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All of humanity isn't about to be destroyed. Jaws is about a small shark okay, small relative to the beast in Deep Blue Sea that attacks the beaches of Amity Island. Its stakes are those merely of a few people in a small seaside town. The threat is that the town might have to shut down the beach for a couple of months. No alien race is going to enslave the whole of the human race. No ring of power will determine who controls the cosmos. Spielberg apparently did not feel that the only way to get audiences to care about a story was to jack the jeopardy up as high as it could go.
The characters are morally complicated. Rather than a simple struggle between good guys and bad guys—servants of light against servants of darkness— Jaws actually tried to humanize Police Chief Martin Brody: Should he keep the beaches open after knowing about the shark or should he not?
Such moral complications are not possible in the big blockbusters of our moment, in which the struggle must be purified to the point where a six-year-old could understand the struggle.
There aren't even any young and beautiful people in it. This, more than anything else, distinguishes Jaws from all the blockbusters that followed it.
When Williams first played the theme for Spielberg, Spielberg thought he was joking. The scene from Jurassic Park in which Lex and Tim hide from the Velociraptors in the kitchen is a masterclass in building, sustaining, and paying off tension.
Audiences have been haunted by the shark in Jaws for 45 years. Some moviegoers in swore off ever going in the ocean again, fearing that a foot great white would be lurking beneath the surface. The shark is one of the most unforgettable monsters in movie history, and yet it only appears on-screen for four minutes. What makes a monster movie work is not the monster itself, but the anticipation of it. At its core, Jurassic Park is a Frankenstein story. Between and , the number of malls in America had grown from 1, to 12, and Jaws rode high on the growing wave of multiplex cinemas that these urban meccas increasingly housed.
Promotional tie-ins, including Jaws -themed ice-creams, were everywhere. Today, received wisdom has it that Jaws essentially redefined the economic models of Hollywood. This change led to some staggering box-office bonanzas, but it has come at a price.
Whether or not Jaws really did change the film industry for ever is one of the subjects to be debated at the Jaws 40th Anniversary Symposium at De Montfort University, Leicester, later in June.
Some critics have claimed that it marks the point that Hollywood became more interested in archetypes than characters, but it was also the birth of a new kind of family film. I remember seeing it in Plymouth on Boxing Day and thinking that this was really a film for us, for the generation of The Towering Inferno and Earthquake , offering the kind of thrills that had previously been the domain of X-rated movies.
For me, it remains one of the truly great and lasting classics of American cinema, a perfect piece of movie-making. J aws began life as a novel by Peter Benchley about a seaside resort named Amity that is terrorised by a great white shark. Police chief Martin Brody, played by Roy Scheider in the film, orders the beaches to be closed, but the mayor and local businessmen insist they stay open — with tragic results.
Eventually, Brody is forced to take to the sea with professional shark hunter Quint Robert Shaw and ichthyologist Matt Hooper Richard Dreyfuss to hunt down the shark and save the town. It was an eating machine.
At the same time, I think it was also my own fear of the water. And that probably motivated me more than anything else to want to tell that story. The production of Jaws proved problematic from the outset. Three drafts of the Jaws script were produced by Benchley before playwright Howard Sackler was brought in to do uncredited rewrites. Gottlieb would continue to do rewrites throughout the production, often incorporating material improvised in rehearsal by the cast, with added input from John Milius.
Several residents were cast in minor roles, but a few feathers were ruffled by the prospect of a Hollywood production rolling into town.
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