Based on a 1973 best-selling novel by Peter Benchley, Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg, opened in theaters in 1975.
Jaws was Spielberg’s second film, after The Sugarland Express, and one of the very first modern summer blockbusters. The film starts with a shark attacking a young woman while swimming after a beach party in a New England resort town. Jaws was the highest-grossing until 1977’s Star Wars was released.
The filming took place in the fictional beach town of Amity. with Roy Scheider as the police chief, Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as a marine biologist, and Robert Shaw as a fisherman.
Spielberg insisted on shooting in the real sea rather than using a studio tank. The filming started off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, with many delays and difficulties as Spielberg’s decision affected production time and budget. It was the first motion picture set at sea to be shot on the ocean.
One of the major problems was the shark itself. Spielberg didn’t want to use the mechanical sharks built for the film and looked for ways to depict the shark’s presence in the water without actually showing it. One of the things he did was using music to signal the shark’s approach. Composer John Williams created a simple repetition of two alternating notes that became one of the most recognized pieces of music in cinema.
Jaws was also a success in terms of marketing. Spielberg used 30-second trailers to promote the video on television. Prior to Jaws and a few other movies of this era, television advertising was considered to be too expensive.
Another marketing strategy was the film’s distribution on its opening weekend. At that time, films typically opened first in a major city, then in other cities and towns, but Jaws opened in more than 400 theaters across the United States. Summertime releases were also reserved for less quality films, as audiences at the time tended to avoid going to the movies during the summer.
Jaws is on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest American films of all time. In 2001 it was added to the National Film Registry, a film preservation program that belongs to the U.S. Library of Congress.
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