40 YEARS OF JAWS
After four decades, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is still swimming strong.
IT seems apt that on the week Jaws celebrates its 40th anniversary, the No. 1 movie would be Jurassic World. After all, it was Jaws’ director Steven Spielberg who filmed the original Jurassic Park ( and its sequel, The Lost World), and he is also the executive producer of this latest sequel, which made a whopping US$ 204mil ( RM763mil) killing at the US box office last weekend, the second largest opening of a movie ever.
Jurassic World is the latest of the bigbudget, high- concept “summer blockbusters”, a trend which may be the norm today, but actually only started 40 years ago when Jaws splashed its way into cinemas.
Make no mistake about it – Jaws is the father of the modern blockbuster. Before 1975, film studios considered summer season as a period to release their “lesser” films, and preferred to leave their big releases for the winter holiday season. Then, along came a little movie about a giant shark, directed by a then- unknown Spielberg.
To commemorate the movie’s 40th anniversary ( it was released on June 20, 1975), we’ve come up with a list of 10 things we love about Jaws.
1. That poster
Endlessly parodied and shamelessly copied, the poster featuring the shark coming up from below an unsuspecting swimmer is truly one of the most iconic movie posters ever designed.
2. John Williams’ score
Williams won the 1976 Oscar for Best Original Score for his understated but brilliant score, which added more suspense and terror to the movie than any amount of blood or shark teeth ever could. Never has the tuba sounded more ominous and scary.
3. Bruce the shark
Three mechanical sharks were built for the production: two had skin on only one side, and the other was fully skinned. Spielberg named the shark “Bruce”, erm, after his lawyer.
Unfortunately, Bruce broke down so often that Spielberg had to come up with another way to represent the shark. In the end, he had the idea of using the camera to show the shark’s point of view, which only made it all the more chilling.
In an interview, Spielberg explained: “The shark not working was a godsend. It made me become more like Alfred Hitchcock than like Ray Harryhausen.”
4. Spielberg’s magic touch
We didn’t know it then, but Spielberg had plenty more magical movie tricks up his sleeve. While Jaws was Spielberg’s big break, he wasn’t exactly the studio’s first choice. Apparently, the studio had another director in mind, but unfortunately for that guy, he didn’t seem to know the difference between a shark and a whale. So, Spielberg got the job, and the rest is history.
5. Roy Scheider
It’s hard to imagine anyone else other than Scheider in the role of police chief Martin C. Brody. Scheider may have gotten an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in 1971’ s The French Connection, but when Spielberg cast him in Jaws, the film studio was at first reluctant to sanction it. It was only when Scheider signed a three- film deal ( Jaws, Jaws 2, and Wages Of Fear) that they relented.
6. “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
The most iconic line in the movie, uttered by Brody, was not even in the script. Scheider improvised the line, and it is No. 35 on the American Film Institute’s list of best movie quotes of all time.
7. The shark’s death
It’s one of THE greatest climaxes to a movie – Brody on a sinking boat, lying on the mast, aiming his rifle at the oxygen tank in the shark’s mouth, and with a final “Smile, you son of a ...” BOOM!
In Peter Benchley’s novel, which the film is based on, the shark eventually dies after succumbing to wounds inflicted upon it by the hunters.
That wouldn’t have been as great an ending as the one Spielberg cooked up though ( Mythbusters once did an episode that proved that there was no way the tank would have exploded – if punctured by a bullet, the tank would just fly around like a rocket because of the decompressed air).
8. It’s been left untarnished by crappy sequels and pretenders
By all means, Jaws 2, Jaws 3- D, and Jaws: The Revenge were awful sequels. In fact, Jaws: The Revenge was voted one of the worse sequels ever, even getting a nomination for the worst movie of 1987 at the Razzie Awards. The fact that, despite these horrendous follow- ups, the reputation of the original Jaws has been left untarnished is testament to the genuine quality of the film.
There have also been countless imitators ranging from Deep Blue Sea to the frankly absurd Sharknado films, but there has been no other shark film that has come close to Jaws. However, Spielberg did say once that Piranha was the one that came the closest.
9. It started the summer blockbuster phenomenon
After the success of Jaws, the film industry realised there was a huge summertime market they could tap into. From then onwards, summer blockbusters gradually became the norm. Spielberg himself directed or produced many of those blockbusters, including the Indiana Jones trilogy, E. T. The Extra- Terrestrial, and, of course, Jurassic Park.
10. It was a record breaker
Jaws gobbled up the competition on its way to a record- breaking US$ 470.7mil global box office haul. While that number may seem tame by today’s billion dollar standards, back in 1975, that number made Jaws THE undisputed champion of the box office.
It held the title of highest grossing film of all time for two years until 1977, when Spielberg’s close friend George Lucas took cinemagoers on a journey set long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...