Jaws (film)

Jaws (1975) is an American film, based on a best-selling novel by Peter Benchley which itself was based loosely on the true story of the Jersey Shore Shark Attacks of 1916. In the story, a resort town's police chief tries to protect beachgoers from the predations of a huge great white shark by closing the beach, only to be overruled by the money-grubbing town council. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg and stars Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss and Lorraine Gary.

Synopsis

The film opens with a young girl swimming just off Amity Island, a summer resort akin to Martha's Vineyard. Suddenly, she begins to get jerked around and is pulled under. The next morning, Martin Brody (Scheider), the Amity Island Chief of Police, finds some of her remains and concludes that she was killed in a shark attack. Chief Brody orders the beaches closed, but the mayor ignores his warnings and orders the beaches kept open: Amity is dependent on summer tourism, and the Fourth of July celebration is near. He tells Brody to say the girl was killed by a boat propeller. A few days later, a boy is killed by the shark while swimming on a crowded beach, and his mother places a $3,000 bounty on the animal.

The bounty starts an amateur shark hunting frenzy, but also attracts marine biologist Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss) and professional shark hunter Quint (Shaw). After scraping his fingernails on a chalkboard to get the attention of the town hall meeting, Quint says of the bounty, "I'll find 'im for three, but I'll catch 'im—and kill 'im—for ten." When Hooper examines the remains of the first victim, he becomes convinced that a Great White Shark was responsible, a voracious predator known to be dangerous to humans. His angry retort to the coroner, "This is not a boat accident," is one of the movie's most memorable lines, though often misquoted as "This was no boating accident!"

A large Tiger Shark is caught by amateur fisherman, and for a moment everyone is pleased that the terror is over, but then Hooper asks to cut open the fish "to be sure" and concludes that they are looking for a much larger fish. Brody wants the beaches closed, but Mayor Vaughn still refuses. Brody and Hooper venture out at night and, when Hooper puts on scuba gear to check the hull of a wrecked local boat, discover more victims.

On the Fourth of July, after a false alarm triggered by a prank shakes everyone up, the shark attacks in the "pond," an estuary where Brody told his son to stay; another victim is killed and Brody's son is nearly attacked. The stunned mayor relents, closes the beaches, and agrees to pay Quint's price. Brody, Hooper, and Quint set out in Quint's boat, the Orca, to face and destroy the maneater.

Up till now, only parts of the shark have been seen, the monster being more like a presence. This builds up to one of the film's biggest moments when Brody, while tossing chum into the sea to lure the shark is shocked and horrified when it surfaces right in front of him. He realizes the fish is massive, with a size that is at least half of the Orca. In one of the film's most enduring lines, the stunned Brody tells Quint, "You're gonna need a bigger boat." Hooper and Quint estimate the shark to be 20-25 feet long. After the men harpoon it with a line attached to a yellow floatation barrel, the shark swims away and disappears. When night falls without another sighting, the men retire below for dinner and drinking, where they compare scars. Quint tells of his terrifying experience with sharks as a survivor of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. While they sing a drinking song, the shark suddenly attacks and damages the boat. Quint fires at it in vain with his M1 Garand rifle, but it disappears again.

In the morning, the men make repairs to the boat, and Quint destroys the radio to keep Brody from calling the Coast guard for help. The shark attacks again and, in a protracted battle that further damages the boat, is harpooned twice more with lines attached to yellow flotation barrels to mark its movements and drain its strength. But the huge shark pulls the barrels under nevertheless. The strange, unpredictable movement and appearances of the barrels give the shark a menacing presence.

In a desperate new approach, Hooper enters the water with an scuba gear inside a shark proof cage. He intends to stab the shark inside the mouth with a hypodermic needle filled with a powerful poison. The monster shark destroys the cage, and Hooper flees to the seabed. As Quint and Brody raise the empty cage, the shark throws itself onto the boat, crushing the stern. Quint slides into its mouth, kicking and screaming. As he is thrashed about from side to side, Quint grabs a machete and attempts fend it off, but nevertheless dies the horrible death he has feared for so long. Brody flees to the boat's cabin, now partly submerged, and throws a pressurized air tank into the shark's mouth.

Brody takes Quint's rifle and climbs the mast of the sinking boat, where he temporarily fends it off with a harpoon. On the shark's next attack, Brody fires repeatedly, at last managing to hit the air cylinder, blowing the shark's head to pieces, thereby destroying the monster by means of its own rapacious hunger. With the boat submerging, Hooper bobs to the surface alive. The two survivors swim for the shore using floatation barrels for a raft as sea gulls begin consuming the shark’s remains.

Production history

The film was produced by Richard Zanuck and David Brown, who had purchased the film rights to Peter Benchley's novel in 1973. His novel was loosely based on a real-life event in the summer of 1916 when a series of shark attacks killed four people along the New Jersey coast and triggered a media frenzy. They signed Spielberg to direct in the same year, prior to release of his first theatrical film, The Sugarland Express (also a Zanuck / Brown production). Despite his lack of feature film experience, Spielberg had proved adept at suspense material with the 1971 telemovie Duel, among other blockbuster smashes such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which was released in 1977.

