Steven Spielberg’s Shark Classic Turns 50, Its Bite Intact

One of my formative movie memories is of being in a theater in 1975, packed with excited kids and teenagers in Newcastle, Australia, to see Jaws for the first time. It’s not surprising that an audience in a city with miles of golden beaches might be especially primed to react to Steven Spielberg’s ageless shark shocker.

Even so, the screams were deafening, the nervous laughter that followed each jolt of terror was contagious and the physical sensation of entire rows of seats shaking as people reflexively lifted their feet up off the floor — and “out of the water” — during each attack was unforgettable.

This was long before massive Imax screens, earth-rumbling sound systems and haptic motion seating made the visceral moviegoing experience a regular thing. It felt like the modern-day equivalent of French audiences ducking or even fleeing the theater as cinema pioneers the Lumière brothers sent a train hurtling toward them in 1896, urban legend or not.

Spielberg’s first major hit single-handedly changed the business model for Hollywood, giving birth to the blockbuster summer event movie. I’ve been a sucker for shark thrillers ever since, and even after way too many viewings to count, Jaws still scares the hell out of me.

It spawned a feeding frenzy of imitators that continues to this day, aiming to tap into our primal fear of the monster from the deep. Some are effectively lean and mean, like the narratively spare Open Water in 2003, or The Shallows from 2016, which is basically Blake Lively in a bikini being circled on a rock by a great white for 90 minutes.

But nothing has ever come close to the tension that floods our veins at the sound of that immortal two-note ostinato, the signature of John Williams’ suspenseful score. Or the dolly zoom on the face of Roy Scheider’s aquaphobic Amity Island police chief Martin Brody as he watches from the beach while a kid on an inflatable raft turns into a fountain of blood. Or Brody scooping chum from a bucket off the back of the Orca — the boat owned by Robert Shaw’s maverick shark hunter Quint — when their target rears up out of the Atlantic, razor teeth bared.

Spielberg’s mastery, even at that early stage of his career, was in full bloom. Possibly the best thing that happened to him on that troubled shoot — with its soaring budget and stretched schedule — was the constant malfunctioning of the mechanical prop sharks. That forced the director to get crafty, almost inadvertently generating one of the all-time great screen examples of the power of the unseen monster to frighten the wits out of us.

Prop issues also led to Spielberg making more extensive use of footage shot by pioneering Australian underwater cinematographers Ron and Valerie Taylor, notably in a standout scene in which a shark attacks and destroys a dive cage. That sequence featuring a real great white in action prompted a rewrite that saved the life of Matt Hooper, the wise-ass oceanographer played by Richard Dreyfuss. (He was shark food in the novel and the original shooting script.)

Jaws was shot on Martha’s Vineyard, just a hop, skip and jump up Cape Cod from where I spend time every summer in beautiful Provincetown. Even before reports of shark attacks in the area in recent years or the addition of warning signs on the main beaches, I always had a Chief Brody moment whenever I put a toe in the water. But it’s never stopped me going in.