Jaws (film)

Jaws
File:Jaws DVD.jpg DVD cover
Directed by	Steven Spielberg
Written by	Peter Benchley Carl Gottlieb Howard Sackler (uncredited)
Produced by	David Brown Richard D. Zanuck
Starring	Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary
Cinematography	Bill Butler
Edited by	Verna Fields
Music by	John Williams
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release date	June 20 1975
Running time	124 min.
Country	USA
Language	English
Budget	$7,000,000

This article is about the 1975 film. For other uses of the term, see Jaws .

Jaws is a 1975 horror/thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg, and based on Peter Benchley's best-selling novel of the same name. The novel was inspired by actual shark attack events in American history, namely the Jersey Shore Shark Attacks of 1916. In the film, the police chief of Amity Island, a summer resort town, tries to protect beachgoers from the predations of a huge great white shark by closing the beach, only to be overruled by the money-grubbing town council. After several attacks, the police chief proceeds to enlist the help of a marine biologist and later a professional shark hunter to kill the shark. The film stars Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as marine biologist Matt Hooper, Robert Shaw as the shark hunter Quint, Lorraine Gary as Brody's wife Ellen, and Murray Hamilton as the greedy Mayor Vaughn.

Jaws is regarded as a watershed movie in motion picture history, as it is the father of the "summer blockbuster movie". Due to the movie's success in advanced screenings, studio executives decided to distribute the film in a much wider release than ever before. The Omen followed suit a year later in the summer of 1976, and then Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope copied this format two years later in 1977, cementing the notion for movie studios to distribute their big-release action and adventure pictures (commonly referred to as tentpole pictures) during the summer season. It is also thought to be the movie that first boosted Steven Spielberg's directorial career.

The movie was followed by three sequels, generally regarded as increasingly poor in quality when compared to the original: Jaws 2 (1978), Jaws 3-D (1983) and Jaws: The Revenge (1987).

Synopsis

Template:Spoiler-about The film begins at a late night beach party. A young woman leaves the party to go for a swim; while in the water, she is suddenly jerked around by some unseen force and then pulled under. The next morning, Chief of Police Martin Brody (Scheider) is notified that the woman is missing, and heads out to the beach. Brody and his deputy find the girl's mangled remains, and Brody comes to the conclusion that it was a shark attack. Before he can close the beaches he is intercepted and overruled by the town's mayor, Larry Vaughn (Hamilton), who tells Brody that the girl was killed by a boat propeller. Vaughn is concerned about the incident hurting the summer tourist season, especially the upcoming 4th of July celebration, as it is the town's major source of income. After the town medical examiner backs up the mayor's story, Brody reluctantly goes along with them.

A few days later, a young boy is killed by a shark while swimming at the beach, and his mother places a USD$3,000 bounty on the animal. The bounty sparks an amateur shark hunting frenzy, but it also attracts the local Quint (Shaw), a professional shark hunter. Quint interrupts a town meeting to offer his services, but is rejected because of his high price. Marine biologist Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss) then arrives at the town harbor amidst the shark hunting frenzy and introduces himself to Brody. Hooper conducts an autopsy of the first victim, where he quickly concludes that she was killed by a shark. However, a large tiger shark is caught by a group of novice fishermen, leading the townspeople to believe that the killer is dead. Hooper is unconvinced, and asks to examine the contents of the fish's stomach to determine if it is the correct shark. Vaughn refuses to make a public spectacle of the "operation", so Brody and Hooper return after dark. They learn that the captured shark does not have any human remains inside it, so they venture out in Hooper's state-of-the-art boat to scout around for the real killer. They come across a half-sunken wreckage of a local fishing vessel, and after donning scuba gear to check the hull, Hooper discovers another victim. Nevertheless, Vaughn still refuses to close the beaches.

File:Jaws photo.JPG

Quint (Robert Shaw)'s fishing vessel, The Orca.

On the Fourth of July, the beaches are mobbed, and surrounded by a cordon of police boats. While a prank triggers a false alarm and draws off the authorities' attention, the real shark enters an estuary and kills another man, nearly getting one of Brody's sons as well. Brody forces the stunned mayor to close the beaches and hire Quint. Brody and Hooper join the hunter on his boat, the Orca, and the trio set out to hunt down the man-eater.

Brody is given the task of chumming, or shoveling a mixture of fish parts and blood into the sea to attract the shark. While Brody is engaged in the task the enormous shark suddenly looms up behind the boat; watching it circle the Orca, Quint and Hooper estimate the beast is at least twenty feet long. Quint manages to harpoon it with a line attached to a flotation barrel which is designed to simultaneously weigh the fish down and track it on the surface, but the shark swims away and disappears. Night falls without another sighting and the men retire to the boat's cabin, where they compare scars and Quint tells of his experience with sharks as a survivor of the World War II sinking of the USS Indianapolis. The shark reappears, damages the boat, and slips away before the men can harm it.

