Jaws

Jaws is a 1975 American horror/thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on the 1974 novel of the same name by Peter Benchley. The film was distributed by Universal Pictures. Released on June 20, 1975, the film is the first film in the franchise, followed by Jaws 2 on June 16, 1978, Jaws 3-D on July 22, 1983 and Jaws: The Revenge on July 17, 1987.

Plot
During a beach party at dusk on Amity Island, New England, a young woman, Chrissie Watkins, goes skinny dipping in the ocean. While treading water, she is violently pulled under. The next day, her partial remains are found on shore. The medical examiner's ruling that the death was due to a shark attack leads police chief Martin Brody to close the beaches. Mayor Larry Vaughn overrules him, fearing that the town's summer economy will be ruined. The coroner now concurs with the mayor's theory that Chrissie was killed in a boating accident. Brody reluctantly accepts their conclusion until another fatal shark attack occurs shortly thereafter. A bounty is placed on the shark, prompting an amateur shark-hunting frenzy. Local professional shark hunter Quint offers his services for $10,000. Meanwhile, consulting oceanographer Matt Hooper examines Chrissie's remains, and confirms her death was caused by a shark—an unusually large one.

When local fishermen catch a tiger shark, the mayor proclaims the beaches safe. Hooper disputes that it is the same predator, confirming this after no human remains are found inside it. Hooper and Brody find a half-sunken vessel while searching the night waters in Hooper's boat. Underwater, Hooper retrieves a sizable great white shark's tooth embedded in the submerged hull. He drops it in fright after encountering a partial corpse. Vaughn discounts Brody and Hooper's statements that a huge great white shark is responsible for the deaths, and refuses to close the beaches, allowing only added safety precautions. On the Fourth of July weekend, tourists pack the beaches. Following a juvenile prank in which the presence of a shark is simulated, the real shark enters a nearby estuary, killing a boater and causing Brody's oldest son, Michael, to go into shock. Brody then convinces Vaughn to hire Quint.

Quint, Brody, and Hooper set out on Quint's boat, the Orca, to hunt the shark. While Brody lays down a chum line, Quint waits for an opportunity to hook the shark. Without warning, it appears behind the boat. Quint, estimating its length at 25 feet (7.6 m) and weight at 3 tonnes (3.0 long tons; 3.3 short tons), harpoons it with a line attached to a flotation barrel, but the shark pulls the barrel underwater and disappears.

At nightfall, Quint and Hooper drunkenly exchange stories about their assorted scars, and Quint reveals that he survived the USS Indianapolis. The shark returns unexpectedly, ramming the boat's hull, and disabling the power. The men work through the night, repairing the engine. In the morning, Brody attempts to call the Coast Guard, but Quint, who has become obsessed with killing the shark without outside assistance, smashes the radio. After a long chase, Quint harpoons another barrel into the shark. The line is tied to the stern cleats, but the shark drags the boat backward, swamping the deck and flooding the engine compartment. Quint prepares to sever the line to prevent the transom from being pulled out but the cleats break off, keeping the barrels attached to the shark. Quint heads toward shore to draw the shark into shallower waters, but he intentionally pushes the damaged engine past the safety limits and the overtaxed engine fails.

With the Orca slowly sinking, the trio attempt a riskier approach. Hooper puts on scuba gear and enters the water in a shark-proof cage, intending to lethally inject the shark with strychnine, using a hypodermic spear. The shark attacks the cage, causing Hooper to drop the spear, which sinks and is lost; Hooper manages to escape to the seabed. The shark then attacks the boat directly and devours Quint. Trapped on the sinking vessel, Brody jams a pressurized scuba tank into the shark's mouth, and, climbing the crow's nest, shoots the tank with a rifle. The resulting explosion obliterates the shark. Hooper surfaces, and he and Brody paddle back to Amity Island clinging to the remaining barrels.

Cast

 * Roy Scheider as Chief Martin Brody.
 * Robert Shaw as Captain Quint.
 * Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper.
 * Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody.
 * Murray Hamilton as Mayor Larry Vaughn.
 * Carl Gottlieb as Meadows.
 * Jeffrey Kramer as Deputy Hendricks.
 * Susan Backlinie as Chrissie Watkins.
 * Peter Benchley as Interviewer.
 * Jay Mello as Sean Brody.
 * Lee Fierro as Mrs. Kintner.

