Across a half century, Jaws never jumped the shark

Fifty years onward, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws hasn’t lost any of its bite. It remains a terrifying thriller, a rousing action film, and a riveting drama that explores the captivating dynamics between three fascinating characters (Roy Scheider’s Brody, Richard Dreyfus’ Hooper, and Robert Shaw’s Quint). But perhaps most importantly, re-watching this film today reminds us of how much cinema has changed, in both positive and negative ways.

Click here to listen to a recording of our CineVerse group discussion of Jaws, conducted earlier this month. To hear the latest Cineversary celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jaws, click here.

The first of its kind

Before Jaws, summer movies were often lesser fare, including B-picture cheapies and exploitation films, and Christmastime and winter were when bigger-budget prestige pictures were often released. Studios didn’t want to spend big money on large productions to be released in the summer, when Americans typically went on vacation and visited theaters less frequently.

Jaws has since come to be regarded as the granddaddy of the summertime cinematic spectacle (which is fitting considering that it’s set during the heart of that season); it positioned Memorial Day through Independence Day as the prime window for major tentpole movies and film franchise releases.

A massive hit, this movie was the first to top the $100 million mark in box office revenues. In only two months, it became the highest-grossing picture of all time before Star Wars broke that record two years later. Jaws proved that popcorn escapist movies that were also crafted with quality could generate both big box office and critical acclaim. Indeed, it revolutionized the industry by advancing, if not creating, the concept of the modern "event film" – a movie so highly anticipated that audiences flocked to theaters in droves, often returning multiple times to see it and waiting in long lines. This phenomenon became a defining characteristic of modern Hollywood blockbusters.

Movie budgets, distribution tactics, and marketing strategies were forever changed. Pre-Jaws, only epic projects were given gigantic budgets. Jaws’ budget ballooned from around $4 million to over $9 million – a king’s ransom back then. But its total box office take of more than $470 million (equating to nearly $1.2 billion today, making it the seventh highest-grossing motion picture in history adjusted for inflation) established that throwing more dollars at this kind of entertainment was a good investment. The film sparked corporate hunger for immediate, massive profits, with studios eager for future releases to replicate the instant success of Jaws.

It was groundbreaking also in being the first motion picture released to over 400 and eventually more than 900 theaters during its initial run. Additionally, Jaws was a key film that established the benefits of backing a wide national release with heavy media advertising in TV and print. Before Jaws, Hollywood would often let a film gain notice via slow word of mouth. In fact, the marketing campaign for Jaws was revolutionary for its era, being the first to utilize a cross-platform approach that included television, radio, and print media. Prior to Jaws, Hollywood seldom advertised newer upcoming films on TV. Universal coughed up $1.8 million to market the film, including an unheard-of for that time $700,000 on a national TV advertising blitz. This broad and highly visible strategy, which focused on the shark's mystery and the film's suspense, redefined how films were marketed, creating immense anticipation leading up to its release.

But Jaws had a massive impact far beyond the movie theater. It did for swimmers what Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho did for shower-takers, and it continues to make millions of people afraid to go into the water. That says a lot about the lasting power and reach of a mere motion picture.

Filmed on location at Martha’s Vineyard and off its coast, this was the first major film to be shot on the ocean, specifically the Atlantic; common practice up to this point was to simulate the ocean by shooting inside a giant water tank.

Although earlier movies had their share of licensed merch, Jaws was the OG in that department, a cash cow that boasted a wide array of authorized products, such as toys, posters, T-shirts, books, a soundtrack album, beach towels, shark costumes, hobby kits, and other shark-themed items. Jaws paved the way for movie merchandising to become a highly profitable industry.

Additionally, Jaws was the first LaserDisc title in North America, released in 1978, and a huge hit on VHS a few years later, helping to prove that releasing popular titles on home video formats was a surefire license to print money.

A work of exemplary craftsmanship

Ruminate for a moment on how Jaws boasts an embarrassment of riches when it comes to classic scenes. Many cite the moment when Brody, scooping chum off the bow and startled by the giant shark, walks back to his shipmates and says, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Others point to the sequence on the beach when the young Kintner boy is snatched by the shark, with blood spurting out of the water like Old Faithful, and we see that classic dolly zoom shot of Brody. But it’s Quint’s U.S.S. Indianapolis soliloquy that most agree is the standout moment. Another example of a fantastic monologue that empowers our imagination to fill in the blanks we are told but don’t see is Hooper’s orally descriptive autopsy of the dead girl.

