatically cuts off, as it does after Chrissie's death. Toward the film's climax, this conditioning is exploited when the shark suddenly appears with no musical introduction at all.

  The score earned Williams an Academy Award. He also won the Grammy Award, the BAFTA Award for Best Film Music, and the Golden Globe Award. Spielberg later said that without Williams's score the film would have been only half as successful. The American Film Institute later ranked the score sixth on its list of the greatest film scores. Williams had previously scored Spielberg's debut feature, The Sugarland Express, and the collaboration would continue across almost all of Spielberg's subsequent films.

• 7. Inventing the Blockbuster

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  Universal spent $1.8 million marketing Jaws, including an unprecedented $700,000 on national television advertising. About two dozen 30-second advertisements aired each night on prime-time network television beginning on the 18th of June 1975, two days before opening. The studio and publisher Bantam agreed on a shared title logo appearing on both the paperback novel and all film advertising. The film poster, featuring the shark rising toward a lone swimmer, was designed by the Seiniger Advertising agency over six months. Principal Tony Seiniger explained that "no matter what we did, it didn't look scary enough", finally deciding "you had to actually go underneath the shark so you could see his teeth." The same artist who created the paperback cover, Bantam employee Roger Kastel, made the poster.

  On the 20th of June 1975, Jaws opened across North America on 464 screens, 409 of them in the United States and the remainder in Canada. That release pattern was strikingly wide for the era. Wide openings were typically associated with exploitation films of doubtful quality, used to blunt the effect of negative reviews. Universal chairman Lew Wasserman had actually ordered a planned release to as many as 900 theaters scaled back, saying he wanted people to have to drive to see the film rather than find it locally. The coupling of broad simultaneous distribution with a national television campaign was virtually unheard of at the time.

  Jaws opened with a record $7 million weekend and grossed $21,116,354 in its first 10 days. It reached $100 million in its first 59 days from 954 playdates. In just 78 days it overtook The Godfather as the highest-grossing film at the North American box office. It spent 14 consecutive weeks as the number-one film in the United States. Its initial release ultimately brought in $123.1 million in rentals. It was the highest-grossing film of all time until Star Wars, which debuted two years later. By September 1975-40 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds had reportedly seen it. The Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 2001. As of 2014, it had sold 128 million tickets in the United States and Canada, ranking it seventh among the highest-grossing films of all time adjusted for ticket price inflation.

• 8. What the Shark Meant

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  Academic critics have read the shark in strikingly different ways. Stephen Heath relates the film's ideological meanings to the Watergate scandal, arguing that Brody represents the white male middle class restoring public order "with an ordinary-guy kind of heroism born of fear-and-decency". He also examined Jaws as an "industrial product" that sells on the basis of the pleasure of cinema, keeping the industry alive by being extraordinarily profitable.

  Fredric Jameson highlighted what he called the polysemy of the shark, its capacity to represent many different fears at once, from communism to the Third World to the anxieties of contemporary American life. He argued that this multiplicity of meaning is itself ideological, allowing essentially social and historical anxieties to be reconfigured as conflicts with nature. Jameson read Quint's death as the symbolic overthrow of an old, populist America and Brody and Hooper's partnership as an allegory of law-and-order allying with a new technocracy.

  Neal Gabler analyzed the film as presenting three approaches to solving an obstacle: science through Hooper, spiritualism through Quint, and the common man through Brody. The film endorses the last. Peter Biskind noted that unlike the typical New Hollywood conflict of hip counterculture figures against authority, the overarching conflict in Jaws pits the heroes against a menace that targets everyone regardless of socioeconomic position.

  The shark had real-world consequences that Benchley later deeply regretted. The film allegedly inspired what has been called the "Jaws effect", in which fishing tournaments killed large numbers of sharks. Benchley campaigned to stop shark depopulation, saying that "Jaws was entirely a fiction". Spielberg echoed this, saying he regretted "the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film". Benchley had drawn his story from the real-life capture of an enormous shark by sport fisherman Frank Mundus in 1964, a detail that would carry consequences for ocean ecosystems for decades after the credits rolled.