[Back to Page 3]

Coate: Compare and contrast Jaws with the other movies in the Jaws franchise and/or its imitators.

Awalt: Jaws was made by one of the greatest storytellers in cinema history. The other films in what unfortunately was forcefully shaped into a franchise were made strictly for the market.

Bouzereau: I like Jaws 2 very much, but does not compare to Jaws.

Hall: I will be re-watching the sequels over the next few days and very much doubt that they will seem any better than I remember them, which is as inept rip-offs. I enjoyed Grizzly (aka Claws) when I first saw it, though I doubt that it would stand up to childhood memory now. Piranha (the 1978 original) is rather good, Killer Fish not; a friend I respect likes Orca, but I can’t say that I agree.

Hollander: For those of us old enough to remember the endless “man vs beast” horror flicks unleashed in its aftermath, we should recognize that Jaws truly created the market for that sub-genre (Hitchcock’s The Birds not withstanding). “Animal slasher” films cropped up concurrently with “maniac slasher” films thanks to the table set by Jaws. Flicks like Orca, Piranha, Grizzly, Up from the Depths, Barracuda, Alligator, The Swarm, Tentacles, Food of the Gods, Cujo, Kingdom of the Spiders, Empire of the Ants, Leviathan, Great White, and the like, were the illegitimate children of the daddy of them all. Even now the grandchildren are coming. But as a fan, it’s fun to consider that forty years later, Jaws needs no dentures, and is still biting butt and taking names. Deep Blue What?.... As for the Jaws sequels, similarities seem less evident than the contrasts. The overall tone of the films changed, progressively with Jaws 2 and drastically with the last two installments. So much so that I personally cannot consider any of them to be the same universe presented in the first film, nor even one with another. While Jaws 2 (which I do really like a lot) comes the closest—with some key continuities of cast, a Williams score, and a few locales—much of it departs from the primal aspects captured so well in the original. I credit much of that to Bill Butler’s effective waterline shots. In Jaws, the viewer is placed in the ultimate place of vulnerability along with the pending victims. We can’t see what lurks two inches south of our eye line where the rest of us is. Butler denies us that, allowing our imaginations to run amok. When the shark finally invades the space, we are forced to witness the carnage from a vantage point anyone who’s ever treaded the surf can uncomfortably relate to. Even as a kid, I recognized this as key to its fear factor. Over the years, I’ve been told by many that they refuse to swim in the ocean to this day because of Jaws. I still contend this technique is the main reason why. The sequels don’t employ this visual device to their advantage…. I also think the later films tried too hard to be creative with the subjects of attack sequences—as if the filmmakers are saying, “Wait’ll you see THIS!” Instead of a feeding ground of common beach-going tourists (which is what most can associate with), we are treated to a buffet of anonymous scuba divers and water-skiers, sailing teenagers, helicopter pilots, stunt show skiers, Sea World employees in submerged control rooms, and policemen in patrol boats on Christmas Eve. And again, mostly shot from un-relatable vantage points…. It should also go without saying that the character interplay in Jaws is simply unmatched in the rest.

We are so immersed in the story and characters, we forget it’s familiar actors Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss. For two hours we only see Brody, Quint and Hooper. And we believe in them. Period…. It’s been said that Scheider disdained the notion that Jaws is primarily a “shark movie.” He understood the titular shark was not the “main” character. He was right. I think of the four films in the franchise, the original is the only one primarily about the characters and story. And in my view, that is precisely why the shark scenes are as effective as they are. It’s more about corruption and cover-up, community paranoia and greed, a father’s battle to protect his loved ones against a tide of indifference, and competitive relationships isolated at sea. In this sense, the shark is something more akin to a MacGuffin than the main point. That’s why I believe Jaws, with only four on-screen attack scenes is the only “shark movie” you’ll find with the clout to be celebrated 40 years later as cultural landmark…. A couple of other points: I think the use of actual locals for bit parts in Spielberg’s earliest films was one of many strokes of his genius. I’ve always appreciated this aspect of Jaws in making “Amity” feel incredibly genuine. Many of the minor characters are homely, un-Hollywood types, whose presence throughout the first half of the movie convince us this is all happening in the real world, giving it an almost documentary-like feel…. Another device Spielberg consistently employs in his work is overlapping dialogue. Real life is like that. In dialogue, people commonly verbally bumper car each other. When we see this conversational style depicted well in movies, we sense it is spontaneous and genuine. No director does it better. And Jaws is one of the finest examples…. Spielberg’s famous shot framing is another aspect that separates his entry from the rest. Dissected in film schools to this day, the seamless Kintner attack setup where each camera angle is wiped to the next by passing bathers is considered one of cinema’s best examples of shot exposition. One of my favorite scenes is when Brody and Hooper argue with the Mayor in front of the billboard. Brilliant choreography within a single moving shot, letting the actors shift around within the frame changing its composition without requiring a single edit, and all while talking wildly over each other in an effort to be heard—genius. For those who consciously or unconsciously notice all these elements in Jaws, we sense their absence in the sequels.