The main theme by GOAT composer John Williams is perhaps the most instantly recognized piece of movie music ever, helping the iconic score place sixth on the American Film Institute’s list of top 25 film scores. The two main notes signify the shark as an “unstoppable force of mindless and instinctive attacks… Grinding away at you, just as a shark would do – instinctual, relentless, unstoppable,” said Williams. He and Spielberg use music wisely during the film, often ratcheting up the tension by extending quieter, music-free sequences and then unexpectedly pouring on the main theme to insinuate impending danger.

While the creature effects are amazing for their day, and the subaquatic photography and location shooting on the ocean are phenomenal, the greatest enjoyment of this film comes from the dynamics between these three men trapped on a relatively small boat, and the relationship triangle that’s explored. Shaw’s embodiment as Quint represents one of the great side character performances in the movies, and his debut in the film – scraping his fingernails across the chalkboard and delivering a colorfully gruff, commanding, and slightly unhinged monologue – persists as one of the most memorable character introductions in film history.

Jaws is also chock-full of all-time memorable lines, including the aforementioned "You're gonna need a bigger boat"; "Smile, you son of a bitch!"; "You know the thing about a shark, he's got... lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes”; “Mr. Vaughn, what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine. It's really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that's all”; "You’re certifiable, Quint”; “You yell 'shark,' we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July."; "Here's to swimmin' with bow-legged women."; "Back home we got a taxidermy man. He gonna have a heart attack when he sees what I brung him"; “I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him, and kill him, for ten. But you've gotta make up your minds. If you want to stay alive, then ante up. If you want to play it cheap, be on welfare the whole winter. I don't want no volunteers, I don't want no mates, there's just too many captains on this island. $10,000 for me by myself. For that you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing”; “I'm not talkin' 'bout pleasure boatin' or day sailin'. I'm talkin' 'bout workin' for a livin'. I'm talkin' 'bout sharkin'!”

This movie also boasts among the most perfectly written final lines that close out the picture: “What day is this?” “It's Wednesday... eh, it's Tuesday, I think.” “Think the tide's with us?” “Keep kicking.” “I used to hate the water...” “I can't imagine why.” Truth is, Jaws is thoroughly satisfying from first frame to last; if you sit through the entire end credits, you can actually see Brody and Hooper, far off in the distance, reach the safety of the shore.

Jaws earned three Oscars, one for Best Film Editing, another for its musical score, and a third for Best Sound. It was also nominated for Best Picture but lost to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Jaws has also earned lasting recognition across countless “greatest films” lists. The American Film Institute ranked it 48th on its 100 Years…100 Movies list in 1998 (later 56th in the 10th Anniversary edition), named its shark the 18th greatest movie villain and the film itself as the second greatest thriller, while Roy Scheider’s iconic line, "You're gonna need a bigger boat," landed at number 35 on their top 100 movie quotes. Empire magazine ranked Jaws the fifth-greatest film in history in 2008, with Quint at number 50 on its list of top movie characters, and has appeared on numerous other best-of lists compiled by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, Total Film, Variety, and Leonard Maltin, cementing its status as a cultural and cinematic milestone. It’s also been named the eighth-best-edited film ever per the Motion Picture Editors Guild. In 2001, the United States Library of Congress selected Jaws for preservation in the National Film Registry, hailing it as a defining horror film and the original "summer blockbuster."

Spielberg’s talents surface

But most important to cinephiles, this is the work that solidified Steven Spielberg as a major filmmaking force: Jaws was his first big hit, propelling him to superstardom as a household name director, one who would go on to craft some of the biggest and best American movies of the next 50 years. Jaws benefits from his masterful direction, along with exemplary editing, a terrific screenplay, unforgettable characters, and stellar dialogue.

