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Jaws (film)
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| Jaws | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster by Roger Kastel | |
| Directed by | Steven Spielberg |
| Produced by | |
| Screenplay by | |
| Based on | Jaws by Peter Benchley |
| Starring | |
| Music by | John Williams |
| Cinematography | Bill Butler |
| Edited by | Verna Fields |
Production company | Zanuck/Brown Productions |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
Release date |
|
Running time | 124 minutes[1] |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $9 million |
| Box office | $470.7 million |
Jaws is a 1975 American thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Peter Benchley's 1974 novel of the same name. In the story, a giant man-eating great white shark attacks beachgoers on Amity Island, a fictional New England summer resort town, prompting the local police chief to hunt it with the help of a marine biologist and a professional shark hunter. The film stars Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, Robert Shaw as shark hunter Quint, Richard Dreyfuss as oceanographer Matt Hooper, Murray Hamilton as Larry Vaughn, the mayor of Amity Island, and Lorraine Gary as Brody's wife, Ellen. The screenplay is credited to both Benchley, who wrote the first drafts, and actor-writer Carl Gottlieb, who rewrote the script during principal photography.
Shot mostly on location on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, the film had a troubled production, going over budget and past schedule. As the art department's mechanical sharks suffered many malfunctions, Spielberg decided to mostly suggest the animal's presence, employing an ominous, minimalistic theme created by composer John Williams to indicate the shark's impending appearances. Spielberg and others have compared this suggestive approach to that of classic thriller director Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Pictures gave the film what was then an exceptionally wide release for a major studio picture, over 450 screens, accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign with a heavy emphasis on television spots and tie-in merchandise.
Now considered one of the greatest films ever made, Jaws was the prototypical summer blockbuster, with its release regarded as a watershed moment in motion picture history. Jaws became the highest-grossing film of all time until the release of Star Wars (1977). It won several awards for its soundtrack and editing. Along with Star Wars, Jaws was pivotal in establishing the modern Hollywood business model, which revolves around high box-office returns from action and adventure pictures with simple "high-concept" premises that are released during the summer in thousands of theaters and supported by heavy advertising. It was followed by three sequels, none with the participation of Spielberg or Benchley, and many imitative thrillers. In 2001, Jaws was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Plot[edit]
During a late-night beach party on Amity Island, a young woman goes swimming in the ocean. While treading water, she is violently pulled under. The next morning, her partial remains are found on shore. The medical examiner ruling the death a shark attack leads Police Chief Martin Brody to close the beaches. Mayor Larry Vaughn overrules him, fearing it will ruin the town's summer economy. The coroner now concurs with the mayor's theory that the girl was killed in a boating accident. Brody reluctantly accepts their conclusion until another fatal shark attack occurs shortly after. A bounty is then placed on the shark, resulting in an amateur shark-hunting frenzy. Local professional shark hunter Quint offers his services for $10,000. Meanwhile, consulting oceanographer Matt Hooper examines the first victim's remains and confirms the death was from a shark attack.
When local fishermen catch a large tiger shark, the mayor proclaims the beaches safe. Hooper disputes it being the same predator, confirming this after no human remains are found inside it. Hooper and Brody find a half-sunken vessel while searching the night waters in Hooper's boat. Underwater, Hooper retrieves a sizable great white shark's tooth embedded in the submerged hull. He drops it after finding a partial corpse. Vaughn discounts Brody and Hooper's claims that a huge great white shark is responsible and refuses to close the beaches, allowing only added safety precautions. On the Fourth of July weekend, tourists pack the beaches. Following a juvenile prank, the real shark enters a nearby estuary, killing a boater and causing Brody's son, Michael, to go into shock. Brody finally convinces a devastated Vaughn to hire Quint.
Quint, Brody, and Hooper set out on Quint's boat, the Orca, to hunt the shark. While Brody lays down a chum line, Quint waits for an opportunity to hook the shark. Without warning, it appears behind the boat. Quint estimates the shark's length at 25 feet (7.6 m) and harpoons a barrel into it, but it drags the barrel underwater and disappears.
