Jaws hit theaters 50 years ago this week, turning Steven Spielberg from an unknown to a famous Hollywood director. The thriller also won composer John Williams his second Oscar for that iconic score, and forced studios to rethink distribution and marketing.
Bow Van Riper, film historian and research librarian at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, on the island off the coast of Massachusetts where Jaws was shot, says that summer blockbuster is iconic for three reasons.
The first is that Spielberg’s commissioned electromechanical shark didn’t function correctly, so he found ways to suggest the presence of the animal without actually showing it. For example, he used the famous yellow barrels as a stand-in. “That makes the movie not just a series of jump scares when somebody gets eaten. It makes it an incredible exercise in suspense,” Riper says.
The second reason: The characters Brody, Hooper, and Quint are well-developed, their connections are constantly shifting throughout the story, and audiences care about them.
“Jaws is a monster movie in which the monster isn't actually the star. What you're invested in is whether these three guys are going to avoid killing each other for long enough to figure out how to team up and kill the shark,” Riper says.
He adds, “Those tensions between the characters and the way Spielberg uses dialogue and seemingly throw-away bits of business to establish the characters — gives us not one but three people to root for, and keeps the audience deeply involved in what's going onboard that boat for the entire last third of the movie.”
Finally, Jaws was shot in a real ocean with real people playing background roles — during a time of computer-generated images. And so, it delivers realism that still resonates, Riper says.
Before this film, summer was a time of mediocre films, not blockbusters that Jaws turned out to be. “Nobody in their right mind would release what was expected to be a huge hit at the end of June. And yet, Jaws, which opened on thousands of screens on the third weekend of June 1975, did huge business and continued to do huge business all summer, becoming the top-grossing film of all time. Star Wars, Iron Man, every summer blockbuster that came after Jaws owes its timing and its marketing strategy to what Universal did with Jaws in 1975.”
However, following the film’s release, many people were afraid of going into the ocean. Riper explains that the human brain is programmed to fear being alone and defenseless in a dangerous environment filled with creatures that are bigger than us and are better hunters. Jaws cleverly taps into that psyche, in part by showing shots from below of swimmers’ legs swinging back and forth to float. “Everybody who's ever been swimming in the ocean, or in a lake even, has probably done something like that, and by showing us the shark’s perspective on what we look like, it makes you, next time you're in the water, wonder what might be down there below, where your eyes can’t penetrate, looking at you and thinking, ‘Hmm, lunch.’”
But the reality is that sharks aren’t so interested in people. Riper says he’s heard marine biologists say the best way to not fall prey to a shark attack is to not act like a seal.
The film also brought a massive boost of attention and tourism dollars to Martha’s Vineyard, which previously was a sleepy town. The Obamas and Clintons go there, along with countless summer visitors.
As for the last time Riper watched Jaws, it was about three weeks ago. “The Boston Pops were performing it with a live orchestral score, and my wife gave me tickets to it for my birthday, so I got to see it on a really big screen and hear John Williams' score live for the first time, which was a real treat,” he recalls.