The director demonstrates bravura flourishes time and again in Jaws, but especially in cleverly shot and edited scenes along the beach at the start of Act II. Ponder the execution of this episode, where Brody sits nervously on the shore, watching bathers vigilantly. The camera pans left with one set of characters, then in the same shot reverses direction to follow characters walking the other way, a pattern Spielberg repeats. We see a blurry figure pass in front of Brody, totally eclipsing the frame, allowing Spielberg’s next shot to cut in closer to Brody – a technique repeated three times – suggesting increasing tension felt by the police chief. Spielberg shifts from shots of the bathers back to Brody and employs misdirection in the form of the older swimmer wearing a dark bathing cap that Brody – and the viewer – briefly believes is a shark. There’s an extreme close-up of a man addressing Brody on the right side of the frame, and a shouting swimmer behind and to the left of that man. The effect is that we, like Brody, are often distracted from lurking dangers in the water. Soon, we feel a pervading sensation of impending doom, ushered in by the ominous disappearance of the stick-fetching dog, followed by underwater shark POV shots of swimming and floating bodies. Amidst all the visual stimuli diverting our gaze, Mrs. Kitner’s young son is ravaged off in the distance, with no push-in, zoom-in, or cut to close-up of that attack. Then comes the famous Hitchcock Vertigo shot replication depicting Brody’s instant realization of this horror, achieved by having the camera suddenly zoom in on his face while simultaneously dollying the camera backward. The director’s cinematic prowess and command of visual storytelling are perhaps more apparent in this sequence than at any other point in the film.

This entire scene can be described as Hitchcockian “pure cinema,” in which the filmmakers allow relatively wordless visuals to efficiently propel the narrative. Another case in point: Brody thumbing through various shark literature featuring gruesome photos and drawings of predators and their victims.

Spielberg and his team devise clever underwater and bobbing camera shots – many of them POVs from the shark’s perspective that create wholly unsettling to outright terrifying visuals. Perhaps the most effectively frightening submerged sequence involves Hooper in the shark cage, which presents juxtaposing shots of the approaching and attacking shark with close-up images of the terrified diver; the image of the great white surprising him from behind the cage is pure nightmare fuel.

The filmmaker also deserves kudos for paring down the original Peter Benchley novel to its essential elements, casting aside subplots like Brody’s wife having an affair with Hooper while extending sequences like the shark hunt. Additionally, Spielberg purposely avoided casting any major recognizable stars, opting instead for more anonymous thespians whom audiences could better identify with. His superstar was going to be the Great White itself.

The burgeoning talent’s gift for conveying plausible family dynamics and capturing realistic slice-of-life moments between characters – amply evidenced in many Spielberg films to follow – is displayed in the improvised scene where Brody’s son imitates his dad’s every facial gesture and body movement at the dinner table, a wonderful little moment of verisimilitude and humor.

Roger Ebert admired Spielberg for continuing to “devote close attention to characters, instead of hurrying past them to the special effects, as so many 1990s f/x directors did. In Jaws and subsequently, he prefers mood to emotional bludgeoning, and one of the remarkable things about the picture is its relatively muted tone. The familiar musical theme by John Williams is not a shrieker, but low and insinuating. It’s often heard during point-of-view shots, at water level and below, that are another way Spielberg suggests the shark without showing it… The shark has been so thoroughly established, through dialogue and quasi-documentary material, that its actual presence is enhanced in our imaginations by all we’ve seen and heard.”

This Spielberg film is often most remembered for its major set pieces, haunting visuals, and widely quoted sequences. But don’t forget the many minor but equally masterful shots – often incredibly brief – that are a testament to his brilliance as a visual storyteller. For example, the image of Brody staring out of the window of the Orca, superimposed with reflections of the ocean waves; the slightly lingering shot of Quint’s machete glinting in the sun; and the gorgeous put gooseflesh-inducing graphic of the shark’s dorsal fin gliding through rippling water, backlit by the silvery evening sun.

Only 26 years old at the time of filming, Spielberg deserves infinite credit for improvising when necessary, keeping his cool when delays would frequently occur due to things like cameras becoming waterlogged and nearby boats drifting into his shots, and working around the frequent mechanical shark malfunctions-- undesirable circumstances that prolonged the shooting schedule from 55 days to 159 days. Unable to rely on his shark props, he often chose to imply the creature’s presence rather than show it outright. (He wasn’t alone: In the 1970s, several films with giant creature props faced significant breakdowns. The Land That Time Forgot (1975) had puppet dinosaurs that often broke down, while At the Earth’s Core (1976) struggled with cumbersome creature suits. The gigantic mechanical ape built for King Kong (1976) famously failed to work, slowing production. Food of the Gods (1976) featured malfunctioning oversized animal props, and Tentacles (1977) had issues with its killer octopus’s mechanical tentacles. Prophecy (1979) saw a mutant bear prop frequently malfunction, and Island of the Fishmen (1979) dealt with torn fish suits. Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) also faced challenges with its ape makeup. These films showcase the technical difficulties of large creature effects before CGI became prevalent.)