McBride: Apples and oranges. I wrote an article for Daily Variety in the wake of Jaws about all the cheesy animals-or-fish-on-a-rampage movies that followed in its wake. Joe Dante’s tongue-in-cheek 1978 Piranha—in which my name is called out to get out of the water during the piranha attack on a kids’ camp—was considered by Spielberg “the best of the Jaws rip-offs.” But some films are better off not having sequels, as Jaws had to diminishing returns. Spielberg has been wise never to make a sequel to the ineffable E.T..

Morris: I’d really rather not. The Jaws sequels represent all the greed and cynicism that Hollywood is often accused of, and Jaws itself is too often wrongly blamed for. Start with something really successful and milk it to death, each new release becoming an ever-more pale imitator in a succession of insults to the audience. More interesting was Alien, which began self-consciously with a pitch that described it as Jaws in Space and it went on to spawn a series of sequels, each one original and distinctive. Jurassic Park was Spielberg’s return to the monster thriller picture, but it worked by having its own special qualities. There’s a danger there also, if the franchise keeps running, of ever less satisfying films if merchandizing is allowed to take over as the main reason for making them. However, I must confess I enjoy the gag in the Jurassic World trailer where they have a giant shark dangling on a line for a huge underwater dinosaur to jump out towards the camera and devour it. I haven’t seen too many of the Jaws rip-offs, but I was very impressed by Open Water, which—on a micro budget—builds tension and saves money by keeping all its horror off screen, although it does show fins and ripples on the surface to indicate circling predators. It knows what it’s up to as well: a brief shot of an ID card shows that one of the protagonist-victims is called Alex Kintner—after the boy devoured close to the beach when Brody is watching in Jaws.

Coate: We are currently in an era of remakes and reboots and Jaws has been name-dropped as a remake candidate. Should Jaws be remade?

Awalt: Not over Quint’s dead body (may the old sea dog rest in pieces). I’m not inherently against remakes or re-imaginings, since great films have come about this way, but it is hard to fathom or even justify, outside of a studio’s concerns for the market, their shareholders and their library’s brand recognition, any filmmaker bringing more than a retread to a film as singular and still as vibrant and alive as Jaws. Maybe it’s precious, but early Spielberg films like Duel, Jaws, Close Encounters, E.T. and other notable, successful and most of all, to this day beloved movies, should not be remade in Spielberg’s lifetime or so long as the films still engage audiences as they do. Unless a filmmaker considers her or himself and their ideas unique enough to truly make something new and special where cinematic gods have already tread, they’d be on a fool’s errand to even try to one-up or carbon copy Spielberg.

Bouzereau: NOOOOO!!!!! That would be very sad and I would never go see it.

Hall: No.

Hollander: ABSOLUTELY NOT! Oops, did I yell that? Sorry. Having said so, I don’t see how a remake of Jaws could really have anywhere near the impact of its predecessor on today’s audiences. We simply know too much. We have become too familiarized with the real nature of great whites thanks to decades of shark research and science channels (Shark Week, Nat Geo, etc.). Back in the early seventies, however, mass ignorance about these animals helped set the stage for a book and film like Jaws. Documentaries like Blue Water, White Death depicted Great Whites as vicious bloodthirsty man-eaters. The public was only just becoming acquainted with the mysterious “terrors” of the deep. These fish were rarely ever caught on camera in those days. When a few teeth-bearing shark photos by Ron and Valerie Taylor were popularized in the press, these frightening images became etched in our minds. Looking at them felt similar to looking at the famous “pictures” of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. It was into this culturally paranoid environment that Jaws came out to play. So, yes. No remakes please…. Secondly, you can bet that we would never get the acting caliber of the original cast. It would be big name “celebrities” hired to propel opening weekend sales, not to convey the characters to drive the narrative. The actors in Jaws were just familiar enough at the time to give us a head start in the sense that we know them, but not enough for their fame to overwhelm the people they were portraying. For example, I found this to be the case with Tom Cruise’s casting in War of the Worlds. Although he was quite good in the role, he was just ...Tom Cruise... not... I don’t even remember his character’s name right now.

