A scene from Steven Spielberg's Jaws, based on the popular novel by Peter Benchley.
Steven Spielberg’s 1975 sleeper hit has been credited and criticised for helping create blockbuster culture. It endures because of the fundamentals.
The impact of Jaws on contemporary cinema has been so thoroughly researched, prosecuted and scientifically proved that it has taken on the contours of catechism: Lo, it came to pass that Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel about a man-eating great white shark opened in a record number of theatres, became the first film to earn more than US$100 million ($165m) at the box office and thus invented the modern Hollywood blockbuster, transforming and redefining (or - tomato/tomahto - ruining and destroying) American movie culture forever and ever. Amen and pass the popcorn.
It’s true that in 1975, when it was released in more than 400 theatres, Jaws became the first motion picture to break the US$100m barrier in gross box office receipts, a record George Lucas’ Star Wars would annihilate two years later. Together, Spielberg and Lucas would be credited – and blamed – for ushering in an inflationary era in Hollywood that has continued for 50 years, wherein the budgets and visual effects and escapist fantasies got bigger and the ideas got commensurately smaller. With the craven pursuit of ever jumpier jump scares and wall-to-wall marketing campaigns and the chronic merch-fever and sequel-itis, the conventional wisdom goes: we’re living in a world that Jaws made.
To which its most ardent lifelong admirers rightly respond: if only.
Five decades on, it’s easy to forget just how remarkably undiluted the pleasures of Jaws were, and how unassailable its craft. Spielberg was 27 when he made it, having grown up a movie-mad kid in Arizona; he dramatised the transformative experience of seeing The Greatest Show on Earth with his parents in his 2022 biographical film, The Fabelmans. Unlike many of his baby-boom peers, he didn’t go to a top film school, instead learning on his feet while directing episodes of Columbo and Night Gallery. By the time he directed Jaws, he had made Duel and The Sugarland Express, each a demonstration of Spielberg’s savant-like command of visual storytelling at its most primal and emotionally instinctive.
Jaws would prove to be an expression of those qualities at their most impressive and, frankly, disarmingly simple. As a movie, it’s an exercise in superb technique in every area: take one element away, and it doesn’t work.
Jaws isn’t Jaws without John Williams’ musical score, its thumping ostinato eerily echoing the sound of two legs kicking underwater. Its sense of immediacy dissipates without the exquisite camerawork of director of photography Bill Butler and his team, who faced the arduous challenge of filming the boat scenes on the open water with handheld equipment, and who ingeniously filmed the swimming scenes at water level, to make audiences feel like they were in danger, too.
The shark created by production designer Joe Alves and special effects master Robert Mattey for Jaws – with nary a computer program in sight – was a famous disaster: It kept malfunctioning at crucial moments during a production that went famously over budget and over schedule. So – with the help of editor Verna Fields – Spielberg hid the villain for as long as possible, bringing it into view in short, terrifying bursts: The first, full-on shot of the fish, while Roy Scheider obliviously chums in the foreground, was an instant classic, thanks to Fields’ quick cut to his stunned reaction.
Even the screenwriting in Jaws reflects Hollywood’s art-by-committee at its best: While the script is credited to Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, its most memorable monologue, boat captain Quint’s mesmerising recollection of the real-life USS Indianapolis disaster during World War II, was a constantly rewritten product of Gottlieb, screenwriters Howard Sackler and John Milius, and the actor himself. (Also true to sacred Hollywood tradition, the authorship of the speech has been the subject of decades-long mythology and debate.)
Quint, of course, was played by Robert Shaw in a performance that became instantly indelible. With Richard Dreyfuss’ motormouthed scientist and Scheider’s mild-mannered, bespectacled police chief, Quint was the most important element of analogue, which was a monster movie, sure, but was just as thoroughly satisfying as a character-driven drama. Shaw, Dreyfuss and Scheider were three of a handful of professional actors who appeared in the film; many of the supporting roles and all of the background performers were cast with locals from Martha’s Vineyard, where Jaws was filmed, lending it that much more analogue realism.
In 1975, people didn’t just flock to theatres to see Jaws – they flocked and re-flocked, partly to chase the endorphin rush but also because they loved those guys. Jaws might have initiated a whole new era of blockbusters, but at its best, it was also an excellent hangout movie. And it exemplified filmgoing as a supremely collective experience, where one’s fellow spectators provide as much pleasure as what’s up on screen. In Laurent Bouzereau’s upcoming documentary for National Geographic, Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story, the director Guillermo del Toro giddily recalls his first experience seeing the film, observing how “the whole theatre reacted like a musical instrument”.
It’s now taken as gospel that Jaws was the first blockbuster, but that’s not entirely true. In his wise and witty 2004 book, Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, the film writer Tom Shone smartly deconstructs the myths that have attached to Spielberg and Lucas, and their respective roles in creating blockbuster culture, pointing out that we’ve had blockbusters for as long as pictures have moved. The difference was that, in the era of Gone With the Wind and, later, The Sound of Music, it was the audience who conferred blockbuster status on a film, by going to see it in huge numbers. It only became a pre-existing identifier in the 1970s when, as Shone wrote, the term became “the name a movie calls itself, before it is even out of the gate”.
During the 1960s, Hollywood was put on its back foot by its own hidebound tastes, having missed the cultural signals of the decade and stubbornly sticking to stale formulas. By the time Jaws came out, the industry was on the upswing again thanks to hits like Love Story, The Godfather and Airport – wildly different movies that could fairly be called blockbusters in their own right. If Jaws was heir to anything, it was The Exorcist, another bestseller adaptation, which became a literal monster hit in 1973.
In other words, while it was adroitly conceived and exceptionally well made, Jaws wasn’t an outlier but a continuation of a post-1960s, post-Watergate trend in which film-making returned to reassuringly familiar genres that lured filmgoers back into theatres. It’s a trend that never really faded and, in the hands of practitioners like Ridley Scott, Kathryn Bigelow, Denis Villeneuve and Ryan Coogler, has resulted in some thrilling advances in visual language. What is Sean Baker’s Anora if not another hooker-as-Cinderella fantasy, given harder edges and a club-drug buzz?
There’s no doubt that movies have gotten progressively less sophisticated since Jaws, and Spielberg’s own “childlike wonder” era arguably gave an entire generation of adults new warrant to demand less moral complexity from their screen narratives. Paradoxically, those nuances found a welcoming home on the very medium Spielberg fled to direct features: television. Meanwhile, Star Wars, closely followed by Superman in 1978, sealed the fate of modern mainstream film-making, which has been on a single-minded mission to squeeze every comic book, TV show and whiff of culture nostalgia until it’s an empty husk of callbacks, CGI Easter eggs and guilty pleasure needle drops.
The trajectory has been a terrible one. But please, don’t blame Jaws by confusing its simplicity with being simplistic. When filmgoers are bemoaning the current state of too-big, too-empty, too-sequelised movies, and diagnosing where the metastasis began, they would do well to remember that Jaws isn’t patient zero but the antidote.
Jaws is undoubtedly a vehicle for spectacle and sensation. But underneath its roiling surface lurks an efficient, flawlessly constructed mechanism of entertainment at its purest. Spectacle and sensation will always drive Hollywood – it’s the ballyhoo that gets us through the door. But in the escalating arms race of shocks and synthetic dazzlement, Jaws still keeps us coming back, reminding us that the fundamentals – character, visceral storytelling, authenticity and humanism – will always be the greatest show on Earth.
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