In different interviews, Spielberg said: “I was pretty naive about mother nature, and the hubris of a filmmaker who thinks he can conquer the elements was foolhardy, but I was too young to know I was being foolhardy when I demanded that we shoot the film in the Atlantic Ocean and not in a North Hollywood tank.” "The shark not working was a godsend. It made me become more like Alfred Hitchcock than like Ray Harryhausen." "The more fake the shark looked in the water, the more my anxiety told me to heighten the naturalism of the performances." “Today, a digital shark would not break down… There’d be some nice interactive water explosions to marry the digital shark with the actual water. That’s all it would be. There would not have been a full-size shark. Therefore, the film would have been only half as effective. So I was saved by the breakdown in technology.”

Reviewer Richard Scheib seems to agree, writing: “Spielberg builds the menace of the shark up highly effectively. He crafts scares with a superb elegance. He sends the film barrelling at you one way and then playfully pulls back from what you think is about to happen – (like) the beach scene where a shark attacks children in a nearby inlet while everyone’s attention is diverted by children with a fake fin. The build-up is such that the audience is like putty when Spielberg pulls his actual jumps.”

An ocean of copycats

Consider that about 55 minutes elapse before you first see the shark. Spielberg continued the tradition – earlier established in major horror and sci-fi films like Frankenstein (1931), King Kong (1933), The Thing From Another World (1951), and Godzilla (1954) – where the monster isn’t shown until well into the story. This custom was copied in subsequent creature features, including Alien (1979), Tremors (1990), Jurassic Park (1993), and remakes of King Kong (2005) and Godzilla (2014).

Movies that were influenced by or outright attempted to copy the formula for Jaws are too numerous to mention, but the major coattail riders include Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976), Grizzly (1976), Orca (1977), Tentacles (1977), The Deep (1977), Piranha (1978), Barracuda (1978), Alien (1979), Alligator (1980), Great White (1981), Monster Shark (1984), Deep Blood (1990), Deep Blue Sea (1999), the Sharknado film series (2013 – 2018), The Shallows (2016), 47 Meters Down (2017), and The Meg (2018). Jaws also spawned three inferior sequels between 1978 and 1987.

Jaws has been famously spoofed or referenced across pop culture and in several pictures, including The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), Saturday the 14th (1981), Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), Blood Beach (1980), Airplane! (1980), Caddyshack (1980), Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994), Mallrats (1995), and Chasing Amy (1997), Blades (2001), Trees (2001), Open Water (2003), and Piranha 3D (2010).

Spielberg and company were inspired by a number of filmic and literary predecessors, including Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People (1882, which is also about a concerned townsperson who tries to warn citizens of a discovered danger), and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952); monster and sci-fi films from the 1950s like The Thing from Another World (1951), It Came From Outer Space (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Godzilla (1954), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), and The Monster That Challenged the World (1957); westerns such as The Searchers (1956) and Rio Bravo (1959); and Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). There are also a few early moments where the director invokes the style of Howard Hawks, with several characters cross-talking over one another.

Yes, this is a horror film

Only two years after The Exorcist, Jaws continued a new tradition of quality prestige horror and rejuvenated a timeless template for how creature features should be made. “Jaws is the rare monster movie that doesn’t idly mark time as we wait for the next big shock,” penned Slant Magazine critic Chuck Bowen. “The shark, effectively built up as an object of myth and obsession for the first half of the film, would be a crushing disappointment if it looked ‘real,’ something most contemporary monster movies, in their reliance on generic CG, seem to sadly fail to comprehend. The shark in Jaws is the shark of our collective worst nightmares, almost otherworldly in its enormity and texture. The shark can mean anything you want it to mean, or nothing, and that uncertainty epitomizes this movie’s lasting appeal.”

Next to Poltergeist, this has got to be the scariest and goriest PG-rated film in history, full stop. Jaws contains two of the finest jump scares in the horror canon: the severed head Hooper suddenly encounters in his underwater investigation, and the unexpected surfacing of the giant shark that precedes Brody’s “bigger boat” quote.

Jaws currently ranks tops in Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the 200 best horror films of all time and places second in the American Film Institute’s list of the best thrillers ever. It topped Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments, was named the sixth-scariest film ever by the Chicago Film Critics Association, and was voted the greatest film in the “Nature Bites Back” subgenre by listeners of the popular Evolution of Horror podcast.