McBride: Spielberg and the film’s late producer Richard Zanuck both have remarked that with CGI today, you would ruin Jaws because it would become a cartoon.

Morris: Definitely not. What would be the point? CGI would make it easy to show the shark. That, after all, was why the technology was introduced during the making of Jurassic Park—so the dinosaurs could be seen more convincingly. Jaws is effective because the difficulties with the mechanical sharks forced Spielberg to keep the monster off-screen for most of the movie. What we can’t see causes us to project our own meanings, our own fears, onto it—to fill the gap, as it were. What we imagine is always going to be far worse than any rubber puppet that we can see; and when it does eventually appear, audiences accept it because they already believe in what it can do. They’ve seen what it’s capable of. The shark exists in ourselves; it’s a part of us, not someone else’s creation up there on the screen challenging our credulity. It’s a product of our minds and so we have to believe in it. It would seem gratuitous to keep the shark off-screen when it could so easily be rendered digitally, so audiences would rightly feel manipulated and, in a sense, cheated. The filmmakers would be faced with a massive problem to get round that. On the other hand, to show the shark from the outset would be tantamount to revealing the murderer’s identity during the first attack in Psycho—it would totally undermine how the movie works.

Coate: What is the legacy of Jaws?

Awalt: Jaws stands at the vanguard of the sea changes that occurred in 1970s filmmaking. It’s the era when genre filmmaking became truly respectable, through (I believe) the combination of stories—even fantastic tales—grounded in a verisimilitude the cinema had been pushing toward since the MPAA’s rating system was instituted in the late 1960s, and since productions went on location rather than being studio bound; very intelligent, creative and media literate filmmakers who grew up on both "A-" and "B-movies" brought the production value of the former to the concepts of the latter; and these same filmmakers pushed art and production designers, and artistic and technical wizards in makeup, special, mechanical and visual effects to give something more real than bad optical composites, pie tins on strings or men in zippered rubber suits to represent the fantasy elements of genre storytelling. Jaws was one of the key films at the turning point for this kind of filmmaking, and maybe it might not have happened if the studio system wasn’t retiring and crumbling around the young "movie brats" who defined the era and helped deliver the future of filmmaking into the screen wonders we’ve been enjoying for decades since.

Bouzereau: Jaws is a classic, alongside Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Ben-Hur, Psycho, and very few other perfect films.

Hall: It’s easily overstated. Clearly, as the first film to break the $100 million domestic rentals barrier, it set a new benchmark for potential earnings and inspired Hollywood studios to aim for more of the same kind of success. It helped popularize (but did not initiate) the pattern of increasingly wide release of potential blockbusters in the summer months, along with the tendency to promote films via intensive national television advertising. But that does not make it the "first" blockbuster, the first "summer blockbuster," the first big-budget studio movie to "open wide," nor the first film to be made into a hit by TV—all these things had occurred much earlier. It’s just that Jaws helped redefine the categories and demonstrated the potential of the distribution and promotional strategies it used so effectively. As such, it was highly influential—but so too were The Godfather, The Exorcist and Star Wars.

Hollander: I think the cultural contribution history will most remember about Jaws is its pioneering of the summer blockbuster phenomenon. For better or for worse, the way movies are made and marketed changed overnight because of it. Of course, there are many other ripples that have gone out from the splash that Jaws made; many of which we cover in The Shark is Still Working. It was really the first to bring mass awareness of sharks in general and the Great White in particular. There’s no denying it had a tremendous effect on the swimming habits of a generation. Regrettably, the fear generated by Jaws initially prompted over-fishing of these animals, which eventually led to their inclusion on the endangered species list. On the plus side, however, many of today’s leading shark conservationists cite an early fascination with the movie as the catalyst for their career choice. It also cannot be denied, Jaws gave us one of the most iconic movie posters ever, a game-changing John Williams score, inspired many of today’s hottest filmmakers, and arguably remains Spielberg’s most perennially-broadcast and screened films.

