Jaws: The Shark Movie That Changed the World

[Gerald]

Forty-five years ago, in the summer of 1975, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws transformed the Hollywood landscape, sparked a cultural phenomenon, and took a huge bite out of the collective psyche. Visually compelling and augmented by an iconic musical score, the adaptation of Peter Benchley’s novel about a great white shark terrorizing a beach resort was a masterpiece of the thriller genre. From the movie’s opening moments, when a young woman gets devoured while taking an evening skinny-dip, Spielberg—just 27 when he made the picture—grabs us and never lets go. “I went to the third public screening in Hollywood, and the whole audience jumped as one when the girl was yanked under by the shark,” recalls film historian and screenwriter Joseph McBride, author of Steven Spielberg, A Biography. “It was like a wave. The only comparable experience I’d had was while working as a vendor at Milwaukee County Stadium on November 24, 1963, the day Lee Harvey Oswald was shot. I was walking through the stands and everybody had these portable radios and the news came rippling through the stadium.”

Jaws would become history’s highest-grossing film (eclipsed in 1977 by Star Wars), but it’s remarkable that it ever got made in the first place. The shoot on Martha’s Vineyard—directed by a rising but relatively unknown young filmmaker—was notoriously arduous, not least because the elaborately designed mechanical sharks used for the title character constantly malfunctioned. As it turned out, those snafus made Jaws a better film. The villain doesn’t even make an appearance until 81 minutes into the picture—in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock and other masters of suspense, it was the idea of the shark, the unseen menace lurking in the depths, that had audiences grabbing their seats. “[Jaws producer] Richard Zanuck told me back in the ’90s that if you made the film today, they would have used CGI and it would be stupid and unreal,” McBride says. “It would all look like a cartoon, what they would do is have the shark do all sorts of stunts. I actually saw the storyboards they’d done for Jaws, and it showed the [mechanical] shark jumping and doing all kinds of tricks. Spielberg was thin ing of doing that . . . [but] he later realized that what made the film work was you didn’t see the shark very much.”

https://www.life.com/arts-entertainm...ged-the-world/

I remember how people basically did not choose to even bathe in their bathtub ... it reflected a bit what a big impression the film made when it came out. Robert Shaw did not get in my eyes the Oscar that he really deserved a true personality and a man with a lot of integrity and like many great people he passed away far too soon.

[McBeck]

The extra material reveals that the music made all the difference. From "meh" to "best movie EVAH"

[Gerald]

Originally Posted by McBeck

The extra material reveals that the music made all the difference. From "meh" to "best movie EVAH"

I agree.