“Jaws”
1975 • PG • 2hs 4mins • Watch trailer • Rent it
🇺🇸 July 4th Pick: These colors don’t run, even from sharks.
You’re reading Pizza & a Movie—rewinding the stories of rental classics. Tonight we’re pinching our noses and throwing chum in the water as we chase the July 4th weekend watch. Let’s see how Steven became Spielberg in 1975’s Jaws.
Here’s the plot. Bad dad Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), the recently hired top cop on seaside Amity Island, doesn’t like water. It’s a phobia not made any better by a sudden string of gruesome deaths just off shore. Folks are gettin’ chomped. Young buck oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) says the attacks are definitely the work of a shark but loses the critical evidence to prove it, a personality trait that definitely won’t come up again (foreshadowing!). Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) sticks his head firmly in the sand. Without hard evidence the beach stays open, he says.
July 4th arrives. Townspeople and tourists frolic in liberty, justice and saltwater—until Jaws eats a guy, that is. In fairness to Jaws, dumping a couple hundred people in the ocean like so many hot dogs on the grill feels like a clear message. “We have too many!” it says. “Take one or two at least!” it says. After Jaws has lunch, the mayor hires grizzled sea captain Quint (Robert Shaw), who bears more than a passing resemblance to Captain Ahab, to hunt and kill the shark.
And so unfolds the tale of an innocent shark being terrorized by a seaside community.
Baby Shark
How’d we get Jaws? It started as a book. Specifically a best-selling novel by one Peter Benchley, who was having a bad time. He’d written for magazines and presidents but felt he had a book in him. The thing is that Benchley had a family, and families gotta eat. Before taking a desk job again, he gave himself one last shot. Pitched every publisher who’d take a meeting on a non-fic about pirates and a yarn about sharks. Guess which one sold?
With an advance in hand, he wrote in a spare room above a furnace company in the winter and a chicken coop in the summer. After a rocky year and a half, the book was finished. But it still didn’t have a title. Benchley came up with 125 possibles—his publisher hated all of them. With twenty minutes left before printing, they agreed on “Jaws”. Benchley summarized its virtues thusly: “I don’t know [what it means], but it’s short, it fits on a jacket, and it may work.” Well, you heard the man.
You print “Jaws” with a shark pic to explain whose jaws and a lil’ swimmer to explain what they want, and you’ve got a bestseller on your hands. It was on the NYT list for 44 straight weeks in ’74. Everybody loved this shark book! It’s like if Liz Gilbert ate swimmers instead of pasta in Eat, Pray, Love. Book clubs went bananas for it.
Meanwhile, Spielberg was already working on the movie version. But the 28-year-old wasn’t Spielberg yet, just some Steven. He’d been directing TV shows for a few years. Sure, he’d made four movies before Jaws, but three of those were TV movies. And no one saw the theatrical one. But Jaws? Jaws changed everything.
Jaws Was Not Fun
Look, just because this is a Spielberg movie doesn’t mean making it went smoothly. It did not. Shooting on the ocean translated to being constantly over budget and behind schedule. But! Our guy is a chill visionary who turned a steady supply of lemons into ice-cold shark-flavored lemonade. It went like this:
🍋 Reviewers didn’t like the book’s shallow characters and bad writing. And the author wrote the screenplay too, yikes.
🍸 They rewrote the script nightly over dinner with cast, filmed it the next day.
🍋 The movie had to convert book fans into ticket-buyers.
🍸 They reused the book cover, no changes made.
🍋 Readers really only liked the shark stuff.
🍸 The movie scrapped all the side quests to become a shark thrills delivery device.
🍋 The fake sharks broke down all the time.
🍸 The power of suggestion—fins, barrels, score. See less of the villain, fear ‘em more.
🍋 The real sharks did stuff like attacking the boat and cage.
🍸 Put it in the movie!
🍋 Speaking of real sharks, I heard some folks got sharked in the ‘60s.
🍸 Sounds like free marketing!
🍋 It happened in ’45 too. Would including that be in bad taste?
