40 years ago today this film was released. It did quite well!
Jaws, 40 years on: âOne of the truly great and lasting classics of American cinemaâ The true meaning of Jaws has been picked over by critics and academics ever since its release in June 1975, and even its status as the first summer blockbuster has been questioned. But isnât it just about a killer shark?Mark KermodeFirst things first; Jaws is not about a shark. It may have a shark in it â and indeed all over the poster, the soundtrack album, the paperback jacket and so on. It may have scared a generation of cinemagoers out of the water for fear of being bitten in half by the âteeth of the seaâ. But the underlying story of Jaws is more complex than the simple terror of being eaten by a very big fish. As a novel, it reads like a morality tale about the dangers of extramarital sex and the inability of a weak father to control his family and his community. As a film, it has been variously interpreted as everything from a depiction of masculinity in crisis to a post-Watergate paranoid parable about corrupt authority figures. But as a cultural phenomenon, the real story of Jaws is how a B-movie-style creature-feature became a genre-defining blockbuster that changed the face of modern cinema. In the wake of the epochal opening of Jaws 40 years ago, the film industry would find itself on the brink of a brave new world wherein saturation marketing and mall-rat teen audiences were the keys to untold riches. To this day, many consider the template of contemporary blockbuster releases to have been laid down in the summer of 1975 by a movie that redefined the parameters of a âhitâ â artistically, demographically, financially.
According to David Brown, one of the filmâs producers: âAlmost everyone remembers when they first saw Jaws. They say, I remember the theatre I was in, I remember what I did when I went home â I wouldnât even draw the bathwater.â I was no exception. I first saw the movie at the ABC Turnpike Lane in north London at the age of 12. It was a Sunday afternoon and Iâd had to catch two separate buses to get to the cinema. I sat on the right-hand side of the packed auditorium and I remember very clearly finding the opening sequence so alarming that I wasnât sure Iâd be able to get through the rest of the film. As I told director Steven Spielberg several decades later, watching poor Susan Backlinie being dragged violently back and forth by an unseen underwater assailant, screaming blue murder, I genuinely feared that I would lose control of my bodily functions (âI like that!â laughed the director).
The lenient A certificate had meant that Iâd been able to see the movie on my own, without an accompanying parent or guardian, merely the warning that âthe film may be unsuitable for young childrenâ. But the entire cinema seemed utterly traumatised by that unforgettable opening sequence, and in the wake of this ruthlessly efficient curtain-raiser (you see nothing, but fear everything), two people hurried to the exit. As they left, I remember whispering to myself in a state of sublime terror: âI am never going swimming again, I am never going swimming againâŚâ
This, of course, had been the reaction of millions of cinemagoers in the US, where Jaws had become a summer movie sensation. In his influential essay, The New Hollywood, film historian Thomas Schatz notes that Jaws ârecalibrated the profit potential of the Hollywood hit and redefined its status as a marketable commodity and cultural phenomenon as wellâ. Significantly, it achieved this success at a time when âmost calculated hits were released during the Christmas holidaysâ. Not so Jaws, which according to David Brown was âdeliberately delayed until people were in the water off the summer beach resortsâ. Indeed, one of the filmâs most memorable tag-lines was âSee it before you go swimming!â. Yet it wasnât just the resorts where Jaws showed its boxâoffice teeth.
Despite the fact that the summer months had traditionally been slow for cinemas (why go to the movies when the sun is shining?), Spielbergâs brilliantly constructed shocker struck a nerve with young audiences whose natural environment was not the beach but the shopping mall. Between 1965 and 1970, the number of malls in America had grown from 1,500 to 12,500 and Jaws rode high on the growing wave of multiplex cinemas that these urban meccas increasingly housed. Along with confirming âthe viability of the summer hit, indicating an adjustment in seasonal release tacticsâ, Schatz also argues that Jaws struck a chord with a new generation of moviegoers who had âtime and spending money and a penchant for wandering suburban shopping malls and for repeated viewings of their favourite filmsâ. It didnât hurt that these malls were air-conditioned, with the multiplex cinemas they increasingly housed providing a cool alternative to the sweltering summer heat.
