Fifty years of the summer blockbuster.
“Amity Island had everything. Clear skies. Gentle surf. Warm water. People flocked there every summer. It was the perfect feeding ground.”
On June 20, 1975, moviegoers lined up to see a new picture, a pulpy horror movie about a shark. And it delivered, offering popcorn-spilling jump-scares as the shark leapt up on the screen. The pulsing score, by John Williams, tapped into the viewer’s fear centers, implying menace better than any movie theme since Psycho.
The premise of Jaws fits easily into a genre of vacation-spot-ruined-by-sudden-threat, whether it be birds descending on Bodega Bay or Jason Voorhees appearing at Camp Crystal Lake. And like such films, it has many possible interpretations.
Some see it as a parable of governmental failure: the villain is not the shark, but rather the stupid and venal mayor who doesn’t want to close the beach. Or is it a caution against beachside promiscuity? Or a punishment for environmental depredation? Whatever the reading, the shark itself has no moral agency; thus, it becomes the absence of meaning around which the human characters move.
In October 2021, I visited London to see a new play: The Shark Is Broken by Ian Shaw, the son of Jaws actor Robert Shaw. The younger Shaw played his father and, joined by two castmates as Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss, portrayed the behind-the-scenes time-killing on the set. The delays with the animatronic shark meant they had plenty of time to shoot the breeze on the model boat, as production stretched for weeks over schedule. Shaw agonizes over his tax situation. Dreyfuss is at turns arrogant and neurotic; this was one of his first movies. Scheider, an accomplished television and theater actor, emerges as the mediator between the two personalities. After many false starts, fights, reconciliations, and script adjustments, we see them play out the pivotal scene, in which Shaw recites the speech about the USS Indianapolis.
For those who never saw the movie (or have forgotten), Shaw’s character, Quint, is a survivor of that ship, which was sunk by the Japanese in 1945, having just delivered to the US base at Tinian the components of the bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima. The sinking threw over 800 men into the Pacific. Over the next three days, dozens were killed by sharks. This is Quint’s private grief, his survivor guilt, his vendetta against sharks. It was also fitting for a movie made in the post-Watergate cultural moment, to remember a wartime tragedy, as the characters reflected different versions of disillusionment with the state. The embittered Quint has had his naval tattoo removed. Police Chief Brody has moved to Amity to get away from what he saw as urban collapse in New York City. Matt Hooper, the marine biologist, is discovering how recalcitrant local authorities can be, even when they are putting lives at risk.
The film’s cultural resonance is such that a play set during the filming would run on both sides of the Atlantic more than 40 years later. It wasn’t just a creature feature, but a thriller. The drama is the human reaction to pressure, to danger. Three men: a local cop, a fisherman, and a marine biologist. All working together to defeat the shark.
Peter Benchley wrote the novel, which was already a bestseller before it was picked up to be adapted for film. Benchley, journalist and scion of a literary family, had previously written a book about his travels in Europe, and a feature on Nantucket for National Geographic, describing the rhythms of the community and its annual influx of tourists. Turning to fiction, his inspiration for Jaws was, at least partly, a series of shark attacks in New Jersey in 1916, and a large shark caught by a fisherman off the coast of Long Island in 1965, and it is easy to see that Amity is based on Nantucket.
The novel contains additional subplots and characters, and it took several writers, including Benchley himself and Shaw, to knock it into a taut screenplay. Like many good movies, Jaws went on to spawn a succession of weaker sequels, but it was Spielberg who really got his break. He would make many more box office hits, anticipating audiences and returning to the animal threat with films like Jurassic Park. The technology of the creatures got better, but the themes are the same: moronic, greedy officials, and unlikely heroes.
But Jaws was more than a hit movie. It was something new: the first summer blockbuster.
The movie changed the box office formula for success. Summer became a peak movie season, as viewers discovered the air-conditioned comfort of the multiplex, dozens of which had been built across the US in the early 1970s. Along with the expansion of the shopping mall, the multiplex moved entertainment into the suburbs. Studios pivoted to releasing their big movies in June rather than the fall. Jaws would become the highest-grossing movie ever, only to be overtaken a few years later by Star Wars.
The film gave Benchley a massive career boost, as he went on to sell other novels and became involved in marine conservation. He made oceanic thrillers his beat, with The Deep, The Island, and The Beast. But none would touch Jaws in cultural impact.
It also created a shark industry. Shark Week on television, “Great White” being a household term—indeed it’s hard to imagine the golfer Greg Norman getting that nickname in the early ’80s, if it hadn’t been in Jaws’s wake.
Sharks were hardly unknown before, but Jaws put them in the pantheon of cinematic horrors—as well as casting them as real-world villains, which both encouraged shark hunting, and also increased interest in them from scientists.
In the end, the unreliable mechanical shark probably helped the film. To work around its absence, Spielberg had to come up with other ways of portraying the attacks. He went with scenes that were more suggestive than graphic: a swimmer’s leg, a red cloud in the water, a scream.
The audience could imagine the shark, far worse than the rubberized version on screen. Hidden in the darkness, just when you thought you were safe.