🍸 Throw it in too! That’s drama, baby.
At the end of the shoot, the budget of $4M had become $9M. The crew, sunburned. The cameras, soaked. 55 days had turned into 159. And Spielberg’s reputation was in tatters. “I thought my career as a filmmaker was over. I heard rumors … that I would never work again because no one had ever taken a film 100 days over schedule,” he said.
Thankfully, he was wrong.
The Invention of the Blockbuster
We call summer Blockbuster Season. It’s the contrast to sentimental feelings flicks of November and awards-bait of late December. Blockbuster Season knows it’s hot. Come inside, forget the boredom of summer vacation for a couple hours, have a good time. All you want is a roller-coaster for the brain, a vacation from good sense.
Let’s go back to before Blockbuster Season existed.
In ’75, summertime was a trash heap. It was where studios hauled their stinkers for audiences to pick over. Jaws, capitalizing on the novel’s runaway success and the just sorta shakiness in the zeitgeist, became the movie everyone went to see. It turned industry conventions upside-down by breaking two big rules.
First, Jaws premiered in wide release instead of starting small. Before Jaws, you’d put a movie out in a few dozen theaters, then gradually increase the number as it caught on (or pull it if it didn’t). Jaws opened in 464 theaters, which—running the numbers, hang on—is a lot? Yeah, it’s a lot. In an era when studios had to pay for each physical print, starting in almost 500 theaters was a huge gamble. But like a shark at the beach, Universal really went for it.
Second, Jaws aimed for a general audience instead of a segment. It’s an adventure set in a small town filled with splashing kids, worried grown-ups, three heroes and a big ol’ shark. There’s science. Light class warfare. Not quite enough on-screen violence to keep parents from taking their kids. Metro dwellers could relate to a beach escape while the heartland saw themselves in Amity’s tight-knit community. Jaws was a household name already, having sold 5.5 million copies by the movie’s opening night. Bottom line: It had something for everyone.
Jaws saw the birth of a new Hollywood business model: The summer blockbuster. A simple movie for everybody that’s in every theater on day one. Audiences love them, studios have to rent extra warehouses just to hold all the greenbacks they generate.
Jaws’s success was an accident of good timing. But if someone could do it again, that would really be something. We didn’t have to wait long. Star Wars in ’77 did it again. And then Spielberg broke its records in ’82 with E.T. The summer blockbuster became a thing pretty fast.
Let’s Get High (Concept)
Look, no movie’s going to be a blockbuster if you can’t get butts in seats. You need a killer premise. A focused, easy-to-understand idea everyone will remember and tell to their friends. Allow me to introduce the high-concept premise. It’s high-level, not high-brow.
While low-concept films deal in character conflict, thematic shading and complex tension, high-concept movies just ask “What if…” It’s pretty much the only kind of movie Spielberg makes. Here, I’ll prove it:
Indiana Jones: What if James Bond was an archeologist?
E.T.: What if an alien was your friend?
Hook: What if your dad was Peter Pan?
Jurassic Park: What if dinosaurs came back?
Saving Private Ryan: What if you could live through WWII?
Minority Report: What if you could prevent the future?
The Terminal: What if you got stuck in the airport?
War of the Worlds: What if there was a war of the worlds?
War Horse: What if there was a war horse?
Bridge of Spies: What if there was a bridge of spies?
You get it. But somehow? Jaws packs two of these. First, “What if there was a shark at the beach?” Then the follow-up: “What if it wouldn’t leave?” Now that sells tickets.
How Much of It Was Real?
I’m not gonna lie to you. Basically none of what happens in the movie is real. But here’s some stuff that is:
✔ It’s a real fish town. Amity Island is made up, but they shot in a fishing village in Martha’s Vineyard. Many of the extras were working fisherfolk who lived there.
✔ Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916, referenced in the movie, actually happened. Jaws works so well as a boogeyman story because this part of the country was still frightened of fins in the water.