At nightfall, as the three swap stories, the great white returns unexpectedly, ramming the boat's hull and killing the power. The men work through the night repairing the engine. In the morning, Brody attempts to call the Coast Guard, but Quint smashes the radio, enraging Brody. After a long chase, Quint harpoons another barrel into the shark. The line is tied to the stern, but the shark drags the boat backwards, swamping the deck and flooding the engine compartment, forcing Quint to sever the line to prevent the transom from being pulled out. He then heads toward shore, intending to lure the shark to shallower waters and suffocate it, but the overtaxed engine quits.
With the Orca slowly sinking, the trio attempt a riskier approach: Hooper dons scuba gear and enters the water in a shark-proof cage, intending to lethally inject the shark with strychnine using a hypodermic spear. The shark demolishes the cage before Hooper can inject it, but he manages to escape to the seabed. The shark then attacks the boat directly, killing Quint. Trapped on the sinking vessel, Brody stuffs a pressurized scuba tank into the shark's mouth, and, climbing the mast, shoots the tank with Quint's rifle, destroying it. The resulting explosion obliterates the shark. Hooper resurfaces, and he and Brody paddle to Amity Island clinging to boat wreckage.
Production[edit]
Development[edit]
Richard D. Zanuck 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, then 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".[2][3] 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.[4] They purchased the movie rights in 1973, before the book's publication, for approximately $175,000 (equivalent to $0.94 million in 2016).[5] 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.[6]
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.[7] However, they grew irritated by Richards's habit of describing the shark as a whale and soon dropped him from the project.[7]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.[5] He later observed that it was similar to his 1971 television film Duel in that both deal with "these leviathans targeting everymen".[4] After Richards's departure, the producers signed Spielberg to direct in June 1973, before the release of The Sugarland Express.[7]
Before production began, however, Spielberg grew reluctant to continue with Jaws, in fear of becoming typecast as the "truck and shark director".[8] 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.[9] Brown helped convince Spielberg to stick with the project, saying that "after [Jaws], you can make all the films you want".[8]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.[10]
Writing[edit]
For the screen adaptation, Spielberg wanted to stay with the novel's basic plot, while omitting Benchley's many subplots.[5] 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."[11]When the producers purchased the rights to his novel, they promised Benchley that he could write the first draft of the screenplay.[5] 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.[12] Overall, he wrote three drafts before the script was turned over to other writers;[5] delivering his final version to Spielberg, he declared, "I'm written out on this, and that's the best I can do."[13] Benchley would later describe 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."[12] One of his 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.[14] During the film's production, Benchley agreed to return and play a small onscreen role as a reporter.[15]
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.[8] Columbo creators William Link and Richard Levinson also declined Spielberg's invitation.[16] 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.[4] 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."[12]
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.[13] Spielberg sent Gottlieb a script, asking what the writer would change and if there was a role he would be interested in performing.[17] Gottlieb sent Spielberg three pages of notes, and picked the part of Meadows, the politically connected editor of the local paper. He passed the audition one week before Spielberg took him to meet the producers regarding a writing job.[18]
While the deal was initially for a "one-week dialogue polish", Gottlieb eventually became the primary screenwriter, rewriting the entire script during a nine-week period of principal photography.[18] 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, most notably Roy Scheider's ad-lib of the line "You're gonna need a bigger boat."[19] John Milius contributed dialogue polishes,[20] and Sugarland Express writers Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood also made uncredited contributions.[21] Spielberg has claimed that he prepared his own draft, although it is unclear to what degree the other screenwriters drew on his material.[20] 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".[22] The director estimated the final script had a total of 27 scenes that were not in the book.[14]
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.[23] Sackler came up with the backstory of Quint as a survivor of the World War II USS Indianapolis disaster.[24] 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.[20] According to the director, Milius turned Sackler's "three-quarters of a page" speech into a monologue, and that was then rewritten by Shaw.[24] Gottlieb gives primary credit to Shaw, downplaying Milius's contribution.[25]
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