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POSTER
ART - The
developers spent around six months working on the poster art for Jaws.
Steven
Spielberg cut his teeth on the meaty role Jaws presented, directing a
film using a giant rubber shark model, that simply would not work. Oddly
enough, having to resort to Alfred Hitchcock like suspense building, in not
showing 'Bruce,' as the flawed animatronic became known, the lack of props
actually helped to make the film a success.
When a killer shark unleashes chaos on a beach community, it's up to
the local sheriff, a marine
biologist, and an old sea dog to hunt the beast down.
Director
Steven Spielberg delivers an iconic film that has an entertaining story featuring unforgettable characters. Not to mention
'Bruce'
the shark. This was the original summer blockbuster that kicked off that trend in Hollywood.
This is an iconic movie, superbly made. It's not the best movie ever, but it's the best
shark movie by far - until Hollywood decides to give it another go.
But we all know how long it takes for a re-make to be better than the
original. King-Kong and Titanic are testament to that.
The picture was produced by Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown
(Zanuck/Brown Productions). It was a Universal Pictures release on June
20th 1975. The stunning music track was composed by
John
Williams.
The screenplay was by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottieb. The movie starred Roy
Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary and Murray Hamilton.
Jaws
is a 1975 American thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg, based on
Peter Benchley's 1974 novel of the same name. In the film, a man-eating
great white shark attacks beachgoers at a summer resort town, prompting
police chief Martin Brody (Roy
Scheider) to hunt it with the help of a marine biologist (Richard
Dreyfuss) and a professional shark hunter (Robert Shaw). Murray Hamilton
plays the mayor, and Lorraine Gary portrays Brody's wife. The
screenplay is credited to
Benchley, who wrote the first drafts, and actor-writer Carl
Gottlieb, who rewrote the script during principal photography.
Shot mostly on location on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, Jaws
was the first major motion picture to be shot on the ocean,
and as a result had a troubled production, going over budget and
past schedule. As the art department's
mechanical sharks often malfunctioned, Spielberg decided mostly to suggest the
shark's
presence, employing an ominous and minimalist theme created by composer
John Williams to indicate its impending appearances. Spielberg and
others have compared this suggestive approach to that of director Alfred
Hitchcock. Universal Pictures gave the film what was then an
exceptionally wide release for a major studio picture, on over 450
screens, accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign with a heavy
emphasis on television spots and tie-in merchandise.
Jaws
was the prototypical summer blockbuster, regarded as a watershed moment
in motion picture
history. It won several awards for its music and editing. It was the
highest-grossing film until the release of Star Wars in 1977. Both
films were pivotal in establishing the modern Hollywood business model,
which pursues high box-office returns from action and adventure films
with simple high-concept premises, released during the summer in
thousands of theaters and advertised heavily. Jaws was followed by three
sequels (without the involvement of Spielberg
or Benchley) and many imitative thrillers. In 2001, it was selected
by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States
National Film Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically
significant".
Not much of a shocker that!
WRITING
For the screen adaptation, Spielberg wanted to stay with the novel's basic plot, but discarded many of Benchley's subplots. He declared that his favorite part of the book was the shark hunt on the last 120 pages, and told Zanuck when he accepted the job, "I'd like to do the picture if I could change the first two acts and base the first two acts on original screenplay material, and then be very true to the book for the last third." When the producers purchased the rights to his novel, they promised Benchley that he could write the first draft of the screenplay. The intent was to make sure a script could be done despite an impending threat of a Writer's Guild strike, given Benchley was not unionized. Overall, he wrote three drafts before the script was turned over to other writers; delivering his final version to Spielberg, he declared, "I'm written out on this, and that's the best I can do." Benchley later described his contribution to the finished film as "the storyline and the ocean stuff—basically, the mechanics", given he "didn't know how to put the character texture into a screenplay." One of his changes was to remove the novel's adulterous affair between Ellen Brody and Matt Hooper, at the suggestion of Spielberg, who feared it would compromise the camaraderie between the men on the Orca. During the film's production, Benchley agreed to return and play a small onscreen role as a reporter.
Spielberg, who felt that the characters in Benchley's script were still unlikable, invited the young screenwriter John Byrum to do a rewrite, but he declined the offer. Columbo creators William Link and Richard Levinson also declined Spielberg's invitation. Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Howard Sackler was in Los Angeles when the filmmakers began looking for another writer and offered to do an uncredited rewrite; since the producers and Spielberg were unhappy with Benchley's drafts, they quickly agreed. At the suggestion of Spielberg, Brody's characterization made him afraid of water, "coming from an urban jungle to find something more terrifying off this placid island near Massachusetts."
