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Jaws (1975): Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss. Directed by Steven Spielberg, Screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, based on Benchley’s novel.
Get the film at Amazon: Jaws (30th Anniversary Edition)

You know, watching the trailer at the bottom of this page makes me want to watch this film again, even though I watched it last only little over a month ago. I guess this is not only because it’s a well-made film (against all odds), but cracking good fun as well.

By this point, in the 1970’s, I was starting to get to the age where I could sneak into PG and R rated movies on my own, so a lot of my favorite films come from the 1974 - 1976 era. I guess, trying to cash in on the lines-around-the-block stir that “The Exorcist” caused only a couple of years before, Universal pulled out all the stops on the hype and tie-ins. I think I had every conceivable piece of shark paraphernalia, including several Doodle Art posters (older readers will remember those … they were basically an excuse to sell replacement pens). I even made this terrific dinner plate, as part of a school project, that showed a guy being bloodily eaten by a great white. Mmmmmm.

What I didn’t realize, at my young age, enjoying the film merely as entertainment, was how new and different a voice Spielberg was to filmmaking at the time. I can certainly see, looking back now, how serious filmmakers would look down on him, since he seemed to be the genius culmination of years of television and film as a basic diet. He wasn’t making “film”, he didn’t seem to care about making “film”, he was making “movies”, like the ones he enjoyed when he was growing up, only better, much, much better.

It was really a turning point in film history, where directors who had grown up, surrounded by visual storytelling, were now telling their own stories, often regurgitations and reimaginings of what had already been made previous. Not remakes, but wholly original material inspired by classic material. “Jaws”, on the surface, is a horror film. It’s about a monster eating people and has enough jolts to keep a young audience happy, but at its core, it’s an adventure film, and that’s no more apparent than in the second half, when the tables turn and the hunt for the shark begins.

Spielberg’s creative enthusiasm was infectious, especially to younger filmmakers who were starting off like he did, in their back yards with an 8mm camera. I have to admit, I myself cut a fin shape from a rubber car floor mat, nailed it to a couple of pieces of wood tied to a string and made my own super-8 shark epic in the lake behind our house (with the help of some leftover bits of meat from the local butcher, something that excited most of the dogs in the neighborhood).

The summer of 1975 was the summer of “Jaws” and it’s a summer I will long remember. The film was a phenomenon unlike any before it. There was no denying Universal had hit the jackpot and for the years that followed its release they would try to duplicate its success by taking a few variables here and a couple elements there and jamming them into some other property without success. Single-minded creatures, like sharks, studios are. With dollar signs in their eyes, the movie business was beginning to no longer exist as merely an industry that makes films, other ways for money to be made were emerging. True filmmaking had only a couple of years left, before a friend of Spielberg’s spectacularly and unwittingly dealt the final blow.

Original Trailer:

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