In the morning, the men make repairs to the engine, and Quint destroys the radio to keep Brody from calling the Coast Guard for help. The shark attacks again, and after a long chase Quint harpoons it with two more barrels. The men tie the barrels to the stern, but the shark tows the ship backwards through the water, overflooding the engine and finally ripping free.

With the Orca dead in the water, the trio try a desperate new approach. Hooper dons his scuba gear and enters the ocean inside a shark proof cage: he intends to stab the shark inside the mouth with a hypodermic needle filled with a powerful poison. The monster shark instead destroys the cage, and Hooper flees to the seabed. As Quint and Brody raise the remnants of the cage, the shark throws itself onto the boat, crushing the stern. Quint slides into its mouth, slashing at it in vain with a machete before being pulled under and devoured. Brody flees to the boat's cabin, now partly submerged, and throws a pressurized air tank into the shark's mouth when it rams its way inside.

Brody takes Quint's rifle and climbs the mast of the rapidly-listing boat, where he temporarily fends off the attacker with a harpoon. The shark circles around and charges one last time at Brody, who fires the rifle at the tank still jammed in the shark's mouth. He manages to score a hit and the shark's head explodes, the rest of its body sinking to the ocean floor in a cloud of blood.

Hooper bobs to the surface alive and joins Brody. As the Orca joins the shark at the bottom of the ocean, the two survivors swim to shore using the flotation barrels as a raft. Template:Endspoiler

Production history

The film was produced by Richard Zanuck and David Brown, who had purchased the film rights to Peter Benchley's novel in 1973. His novel was loosely based on a real-life event in the summer of 1916 when a series of shark attacks killed four people along the New Jersey coast and triggered a media frenzy. They signed Spielberg to direct in the same year, prior to release of his first theatrical film, The Sugarland Express (also a Zanuck/Brown production). Despite his lack of feature film experience, Spielberg had proved adept at suspense material with the 1971 telemovie Duel.

Peter Benchley wrote the first draft of the screenplay, with a subsequent draft prepared by Howard Sackler. Carl Gottlieb (who also appears in a supporting acting role in the film as Meadows, the politically connected reporter) was brought in to add humour and more depth to the characters. Gottlieb rewrote many scenes during principal photography, and John Milius contributed some dialogue polishes. Spielberg has claimed that he prepared his own draft, although it is unclear if any of the other screenwriters drew on his material.

File:Quint monologue.jpg

Robert Shaw, as Quint, delivering the USS Indianapolis monologue.

The authorship of Quint's monologue about the fate of the cruiser USS Indianapolis has caused substantial controversy as to who deserves the most credit for the speech. Spielberg tactfully describes it as a collaboration among John Milius, Howard Sackler and Robert Shaw. Gottlieb gives primary credit to Shaw, downplaying Milius' contribution.

Location shooting occurred at Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Many local actors were used to play uncredited characters in the movie. The film had a troubled shoot and went considerably over budget. The logistical problems of shooting at sea led to many delays, and the mechanical shark frequently malfunctioned, due to the hydraulics of the innards being brutalized by salt water. The three mechanical sharks were collectively nicknamed "Bruce" by the production team after Spielberg's lawyer, a piece of trivia that has been cited in a number of shark-related stories (such as the name of the shark in 2003's Finding Nemo). Spielberg referred to the mechanical shark as "the turd" on a British program about famous horror scenes and confessed that they had even less flattering names for it throughout filming. The film was given the nickname "Flaws" by many of the dispassionate crew members.

To some degree, the delays in the production proved serendipitous. The script was refined during production, and the unreliable mechanical sharks forced Spielberg to shoot many of the scenes with the shark only hinted at. For example, for much of the shark hunt its location is represented by floating yellow barrels that have been tied to it during the hunt. This enforced restraint is widely thought to have increased the suspense of many scenes, giving it a Hitchcockian tone.

John Williams contributed the acclaimed film score. The main theme became a classic piece of suspense music, synonymous with approaching danger, evoking the start of Allegro con fuoco, the fourth movement from Dvořák's Symphony No. 9. Echoes of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, particularly the opening of "The Adoration of the Earth", are heard as well. Another influence may have been Ed Plumb's score for Walt Disney's Bambi, which used a low, repeating musical motif to suggest approaching danger from the off-screen threat of Man. When the piece was first played for Spielberg, he was said to have laughed at John Williams, thinking that it was a joke. Spielberg was later quoted as saying that without Williams' score, the movie would have been only half as successful.