Peter Benchley wrote the first draft of the screenplay, with a subsequent draft prepared by Howard Sackler. Carl Gottlieb (who also appears in a supporting acting role in the film as a reporter) was brought in to add humour and more depth to the characters. Gottlieb rewrote many scenes during principal photography, and John Milius contributed some dialogue polishes. Spielberg has claimed that he prepared his own draft, although it is unclear if any of the other screenwriters drew on his material.

The authorship of Quint's monologue about the fate of the cruiser USS Indianapolis has caused substantial controversy, with dispute as to who deserves the most credit for the speech. Spielberg tactfully describes it as a collaboration between John Milius, Howard Sackler and Robert Shaw. Gottlieb gives primary credit to Shaw, downplaying Milius' contribution.

Contrary to other opinions, Roy Scheider did not ad-libb Chief Brody's famous line: "You're gonna need a bigger boat" (cf. imdb.com). Nevertheless, Spielberg liked it so much, that the line appears two more times during the movie (in rendered versions).

Location shooting occurred at Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. The film had a troubled shoot and went considerably over budget. The logistical problems of shooting at sea led to many delays, and the mechanical shark frequently malfunctioned, due to the hydraulics of the innards being brutalized by salt water. The three mechanical sharks were collectively nicknamed "Bruce" by the production team after Spielberg's lawyer, a piece of trivia that has been cited in a number of shark-related stories (such as the appearance of the shark in 2003's Finding Nemo). Spielberg referred to the mechanical shark as "the turd" on a British program about famous horror scenes and confessed that they had even less flattering names for it throughout filming.

To some degree, the delays in the production proved serendipitous. The script was refined during production, and the unreliable mechanical sharks forced Spielberg to shoot many of the scenes with the shark only hinted at. For example, for much of the shark hunt its location is represented by floating yellow barrels that have been tied to it during the hunt. This enforced restraint is widely thought to have increased the suspense of many scenes, giving it a Hitchcockian tone. The film was given the nickname "Flaws" by many of the dispassionate crew members.

John Williams contributed the acclaimed film score. The main theme became a classic piece of suspense music, synonymous with approaching danger, and has echoes of the start of the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 - a possible influence. When the piece was first played for the Spielberg, he was noted to have laughed at John Williams, thinking that it was a joke. Spielberg was later quoted as saying that without Williams' score, the movie would have been only half as successful. Another influence is Ed Plumb's score for Walt Disney's Bambi, which used a low, repeating musical motif to suggest approaching danger from the off-screen threat of Man.

The scene where Hooper discovers Ben Gardner's body in the hull of the wrecked boat was added after an initial screening of the film. Spielberg mentions in the special features of the DVD release that after he saw everyone's reaction, he got so greedy for "one more scream" that he financed this addition with $3000 of his own money after he was denied funding from Universal Studios. Their thought was that there was nothing wrong with the film the way it was, and that it should be left alone.

At the time of the film's release, it was reported that Spielberg liked to drop into theaters and sit in the back, watching the audience's reaction. One of his favorite scenes was a tight shot of Brody tossing chum over the stern, has back to the water, commenting on "shoveling this shit", immediately after which the open-mouthed shark breaks the surface. Spielberg enjoyed the audience's reaction switching from laughter to screams in a split-second.

Many locals from Martha's Vinyard played uncredited speaking roles in the film.

Footage of real sharks was shot by Ron and Valerie Taylor in waters off South Australia, although only a handful of these shots were used in the finished film

Impact and significance

Upon its release, the film beat the then-$85 million gross of the reigning box-office champion, The Godfather, becoming the first movie to reach more than $100 million in box-office receipts, eventually the film would go on to gross over $470 Million worldwide and become the highest grossing box-office hit for many years, securing Steven Spielberg's spot in cinema history. This feat was not matched until Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, which debuted two years later, in 1977. Jaws was a key film in establishing the benefits of a wide national release backed by heavy media advertising, rather than a progressive release that let a film slowly enter new markets and build support over a period of time. The wide national release pattern would become standard practice for high-profile movies in the late 1970s and after.

Jaws is also often cited as indicating a shift in the type of movies made by Hollywood studios. Along with The Exorcist and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, it is an example of a high-budget movie in what had previously been considered a disreputable or low-budget genre (in this case, suspense/horror). The runaway success of these films led to increased genre-film production by studios.

Though a horror classic (voted to have the scariest scenes ever by a Bravo Halloween TV special), the film is widely recognized to be responsible for many fearsome and inaccurate stereotypes about sharks and their behavior. Benchley has said that he never would have written the original novel had he known what sharks are really like in the wild.[1] He has since written Shark Trouble, a non-fiction book about shark behavior.

Conservation groups have bemoaned the fact that the movie has made it considerably harder to convince the public that sharks (who, as macro-predators, constitute an important part of the ocean's ecosystem) should be protected.

Jaws was followed by three sequels, generally regarded as increasingly poor in quality as compared to the original: Jaws 2 (1978), Jaws 3-D (1983) and Jaws: The Revenge (1987). The original movie has a presitigiously rare 100% rating (no bad reviews found) at Rotten Tomatoes, a website that accumulates numerous reviews for movies, while Jaws: The Revenge has a decidedly unprestigious 0% rating (no good reviews found).

