Jaws (film)
Jaws is a 1975 American thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg. Based on the 1974 novel by Peter Benchley, it stars Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, who, with the help of a marine biologist and a professional shark hunter, hunts a man-eating great white shark that attacks beachgoers at a New England summer resort town. Murray Hamilton plays the town's mayor, and Lorraine Gary portrays Brody's wife. The screenplay is credited to Benchley, who wrote the first drafts, and actor-writer Carl Gottlieb, who rewrote the script during principal photography.
Shot mostly on location at Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts from May to October 1974, Jaws was the first major motion picture to be shot on the ocean and consequently had a troubled production, going over budget and schedule. As the art department's mechanical sharks often malfunctioned, Spielberg decided to mostly suggest the shark's presence, employing an ominous and minimalist theme created by composer John Williams to indicate its impending appearances. Spielberg and others have compared this suggestive approach to that of director Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Pictures released the film to over 450 screens, an exceptionally wide release for a major studio picture at the time, accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign with heavy emphasis on television spots and tie-in merchandise.
Regarded as a turning point in motion picture history, Jaws was the prototypical summer blockbuster and won several awards for its music and editing. It was the highest-grossing film in history until the release of Star Wars two years later; both films were pivotal in establishing the modern Hollywood business model, which pursues high box-office returns from action and adventure films with simple high-concept premises, released during the summer in thousands of theaters and advertised heavily. Jaws was followed by three sequels, none of which involved Spielberg or Benchley, as well as many imitative thrillers. In 2001, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Plot
In the New England beach town of Amity Island, a young woman goes for a late-night ocean swim. An unseen force attacks and pulls her underwater. Her partial remains are found washed up on the beach the next morning. After the coroner concludes it was a shark attack, Amity police chief Martin Brody plans to close the beaches. Mayor Larry Vaughn persuades him to reconsider, fearing the town's summer economy will suffer. The coroner, apparently under pressure, now concurs with the mayor's theory that it was a boating accident. Brody reluctantly accepts their conclusion until young Alex Kintner is killed at a crowded beach. A $3,000 bounty is placed on the shark, causing an amateur shark-hunting frenzy. Quint, an eccentric local shark hunter, offers his services for $10,000. Consulting oceanographer Matt Hooper examines the girl's remains, confirming she was killed by an unusually large shark.When local fishermen catch a tiger shark, Vaughn declares the beaches safe. A skeptical Hooper dissects the shark and, finding no human remains inside its stomach, concludes the killer shark is still active. While searching the night waters in Hooper's boat, Hooper and Brody find the half-sunken boat of Ben Gardner, a local fisherman. Hooper dons a scuba suit and goes underwater to check the boat's hull and finds a large shark tooth embedded into it. He drops the tooth after encountering Gardner's severed head. Vaughn dismisses Brody and Hooper's assertions that a great white shark caused the deaths and refuses to close the beaches, allowing only increased safety precautions. On the Fourth of July weekend, tourists pack the beaches. The shark enters a nearby lagoon, killing a boater and nearly killing Brody's son, Michael, who is hospitalized with shock. Brody then convinces a guilt-ridden Vaughn to hire Quint.
Despite initial tension between Quint and Hooper, and Brody's fear of the ocean, the three head out to sea on Quint's boat, the Orca, to hunt for the shark. As Brody lays down a chum line, the shark suddenly appears behind the boat. Quint, estimating it is long and weighs, harpoons it with a line attached to a flotation barrel, but the shark pulls it underwater and disappears.
At nightfall, Quint and Hooper drunkenly exchange stories about their assorted body scars. One of Quint's is a removed tattoo; he reveals that during World War II, he survived the sinking of the, during which sharks killed many U.S. sailors. The shark returns, ramming the boat's hull and disabling the power. The men work through the night, repairing the engine. In the morning, Brody attempts to call the Coast Guard, but Quint, obsessed with killing the shark without outside assistance, smashes the radio. After a long chase, Quint harpoons the shark with another barrel. The line is tied to the stern cleats, but the shark drags the boat backward, swamping the deck and flooding the engine compartment. As Quint is about to sever the line to save the boat's transom, the cleats break off; the barrels stay attached to the shark. To Brody's relief, Quint speeds the Orca toward shore to draw the shark into shallower waters, but the damaged engine fails.
As the boat takes on water, the trio attempt a riskier approach. Hooper suits up and enters a shark-proof cage, intending to lethally inject the shark with strychnine via a hypodermic spear. The shark attacks the cage, causing Hooper to drop the spear. While the shark destroys the cage, Hooper escapes to the ocean bottom. The shark leaps onto the boat's stern, subsequently devouring Quint. Trapped on the sinking vessel, Brody thrusts a scuba tank into the shark's mouth and, climbing onto the crow's nest, shoots the tank with a rifle. The resulting explosion kills the shark. Hooper resurfaces and he and Brody paddle back to shore, clinging to the remaining barrels.