The scene where Hooper discovers Ben Gardner's body in the hull of the wrecked boat was added after an initial screening of the film. Spielberg mentions in the special features of the DVD release that after he saw everyone's reaction, he got so greedy for "one more scream" that he financed this addition with $3,000 of his own money after he was denied funding from Universal Studios. Their thought was that there was nothing wrong with the film the way it was and that it should be left alone. Ironically, this added scene could be considered a continuity error; Brody later tries to convince the mayor to close the beaches but never thinks of mentioning a confirmed kill to bolster his argument.

At the time of the film's release, it was reported that Spielberg liked to drop into theaters and sit in the back, watching the audience's reaction. One of his favorite scenes was a tight shot of Brody tossing chum over the stern, his back to the water, commenting on "shoveling this shit", immediately after which the open-mouthed shark breaks the surface. Spielberg enjoyed the audience's reaction switching from laughter to screams in a split-second.

Footage of real sharks was shot by Ron and Valerie Taylor in waters off the Commonwealth of Australia, using a dwarf in a miniature shark cage to create the illusion that the sharks were incredibly enormous. Originally, the script had the shark killing Hooper in the shark cage, but while filming, one of the sharks became trapped in the girdle of the cage, and proceeded to tear the cage apart. Luckily, the dwarf used was not in the cage at the time, so the script was changed to allow Matt Hooper to live and the cage to be empty. Despite this rare footage of violent great white sharks, only a handful of these shots were used in the finished film.

The role of Quint was originally offered to actors Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden, both whom passed. Producers Zannuck and Brown had just finished working with Robert Shaw on the The Sting, and suggested him to Spielberg as a possible Quint. Roy Scheider became interested in the project after overhearing a screenwriter and Spielberg at a party talking about having the shark jump up onto a boat. Richard Dreyfuss initially passed on the role of Matt Hooper, but after seeing a screening of a film he had just done called The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, he thought his performance in that film was so awful that he immediately called Spielberg back and accepted the Matt Hooper role (fearing that no one would want to hire him once Kravitz was released.) The first person actually cast for the movie was Lorraine Gary.

Impact and significance

Jaws was a key film in establishing the benefits of a wide national release backed by heavy media advertising, rather than a progressive release that let a film slowly enter new markets and build support over a period of time. The wide national release pattern would become standard practice for high-profile movies in the late 1970s and after.

Jaws is also often cited as indicating a shift in the type of movies made by Hollywood studios. Along with The Exorcist and Star Wars, it is an example of a high-budget movie in what had previously been considered a disreputable or low-budget genre (in this case, suspense/horror). The runaway success of these films led to increased genre-film production by studios.

Public Image of Sharks

The movie Jaws conjured up so many scares that many beaches reported business as being down in the summer of 1975 due to the movie's profound impact. Though a horror classic (voted to have the scariest scenes ever by a Bravo Halloween TV special), the film is widely recognized as being responsible for many fearsome and inaccurate stereotypes about sharks and their behavior. Benchley has said that he never would have written the original novel had he known what sharks are really like in the wild. He later wrote Shark Trouble, a non-fiction book about shark behavior and Shark Life, another non-fiction book describing his dives with sharks. Conservation groups have bemoaned the fact that the movie has made it considerably harder to convince the public that sharks (who, as macro-predators, constitute an important part of the ocean's ecosystem) should be protected.

Creative Influence

Jaws has been spoofed and referred to in other movies, most notably in the opening sequence of 1941, directed by Spielberg himself. Other references are to be found in Meatballs (1979), Airplane! (1980), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Clerks (1994), Mallrats (1995), Chasing Amy (1997), Caddyshack (1980) and Shark Tale (2004). In Back to the Future Part II (executive produced by Steven Spielberg), a movie theater sports an animated holographic shark over a marquee that reads "Jaws 19" and "This time it's really really personal" and "Directed by Max Spielberg". The film has been adapted into a video game and even a musical, titled "Giant Killer Shark: The Musical", which premiered in the summer of 2006 at the Toronto Fringe Festival. Also, many films have adopted the "man versus beast" format of Jaws but with different animals, such as the giant squid in The Beast (1996).

Reaction

Box Office Performance

When Jaws was released on June 20, 1975, it had a limited release and opened at 409 theaters. It got a wider release on July 25, 1975 at 675 theaters. On its first weekend it managed to gross over $7 million, and was the top grosser for the following five weeks. During its run in theaters, the film beat the then-$85 million domestic gross of the reigning box-office champion, The Godfather, becoming the first movie to reach more than $100 million in domestic box-office receipts. Eventually, Jaws would go on to gross over $470 million worldwide and become the highest grossing box-office hit for two years, securing Steven Spielberg's spot in cinema history. This feat was not surpassed until Star Wars debuted two years later, in 1977.