A video game based around the premise of a great white shark attacking human beings, called Jaws: Unleashed, is due to be released on May 1, 2006. The twist is that the player controls the shark, and must defend their underwater habitat from polluting humans.

Jaws has been spoofed and referred to in other movies, most notably in the opening sequence of "1941", directed by Spielberg himself. Other references are to be found in Airplane! (1980), Clerks. (1994), Mallrats (1995), Chasing Amy (1997), and Caddyshack (1980). In Back to the Future Part II (executively produced by Steven Spielberg), a movie theater sports an animated holographic shark over a marquee that reads "Jaws 19" and "This time it's really really personal" and "Directed by Max Spielberg."

The film has even been turned into a musical, titled "Giant Killer Shark: The Musical", which will premier in the summer of 2006 at the Toronto Fringe Festival.

Mythbusters show

On July 17, 2005, a two-hour episode of MythBusters was aired, where the Mythbusters tested myths based on the Jaws film. These myths included:

• Shooting a pressurized SCUBA tank will blow it up. (Busted, as a punctured air cylinder will rocket around as the air exits but will not explode.)
• A shark can be fended off by punching it in various parts of its body. (Plausible)
• A great white shark can rip a hole in a boat. (Plausible)
• A great white shark can pull a boat backwards with great enough speed that waves break over the rear end. (Busted, but the boat's engine was starting to lose power, so the myth is possibly plausible.)
• A great white shark can damage/destroy a shark cage by ramming it. (Confirmed)
• A great white shark can pull floatation barrels underwater and keep them there. (Busted, as the barrels will not stay under for long.)

30th anniversary

In June 2005, on the 30th anniversary of the film's release, a festival, JawsFest, was held in Martha's Vineyard. Jaws was also then re-released on DVD, this time including the full two-hour documentary produced by Laurent Bouzereau for the LaserDisc, and which had appeared as a one-hour version on the original 2000 DVD release.

Awards

Jaws won Academy Awards for Film Editing, Music (Original Score) and Sound. It was also nominated for Best Picture.

The film is consistently on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films. Jaws was #48 on American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movies, #2 on its 100 Years... 100 Thrills, and #1 in the Bravo cable network's five-hour miniseries The 100 Scariest Movie Moments (2004) [2]. The shark was also anointed #18 on AFI's 100 Years, 100 Heroes and Villains, opposite Robin Hood. In 2001 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

In 2005, the American Film Institute voted Roy Scheider's line "You're gonna need a bigger boat" as number 35 on its list of the top 100 movie quotes.

Differences from the novel

The film differed in some notable aspects from Benchley's original novel:

• In the novel, Hooper is killed by the shark during the dive to examine it, with the intention to kill it with a shot of Strichnine Nitrate
• The novel also describes a short sexual encounter between Hooper and Brody's wife. They are portrayed as having been acquainted with each other during their youth.
• Portrays Quint as being bald, cleanshaven and 6'4" in height. Robert Shaw's Quint was considerably shorter, and with plenty of head and facial hair.
• In the novel, the mayor has Mafia ties and wants the beaches kept open for the reason.
• The events in the final reel of the film (boating, drinking, and singing with Quint), take place in a series of boat trips in the novel.
• Quint dies from drowning after he gets his foot caught on his harpoon rope and being dragged under by the shark.
• Quint's monologue about the USS Indianapolis is absent from the novel. In the novel, Quint mentions that he had been working in the business for thirty years, or since 1944; the USS Indianapolis wasn't sunk until 1945.
• Quint used a dead baby dolphin as bait.
• In the film, the shark is 25 feet in length, slightly above average for the Great White, in the novel, Hooper claims the shark is "boardering on Megalodon size."
• In the novel, the shark dies as a result of injuries from the harpoons embedded into it and so forth. For the film, something with more visual impact was deemed necessary.

Differences from screenplay to screen

The film was written (and re-written) in three different screenplays (by Steven Spielberg, Howard Sackler and Carl Gottlieb respectively). There are scenes that differed from screenplay to screen: -

• A scene where the harbormaster is killed by the shark while cleaning out his coffeepot in the ocean.
• Quint is introduced to the film by watching the film version of Moby Dick. His laughter throughout makes people get up and leave the theater (this is thought to be an influence on Wesley Strick's Cape Fear). 'Moby Dick' could not be licensed from Gregory Peck (the rights owner).
• When the shark is blown-up, it is not after a charge attack, but popping up out of the water below the crow's nest of the sinking vessel.

References

• Benchley, Peter (1973) "Jaws". Doubleday.
• Blake, E. (1975) On Location...On Martha's Vineyard: The Making of the Movie Jaws. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.
• Brode, D. (2000) The Films of Steven Spielberg. (Revised ed.) New York, NY: Kensington. ISBN 0806519517
• Gottlieb, C. (1975) The Jaws Log. New York, NY: Dell Publishing.
• Sinyard, N. (1987) The Films of Steven Spielberg. Middlesex: Hamlyn/Bison Books. ISBN 0600552268