Fifty years ago, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) became a cultural phenomenon. The film took the box office by storm in the summer of 1975, becoming the highest grossing movie ever made at the time and receiving four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, and three wins.
Based on Peter Benchley’s hit novel, Jaws tells the story of a New York City cop, played by Roy Scheider, who moves his family to a quiet beach community, only to be confronted by the threat of a killer great white shark. Despite its infamously troubled production, plagued by technical issues with the mechanical shark and the perils of shooting on the open ocean, when the movie hit screens it captured the global imagination, defining the summer blockbuster and launching Spielberg into the stratosphere.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary, Disney has released Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story, a new documentary now showing on Disney Plus, Hulu and the National Geographic Channel.
The documentary comes from famed behind-the-scenes filmmaker and writer, Laurent Bouzereau, who has made many docs on Spielberg’s films dating back to the 1990s, and more recently wrote the book Spielberg: The First Ten Years (2023) and directed last year’s acclaimed Music By John Williams.
An all-star cast of famed filmmakers, including George Lucas, Guillermo Del Toro, Jordan Peele, James Cameron and Steven Soderbergh, a self-professed Jaws obsessive who’s long been in the process of writing a book about the film’s production, join Spielberg, the Benchley family, screenwriter Carl Gottlieb and many others, to reflect on the notoriously troubled process of making the film.
Among highlights is a look into the origins of the film’s story and the construction of its classic screenplay, from first draft to final cut.
Here are some key screenwriting takeaways from Jaws @ 50.
Where did the idea for Jaws come from?
In the documentary, Peter Benchley’s family members relay that growing up in New York CIty, he would often go on fishing trips off of Nantucket with his dad. What struck the impressionable young Benchley most were the many shark sightings that occurred on their fishing trips, and the distinction between tourists from the cities and “islanders”, those who were born, raised and would stay in the small coastal towns forever.
When adult Benchley saw Peter Gimbel’s documentary, Blue Water, White Death (1971), featuring stunning underwater footage of shark experts Ron and Valerie Taylor, who would later film real sharks for Jaws, he became inspired to finally write about his lifelong fascination. Benchley also came across the story of a 4,500lb, 18ft shark caught by Montauk fisherman Frank Mundus, who became the basis for the character of Quint, the salty shark hunter played by Robert Shaw. Combining these real life inspirations with his personal experiences of being a shark-obsessed city transplant in a small fishing town, Benchley conceived of a story that explored what would happen if one of these massive great whites terrorized a coastal community. The mystique, allure and danger of the almost mythical animal became a key selling point of Benchley’s book, turning Jaws into a best seller.
The art of choosing a title
The title selection for Jaws was a family affair, with Benchley enlisting his wife and children to create pages and pages of titles over the course of months, the hand-written lists appearing in the documentary. The more pretentious possibilities included Leviathan Rising and The Terror of the Deep, while Benchley’s father suggested Who Dat Noshin’ On My Leg?, which might have kept the film from quite as much box office success. At the last possible moment before the book needed to go to press, Benchley finally decided that the most compelling title was Jaws. By the time the film went into production, the title and now-iconic cover image of the giant shark launching upwards toward an unsuspecting swimmer, were so well-known that the studio used both for the movie.
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When a young Steven Spielberg first read the galleys for Benchley’s upcoming novel, he was immediately enthralled by it.
The relentless shark reminded Spielberg of the monstrous truck in his debut feature film, Duel (1971), which stalks and terrorizes a hapless traveling salesman. Spielberg decided to make Duel after reading a short story of the same name by Richard Matheson.
In both stories, a central family man has to get out of his urban comfort zone and do battle with the monster in desolate nature, far from home. Spielberg highlights in the documentary that the simple nightmare premise of each story showed great possibilities for suspense filmmaking in the lineage of one of his favorite filmmakers, Alfred Hitchcock. It’s easy to see parallels in both films with Hitchcock’s classic, The Birds (1963), in which the titular creatures attack the everyday people of a coastal town for seemingly no reason. Actress Susan Backlinie, who plays the shark’s first victim, points out that the opening skinny dipping scene also shares the DNA of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) shower scene. While reading the last 100 or so pages of Benchley’s book, the hunt for the shark left Spielberg so scared and excited that he became desperate to put it on screen.