Development
Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, producers at Universal Pictures, independently heard about Peter Benchley's novel Jaws. Brown came across it in the literature section of lifestyle magazine Cosmopolitan, then edited by his wife, Helen Gurley Brown. A small card written by the magazine's book editor gave a detailed description of the plot, concluding with the comment "might make a good movie".[3][4] The producers each read the book over the course of a single night and agreed the next morning that it was "the most exciting thing that they had ever read" and that they wanted to produce a film version, although they were unsure how it would be accomplished.[5] They purchased the movie rights in 1973, before the book's publication, for approximately $175,000 (equivalent to $990,000 in 2018).[6] Brown claimed that had they read the book twice, they would never have made the film because they would have realized how difficult it would be to execute certain sequences.[7]

To direct, Zanuck and Brown first considered veteran filmmaker John Sturges—whose résumé included another maritime adventure, The Old Man and the Sea—before offering the job to Dick Richards, whose directorial debut, The Culpepper Cattle Co. had come out the previous year.[8] However, they grew irritated by Richards's habit of describing the shark as a whale and soon dropped him from the project.[8] Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg very much wanted the job. The 26-year-old had just directed his first theatrical film, The Sugarland Express, for Zanuck and Brown. At the end of a meeting in their office, Spielberg noticed their copy of the still-unpublished Benchley novel, and after reading it was immediately captivated.[6] He later observed that it was similar to his 1971 television film Duel in that both deal with "these leviathans targeting everymen".[5] He also revealed in "The Making of Jaws" documentary on the 2012 DVD release that he directly referenced Duel by repurposing the sound of the truck in Duel being destroyed as the death roar of the shark. After Richards's departure, the producers signed Spielberg to direct in June 1973, before the release of The Sugarland Express.[8]

Before production began, however, Spielberg grew reluctant to continue with Jaws, in fear of becoming typecast as the "truck and shark director".[9] He wanted to move over to 20th Century Fox's Lucky Lady instead, but Universal exercised its right under its contract with the director to veto his departure.[10] Brown helped convince Spielberg to stick with the project, saying that "after [Jaws], you can make all the films you want".[9] The film was given an estimated budget of $3.5 million and a shooting schedule of 55 days. Principal photography was set to begin in May 1974. Universal wanted the shoot to finish by the end of June, when the major studios' contract with the Screen Actors Guild was due to expire, to avoid any disruptions due to a potential strike.[11]

Writing
For the screen adaptation, Spielberg wanted to stay with the novel's basic plot, but discarded many of Benchley's subplots.[6] He declared that his favorite part of the book was the shark hunt on the last 120 pages, and told Zanuck when he accepted the job, "I'd like to do the picture if I could change the first two acts and base the first two acts on original screenplay material, and then be very true to the book for the last third."[12] When the producers purchased the rights to his novel, they promised Benchley that he could write the first draft of the screenplay.[6] The intent was to make sure a script could be done despite an impending threat of a Writer's Guild strike, given Benchley was not unionized.[13] Overall, he wrote three drafts before the script was turned over to other writers;[6] delivering his final version to Spielberg, he declared, "I'm written out on this, and that's the best I can do."[14] Benchley would later describe his contribution to the finished film as "the storyline and the ocean stuff – basically, the mechanics", given he "didn't know how to put the character texture into a screenplay."[13] One of his changes was to remove the novel's adulterous affair between Ellen Brody and Matt Hooper, at the suggestion of Spielberg, who feared it would compromise the camaraderie between the men on the Orca.[15] During the film's production, Benchley agreed to return and play a small onscreen role as a reporter.[16]

Spielberg, who felt that the characters in Benchley's script were still unlikable, invited the young screenwriter John Byrum to do a rewrite, but he declined the offer.[9] Columbo creators William Link and Richard Levinson also declined Spielberg's invitation.[17] Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Howard Sackler was in Los Angeles when the filmmakers began looking for another writer and offered to do an uncredited rewrite; since the producers and Spielberg were unhappy with Benchley's drafts, they quickly agreed.[5] At the suggestion of Spielberg, Brody's characterization made him afraid of water, "coming from an urban jungle to find something more terrifying off this placid island near Massachusetts."[13]

Spielberg wanted "some levity" in Jaws, humor that would avoid making it "a dark sea hunt", so he turned to his friend Carl Gottlieb, a comedy writer-actor then working on the sitcom The Odd Couple.[14] Spielberg sent Gottlieb a script, asking what the writer would change and if there was a role he would be interested in performing.[18] Gottlieb sent Spielberg three pages of notes, and picked the part of Meadows, the politically connected editor of the local paper. He passed the audition one week before Spielberg took him to meet the producers regarding a writing job.[19]

While the deal was initially for a "one-week dialogue polish", Gottlieb eventually became the primary screenwriter, rewriting the entire script during a nine-week period of principal photography.[19] The script for each scene was typically finished the night before it was shot, after Gottlieb had dinner with Spielberg and members of the cast and crew to decide what would go into the film. Many pieces of dialogue originated from the actors' improvisations during these meals; a few were created on set, most notably Roy Scheider's ad-lib of the line "You're gonna need a bigger boat."[20] John Milius contributed dialogue polishes,[21] and Sugarland Express writers Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood also made uncredited contributions.[22] Spielberg has claimed that he prepared his own draft, although it is unclear to what degree the other screenwriters drew on his material.[21] One specific alteration he called for in the story was to change the cause of the shark's death from extensive wounds to a scuba tank explosion, as he felt audiences would respond better to a "big rousing ending".[23] The director estimated the final script had a total of 27 scenes that were not in the book.[15]

