Sink Your Teeth into These Jaws Secrets
Even among the, uh, sharkiest film critics, Jaws is considered one of the most revered movies of all time.
It was 50 years ago that the picture swam into theaters. At the time, Steven Spielberg was still a small fish in the big Hollywood pond—with Jaws being only the second feature film he’d ever directed. But that didn’t stop the then-27-year-old filmmaker from diving deep into the project.
"This would be both the worst experience of my career," Spielberg, now 78, said in the 2010 documentary Jaws: The Inside Story, "and the greatest experience of my career."
Indeed, the making of the movie was no day at the beach. As Spielberg tried to captain this ship, he dealt with issues around filming out in open water, managing a burgeoning budget and shooting schedule and having his titular star—a giant mechanical shark—constantly break down.With “the shark, they didn’t have a clue and yet they started principal photography," Richard Dreyfuss—who starred in the film alongside Roy Scheider and Robert Shaw—said in the 1997 documentary In the Teeth of Jaws, “there were a couple of key people not cast, and the script was still to be written. So, that’s a perfect formula to making a successful film.'
But in a way, it was the perfect formula in that it forced Spielberg to pivot—resulting in him having to focus more on alluding to the shark’s presence than actually show it as often as he had originally intended.
“It twerked up the suspense of the movie because you really didn’t know where it would come from next,” Spielberg explained in a 1992 episode of 60 Minutes. “Rather than seeing the shark every scene, instead I just played a lot of the fear from people in water: Seeing their legs kicking, a point of view of the camera moving, or just seeing the surface of the water with nothing below, that’s what I think turned the movie more into an exercise of suspense than just a horror film.”
Needless to say, audiences were hooked. Jaws broke box office following its June 20, 1975 release and snagged three Oscars. Had the mechanical shark work, Spielberg added, "I probably would’ve had a movie that wouldn’t have been as successful."
In honor of the movie’s anniversary, cue up the Jaws theme song (dun-dun, dun-dun) and take a bite out of these fun facts about the film.
1. The movie is based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel by the same name. However, the author never expected the story to become a hit book—let alone one of the most popular films of all time.
"I knew they couldn’t make a movie about it because the technology was nowhere near good enough to make a great white shark, and I knew you couldn’t catch and train one," Benchley said in the 2007 documentary The Shark Is Still Working. "So I had no sense that this was going to be a success beyond just being published 'til the movie had been open for a while and the paperback was selling millions of copies. And even then, who would have guessed that down the road it would've had any currency?"
2. Actually, the famed movie poster of a woman blissfully swimming as a shark lingers underneath was the artwork for the paperback."Oscar Dystel, who was the chairman of the company [Bantam Books], always regretted that he didn't sell it to us," Jaws producer David Brown added in the doc. "He could have sold us the artwork, but he gave it to us as a publicity thing."
3. As for how Benchley—who made a cameo in the film as a news interviewer—came up with the title Jaws?
"With 20 minutes to go before the book had to go into production, I sat with my editor at a restaurant in New York, and I said, 'We don't agree on anything except one word: Jaws. Call it Jaws,'" he said in In the Teeth of Jaws. "And he said, 'What does it mean?' I said, 'I haven't the faintest idea but at least it's short.'"
4. While Jaws catapulted Steven Spielberg to a new level of fame, he wasn't the original director. The filmmaker expressed interest in helming the project after producer Richard Zanuck asked him to read over the script.
"I came into the office on Monday," Spielberg recalled in the 2010 documentary Jaws: The Inside Story, "and I remember saying to Dick Zanuck, 'Look, if anything ever happens with this director that you’ve assigned this project to, if for some reason he drops out, I would love to tell the story.'"
He got his wish after the first director landed in a fishy situation by calling the shark a whale during a meeting. "Peter Benchley said, 'Look, I don’t want to work with a director that can’t distinguish the shark from the whale from Moby Dick,'" Spielberg added. "So, it came to me."5. Still, Spielberg considered turning down the opportunity. Why? According to Jaws: The Inside Story, he was interested in directing the 1975 film Lucky Lady instead, but former president of Universal Studios Sid Sheinberg, convinced him to do Jaws.
6. While Robert Shaw was cast as shark hunter Quint, Spielberg originally envisioned someone else for the role.
"I only had one person in mind to play the part," he noted in Jaws: The Inside Story. "I wanted Lee Marvin."
However, The Dirty Dozen star wasn't exactly eager to dive into the project.
"Lee Marvin was actually available," screenwriter Carl Gottlieb added in the doc, "but he was sport fishing down in Cabo San Lucas on a real boat fishing for real big fish and he didn’t want to cut short his vacation.”
Spielberg then considered casting The Godfather alum Sterling Hayden, but he didn’t work out either.
"Sterling owed the government millions and millions in back taxes, and they would seize his salary," Gottlieb continued. "So, basically he’d be working for the government. So, he chose not to do that.”According to the documentary, it wasn’t until Zanuck and Brown recommended Shaw—who'd appeared in From Russia With Love and A Man for All Seasons—that they found their man.
