Five reasons no one thought Jaws would break cinematic records | Films | Entertainment

Razor-sharp teeth knifing through the ocean beneath an unsuspecting swimmer. A blood-curdling scream, frantic splashing, and then silence. Can one even think of the movie Jaws without hearing its ominous Oscar-winning notes: Duh-dum… Dah-dum…?

Last weekend marked 50 years since Jaws plunged into cinemas, becoming one of Hollywood’s greatest hits. A seminal movie, its cultural impact was far-reaching. Jaws ruined a million beach holidays, as legions of nervous tourists shunned the sea. And the film declared open season on sharks, driving down their populations worldwide as hunters sought them as trophies.

Jaws was also the first summer blockbuster, blazing the trail for decades of mega-budget hits. And it was the first commercial success for a little-known director by the name of Steven Spielberg, who went on to helm modern classics including E.T. – The Extraterrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List. Yet despite its global box office success and rave reviews, Jaws was a trouble-plagued disaster while filming.

Scheduled for 55 days of shooting, Jaws took 159 days to film. Its budget doubled and crew members jokingly dubbed it “Flaws”. Novelist Robert Benchley, whose 1974 bestseller inspired the film, wanted an A-List cast: Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Steve McQueen.

Yet Richard Dreyfuss was cast as marine biologist Dr Matt Hooper, only after the role was turned down by Jeff Bridges, Jon Voight and Timothy Bottoms. Speaking at a 50th anniversary event over the weekend, he admitted: “The word that’s most associated with that film in my mind is waiting! We waited – all day and all night.”

Charlton Heston wanted to play Amity police chief Brody, and when rejected by Spielberg in favour of Roy Scheider, vowed never to work with the director again. Hollywood veteran Robert Shaw rounded out the cast as weathered shark hunter Quint – Spielberg’s first choice Lee Marvin rejected the role. Filmed in the days before computer-generated imagery became routine, Jaws was shot using an animatronic great white shark, nicknamed Bruce in honour of Spielberg’s cutthroat shark of a lawyer. But Bruce – the shark, not the attorney – almost wrecked the entire movie.

The first time the mechanical monster was tested it sank to the ocean floor. The model repeatedly broke down, refusing to flash its lacerating rows of pearly whites on demand, and often looked dead in the water. The film’s famous opening shot, of a skinny-dipping blonde swimmer being pulled beneath the waves by an unseen shark, was only filmed that way because the mechanical shark that was intended to make its appearance kept malfunctioning.

“In the end, that worked to our advantage,” said the film’s late producer Richard Zanuck. “We couldn’t use the shark, so we had to rely on people’s imaginations. That delivered what I think is one of the best openings ever in a movie. The thought of the shark, along with John Williams’ perfect score, created more terror in the imagination than the appearance of the shark would.”

The mechanical shark proved such a drama queen that Spielberg would not let it appear on screen until an hour and 21 minutes into the two-hour movie. “I don’t think that Jaws would do so well today as it did in 1975, because people would not wait so long to see the shark,” confesses Spielberg. “We have an audience now that isn’t patient with us.” But the prop shark’s breakdowns did help disguise any delays that Shaw’s boozing might have caused. Spielberg admits: “It didn’t really matter because the shark wasn’t working anyway.”

Filming mainly outside, with Edgartown, Massachusetts, largely standing in for the beach community of Amity, nature also proved uncooperative. Bad weather forced the filmmakers to send home 400 extras who were waiting to film a crowded beach scene, but when the sun suddenly reappeared the casting executives could only find 150 extras to return. Though the titular star of Jaws is the 25ft great white shark that makes a meal of holidaymakers on America’s New England coast, the animatronic model’s frequent failings forced the film to focus more on the three shark hunters aboard the boat.

But Shaw’s drinking led to onset confrontations, including almost exchanging blows with Zanuck after the actor lost a game of table tennis. Animosity between seasoned Shaw and newcomer Dreyfuss also made for choppy seas for the filmmakers.

Scheider, caught between the duelling actors, recalls of Shaw: “He really thought Dreyfuss needed a slapping down: a young punk with no stage experience. Shaw would say: ‘Look at you, Dreyfuss – you eat and you drink and you’re fat and you’re sloppy. At your age it’s criminal. Why, you couldn’t even do 10 good push-ups.’” Dreyfuss hit back: “I can do 20” – but then failed to deliver.

“I couldn’t do it – he psyched me,” says Dreyfuss, who recalls Shaw as “a man who intimidated me, who scared me, who exhilarated me. I liked him and I hated him”.

Strangely, Dreyfuss has never read the novel Jaws, having been ordered by Spielberg to avoid it and play shark expert Hooper as more nerdy than the book’s Lothario. “I take directions so well that I still haven’t read it,” he says.

Spielberg, displaying his cinematic mastery, overcame every production challenge. When a severed prosthetic arm on the beach looked too fake, the director buried a crew member in the sand so that her arm looked more realistic as Jaws’ first victim’s appendage. Nor was Spielberg satisfied when he first filmed in the ocean the scene of a human head suddenly appearing in a sunken boat. After filming was completed the director took the wrecked boat and fake head to a crew member’s home and shot the scene again in a swimming pool, which ended up in the movie.

Scheider improvised the film’s famous line after seeing the gargantuan shark: “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” The line came to haunt him, however, repeatedly shouted out by fans driving past his home in Long Island, New York. With a runaway budget and months overdue, Spielberg raced to Hollywood to edit his movie and was not even present when his second unit filmed the film’s dramatic climax of the shark’s death.

Spielberg was even initially unhappy with Williams’ “simplistic” score – the two-note theme relentlessly alternating between F and F sharp – though he came to love it.

Jaws not only scared legions of beachgoers from entering the water, but also made sharks among the most feared – and hunted – animals on the planet. This, despite the fact that there are fewer than 10 fatal shark attacks worldwide each year, compared with more than 100 humans killed annually by lions, 500 by hippopotamuses, 1,000 felled by crocodiles, and some 75,000 by venomous snakes.

There are only four on-screen attacks in the entire movie, yet Jaws cemented the myth of the murderous great white shark, sending hunters into a frenzy. Shark populations have plummeted by 70% since the film’s release, led by trophy hunters and the film shaping the public’s perception of sharks to accept huge increases in commercial shark fishing. Some 100 million sharks are killed worldwide each year.

The decimation of sharks worldwide horrified novelist Benchley, who appears in the film playing a television interviewer. He became a vocal conservationist before his death in 2006, and said: “Knowing what I know now, I could never write that book today.”

When Jaws opened in cinemas 50 years ago it became an instant phenomenon. Crowds had lined up around cinemas before – Gone With The Wind, The Sound of Music and The Godfather lured hordes – but Jaws changed the rules for summer blockbusters, previously a season considered the moviegoing doldrums.

Its success was no accident: Universal Pictures spent more money promoting Jaws than any film before, buoyed by one of the most iconic movie posters ever. Despite its huge budget over-run, the film broke even in just three weeks, and with several rereleases over the years has earned an estimated $478million – around $1.5billion adjusted for inflation.

Jaws spawned three sequels, a musical, theme park attraction, video game, multiple documentaries and a continuing fascination with sharks. And it is returning to take another bite out of the box office: the film receives a 50th anniversary release in cinemas in Britain and worldwide later this summer.

Not too shabby for a movie that verged on disaster during filming. Spielberg called Jaws “the errant, wayward child who never listened to his father, but wound up growing up, doing good, and then supporting his father for the rest of his life.”