Benchley had written Jaws after reading about sport fisherman Frank Mundus's capture of an enormous shark in 1964. According to Gottlieb, Quint was loosely based on Mundus, whose book Sportfishing for Sharks he read for research.[24] Sackler came up with the backstory of Quint as a survivor of the World War II USS Indianapolis disaster.[25] The question of who deserves the most credit for writing Quint's monologue about the Indianapolis has caused substantial controversy. Spielberg described it as a collaboration between Sackler, Milius, and actor Robert Shaw, who was also a playwright.[21] According to the director, Milius turned Sackler's "three-quarters of a page" speech into a monologue, and that was then rewritten by Shaw.[25] Gottlieb gives primary credit to Shaw, downplaying Milius's contribution.[26][27]

Casting
Though Spielberg complied with a request from Zanuck and Brown to cast known actors,[16] he wanted to avoid hiring any big stars. He felt that "somewhat anonymous" performers would help the audience "believe this was happening to people like you and me", whereas "stars bring a lot of memories along with them, and those memories can sometimes ... corrupt the story."[22] The director added that in his plans "the superstar was gonna be the shark".[14] The first actors cast were Lorraine Gary, the wife of then-president of Universal Sid Sheinberg, as Ellen Brody,[16] and Murray Hamilton as the mayor of Amity Island.[28] Stuntwoman-turned-actress Susan Backlinie was cast as Chrissie (the first victim) as she knew how to swim and was willing to perform nude.[14] Most minor roles were played by residents of Martha's Vineyard, where the film was shot. One example was Deputy Hendricks, played by future television producer Jeffrey Kramer.[29]

The role of Brody was offered to Robert Duvall, but the actor was interested only in portraying Quint.[30] Charlton Heston expressed a desire for the role, but Spielberg felt that Heston would bring a screen persona too grand for the part of a police chief of a modest community.[31] Roy Scheider became interested in the project after overhearing Spielberg at a party talk with a screenwriter about having the shark jump up onto a boat.[16] Spielberg was initially apprehensive about hiring Scheider, fearing he would portray a "tough guy", similar to his role in The French Connection.[30]

Nine days before the start of production, neither Quint nor Hooper had been cast.[32] The role of Quint was originally offered to actors Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden, both of whom passed.[16][30] Zanuck and Brown had just finished working with Robert Shaw on The Sting, and suggested him to Spielberg.[33] Shaw was reluctant to take the role since he did not like the book, but decided to accept at the urging of both his wife, actress Mary Ure, and his secretary—"The last time they were that enthusiastic was From Russia with Love. And they were right."[34] Shaw based his performance on fellow cast member Craig Kingsbury, a local fisherman, farmer, and legendary eccentric, who was playing fisherman Ben Gardner.[35] Spielberg described Kingsbury as "the purest version of who, in my mind, Quint was", and some of his offscreen utterances were incorporated into the script as lines of Gardner and Quint.[36] Another source for some of Quint's dialogue and mannerisms, especially in the third act at sea, was Vineyard mechanic and boat-owner Lynn Murphy.[37][38]

For the role of Hooper, Spielberg initially wanted Jon Voight.[33] Timothy Bottoms, Joel Grey, and Jeff Bridges were also considered for the part.[39] Spielberg's friend George Lucas suggested Richard Dreyfuss, whom he had directed in American Graffiti.[16] The actor initially passed, but changed his decision after he attended a pre-release screening of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which he had just completed. Disappointed in his performance and fearing that no one would want to hire him once Kravitz was released, he immediately called Spielberg and accepted the role in Jaws. Because the film the director envisioned was so dissimilar to Benchley's novel, Spielberg asked Dreyfuss not to read it.[40] As a result of the casting, Hooper was rewritten to better suit the actor,[32] as well as to be more representative of Spielberg, who came to view Dreyfuss as his "alter ego".[39]

Filming
Principal photography began May 2, 1974,[42] on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, selected after consideration was given to eastern Long Island. Brown explained later that the production "needed a vacation area that was lower middle class enough so that an appearance of a shark would destroy the tourist business."[43] Martha's Vineyard was also chosen because the surrounding ocean had a sandy bottom that never dropped below 35 feet (11 m) for 12 miles (19 km) out from shore, which allowed the mechanical sharks to operate while also beyond sight of land.[44] As Spielberg wanted to film the aquatic sequences relatively close-up to resemble what people see while swimming, cinematographer Bill Butler devised new equipment to facilitate marine and underwater shooting, including a rig to keep the camera stable regardless of tide and a sealed submersible camera box.[45] Spielberg asked the art department to avoid red in both scenery and wardrobe, so that the blood from the attacks would be the only red element and cause a bigger shock.[36]

Fun Facts

 * This was suppose to be a summer movie but the shark was so subborn it took until winter
 * the shark had a lot of problems and it was named Bruce