Themes just below the surface

The primary message underpinning this aquatic thriller is victory of the common man. Jaws is essentially a triangular conflict between three representative types in society. The opposing points on the triangle are Quint, who characterizes real-world experience, superstition, and the past; Hooper, who embodies intellect, science, and the future; and Brody, who exemplifies inexperience, open-mindedness, and the present. Brody is the bridge between the past and future, the grizzled veteran and the upstart intellectual, old school versus new school. In this dynamic, Brody is destined to prevail against their shared adversary (the shark) because he can learn from the mistakes of the past, avoid hypermasculine tendencies and vengeful motivations, and deviate from Quint’s rigid dogma; also, he doesn’t rely on booksmarts, overconfidence, scientific skill, or privilege as Hooper does. Brody is a surrogate for the audience, epitomizing the common man who must use pluck, resourcefulness, courage, and determination to vanquish his foe, despite ironically having a phobia of the water. Film scholar Andrew Britton suggests that Brody’s success at the end of the film highlights how the actions of a single righteous individual can still serve as a meaningful force for social change. Spielberg also noted that Jaws was similar to his 1971 TV movie Duel in how both stories concerned “leviathans targeting everymen.”

Political corruption and capitalistic avarice is a more obvious thesis. It’s fitting that this narrative occurs over Independence Day, just a year removed from our country’s bicentennial. Slant Magazine’s Chuck Bowen insists that Spielberg and company “created a black parody of greed, studliness, and self-entitlement – in other words, a parody of America…(Jaws creates) a disconcerting portrait of America trying to stake its claim in a willful naïveté in the wake of all of the sobering events that define the country in the late 1960s to early 1970s: Watergate, Kent State, Vietnam, etc.” Interestingly, the only other villain in the story besides the great white is Mayor Vaughn, who insists on business as usual despite death and danger in his jurisdiction. This negative political depiction and whitewashing of the truth would have resonated with audiences in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

Another thematic throughline? Defending your territory against an invading force. In Jaws, the shark isn’t the only intruder; there’s also the horde of tourists who descend upon Amity Island for their annual summertime recreational ritual. The Ringer’s Adam Nayman argues that “Jaws reroutes the trajectories and themes of classics like Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – cautionary tales in which outsiders venturing into the Old Weird America get what’s coming to them via human monsters who’d be better left undisturbed. In Spielberg’s film, the great white is the outsider, constituting a threat that’s at once thoroughly existential and a matter of nickel-and-dime economics. What the shark and Amity’s ruling class have in common is the need for a steady food supply: The visitors who swarm into town on ferries, slathered in sunscreen with fanny packs full of disposable income, are just chum in the water.”

No stink on this old fish

Jaws is the gift to film fans that keeps on giving. Among the numerous nicely wrapped packages it presents to viewers is how it serves as two movies in one, with the first half focused on the terror inflicted on a small community, and the second half a gripping adventure-thriller featuring three men pitted against a monster from hell. Another present is how it so effectively presents the point of view of the underwater predator closing in on its prey near the surface. Birthday and Christmas is rolled into one in the form of the best scene in the movie, which is not an action or horror moment but a simple sequence featuring a really good actor using his own jaws – Robert Shaw delivering his harrowing shipwreck story just before he dies. There’s the serendipitous fact that we don’t even see the shark up close until more than halfway through the film, and sparingly after that, primarily because the mechanical shark Spielberg was relying on kept breaking down – yet that proves fortuitous because not seeing the shark builds intrigue and suspense.

But topping all these fabulous gifts is Spielberg himself, who comes of age while making Jaws and irrefutably validates his gift for cinematic storytelling as well as his dexterity when creative pivoting was required on this trying shoot. Spielberg fostered an environment for several happy accidents to happen. Consider, for example, that the original screenplay called for the shark to kill Hooper in the underwater cage; however, the footage of real sharks that a separate team shot in South Australia didn’t show man-eaters actually ripping apart a dummy, which would have been required. Using this spectacular underwater footage from down under saved Hooper’s character. Also, after Universal refused to foot the bill for a reshoot of the underwater sequence where Hooper encounters the severed head, Spielberg spent $3,000 out of his own pocket to ensure that reshoot, bestowing one of the great jump scares on the world.