Spielberg wanted "some levity" in Jaws, humor that would avoid making it "a dark sea hunt", so he turned to his friend Carl Gottlieb, a comedy writer-actor then working on the sitcom The Odd Couple. Spielberg sent Gottlieb a script, asking what the writer would change and if there was a role he would be interested in performing. Gottlieb sent Spielberg three pages of notes, and picked the part of Meadows, the politically connected editor of the local paper. He passed the audition one week before Spielberg took him to meet the producers regarding a writing job.
While the deal was initially for a "one-week dialogue polish", Gottlieb eventually became the primary screenwriter, rewriting the entire script during a nine-week period of principal photography. The script for each scene was typically finished the night before it was shot, after Gottlieb had dinner with Spielberg and members of the cast and crew to decide what would go into the film. Many pieces of dialogue originated from the actors' improvisations during these meals; a few were created on set. John Milius contributed dialogue polishes, and Sugarland Express writers Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood also made uncredited contributions. Spielberg has claimed that he prepared his own draft, although it is unclear to what degree the other screenwriters drew on his material. One specific alteration he called for in the story was to change the cause of the shark's death from extensive wounds to a scuba tank explosion, as he felt audiences would respond better to a "big rousing ending". The director estimated the final script had a total of 27 scenes that were not in the book.
Benchley had written Jaws after reading about sport fisherman Frank Mundus's capture of an enormous shark in 1964. According to Gottlieb, Quint was loosely based on Mundus, whose book Sportfishing for Sharks he read for research. Sackler came up with the backstory of Quint as a survivor of the World War II USS Indianapolis disaster. The question of who deserves the most credit for writing Quint's monologue about the Indianapolis has caused substantial controversy. Spielberg described it as a collaboration between Sackler, Milius, and actor Robert Shaw, who was also a playwright. According to the director, Milius turned Sackler's "three-quarters of a page" speech into a monologue, and that was then rewritten by Shaw. Gottlieb gives primary credit to Shaw, downplaying Milius's contribution.
CASTING
Though Spielberg complied with a request from Zanuck and Brown to cast known actors, he wanted to avoid hiring any big stars. He felt that "somewhat anonymous" performers would help the audience "believe this was happening to people like you and me", whereas "stars bring a lot of memories along with them, and those memories can sometimes ... corrupt the story." The director added that in his plans "the superstar was gonna be the
shark". The first actors cast were Lorraine Gary, the wife of president of Universal Sidney Sheinberg, as Ellen
Brody, and Murray Hamilton as the mayor of Amity Island. Stuntwoman-turned-actress Susan Backlinie was cast as Chrissie (the first victim) as she knew how to swim and was willing to perform nude. Most minor roles were played by residents of Martha's Vineyard, where the film was shot. One example was Deputy Hendricks, played by future television producer Jeffrey Kramer. Lee Fierro plays Mrs. Kintner, the mother of the shark's second victim Alex Kintner (played by Jeffrey Voorhees).
The role of Brody was offered to Robert Duvall, but the actor was interested only in portraying Quint. Charlton Heston expressed a desire for the role but Spielberg felt that Heston would bring a screen persona too grand for the part of a police chief of a modest community. Roy Scheider became interested in the project after overhearing Spielberg at a party talk with a screenwriter about having the shark jump up onto a boat. Spielberg was initially apprehensive about hiring Scheider, fearing he would portray a "tough guy", similar to his role in The French Connection.
Nine days before the start of production, neither Quint nor Hooper had been cast. The role of Quint was originally offered to actors Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden, both of whom passed. Zanuck and Brown had just finished working with Robert Shaw on The Sting, and suggested him to Spielberg. Shaw was reluctant to take the role since he did not like the book but decided to accept at the urging of both his wife, actress Mary Ure and his
secretary - "The last time they were that enthusiastic was From Russia with Love. And they were right". Shaw based his performance on fellow cast member Craig Kingsbury, a local fisherman, farmer and legendary eccentric, who was playing fisherman Ben Gardner. Spielberg described Kingsbury as "the purest version of who, in my mind, Quint was" and some of his offscreen utterances were incorporated into the script as lines of Gardner and Quint. Another source for some of Quint's dialogue and mannerisms, especially in the third act at sea, was Vineyard mechanic and boat-owner Lynn Murphy.