In the wake of Jawsâs extraordinary success, film-makers and studios started to see the summer months not as dog days but as prime time, something that had previously only been true for the declining drive-in market. âThe summer blockbuster was born on 20 June 1975, when Jaws opened wide,â wrote the Financial Timesâs Nigel Andrews, adding: âIn the years after Jaws, the entire release calendar changed.â
This change was apparently confirmed two years later by the May 1977 opening of George Lucasâs Star Wars, with its sequels The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi setting new benchmarks for seasonal franchise profitability. In the process, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas became two of the most influential people in Hollywood, the men who, according to popular folklore, had invented the âsummer blockbusterâ.
Jaws opened across North America on 464 screens amid an unprecedented publicity blitz: $2.5m was spent on promotion, a substantial chunk of which went on TV advertising, still a novelty at that time. Promotional tie-ins, including Jaws-themed ice-creams, were everywhere. I remember being on holiday in the Isle of Man long before the filmâs UK opening (it didnât arrive here until December) and buying the novel, the T-shirt and a garish Jaws pendant, all on the strength of the insane levels of news coverage that the filmâs US opening provoked. âLifeguards were falling asleep at their stations,â remembered the filmâs other producer, Richard Zanuck, âbecause nobody was going in the water; they were on the beach reading their bookâ. In the first 38 days of its release, Jaws sold 25m tickets; its rentals in 1975 were a record-breaking $102.5m. When adjusted for inflation, the filmâs total worldwide box office is now estimated at close to $2bn.
Such staggering success proved game-changing, establishing the financial merit of the âfront-loadingâ strategy, which used saturation marketing to turn a movie into an event. According to Carl Gottlieb, who shares Jawsâs screenwriting credit with Peter Benchley: âThat notion of selling a picture as an event, as a phenomenon, as a destination, was born with that release.â
Today, received wisdom has it that Jaws essentially redefined the economic models of Hollywood. This change led to some staggering box-office bonanzas, but it has come at a price. âMy husband keeps citing this as the movie that changed the way movies are made,â says Jaws actress (and wife of former Universal boss Sid Sheinberg) Lorraine Gary (Ellen Brody) in the 1997 BBC documentary In the Teeth of Jaws. âIt got us to where we are today, which is, if itâs not a hundred-million-dollar movie, it doesnât get the kind of support it needs from the studio. It was a good thing at the time [but] itâs an awful legacy to now have everyone used to an enormous hit-you-over-the-head television campaign which costs so much money.â
Whether or not Jaws really did change the film industry for ever is one of the subjects to be debated at the Jaws 40th Anniversary Symposium at De Montfort University, Leicester, later in June. Here, prominent academics Peter Krämer and Sheldon Hall will go head to head on the still-heated question of whether Jaws was indeed the âfirst blockbusterâ (Hall thinks not), while others debate subjects as esoteric as âmasculinity and crisis in Jawsâ, âJaws and eco-feminismâ and (most tantalisingly) âJaws: the case of the archetypal American villain as queer dissident attacking the heteronormativeâ.
Conference convener Ian Hunter says that the purpose of the event is to investigate the movieâs progress from popcorn hit to cinema classic. âThe thing about Jaws is that itâs open to so many interpretations,â says Hunter. âIt can be about Watergate, or the bomb, or masculinity, or whatever. Some critics have claimed that it marks the point that Hollywood became more interested in archetypes than characters, but it was also the birth of a new kind of family film. I remember seeing it in Plymouth on Boxing Day 1975 and thinking that this was really a film for us, for the generation of The Towering Inferno and Earthquake, offering the kind of thrills that had previously been the domain of X-rated movies. For me, it remains one of the truly great and lasting classics of American cinema, a perfect piece of movie-making.â
Jaws began life as a 1974 novel by Peter Benchley about a seaside resort named Amity that is terrorised by a great white shark. Police chief Martin Brody, played by Roy Scheider in the film, orders the beaches to be closed, but the mayor and local businessmen insist they stay open â with tragic results. Eventually, Brody is forced to take to the sea with professional shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) and ichthyologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) to hunt down the shark and save the town.
Film rights were secured by Zanuck and Brown for $150,000 (plus $25,000 for a first draft of the script) before the novel had been published (the book sold 5.5m copies before the movie opened). After potential director Dick Richards reportedly blew the assignment by repeatedly referring to the shark as âa whaleâ, the producers turned to rising director Steven Spielberg, who had just finished work on his feature debut, The Sugarland Express, and had made waves with the TV movie Duel, which pitted an emasculated Dennis Weaver against a giant, predatory truck.
