How ‘Jaws’ Ate the Box Office

In the summer of 1975, lines snaked around city blocks to see Steven Spielberg’s new film Jaws. I was seven years old and far too young to see the movie, but I was still completely obsessed with it.

Many years after its theatrical release, Jaws aired on television. My parents were hosting a dinner party and forbade us kids from watching the film. We were ordered upstairs and told to get ready for bed.

But being an unruly bunch, we staged an insurrection, arranging ourselves on the second floor, which was immediately overtop the dining room below, and jumped up and down as hard as we could. I don’t recall whose brilliant idea this was, but it was likely mine. My brothers were still too young to organize anything, and my sister probably didn’t care either way, but I would have bitten off my own arm to see the film.

You can probably guess the rest: our stepfather came rushing up the stairs in a white rage, and we were all sent to bed.

That was not the end of my obsession with Jaws. Far from it; I’ve seen the movie more times than I can count. Every time it comes on television, I am hooked, line and sinker. I’m sure there’s a Freudian aspect here, tied to trauma.

When we were making an escape from Little Rock, Ark. and the Southern Gothic episode of our lives, Jaws was there. On a late-night bus trip, fleeing a bad situation, my mother was reading a paperback copy of Jaws. I bugged her to look at the cover so many times that she finally tore it off and gave it to me. I stared at the image of the giant shark rocketing from the deep, streaming bubbles from its razored teeth, the girl blithely swimming above. I fell down the sinkhole of shark mania.

And I’m embarrassed to admit that I stooped so low in serving this compulsion that I watched the 1987 horror-adventure Jaws: The Revenge in the movie theatre. Actor Michael Caine’s scenery chewing puts even the mechanical shark to shame in a film so bad it almost beggars description. I think I dragged my sister with me, a crime for which I am still paying.

But it’s good to know that I’m not alone in my obsession.

Many famous filmmakers decided that they, too, wanted to make movies after seeing Jaws. James Cameron, Jordan Peele, Steven Soderbergh and Guillermo del Toro, among many others, cite Spielberg’s blockbuster as a foundational source of inspiration in Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story, a new National Geographic documentary on the making of the film.

Directed by Laurent Bouzereau, who has had a long relationship with the material, Jaws @ 50 benefits from an inside-baseball approach, giving an overview of the time and place of the film’s blockbuster success before settling into a deep dive into the lore surrounding the production.

The story has been covered in exhaustive fashion, but what makes this documentary so fascinating is the vulnerability it uncovers. The uncertainty and insecurity not only of its creator, but also the greater fears of the period. In the post-Nixon era, when authorities were revealed to be venal and corrupt, and environmental angst was creeping into the mass unconsciousness, the great white killing machine at the centre of Jaws was a manifestation of chaos and violence coming home to roost.

In Jaws, home is at the heart of everything; scenes of kids, families and townsfolk going about their ordinary lives are what make the film what it is. In horror movies, it’s the entrance of the uncanny into the ordinary world that summons up our most ancient fears.

A pool of dread, on set and in the film

Spielberg explains how a deep pool of existential dread lies at the centre of the film, and that fanned out to the experience of its production. Actors quarrelled, the shark didn’t work and pressure continued to ratchet up as the budget and shooting schedule ballooned for the 27-year-old novice director. As Spielberg relates in the documentary, the stress of making the film was so intense that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for years afterwards.

When the anxiety and panic attacks proved too great, Spielberg coped by visiting the Orca (the boat used in the original film) at the Universal Studios theme park. There, the Oscar-winning filmmaker would simply sit inside the Orca’s cabin until he felt better.

Spielberg’s struggles with his mental health after production wrapped is one of the more surprising aspects of Jaws @ 50, and there’s plenty more. The lore of the difficulties during the film’s production is the stuff of Hollywood legend, but it is extraordinary to hear them from those closely involved.

The details are fascinating, from the cover art of the paperback publication that replaced the original phallic-looking shark to actor Robert Shaw rewriting the film’s pivotal set piece in a single night, carving Quint’s famous speech about the USS Indianapolis down from eight pages to a lean, mean soliloquy that is easily the high point of the action. Spielberg notes that scene is one part of the film that he will always stop and watch, no matter the time or place.

Too much information can winnow away the magic from a piece of artwork, but in the case of Jaws the opposite appears to be true. The more one knows, the more one wants to know. Jaws @ 50 walks viewers through the process of casting locals for the movie; it talks to the location scout who describes finding the perfect harbour backdrop in Martha’s Vineyard; and it offers a behind-the-scenes look of the footage of great white sharks sourced from divers Valerie and Ron Taylor, whose experiences in filming sharks in the wild formed the raw meat of the groundbreaking 1971 documentary Blue Water, White Death.

But even chumming the waters of the imagination with all this fascinating detail doesn’t really get to the dark heart of the story of Jaws and the nightmare fuel that drives the engine.

Jaws expands upon Spielberg’s earlier film, the 1971 action-thriller Duel, by offering a similar reckoning with the forces of fate. For those who have never seen Duel, swap out the great white shark for a huge, gnarly semi-truck and you have essentially the same story.

Actor Dennis Weaver plays a salesman making his rounds when he becomes the target of a psychopathic truck. I say truck, because although there is ostensibly a human behind the wheel, the audience is never shown the driver, other than flash of an arm. It’s the void at the centre of the action that provides the revving, roaring fear. There is also something inherently male about this conflict.

The same battle of wills drives the boat in Jaws. In author Peter Benchley’s novel that inspired the movie, the power struggle between the three men at the heart of the story (Brody, a cop, Hooper, a marine biologist and Quint, a shark hunter) is far more explicit. They are locked in a struggle with each other in multiple layers of conflict: man against man, man against nature. But ultimately, it’s man against the great grinding gears of fate that bites the hardest: it’s inexorable, unstoppable and full of teeth.

On the 50th anniversary of the film’s release in theatres, a gush of essays flooded the media waters. The more interesting aspect of Jaws is how it does what it does with such ease on screen, despite the hellishness of the production.

As more than one auteur interviewed filmmaker in Jaws @ 50 states, it is an almost perfect film, even with the last goofy 20 minutes when the shark rears out of the water like a toothy grey log and chomps everything to bits.

Small perfect things from the movie remain in my memory, like the teasing banter between the three men, or the sight of the great white slipping into an estuary while a little boy happily puddles about on the sand nearby. It’s in these places of grace that the beauty of Jaws becomes most clearly apparent.

The efforts to recapture the magic in however many movie sequels (six, I think, at last count) revealed that art itself is a rare beast, a singular creature that swims into the zeitgeist, changes everything and refuses to be captured.

That’s truly the magnificence of it all. As hard as we try to grasp onto the tail of the thing, demanding answers, analysis, something definitive, it flicks us away and swims off, unknowable and untamed forever.

‘Jaws @ 50’ premieres July 10 and will be available for streaming from July 11 onward on Disney+ and Hulu.