For the role of Hooper, Spielberg initially wanted Jon Voight. Timothy Bottoms, Jan-Michael Vincent, Kevin Kline, Joel Grey, and Jeff Bridges were also considered for the part. Spielberg's friend George Lucas suggested Richard Dreyfuss, whom he had directed in American Graffiti. The actor initially passed but changed his decision after he attended a pre-release screening of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which he had just completed. Disappointed in his performance and fearing that no one would want to hire him once Kravitz was released, he immediately called Spielberg and accepted the role in Jaws. Because the film the director envisioned was so dissimilar to Benchley's novel, Spielberg asked Dreyfuss not to read it. As a result of the casting, Hooper was rewritten to better suit the actor, as well as to be more representative of Spielberg, who came to view Dreyfuss as his "alter ego".
CRITICS & BOX OFFICE
Jaws opened in 409 theaters with a record $7 million weekend and grossed a record $21,116,354 in its first 10 days recouping its production costs. It grossed $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, sailing past that picture's earnings of $86 million, and became the first film to earn $100 million in US theatrical rentals. 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. Theatrical re-releases in 1976 and Summer 1979 brought its total rentals to $133.4 million.
The film entered overseas release in December 1975, and its international business mirrored its domestic performance. It broke records in Singapore, New Zealand, Japan, Spain, and Mexico. On January 11, 1976, Jaws became the highest-grossing film worldwide with rentals of $132 million, surpassing the $131 million earned by The Godfather. By the time of the third film in 1983, Variety reported that it had earned worldwide rentals of $270 million. Jaws was the highest-grossing film of all time until Star Wars, which debuted two years later. Star Wars surpassed Jaws for the U.S. record six months after its release and set a new global record in 1978.
Across all of its releases Jaws has grossed $476.5 million worldwide; adjusted for inflation, it has earned almost $2 billion at 2011 prices and is the second-most successful franchise film after Star Wars. Including its 2022 reissue, it has grossed $265.8 million in the United States and Canada, equivalent to $1.2
billion at 2020 prices (based on an estimated 128,078,800 tickets sold), making it the seventh-highest-grossing movie of all time adjusted for ticket price inflation. In the United Kingdom, it is the seventh-highest-grossing film to be released since 1975, earning the equivalent of over £70 million in 2009/10 currency, with admissions estimated at 16.2 million. Jaws has also sold 13 million tickets in Brazil, the second-highest attendance ever in the country behind Titanic.
On television, ABC aired it for the first time on November 4, 1979, right after its theatrical re-release. The first U.S. broadcast received a Nielsen rating of 39.1 and attracted 57 percent of the total audience, the second-highest televised movie audience at the time behind Gone with the Wind and the fourth-highest rated. In the United Kingdom, 23 million people watched its inaugural broadcast in October 1981, the second-biggest TV audience ever for a feature film behind Live and Let Die.
Jaws received mostly positive reviews upon release. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars, calling it "a sensationally effective action picture, a scary thriller that works all the better because it's populated with characters that have been developed into human beings". Variety's A. D. Murphy praised Spielberg's directorial skills, and called Robert Shaw's performance "absolutely magnificent". According to The New Yorker's Pauline Kael, it was "the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made ... [with] more zest than an early Woody Allen picture, a lot more
electricity, [and] it's funny in a Woody Allen sort of way". For New Times magazine, Frank Rich wrote, "Spielberg is blessed with a talent that is absurdly absent from most American filmmakers these days: this man actually knows how to tell a story on screen. ... It speaks well of this director's gifts that some of the most frightening sequences in Jaws are those where we don't even see the shark." Writing for New York magazine, Judith Crist described the film as "an exhilarating adventure entertainment of the highest order" and complimented its acting and "extraordinary technical achievements". Rex Reed praised the "nerve-frying" action scenes and concluded that "for the most part, Jaws is a gripping horror film that works beautifully in every department".
Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "It's a measure of how the film operates that not once do we feel particular sympathy for any of the shark's victims. ... In the best films, characters are revealed in terms of the action. In movies like Jaws, characters are simply functions of the action ... like stage hands who move props around and deliver information when it's necessary". He did describe it as "the sort of nonsense that can be a good deal of fun". Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin disagreed with the film's PG rating, saying that "Jaws is too gruesome for children, and likely to turn the stomach of the impressionable at any age. ... It is a coarse-grained and exploitative work which depends on excess for its impact. Ashore it is a bore, awkwardly staged and lumpily written." Marcia Magill of Films in Review said that while Jaws "is eminently worth seeing for its second half", she felt that before the protagonists' pursuit of the shark the film was "often flawed by its busyness". William S. Pechter of Commentary described Jaws as "a mind-numbing repast for sense-sated gluttons" and "filmmaking of this essentially manipulative sort"; Molly Haskell of The Village Voice similarly characterized it as a "scare machine that works with computer-like precision. ... You feel like a rat, being given shock therapy". The most frequently criticized aspect of the film has been the artificiality of its mechanical antagonist: Magill declared that "the programmed shark has one truly phony close-up", and in 2002, online reviewer James Berardinelli said that if not for Spielberg's deftly suspenseful direction, "we would be doubled over with laughter at the cheesiness of the animatronic creature." Halliwell's Film Guide stated that "despite genuinely suspenseful and frightening sequences, it is a slackly narrated and sometimes flatly handled thriller with an over-abundance of dialogue and, when it finally appears, a pretty unconvincing monster."
LEGACY
In the years since its release, Jaws has frequently been cited by film critics and industry professionals as one of the greatest movies of all time. It was number 48 on American Film Institute's 100 Years ... 100 Movies, a list of the greatest American films of all time compiled in 1998; it dropped to number 56 on the 10th Anniversary list. AFI also ranked the shark at number 18 on its list of the 50 Best Villains, Roy Scheider's line "You're gonna need a bigger boat" 35th on a list of top 100 movie quotes, Williams's score at sixth on a list of 100 Years of Film Scores, and the film as second on a list of 100 most thrilling films, behind only Psycho. In 2003, The New York Times included the film on its list of the best 1,000 movies ever made. The following year, Jaws placed at the top of the Bravo network's five-hour miniseries The 100 Scariest Movie Moments. The Chicago Film Critics Association named it the sixth-scariest film ever made in 2006. In 2008, Jaws was ranked the fifth-greatest film in history by Empire magazine, which also placed Quint at number 50 on its list of the 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time. The film has been cited in many other lists of 50 and 100 greatest films, including ones compiled by Leonard Maltin, Entertainment Weekly, Film4, Rolling Stone, Total Film, TV Guide, and Vanity Fair.
In 2001, the United States Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry, recognizing it as a landmark horror film and the first "summer movie". In 2006, its screenplay was ranked the 63rd-best of all time by the Writers Guild of America. In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild listed the film as the eighth best-edited film of all time based on a survey of its membership.
Jaws was key in establishing the benefits of a wide national release backed by heavy television advertising, rather than the traditional progressive release in which a film slowly entered new markets and built support over time. Saturation booking, in which a film opens simultaneously at thousands of theaters, and massive media buys are now commonplace for the major Hollywood studios. According to Peter Biskind, Jaws "diminished the importance of print reviews, making it virtually impossible for a film to build slowly, finding its audience by dint of mere quality. ... Moreover, Jaws whet corporate appetites for big profits quickly, which is to say, studios wanted every film to be Jaws." Scholar Thomas Schatz writes that it "recalibrated the profit potential of the Hollywood hit, and redefined its status as a marketable commodity and cultural phenomenon as well. The film brought an emphatic end to Hollywood's five-year recession, while ushering in an era of high-cost, high-tech, high-speed thrillers."
Jaws also played a major part in establishing summer as the prime season for the release of studios' biggest box-office contenders, their intended blockbusters; winter had long been the time when most hoped-for hits were distributed, while summer was largely reserved for dumping films thought likely to be poor performers. Jaws and Star Wars are regarded as marking the beginning of the new U.S. film industry business model dominated by "high-concept"
pictures - with premises that can be easily described and marketed - as well as the beginning of the end of the New Hollywood period, which saw auteur films increasingly disregarded in favor of profitable big-budget pictures. The New Hollywood era was defined by the relative autonomy filmmakers were able to attain within the major studio system; in Biskind's description, "Spielberg was the Trojan horse through which the studios began to reassert their power."
