How ‘Jaws’ transformed Hollywood 50 years ago
Fifty years after its release, Jaws remains a cinematic landmark that reshaped Hollywood. Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller not only pioneered the summer blockbuster model but also stood out as a masterpiece of suspense and storytelling
New York: Fifty years after “Jaws” sunk its teeth into us, we’re still admiring the bite mark. Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film, his second feature, left such a imprint on culture and Hollywood that barely any trip to the movies, let alone to the beach, has been the same since.
Few films have been more perfectly suited to their time and place than “Jaws,” which half a century ago unspooled across the country in a then-novel wide release accompanied by Universal Pictures’ opening-weekend publicity blitz.
“Jaws” wasn’t quite the first movie to try to gobble up moviegoers whole, in one mouthful (a few years earlier, “The Godfather” more or less tried it), but “Jaws” established — and still in many ways defines — the summer movie. That puts “Jaws” at the birth of a trend that has since consumed Hollywood: the blockbuster era.
When it launched in 409 theatres on June 20, 1975, and grossed a then-record US$ 7.9 million in its first days, “Jaws” set the template that’s been followed ever-after by every action movie, superhero flick or dinosaur film that’s tried to go big in the summer — a sleepy time in theatres before “Jaws” came around.
And yet the “Jaws” legacy is so much more than being Hollywood’s ur-text blockbuster. It’s not possible to, 50 years later, watch Spielberg’s film and see nothing but the beginning of a box-office bonanza, or the paler fish it’s inspired.
It’s just too good a movie — and too much unlike so many wannabes since — to be merely groundbreaking. It’s a masterpiece in its own right. “It supercharged the language of cinema,” the filmmaker Robert Zemeckis says in the upcoming documentary “Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story”, premiering July 10 on National Geographic.
For the film’s 50th anniversary, we looked at some of the things today’s Hollywood could learn from “Jaws” 50 years later:
Locale
Where US-made film productions are shot has been a hot button issue lately. Various incentives often determine movie shooting locations, with set dressings, or CGI, filling in the rest. But “Jaws” shows you just how much more than tax credits you can get from a locale.
Spielberg was convinced the adaptation of Peter Benchley’s novel — inspired by Benchley’s childhood summers on Nantucket — shouldn’t be done in soundstages. After looking up and down the Atlantic coast, he settled on Nantucket’s neighbouring island.
Like his first film, the Mojave Desert-set “Duel”, Spielberg wanted his mechanised shark to swim in a real, definable place. “I felt the same way about Jaws,’” Spielberg says in the documentary.
“I wanted to go to the natural environment so there was some kind of verisimilitude. So it needed to be in the ocean, out to sea.” It wasn’t easy. The budget for “Jaws” nearly tripled to US$ 9 million and the shoot extended from 55 to 159 days.
Spielberg would never again be under financial pressure on a picture, but the tortured “Jaws” production put him under a microscope.
A report from 1975 began: “It is news when a 26-year-old film director goes US$ two million over budget and two and a half months over schedule and manages to avoid getting fired.” More than any other time in his career, Spielberg fretted.
“Jaws’ was my Vietnam,” he told Richard Schickel. “It was basically naive people against nature and nature beat us every day.” It also infused every inch of the frame with smalltown New England flavor in the way that no soundstage, or CGI, ever could.
Less is more
When Spielberg was ready to start filming, his star attraction wasn’t. The mechanised shark, nicknamed “Bruce” after the director’s attorney, suffered frequent failures that forced Spielberg to find different approaches to shooting his shark scenes early in the film.
“Jaws” instead became, to Spielberg, a kind of homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”. The suspense came less from the shark than the fear of the unknown and that spine-tingling question: What’s in the water? Spielberg, with the significant aid of John Williams’ instantly iconic score, delayed the appearance of his Great White until well into the film.
“The visual ellipsis,” the critic Molly Haskell wrote, “created far greater menace and terror, as the shark is nowhere and everywhere.”
Spielberg once estimated that Bruce’s mechanical delays added US$ 175 million to the movie’s box office. On its initial run, “Jaws” grossed US$ 260.7 million domestically in 1975. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about US$ 1.5 billion.
Nowadays, the shark would almost certainly be done, like most movie creatures, with computer animation. But “Jaws” showed that often the most powerful source of dread is our imagination. AP