âI always thought that Jaws was kind of like an aquatic version of Duel,â Spielberg told me in 2006, when I interviewed him for a BBC Culture Show special on the eve of his 60th birthday. âIt was once again about a very large predator, you know, chasing innocent people and consuming them â irrationally. It was an eating machine. At the same time, I think it was also my own fear of the water. Iâve always been afraid of the water, I was never a very good swimmer. And that probably motivated me more than anything else to want to tell that story.â
The production of Jaws proved problematic from the outset. First, there was the screenplay, which was still in flux when principal photography began in May 1974 (Richard Dreyfuss famously declared: âWe started without a script, without a cast and without a sharkâ). Three drafts of the Jaws script were produced by Benchley before playwright Howard Sackler was brought in to do uncredited rewrites. But still things werenât quite right and 10 days before the shoot Carl Gottlieb was enlisted to work with Spielberg on some dialogue scenes, bringing more warmth and âlevityâ to the often unlikable characters. Gottlieb would continue to do rewrites throughout the production, often incorporating material improvised in rehearsal by the cast, with added input from John Milius.
With a projected budget of between $3.5m and $4m, filming got under way at the Massachusetts resort of Marthaâs Vineyard. Several residents were cast in minor roles, but a few feathers were ruffled by the prospect of a Hollywood production rolling into town. âMarthaâs Vineyard is a very upmarket place,â says Nick Jones, producer/director of In the Teeth of Jaws. âThere is a somewhat snobby element of the super-rich, but the businesses rely on tourist dollars. So there was a little tension between those who wanted the film crew there and those who didnât. For example, when the production needed to build Quintâs shack on a vacant harbour lot, they were refused planning permission even though it was only a set. Finally, they were allowed to continue on the proviso that they put everything back exactly the way it was, including the trash!â
Nowadays, Marthaâs Vineyard attracts a steady stream of tourists eager to visit the locations where Jaws was filmed. âIt really is like walking around a movie set,â says Jones. âBefore Jaws, there was a certain notoriety from the Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddick scandal, but the movie really eclipsed that. When we were making the documentary, we went with Lee Fierro [the Marthaâs Vineyard resident who plays Mrs Kintner in the movie] to the stretch of coast where the beach scenes for Jaws were filmed. Itâs very exciting to see those vistas that have become so iconic. And we got taken out to the wreck of the Orca [Quintâs boat], which was just a shell sticking out of the edge of the water. It was bizarre; we stood in it and touched it â it was like touching a piece of the true cross.â
The Jaws shoot was originally scheduled for 55 days, but the production swiftly turned into a logistical nightmare when the mechanical shark (three full-size, pneumatically animated models were constructed) consistently failed to play ball. Nicknamed Bruce after Spielbergâs lawyer, Bruce Ramer, the shark had been built by Bob Mattey, who had created the giant squid for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The models worked fine in the warehouse, but the minute they were dumped into seawater, they started to malfunction. Day after day went by without any usable footage being shot, storms and seasickness the film-makersâ only reward.
Recalling the ordeal of the shoot, Spielberg told me: âJaws to me was a near-death experience â and a âcareer deathâ experience! I went to a party on Marthaâs Vineyard and a very well-known actress came over to me and said, âI just came back from LA and everybody says this picture is a complete stinker. Itâs a total failure and nobody will ever hire you again because youâre profligate in your spending and youâre irresponsible. Everybodyâs calling you irresponsible!â I had never heard the scuttle before, I didnât ever hear the noise that was coming from Hollywood about me. So I was halfway through shooting the picture and this person tells me that my movieâs a disaster, and I am a disaster, and itâs over. And I really believed for the second half of the film that this was the last time I was ever going to shoot a film on 35mm.â
The lengthy shoot took its toll on the cast too. In particular, tensions emerged between Dreyfuss and Shaw to match those between their respective characters, ichthyologist Matt Hooper and crusty shark-hunter Quint. Partly modelled on local character Craig Kingsbury (who has a small role in the movie as the ill-fated Ben Gardner), Quint is a hard-drinking troublemaker who takes pleasure in taunting his city boy colleagues. It was a role into which Shaw threw himself with scene-stealing gusto, to the alarm of Dreyfuss. âThere was a kind of sparring that went on between us,â Dreyfuss told the BBC in 1997. âIt was both playful and â on my part â desperate. [Shaw] knew how to dish it out so you had to learn how to dish it back. He could be very vicious and his humour could be very cutting.â And, like his character, Shaw enjoyed a drink.