✔ Sharks ate sailors in ’45. The events of the USS Indianapolis, covered in Quint’s monologue, really happened. It was the worst shark attack in history by bodycount. Hundreds of sharks swam to the floating survivors. They ate the wounded, then came back for the rest. Deaths may have been as high as 150 men.
✔ Great Whites sometimes bite people. But very rarely. And if they do, the shark is confused and learning what’s what in the buffet of the sea. It’s more of a test nibble, though their nibble is pretty big. They stick to the deep stuff—swimmers need not worry.
✔ Some shots feature real sharks. Those shots were filmed in, I kid you not, the Dangerous Reef. It’s in Australia. Sharks attacked the cage in the water, footage that made it into the movie.
✔ The author hated sharks. Sure, if by “hated” you mean “didn’t know much about” and “figured out how to make money off of”. Benchley went on to be an ocean conservationist and the first guy to ever host Shark Week. Both he and Spielberg deeply regret this movie’s acceleration of shark depopulation.
The Shark That Ate the Box Office
What did folks in ’75 make of this? It gave critics big shark-toothed grins. The ones who liked it liked Spielberg’s deft directing, characters more three-dimensional than their paperback counterparts, action thrills and shark-based chills. Even folks who pointed out that they weren’t very sorry for the people who got gobbled up saw that as more a feature than a bug.
Jaws won three Oscars, losing Best Picture to One Flow Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Even now, we think of Jaws as one of the best, most important movies in the Western film cannon. It’s still so well-known that mouth music-ing dun-dun, dun-dun provokes an in-on-the-joke look from anyone. And we’re coming up on fifty years since this hit.
Did very nervous Spielberg and Universal make their money back? Yeah. Yeah, they did, and fast. Jaws gobbled up $7M against a total budget of $9M on opening weekend alone, in part because it played in so many theaters. It was number one at the box office for 14 weeks straight. It was in theaters for a long time, and off and on again for years afterward. It’s been back for anniversary re-releases too. To date it’s made $476M, but a lot of that was in ’70s money. Figure that’s a cool $2B to us now.
How does Jaws land today? As I write this, yesterday is the first time I’d ever seen it. It feels too long, slack in weird places, with characters I don’t like and a very silly shark flopping around on a boat at the end. There’s a great hour-fifteen movie in here, but the real thing is too long to watch in one sitting if you get sleepy as early in the evening as I do. Regardless, Spielberg’s tension-building and commitment to realism of setting still work. It’s big fun to see the seeds of what he’d become being planted as you watch. And, of course, there’s that theme.
Dun-dun, dun-dun.
That’s Jaws, a July 4th watch worth wading in for. If you’ve never seen it, check it out from your local library like I did. Promise they have a copy. If you already love it, pop the copy you definitely own in and take the ride all over again.
Thanks for reading! And, hey, if you liked this, send it to a pal who would too! Toss ‘em in the water and don’t tell ‘em the risks.
NOTES:
Spielberg and a producer bought hundreds of copies of Jaws, resulting in the novel zooming to the #1 spot in California. They gave the books to people who’d create buzz for the forthcoming movie.
Dreyfuss’s character Hooper was an avatar for Spielberg, who felt seen as a kid playing with stuff he didn’t understand for a job he wasn’t cut out to do.
The term “blockbuster” comes from the nickname for WWII aerial munitions that could level a whole city block. Kinda weird, but it’s meant to mean a big, explosive event. Not glad you know that now, are you?
Shaw based his Quint character on a couple real sea dogs on set, one of which was his neighbor. He memorized what they said and repeated it while the cameras were rolling.
The crew nicknamed their fake shark “Bruce”, after Spielberg’s lawyer. I figure Bruce the shark from Finding Nemo owes his name to Jaws.
Other high-concept premises: iPhone: “What if your computer fit in your hand?” Kindle: “What if you could take your library with you?” Facebook: “What if you could check on anyone?” 2016: “What if great TV became the president?” Coffee: “What if you were never sleepy?”
The score is by John Williams, who Spielberg would go on to work with again on many future projects.