The film had broader cultural repercussions, as well. Similar to the way the pivotal scene in 1960's Psycho made showers a new source of anxiety, Jaws led many viewers to fear going into the ocean. Reduced beach attendance in 1975 was attributed to it, as well as more reported shark sightings. It is still seen as responsible for perpetuating negative stereotypes about sharks and their behavior, and for producing the so-called "Jaws effect", which allegedly inspired "legions of fishermen piled into boats and killed thousands of the ocean predators in shark-fishing tournaments." Benchley would later campaign to stop the depopulation of sharks, saying that "Jaws was entirely a fiction". Spielberg later echoed this sentiment, saying that he regretted "the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film". Conservation groups have bemoaned the fact that the film has made it considerably harder to convince the public that sharks should be protected.
Jaws set the template for many subsequent horror films, to the extent that the script for Ridley Scott's 1979 science fiction film Alien was pitched to studio executives as "Jaws in space". Many films based on man-eating animals, usually aquatic, were released through the 1970s and 1980s, such as Orca, Grizzly, Mako: The Jaws of Death, Barracuda, Alligator, Day of the Animals, Tintorera, and Eaten Alive. Spielberg declared Piranha, directed by Joe Dante and written by John Sayles, "the best of the Jaws ripoffs". Among the various foreign mockbusters based on Jaws, three came from Italy: Great White, which inspired a plagiarism lawsuit by Universal and was even marketed in some countries as a part of the Jaws franchise; Monster Shark, featured in Mystery Science Theater 3000 under the title Devil Fish; and Deep Blood, which blends in a supernatural element. The 1976 Brazilian film Bacalhau parodies Jaws, featuring a killer cod in place of a
shark. The 2009 Japanese horror film Psycho Shark was released in the United States as Jaws in Japan.
Richard Dreyfuss made a cameo appearance in the 2010 film Piranha 3D, a loose remake of the 1978 film. Dreyfuss plays Matt Boyd, a fisherman who is the first victim of the title creatures. Dreyfuss later stated that his character was a parody and a near-reincarnation of Matt Hooper, his character in Jaws. During his appearance, Dreyfuss's character listens to the song "Show Me the Way to Go Home" on the radio, which Hooper, Quint and Brody sing together aboard the Orca.
Martha's Vineyard celebrated the film's 30th anniversary in 2005 with a
"JawsFest" festival, which had a second edition in 2012. An independent group of fans produced the feature-length documentary The Shark Is Still Working, featuring interviews with the film's cast and crew. Narrated by Roy Scheider and dedicated to Peter Benchley, who died in 2006, it debuted at the 2009 Los Angeles United Film Festival.
Shaw's son, Ian Shaw, co-wrote and starred as his father in the play The Shark Is Broken about the making of Jaws, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019 and transferred to the West End in October 2021.
On March 24, 2020, it was announced that Donna Feore will direct and choreograph Bruce, the musical retelling of the behind-the-scenes story of Jaws, with Richard Oberacker writing the musical book and lyrics and Robert Taylor working on the music. It was originally set to premiere in June 2021, but was pushed back to June 2022 at the Seattle Repertory Theatre.
On November 20, 2020, a replica of the shark, also called "Bruce", was lifted into place at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in preparation for the museum's April 2021 opening. It was expected to be a major attraction. Greg Nicotero spent seven months restoring Bruce, which had been created after the original three sharks were destroyed and was on display for 15 years at Universal Studios Hollywood. Bruce then spent 25 years in a junkyard, until the owner donated the shark to the museum in 2016.
SEQUELS
Jaws spawned three sequels to declining critical favor and commercial performance. Their combined domestic grosses amount to barely half of the first film's. In October 1975, Spielberg declared to a film festival audience that "making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick". Nonetheless, he did consider taking on the first sequel when its original director, John D. Hancock, was fired a few days into the shoot; ultimately, his obligations to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which he was working on with Dreyfuss, made it impossible. Jaws 2 (1978) was eventually directed by Jeannot Szwarc, with Scheider, Gary, Hamilton, and Jeffrey Kramer reprising their roles. It is generally regarded as the best of the sequels. Jaws 3-D (1983) does not feature any of the original actors, although it was directed by Joe Alves, who had served as art director and production designer, respectively, on the two preceding films. Starring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr., it was released to heavily negative reviews in 3D format. The effect did not transfer to television or home video, where it was renamed Jaws 3. Jaws: The Revenge (1987) was directed by Joseph Sargent and featured the return of Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody. Co-starring Michael Caine, it is considered one of the worst movies ever made. While all three sequels made a profit at the box office (Jaws 2 and Jaws 3-D were among the top 20 highest-grossing films of their respective years), critics and audiences alike were largely dissatisfied with the films.
You will understand, when you view them.
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