NEW YORK (AP) â Fifty years after âJawsâ sunk its teeth into us, weâre still admiring the bite mark.
1975 film, his second feature, left such a imprint on culture and Hollywood that barely any trip to the movies, let alone to the beach, has been the same since.
Few films have been more perfectly suited to their time and place than âJaws,â which half a century ago unspooled across the country in a then-novel wide release accompanied by Universal Pictures' opening-weekend publicity blitz. âJawsâ wasnât quite the first movie to try to gobble up moviegoers whole, in one mouthful (a few years earlier, âThe Godfatherâ more or less tried it), but âJawsâ established â and still in many ways defines â the summer movie.
That puts âJawsâ at the birth of a trend that has since consumed Hollywood: the blockbuster era. When it launched in 409 theaters on June 20, 1975, and grossed a then-record $7.9 million in its first days, âJawsâ set the template thatâs been followed ever-after by every action movie, superhero flick or dinosaur film thatâs tried to go big in the summer â a sleepy time in theaters before âJawsâ came around.
And yet the âJawsâ legacy is so much more than being Hollywoodâs ur-text blockbuster. Itâs not possible to, 50 years later, watch Spielbergâs film and see nothing but the beginning of a box-office bonanza, or the paler fish itâs inspired. Itâs just too good a movie â and too much unlike so many wannabes since ââ to be merely groundbreaking. Itâs a masterpiece in its own right.
âIt supercharged the language of cinema,â the filmmaker Robert Zemeckis says in the upcoming documentary âJaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story,â premiering July 10 on National Geographic.
That documentary, with Spielbergâs participation, is just a small part of the festivities that have accompanied the movie's anniversary. Marthaâs Vineyard, where âJawsâ was shot, is hosting everything from concerts to âJawsâ-themed dog dress-ups. âJaws,â itself, is streaming on Peacock through July 14, along with a prime-time airing Friday on NBC, with an intro from Spielberg. The âJawsâ anniversary feels almost more like a national holiday â and appropriately so.
But if âJawsâ is one of the most influential movies ever made, Hollywood hasn't always drawn the right lessons from it. âYou're gonna need a bigger boatâ has perhaps been taken too literally in movies that have leaned too much on scale and spectacle, when neither of those things really had much to do with the brilliance of Spielbergâs classic.
For the filmâs 50th anniversary, we looked at some of the things today's Hollywood could learn from âJaws" 50 years later.
Local Color
Every time I rewatch âJawsâ â which I highly recommend doing on some projected screen, even a bedsheet, and preferably with an ocean nearby â I marvel at how much it gets from its Marthaâs Vineyard setting.
Where U.S.-made film productions are shot has been . Various incentives often determine movie shooting locations, with set dressings, or CGI, filling in the rest. But âJawsâ shows you just how much more than tax credits you can get from a locale.
Spielberg was convinced the adaptation of Peter Benchleyâs novel â inspired by Benchleyâs childhood summers on Nantucket â shouldnât be done in soundstages. After looking up and down the Atlantic coast, he settled on Nantucketâs neighboring island. Like his first film, the Mojave Desert-set âDuel,â Spielberg wanted his mechanized shark to swim in a real, definable place.
âI felt the same way about âJaws,ââ Spielberg says in the documentary. âI wanted to go to the natural environment so there was some kind of verisimilitude. So it needed to be in the ocean, out to sea.â
It wasnât easy. The budget for âJawsâ nearly tripled to $9 million and the shoot extended from 55 to 159 days. Spielberg would never again be under financial pressure on a picture, but the tortured âJawsâ production put him under a microscope. An AP report from 1975 began: âIt is news when a 26-year-old film director goes $2 million over budget and two and a half months over schedule and manages to avoid getting fired.â
More than any other time in his career, Spielberg fretted.
ââJawsâ was my Vietnam,â he told Richard Schickel. âIt was basically naive people against nature and nature beat us every day.â
It also infused every inch of the frame with smalltown New England flavor in the way that no soundstage, or CGI, ever could.
Less is more
When Spielberg was ready to start filming, his star attraction wasnât. The mechanized shark, nicknamed âBruceâ after the directorâs attorney, suffered frequent failures that forced Spielberg to find different approaches to shooting his shark scenes early in the film.
âJawsâ instead became, to Spielberg, a kind of homage to Alfred Hitchcockâs âPsycho.â The suspense came less from the shark than the fear of the unknown and that spine-tingling question: Whatâs in the water? Spielberg, with the significant aid of John Williamsâ instantly iconic score, delayed the appearance of his Great White until well into the film.
âThe visual ellipsis,â the critic Molly Haskell wrote, âcreated far greater menace and terror, as the shark is nowhere and everywhere.â
Spielberg once estimated that Bruceâs mechanical delays added $175 million to the movieâs box office. On its initial run, âJawsâ grossed $260.7 million domestically in 1975. Adjusted for inflation, thatâs about $1.5 billion. Nowadays, the shark would almost certainly be done, like most movie creatures, with computer animation. But âJawsâ showed that often the most powerful source of dread is our imagination.
Human-scale
This is the time of year when the fate of the world often hangs in the balance. All manner of summer movies have had no bones about destroying cities for a mere plot point. Yet for all its terror, âJaws" features only a handful of deaths. All of its drama is human-scaled. Compared to more swaggering blockbusters today, âJawsâ would be considered a modest, mid-budget movie.
Thatâs partially why you have to almost remind yourself that the movie has only three main characters in Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Quint (Robert Shaw). Casting director Sherry Rhodes peopled the cast with locals from the island, many of whom inject the film with little moments of day-to-day humanity. âJaws,â in that way, feels more like a community than a cast.
Escapism with something to say
On the one hand, âJawsâ had little to do directly with its times. The Vietnam War had just ended. Watergate had just led to the resignation of President Nixon. The heart-stopping story of a shark off the Massachusetts shoreline promised escapism.
Yet âJawsâ has endured as a parable of capitalism, pulled out time and time again to illustrate those endlessly repeating clashes of cash versus social safety.
âAmity is a summer town,â says Amityâs mayor, Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) in the film. âWe need summer dollars.â
The shark gets the theme song and the movie poster, but the real villain of âJawsâ wears a pinstripe suit and smiles for the cameras. âAs you can see, itâs a beautiful day and the beaches are open,â he says. More than the predator in the ocean, he, and the town, feast on human flesh.
âJawsâ is untouchable
There are boatloads of movies â including the three sequels that followed after â that have tried in vain to capture some of the magic of âJaws.â But what happened in June 1975, let alone on Marthaâs Vineyard the year before, isnât repeatable. Even the greatest movies are products of a thousand small miracles. That title? Benchley came up with it minutes before going to print. The iconic poster came from Roger Kastel's painting for the book. Scheider, for instance, learned about the movie by overhearing Spielberg at a party. Williams relied on just two notes for one of the most widely known film scores in movie history.
But no ingredient mattered more on âJawsâ than the man behind the camera. Filmmaking talents like Spielberg come around maybe a couple times a century, and in âJaws,â he emerged, spectacularly. What's maybe most striking about âJawsâ 50 years later is how much it still doesn't look like anything else.
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Jake Coyle has been writing about movies for the AP since 2013. He's seen âJawsâ at least a dozen times, and screened it for his kids when they were debatably too young for it.
Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