Crafting the perfect screenplay
Many writers’ hands went into the construction of the Jaws screenplay and the writing continued deep into production. The studio initially let Benchley take a shot at adapting his own book, but after three drafts, he concluded that the skills necessary to write a script varied wildly from those of writing a novel. The producers suggested Howard Sackler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who wrote The Great White Hope, about boxer Jack Johnson, and the screenplay for its Academy Award-nominated film adaptation. Sackler’s pass helped establish a firm structure for the film and created a motivation for Quint’s hatred of sharks by making him a survivor of the sunken USS Indianapolis during WWII. Later, Spielberg had his friend John Milius take a crack at Quint’s now-famous monologue about the Indianapolis, but actor Robert Shaw, a writer himself, objected to the monologue’s length, and rewrote it during production.
While Sackler cracked the mechanics of the script, his draft lacked some of the humor that’s quintessential to Spielberg’s aesthetic. For this, Spielberg brought in his friend, comedy writer Carl Gottlieb, to do a dialogue pass, strengthening the banter and character relationships. In the documentary, Gottlieb recalls receiving a copy of the script with a note from Spielberg that said, “Eviscerate it!!”
When Spielberg sought input on the script from his The Sugarland Express (1974) screenwriters Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, they told him, “The shark’s gotta blow up at the end!” While it seemed like a wild notion, blowing the shark up would provide some proverbial fireworks to pay off the tension and erase any ambiguity as to whether it had survived. They even suggested how to do it, by having a character shoot a rifle into a scuba tank in its mouth. In the book, Chief Brody watches in fear as the shark slowly succumbs to harpoon wounds. The idea of shooting the tank gives Scheider’s Brody more agency and the audience a final thrill. Over the various drafts, the book’s sideplots featuring the mafia and romantic entanglements all got stripped away to the story’s bare essence: a reluctant hero getting tested by the elements of nature itself.
Richard Dreyfuss in 'Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story'
","img":{"alt":"Richard Dreyfuss stretching the mouth of a shark, dead on a hook in Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story","height":475,"src":"https://200838.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/200838/Richard%20Dreyfuss%20in%20Jaws%20@%2050.png","width":840},"link_url":{"no_follow":false,"open_in_new_tab":true,"rel":"noopener","sponsored":false,"url":{"content_id":null,"href":"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32743685/?ref_=ttmi_ov_bk","href_with_scheme":"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32743685/?ref_=ttmi_ov_bk","type":"EXTERNAL"},"user_generated_content":false}}]{% endraw %}{% end_module_attribute %}{% module_attribute "smart_objects" is_json="true" %}{% raw %}[]{% endraw %}{% end_module_attribute %}{% module_attribute "smart_type" is_json="true" %}{% raw %}"NOT_SMART"{% endraw %}{% end_module_attribute %}{% module_attribute "tag" is_json="true" %}{% raw %}"module"{% endraw %}{% end_module_attribute %}{% module_attribute "type" is_json="true" %}{% raw %}"module"{% endraw %}{% end_module_attribute %}{% module_attribute "wrap_field_tag" is_json="true" %}{% raw %}"div"{% endraw %}{% end_module_attribute %}{% end_module_block %}“Without those people, you wouldn’t give a hang about the shark.”
One of Spielberg’s best instincts in overseeing the adaptation of the story was emphasizing character over the novelty of the monster. By putting as much focus as possible on the characters and relationships, down to the smallest walk-on part, the ever-evolving script created higher stakes and greater fear. “I feel that Jaws is more of a people picture than a shark movie,” Spielberg says, “Without those people, you wouldn’t give a hang about the shark.”
Benchley’s central trio of Brody, a grumpy city cop, Hooper, a young, excitable PHD student who’s yet to get his hands dirty, and Quint, a grizzled veteran fisherman who resents them both, is a masterclass in dramatic ensemble. But Spielberg and casting director Shari Rhodes brought the characters to life beyond even the richness of the page when choosing actors.
Scheider’s world-weariness and association with New York police films made him the perfect Chief Brody. As the oldest of the bunch, hard-drinking, weathered Shaw gives one of the great screen performances as Quint. And young Richard Dreyfuss embodied Hooper so fully, that the combative dynamic between he and Shaw lent itself perfectly to the characters.
The tensions between the three actors’ personalities became evident over the course of the long production and bled into the characters in a way that transcended the page. But Spielberg and Rhodes worked hard to give every character down to the most background townsperson a lived-in authenticity by the casting of locals. Martha’s Vineyard eccentric, Craig Kingsbury, for instance, took the role of Ben Gardner, and made up all of his own lines, spewing phrases never uttered in the script. Jaws is a perfect example of how the right casting can improve upon even the best screenplay, and of how character is the most important special effect.
