In 1975 Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” changed the movie landscape forever. 50 years later, the film’s legacy looms as large as the great white shark itself. This is why.
Hollywood icon Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was released 50 years ago today and quickly became the highest grossing movie in cinema history. The filmmaker’s career, the summer blockbuster, and our modern obsession with sharks all owe their existence mostly to Jaws, and a new anniversary release (including documentary Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story) all prove it just gets better with age.Jaws – Trial By Water
Spielberg began shooting in May 1974 on Martha’s Vineyard, insisting on real ocean locations for authenticity. The eight-week shoot ballooned to 159 days and the budget soared from $4 million to nearly $10 million.
Every day brought new woes, as rough seas wrecked shots, boats drifted into frame, equipment failed, and the mechanical shark seldom worked as intended. There were actually three “Bruces” built, but saltwater corroded their innards, causing one shark to sink and others to fall apart. “We never fixed the shark, and it was a total disaster,” Spielberg later admitted of those early trials.
Faced with constant delays and a creature that wouldn’t cooperate, Spielberg improvised. He and co-writer Carl Gottlieb were rewriting nightly to work around the malfunctioning shark, slashing its screen time and letting imagination fill in the gaps. Spielberg’s ingenuity transformed a B-movie into Hitchcockian suspense.
Yet during the shoot, Spielberg felt anything but confident. Morale was low among a crew stuck at sea for months, far over schedule and far from home. The director was anxiety-ridden, fearing he’d be fired at any moment, so much so that he refused to leave the island even on weekends. “If I left the island I was certain I would never come back,” he recalled.
At one point, Spielberg even suffered what he thought was a heart attack on set. It was actually a panic attack, brought on by stress (as he says now, “We didn’t have words like PTSD then” to describe the toll). When the final scene wrapped, the 27-year-old filmmaker was convinced his career was over.
Of course, Spielberg’s fears proved unfounded. Instead, Jaws’s torturous production forged a generational filmmaker. The young director’s “trials by water” taught him hard lessons in resourcefulness and resilience. In the following decades, Spielberg would never again face such loss of control on set or financial perils. Jaws’s success granted him creative control for life. But he also never forgot the experience, always saying Jaws made him a better director, and exorcised some personal fears. Spielberg noted that perhaps Jaws was even his own fear of water incarnate.
Five decades on, Spielberg participates fondly in 50th anniversary retrospectives, able to laugh about the nightmare shoot that became legendary. As he says in the Jaws @ 50 documentary, making the film involved “naive people against nature,” and it taught him “you’re gonna need a bigger boat” in more ways than one.Jaws Births The Blockbuster
Before Jaws, the summer months were a Hollywood dead zone reserved for B movies or ignored entirely. Jaws turned that wisdom on its head.
Universal Pictures had boldly decided to market Jaws as a must-see summer event, even delaying its release to June so that “people were in the water off the summer beach resorts,”producer David Brown noted. They blanketed television with millions of dollars worth of ads – unprecedented at the time – and plastered the now-famous image of a shark and swimmer on posters, book covers, and merchandise everywhere.
Tie-ins ranged from Jaws-themed clothing to beach towels to hilarious toilet-seat covers. Jaws was everywhere before it even opened. The tagline “See it before you go swimming,” was a dare that became a cultural catchphrase. This strategy worked better than anyone could possibly have imagined.
Audiences flocked to cinemas, especially multiplexes at the malls.