McBride: It helped further the concept of the blockbuster, but there are myths associated with this. There had been blockbusters before—remember Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Gone With the Wind, etc.? And soon before Jaws there were The Godfather and The Exorcist. But somehow Spielberg and George Lucas (with Star Wars in 1977) are the only filmmakers blamed by some shortsighted critics and historians for supposedly ruining Hollywood by creating the “blockbuster syndrome.” The real causes of that syndrome, which has blighted American filmmaking, are more sociologically and economically based. What really was significant about the Jaws opening was not the number of theaters in which it opened—contrary to legend, numerous films had opened in many more theaters than Jaws to make a quick buck, and the debut of Jaws was actually scaled back by Universal after the second preview from a planned break in more than 1,000 theaters to 409 to help it build word-of-mouth a little more slowly. What was significant was the sizeable national TV ad buy for the film, $700,000, which was large for that time (out of a total national pre-opening advertising budget of $1.8 million)…. That strategy and the film’s runaway success set a trend in Hollywood. Unfortunately, marketing became the tail that wagged the dog. Films became dumbed down to sell in thirty-second or sixty-second national TV ads. You could make a good case that it was actually the spread of television advertising that has ruined both American films and American politics, although there of course are other deeper political and sociological factors at work. Jaws as an aesthetic object has been honored more in the breach than in the observance, since films have become more and more unsubtle and gross over the years. By comparison with some of today’s spectacles, Jaws is starting to look like a Robert Bresson film, an intimate and meditative work deconstructing masculinity.

Morris: Back to how I answered the original question. It changed the way Hollywood worked. It was seen as the first contemporary blockbuster. This wasn’t intentional, however. The movie happened to be both a fine piece of entertainment and a masterly demonstration of cinematic craft and it came along in the right place at the right time. It had been finished way over schedule and at three times the original budget. The more expensive a movie is, the higher the risk becomes if it fails. One way Hollywood deals with this is through high concept: a movie that’s easy to describe and visualize is much easier to market. Although the term didn’t then exist, high concept expresses perfectly how to think about an adaptation of an already best-selling novel about a massive shark that attacks a small-town holiday resort; that has a single-word title and a hugely distinctive graphic style carried across movie posters, book covers, and merchandizing; and that was released during the summer holidays when people were on the beaches. What’s called ”four-walling”—block-booking neighborhood theatres—was a strategy previously adopted to deal with predicted failures; especially when it was combined with nationwide release, it maximized potential audiences before bad word-of-mouth could kill a lousy movie. The huge spend on TV advertising changed Hollywood’s relationship with broadcasting, which it previously saw as a rival. All this might have spelt the end of Spielberg’s career as a director had it not paid off; nor would we have his collaborations with Richard Dreyfuss on screen and John Williams providing most of his subsequent scores. But everything Jaws represents in terms of industry practice would have happened anyway. Previous hits such as The Godfather and The Exorcist were the biggest ever box office. Star Wars, two years later, repeated the success of a midsummer release. You can’t blame Jaws, or its director, for bloated budgets, reliance on special effects, proliferation of sequels, merchandizing, or franchises. It would be an economic certainty, and only a matter of time, before some other movie had come along and inadvertently provided much the same answer to Hollywood’s woes…. So, the legacy of Jaws goes back to what my professors taught me. It has stood the test of time, and as far more than a piece of disposable entertainment.

Coate: Thank you, everyone, for participating and sharing your thoughts about Jaws on the occasion of its 40th anniversary.

---END---

PRINCIPAL CAST & CREW:

• Brody — Roy Scheider
• Quint — Robert Shaw
• Hooper — Richard Dreyfuss
• Ellen Brody — Lorraine Gary
• Vaughn — Murray Hamilton
• Meadows — Carl Gottlieb
• Hendricks — Jeffrey C. Kramer
• Chrissie — Susan Backlinie
• Cassidy — Jonathan Filley
• Estuary Victim — Ted Grossman
• Michael Brody — Chris Rebello
• Sean Brody — Jay Mello
• Mrs. Kintner — Lee Fierro
• Alex Kintner — Jeffrey Voorhees
• Ben Gardner — Craig Kingsbury
• Medical Examiner — Dr. Robert Nevin
• Interviewer — Peter Benchley

• Director — Steven Spielberg
• Producers — Richard D. Zanuck and Robert Brown
• Screenplay — Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb (based upon the novel by Peter Benchley)
• Director of Photography — Bill Butler
• Editor — Verna Fields
• Music — John Williams
• Production Designer — Joseph Alves, Jr.
• Special Effects — Robert A. Mattey
• Production Executive — William S. Gilmore, Jr.