7. Gottlieb also revealed in the documentary that the studio first wanted Bite the Bullet star Jan-Michael Vincent to play marine biologist Matt Hooper. However, Spielberg had his mind set on Richard Dreyfuss, and it wasn't easy to reel him in.
"He said, 'You wanna do it?'" Dreyfuss remembered in Jaws: The Inside Story. "And I said, 'No.' And he said, 'What? Why?' I said, 'Well, that’s gonna be a b--ch to shoot. I’m lazy and I’d rather just watch it than shoot it.' And I turned him down."
Worried how his film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz would perform in theaters, Dreyfuss continued, the actor ended up calling Spielberg and "begged for the part" in Jaws.
8. As for Roy Scheider, he landed the part of police chief Martin Brody after meeting Spielberg at a party.
"I was sitting there and somebody walked over to me and introduced themselves to me and said, 'You’re sitting here all alone. Are you OK?'" Spielberg recalled in Jaws: The Inside Story. "And it was Roy Scheider."
Spielberg began lamenting to Scheider—who at this point had starred in The French Connection—about how he couldn’t find an actor to play Chief Brody.
"I told him the whole story—I even told him the five or six actors I had talked to that I decided that I didn’t want to go with," the Oscar winner continued. "Roy looked at me and he said, 'What about me? I’m an actor. I’d love to be in Jaws.'"
9. While Scheider got the part, Charlton Heston had also been vying for the role. However, Spielberg was concerned Heston—who’d starred in The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, and The Agony and the Ecstasy—was too big of a star and that the audience wouldn’t relate to him.
"I thought for Charlton Heston to play that part would be a little bit not fair for the shark," he added in Jaws: The Inside Story, "because the shark wouldn’t last through the first act."
10. And you're gonna need…to thank Scheider for this iconic line.
"One of the oft-quoted lines in the movie is Roy Scheider saying, 'We gotta get a bigger boat,' which he improvised on the set," Gottlieb said in 1995’s The Making of Jaws. "I acknowledge that as a writer. I'm pleased that he said that."
- 11. As for the mechanical shark used to portray the seafaring creature, Gottlieb revealed in In the Teeth of Jaws that Spielberg named him Bruce after his lawyer Bruce Ramer.12. In fact, more than one mechanical shark was used in the making of the movie.
"Bruce the shark was a compendium of three or four or five mechanical devices," Gottlieb added in the doc. "There was a left-to-right shark, there was a right-to-left shark and there was a shark sled" that showed the fins.
13. And if you're wondering how big these mechanical sharks were, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revealed that one of the shark casts was 25 feet long and weighed 1,208 pounds. (For reference, the Smithsonian notes "the biggest great white sharks can reach up to 20 feet long, but most are smaller.")14. While the sharks had been tested in fresh water before production, things didn't exactly go swimmingly once they hit the salty ocean. There were a lot of technical issues, and Spielberg was forced to pivot.
"The shark never worked," Dreyfuss said in Jaws: The Inside Story. "So the film he intended to shoot couldn’t be shot."
Instead of including lots of shots of the shark, Spielberg more so alluded to its presence by filming the swimmers' legs kicking, the water's surface moving or barrels being dragged across the waves. In fact, Mental Floss reports viewers don't even fully see the shark until one hour and 21 minutes until the movie.
15. One of the most intense scenes is when a woman named Chrissie (Susan Backlinie) is killed by the shark. As for how they created the sense of her being attacked?
"She was actually being tugged left and right by 10 men on one rope and 10 men on the other back to shore," Spielberg said in Jaws: The Inside Story, "and that’s what caused her to move like that."
16. Of course, the music added to the suspense too. But when Spielberg first heard John Williams' now-famous theme song for Jaws, it wasn’t exactly what he'd had in mind.
“I expected to hear something kind of weird and melodic,” the director recalled in The Making of Jaws, "kind of tonal but eerie, and of another world—almost a bit like outer space, inside inner space under the water."
In fact, Spielberg said he started to laugh."He had a great sense of humor," he continued. "I thought he was putting me on. And he said, 'No, that’s the theme to Jaws.'"
But through that song, Spielberg added, Williams "found this signature for the entire movie."
17. While the movie is set in the fictional New England town of Amity Island, most of the film was actually shot in Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. In fact, several locals had cameos in the film.18. Spielberg actually left the set before the last day of shooting.
"He was afraid that the crew was going to throw him into the water," Dreyfuss said in Jaws: The Inside Story. "So, he set it up and left, and that became a Spielberg tradition. I think he still does it. He never shoots the last shot."
19. According to Jaws: The Inside Story, the famous scene where viewers see the head of Ben Gardner (Craig Kingsbury) float through a hole in a boat was filmed in editor Verna Fields' California pool, and Spielberg used milk to make the water appear more ocean-like.
20. To say that Jaws made waves would be an understatement. According to Guinness World Records, it’s considered the first-ever summer blockbuster and is the first film surpass $100 million at the U.S. box office. It also won three Oscars for film editing, sound and original score, though it lost the Best Picture title to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
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