Script changes during production
No matter how sturdy a script is, once time and the elements get involved, everything is always going to change during production and new ideas will come up on the day. The shark’s mechanical issues are well known to have made it so that Spielberg couldn’t show it as often, which led to greater suspense and fear of the unknown. But the continual delays also caused Spielberg to have to rethink and even reshoot certain scenes to keep the movie living and vibrant.
Some of the most iconic moments weren’t scripted, but materialized on the day. “When the shark comes out and Brody backs into the cabin,” Spielberg says, “I said, ‘Roy, when you back in, don’t even look at him. Just keep looking at where the shark breached.” He then instructed Schneider to say the now legendary line, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
The downtime waiting to shoot also led to long improvisations between the three central actors. Spielberg always had a tape recorder running and would write down good lines to include in the next day’s shooting. Quint’s crushing of a beer can, followed by Hooper mockingly crushing a dixie cup, is one example of something that was never in the script, but that brings the characters to life.
Relevance to the times
While a great story, script and cast under the leadership of a visionary director turned this high concept monster movie into a smash hit, the documentary points out how the film’s underlying political themes also struck a chord in the fraught 1970s. While Jaws was in production, America was undergoing the fears and paranoias of the Vietnam War and Watergate. Film writer Janet Maslin highlights how Murray Hamilton’s mayor character was a perfect embodiment of newfound public distrust in elected officials, with the shark reflecting a feeling of senseless danger and violence prevalent in post-Vietnam America.
“The shark isn’t even the greatest monster in the film,” says Jordan Peele, “The fact that the money and the bottom line is working under the surface as being more valuable than the lives at stake, is something that is always true to a certain extent in this capitalist society.”
In an archival interview, Benchley relates that then prime minister of Cuba, Fidel Castro, mentioned to the press that he had read and enjoyed Jaws, which he viewed not as a “commercial American thriller,” but as “a marvelous metaphor about the corruption of capitalism.” Whether it was conscious or not, the themes in Jaws seemed to hit at just the right time, and contributed to the film’s cultural resonance.
The recurring motif of “home”
Early in the documentary, Spielberg identifies the idea of “home” as being central to the movie.
“When I hear 50 years, I think of home,” he says, “Because the theme of home is so consistent with the story of Jaws. It’s about getting home, about returning home, and already being home.”
Indeed, the story is about Brody trying to find a sense of home in a new, strange place. Over the course of the film, he goes from being afraid of the water and frustrated by the quirks and annoyances of Amity, to taking to the water and fighting his fear in order to protect his new home and ensure its safety. Before Brody takes to the sea to hunt the shark, he asks Mrs. Brody if she can take their son home. “Back to New York?” she asks. “No, home here,” he replies. Aboard the Orca during a night of drinking after their first run in with the shark, Brody joins Hooper and Quint in a chorus of the 1925 song, “Show Me The Way To Go Home,” and after the climactic triumph over the monster, the film ends with Brody and Hooper paddling back to the shores of Amity, where Brody’s family awaits.
Spielberg’s own story of the making of Jaws mirrors Brody’s in so many ways. He discusses the trauma he underwent during the 159 day production, a young man in his mid-20s trying to seize what might’ve been his last big shot at making a home for himself in Hollywood. Like Brody, he took to the sea and did battle with the elements, trying to tame a huge studio production with a big budget and his own career on the line. In the end, he succeeded, and Jaws created a home for Spielberg. Today, generations of moviegoers still sell out movie theaters to return to fictional Amity every summer. While the terrifying shark initially got audiences in the theaters, it’s the emphasis on rich characters, relationships and authentic world building that keep us returning to Jaws for a sense of home.
Celebrating Jaws @ 50
The celebration around the 50th anniversary of Jaws is a fun highlight of this movie summer, and moviegoers will get the chance to see it on the biggest screen possible during an IMAX rerelease in August. In the meantime, be sure to watch Jaws @ 50 to get more backstory and insights into the film’s creation. To go even deeper into the film’s production, you can also check out The Jaws Log, an essential, in-depth chronicle by screenwriter Carl Gottlieb himself, from in the trenches. A movie as rich as Jaws always rewards further rewatches and study by any screenwriter.