Awards and Critical Reception

Jaws won Academy Awards for Film Editing, Music (Original Score) and Sound. It was also nominated for Best Picture, although Steven Spielberg was not nominated for Best Director. The film is consistently on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films. Jaws was #48 on American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movies, #2 on its 100 Years... 100 Thrills, and #1 in the Bravo cable network's five-hour miniseries The 100 Scariest Movie Moments (2004). The shark was also anointed #18 on AFI's 100 Years, 100 Heroes and Villains, opposite Robin Hood. In 2001 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2005, the American Film Institute voted Roy Scheider's line "You're gonna need a bigger boat" as number 35 on its list of the top 100 movie quotes. John Williams's score was ranked at #7 on AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores.

Reviews of the film were almost unanimously positive, evidenced by the 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. In his original review, Roger Ebert called it "a sensationally effective action picture, a scary thriller that works all the better because it's populated with characters that have been developed into human beings". Variety's A.D. Murphy praised Spielberg's directorial skills, and called Robert Shaw's performance "absolutely magnificent".

While few, the film was not without its detractors, most of whom enjoyed the suspenseful aspects but not the characters. Vincent Canby, of The New York Times, said "It's a measure of how the film operates that not once do we feel particular sympathy for any of the shark's victims" but that "It's the sort of nonsense that can be a good deal of fun". The only widespread criticism of the film is the fake shark, although it is only seen in the final moments of the film, and is often brushed over by reviewers.

30th anniversary

In June 2005, on the 30th anniversary of the film's release, a festival, JawsFest, was held in Martha's Vineyard. Jaws was also then re-released on DVD, this time including the full two-hour documentary produced by Laurent Bouzereau for the LaserDisc, and which had appeared as a one-hour version on the original 2000 DVD release. The 30th anniversary DVD also included several deleted scenes and outtakes, plus an interview with Steven Spielberg never before available.

Differences

From novel to screenplay

• The setting for the novel is the fictional Long Island resort town of Amity, whereas the film is set on the fictional Amity Island.
• In the novel, Brody is a native of Amity while his wife, Ellen, was previously a member of the wealthy New York summer holiday set before she married Brody. A major theme of the novel is Ellen's sense of displacement and despair with her life in Amity. In the film Brody moved to Amity Island from New York with his family in order to take up the position of the chief of police.
• In the novel, Hooper is killed by the shark during the dive to examine it, with the intention of killing it with a shot from a bangstick.
• The novel also describes a short sexual encounter between Hooper and Brody's wife. They are portrayed as having been acquainted with each other during their youth.
• In the novel, the real reason for the mayor keeping the beaches open is because of his Mafia ties, not the welfare of the town.
• All events in the final reel of the film aboard the boat occur in one unbroken trip at sea, while in the novel the men safely return to Amity's harbor several times.
• Quint drowns after he gets his foot caught in his harpoon rope and is dragged under by the shark (reminiscent of Moby Dick).
• Quint's monologue about the USS Indianapolis is absent from the novel. In the novel, Quint mentions that he had been working in the business for thirty years, or since 1944; the USS Indianapolis was not sunk until 1945.
• In the novel, the shark dies as a result of injuries from the harpoons embedded in it. For the film, something with more visual impact was deemed necessary. The author was not happy with this change, claiming that the airtank explosion was unbelievable.

From screenplay to screen

• The harbormaster is killed by the shark while cleaning out his coffeepot in the ocean.
• Quint is introduced to the film by watching the film version of Moby Dick. His laughter throughout makes people get up and leave the theater; this is thought to be an influence on Wesley Strick's screenplay for Cape Fear which features a similar scene. Moby Dick could not be licensed from Gregory Peck (the rights' owner).
• When the shark is blown-up, it is not after a charge attack but popping up out of the water below the crow's nest of the sinking vessel.
• The USS Indianapolis scene was not in the original screenplay.

References

Books

• Benchley, Peter (1973) Jaws. Doubleday.
• Blake, Edith. (1975) The Making of the Movie Jaws. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.
• Brode, D. (2000) The Films of Steven Spielberg. (Revised ed.) New York, NY: Kensington. ISBN 0806519517
• Gottlieb, C. (1975) The Jaws Log. New York, NY: Dell Publishing.
• Sinyard, N. (1987) The Films of Steven Spielberg. Middlesex: Hamlyn/Bison Books. ISBN 0600552268
• Quirke, Antonia. (2002) Jaws. British Film Institute. ISBN 0-85170-929-X.

DVDs

• Bouzereau, Laurent. (2005) Jaws 30th Anniversary 2-Disc DVD: Disc 2: 2-Hour Documentary". Universal Studios.

External links

• JawsMovie.com
• Jaws at IMDb
• Jaws at Filmsite.org
• Jaws 30th Anniversary Website
• A Documentary about the legacy and fans of JAWS
• Roger Ebert's review of Jaws
• Jaws at Rottentomatoes
• JAWS Amity Island - JAWS Theme Park Attractions
• Trailer