• Studio — Universal Pictures
• Release Date — June 20, 1975
• Running Time — 124 minutes
• Projection Format — Scope
• Sound Format — Mono
• MPAA Rating — PG

SPECIAL THANKS:

Brad Adams, Jerry Alexander, Al Alvarez, Peter Apruzzese, Steven Awalt, Claude Ayakawa, Laura Baas, Jim Barg, Kirk Besse, Serge Bosschaerts, Laurent Bouzereau, Raymond Caple, Miguel Carrara, Scott Clark, Bob Collins, Adam Cray, Nick DiMaggio, Mike Durrett, Sheldon Hall, John Hawkinson, Erik Hollander, William Hooper, Mark Huffstetler, Bill Kretzel, Ronald A. Lee, Mark Lensenmayer, Paul Linfesty, Victor Liorentas, Delailah Little, Stan Malone, Deborah May, Joseph McBride, Nigel Morris, Gabriel Neeb, Scott Neff, Jim Perry, Tim Reed, Melissa Scroggins, Desirée Sharland, John Stewart, Allen Swords, Robert Throop, Joel Weide, Vince Young, and a huge thank-you to all of the librarians who helped with the research for this project.

SOURCES/REFERENCES:

Primary references for this project were hundreds of daily newspapers archived digitally and/or on microfilm and the trade publications Boxoffice, The Hollywood Reporter, and Variety. Additional references for selected information included Mad Magazine, New York Magazine, Newsweek, Playboy, and Time Magazine. Books referenced included Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind (1998, Simon & Schuster), Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History by Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale (2010, Wayne State University Press), The Films of Steven Spielberg by Douglas Brode (1995, Citadel), George Lucas’s Blockbusting: A Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success edited by Alex Ben Block and Lucy Autrey Wilson (2010, George Lucas Books/HarperCollins), The Hollywood Reporter Book of Box Office Hits by Susan Sackett (1996, Billboard), The Jaws Log: 30th Anniversary Edition by Carl Gottlieb (Newmarket, 2005), The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood by Michael Pye and Lynda Myles (1979, Holt, Rinehart and Winston), Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession by Dade Hayes & Jonathan Bing (2004, Miramax), Spielberg: The Man, The Movies, The Mythology by Frank Sanello (1996, Taylor), Steven Spielberg: A Biography by Joseph McBride (1997, Simon & Schuster), and Steven Spielberg: The Man, His Movies and Their Meaning by Philip M. Taylor (1992, Continuum). The following motion pictures were referenced: Back to the Future Part II (1989, Amblin Entertainment/Universal Pictures), Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (2002, Trio/Fremantle/BBC/Shout! Factory), Jaws (1975, Zanuck/Brown, Universal Pictures), The Making of Jaws (1995, Universal Studios Home Entertainment), and The Shark Is Still Working (2007, Finatic Productions, Universal Studios Home Entertainment). Websites referenced include BoxOfficeMojo, CinemaTour, CinemaTreasures. This is a revised and updated version of a previously-published article.

SELECTED IMAGES:

Copyright 1975 Universal Pictures

All figures and data included in this article pertain to the United States & Canada except where stated otherwise.

IN MEMORIAM:

• Robert Shaw (“Quint”), 1927-1978
• Charlsie Bryant (Script Supervisor), 1917-1978
• John R. Carter (Sound), 1907-1982
• Verna Fields (Film Editor), 1918-1982
• Howard Sackler (Screenwriter), 1929-1982
• Murray Hamilton (“Vaughn”), 1923-1986
• Roger Heman, Jr. (Sound), 1932-1989
• Manfred Zendar (Technical Advisor), 1907-1990
• Robert A. Mattey (Special Effects), 1910-1993
• Chris Rebello (“Michael Brody”), 1963-2000
• Lew Wasserman (Universal Studios Chairman), 1913-2002
• Peter Benchley (Screenwriter), 1940-2006
• Percy Rodrigues (Promotional Material Voiceover), 1918-2007
• Roy Scheider (“Brody”), 1932-2008
• Shari Rhodes (Location Casting), 1938-2009
• David Brown (Producer), 1916-2010
• Richard D. Zanuck (Producer), 1934-2012

- Michael Coate

Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4