Production
Development
and David Brown, producers at Universal Pictures, independently heard about Peter Benchley's novel Jaws. Brown came across it in the literature section of lifestyle magazine Cosmopolitan, which at that time was edited by his wife, Helen Gurley Brown. A small card written by the magazine's book editor gave a detailed description of the plot, concluding with the comment "might make a good movie". The producers each read the book over the course of a single night and agreed the next morning that it was "the most exciting thing that they had ever read" and that they wanted to produce a film version, although they were unsure how it would be accomplished. They purchased the film rights in 1973, before the book's publication, for approximately $175,000. Brown claimed that had they read the book twice, they would never have made the film because they would have realized how difficult it would be to execute certain sequences.To direct, Zanuck and Brown first considered veteran filmmaker John Sturges—whose résumé included another maritime adventure, The Old Man and the Sea—before offering the job to Dick Richards, whose directorial debut, The Culpepper Cattle Co., had come out the previous year. They soon grew irritated by Richards's habit of describing the shark as a whale and dropped him from the project. Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg very much wanted the job. The 26-year-old had just directed his first theatrical film, The Sugarland Express, for Zanuck and Brown. At the end of a meeting in their office, Spielberg noticed their copy of the still-unpublished Benchley novel, and after reading it was immediately captivated. He later observed that it was similar to his 1971 television film Duel in that both deal with "these leviathans targeting everymen". He also revealed in "The Making of Jaws" documentary on the 2012 DVD release that he directly referenced Duel by repurposing the sound of the truck being destroyed as the death roar of the shark. After Richards's departure, the producers signed Spielberg to direct in June 1973, before the release of The Sugarland Express.
Before production began, Spielberg grew reluctant to continue with Jaws, in fear of becoming typecast as the "truck and shark director". He wanted to move over to 20th Century Fox's Lucky Lady instead, but Universal exercised its right under its contract with the director to veto his departure. Brown helped convince Spielberg to stick with the project, saying that "after , you can make all the films you want". The film was given an estimated budget of $3.5 million and a shooting schedule of 55 days. Principal photography was set to begin in May 1974. Universal wanted the shoot to finish by the end of June, when the major studios' contract with the Screen Actors Guild was due to expire, to avoid any disruptions due to a potential strike.
Writing
For the screen adaptation, Spielberg wanted to stay with the novel's basic plot, but discarded Benchley's subplots. He declared that his favorite part of the book was the shark hunt on the last 120 pages, and told Zanuck when he accepted the job, "I'd like to do the picture if I could change the first two acts and base the first two acts on original screenplay material, and then be very true to the book for the last third." When the producers purchased the rights to his novel, they promised Benchley that he could write the first draft of the screenplay. The intent was to make sure a script could be done despite an impending threat of a Writer's Guild strike, given Benchley was not unionized. Benchley wrote three drafts before the script was turned over to other writers; delivering his final version to Spielberg, he declared, "I'm written out on this, and that's the best I can do." Benchley later described his contribution to the finished film as "the storyline and the ocean stuff—basically, the mechanics", given he "didn't know how to put the character texture into a screenplay." One of the changes was to remove the novel's adulterous affair between Ellen Brody and Matt Hooper, at the suggestion of Spielberg, who feared it would compromise the camaraderie between the men on the Orca. During the film's production, Benchley agreed to play a small onscreen role as a reporter.Spielberg, who felt that the characters in Benchley's script were still unlikable, invited the young screenwriter John Byrum to do a rewrite, but he declined the offer. Columbo creators William Link and Richard Levinson also declined Spielberg's invitation. Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Howard Sackler was in Los Angeles when the filmmakers began looking for another writer and offered to do an uncredited rewrite; since the producers and Spielberg were unhappy with Benchley's drafts, they quickly agreed. At the suggestion of Spielberg, Brody's characterization made him afraid of water, "coming from an urban jungle to find something more terrifying off this placid island near Massachusetts."
Spielberg wanted "some levity" in Jaws, humor that would avoid making it "a dark sea hunt", so he turned to his friend Carl Gottlieb, a comedy writer-actor then working on the sitcom The Odd Couple. Spielberg sent Gottlieb a script, asking what the writer would change and if there was a role he would be interested in performing. Gottlieb sent Spielberg three pages of notes, and picked the part of Harry Meadows, the politically connected editor of Amity's newspaper. He passed the audition one week before Spielberg took him to meet the producers regarding a writing job.
While the deal was initially for a "one-week dialogue polish", Gottlieb eventually became the primary screenwriter, rewriting nearly the entire script during a nine-week period of principal photography. The script for each scene was typically finished the night before it was shot, after Gottlieb had dinner with Spielberg and members of the cast and crew to decide what would go into the film. Many pieces of dialogue originated from the actors' improvisations during these meals; a few were created on set just prior to filming. John Milius contributed other dialogue polishes, and Sugarland Express writers Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood also made uncredited contributions. Spielberg has claimed that he prepared his own draft, although it is unclear to what degree the other screenwriters drew on his material. One specific alteration he called for in the story was to change the cause of the shark's death from extensive wounds to a scuba tank explosion, as he felt audiences would respond better to a "big rousing ending". The director estimated the final script had a total of 27 scenes that were not in the book.
Benchley had written Jaws after reading about sport fisherman Frank Mundus's capture of an enormous shark in 1964. According to Gottlieb, Quint was loosely based on Mundus, whose book Sportfishing for Sharks he read for research. Sackler came up with the backstory of Quint as a survivor of the World War II disaster. The question of who deserves the most credit for writing Quint's monologue about the Indianapolis has caused substantial controversy. Spielberg described it as a collaboration between Sackler, Milius, and actor Robert Shaw, who was also a playwright. According to the director, Milius turned Sackler's "three-quarters of a page" speech into a monologue, and that was then partially rewritten by Shaw. Gottlieb gives primary credit to Shaw, downplaying Milius's contribution.