But while Shaw proved a somewhat volatile presence, his work on screen was note-perfect, which was more than could be said for the shark. By the time the film-makers had enough usable footage in the can, the production was more than 100 days over schedule, with the budget spiralling toward the $9m mark, $3m of which had been blown on what Spielberg derisively called âthe special defects departmentâ. Yet Bruceâs failure to function proved the making of the film. Unable to get the shark action shots he wanted, Spielberg was forced to take a more Hitchcockian approach, working with editor Verna Fields to conjure tense sequences in which what we donât see is more important that what we do. Meanwhile, composer John Williams filled in the gaps where the shark should be with an ominous score that has become as synonymous with screen terror as Bernard Herrmannâs themes from Psycho. The result was pure magic, causing Spielberg to concede that âhad the shark been working, perhaps the film would have made half the money and been half as scaryâ.
It wasnât until Jaws was test-screened at the Medallion theatre, Dallas, in March 1975 that the film-makers got the sense that they were on to a hit. âThat was the first time I realised that the shark worked, the movie worked, everything about it worked,â Spielberg told me. âThe audience came out of their seats. Popcorn was flying in front of the screen twice during the movie. And then I got greedy and thought, gee, could I make the popcorn fly out of their boxes three times? And thatâs when I shot that scene in my editor Vernaâs pool. I had this idea that maybe when Richard [Dreyfuss] goes underwater to dig the tooth out [of the sunken boat], what if Ben Gardnerâs entire head comes out of the hole? And so I shot it in her pool with a prosthetic head and a plywood boat.â
The scene of Ben Gardnerâs mutilated head floating into view did indeed prove a showstopper. It was just one of a number of intense, gory sequences that earned Jaws the reputation of being the most shocking movie ever to be awarded a family-friendly PG rating in the US. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, critic Charles Champlin complained that âthe PG rating is grievously wrong and misleading⌠Jaws is too gruesome for children and likely to turn the stomach of the impressionable at any age.â (The Motion Picture Association of America defended its lenient rating by pointing out that ânobody ever got mugged by a sharkâ.)
All of which brings us back to the thorny question of what Jaws is really about. For years, I have insisted that Jaws is a classic monster movie âmorality taleâ in which the watery fate of potential victims is sealed by their on-land behaviour. Stephen King memorably wrote: âWithin the frame of most horror tales we find a moral code so strong it would make a Puritan smileâ, and that certainly seems to apply to Jaws. Key to this reading is the character of Hooper, who [plot spoilers ahead!] dies in the novel after having a sordid fling with Brodyâs wife, Ellen, but miraculously survives on screen, largely because the affair doesnât happen in the film. Benchley, who makes a cameo appearance in the movie as a news reporter, remembers that the very first thing Zanuck told him when writing the script was to lose âthat love story, the whole sex nonsenseâ. Spielberg agreed, confirming to me that âmy first impulse was to get rid of the melodrama and the soap opera aspects of the novel, the whole love affair with the ichthyologist and the police chiefâs wifeâ. Instead, he wanted to âgo right for that third actâ, cutting to the chase with dramatic results. But once the affair had been removed, so too was the subtextual justification for Hooperâs violent death.
Although the official explanation for Hooper surviving the shark-cage attack was the unplanned wrecking of the empty cage by a real-life predator (and stuntman Carl Rizzoâs understandable reluctance to get back in the water), it seemed clear to me that without the infidelity subplot Hooper became a heroic character who had to live. When I interviewed Spielberg in 2006, he reluctantly conceded that there was some logic in this. But by the time I spoke to him again in 2012, for BBC Radio 5 Live, he wasnât buying it.
âThe shark doesnât care whether youâre married or single,â he laughed. âIt just wants to eat ya!â But what about Hooperâs survival? I insisted. Surely that only makes sense because you cut out the affair? âWell, I cut the soap opera because I wanted to go out and do a sea-hunt movie,â Spielberg demurred. âI wasnât interested in doing Peyton Place.â
So, Jaws isnât a film about infidelity? (Or masculinity? Or Watergate? Or whatever?)
âNo,â replied Spielberg definitively. âItâs a film about a shark.â
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/31/jaws-40-years-on-truly-great-lasting-classics-of-america-cinema