Behind the screams: 50 bite-sized Jaws facts as the classic movie turns 50

The Advertiser

a day ago

The theme music, the poster, the bloodcurdling screams of the opening scenes ... as Jaws turns 50, let's dive deep into the making of the original Hollywood blockbuster.
Robert Zemeckis, director of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump, says it "supercharged the language of cinema".
Steven Soderbergh, director of Erin Brockovich and Out of Sight, says watching the film at the age of 12 "started me thinking about a career in movies".
Greg Nicotero, movie effects and make-up maestro for The Walking Dead, also remembers seeing Jaws when he was 12.
"My mum tried to cover my eyes," he said of the climatic moment the giant shark devours Robert Shaw's salty sea captain Quint.
"She didn't want me to see it because she was afraid it would traumatise me, and it did. In a good way."
Fifty years ago, on June 20, 1975, Steven Spielberg's shark hunt thriller surfaced in cinemas for the US summer - forever changing the way movies are made, marketed and released and the way we feel about sharks.
The first film to sell $100 million worth of ticket sales at the box office, Jaws created the template for the Hollywood blockbuster - those shamelessly commercial popcorn entertainments hyped by saturation advertising, released on big screens everywhere all at once and promising crowd-pleasing spectacle and thrills.
By the time Jaws opened in Australia six months later, it had already surged past The Godfather to become the highest-grossing movie ever. Never before had so many people queued at the cinema to see the same movie - at least not until Star Wars in 1977.
For his film's 50th anniversary, Spielberg is going back into the water with a 90-minute National Geographic documentary produced with the family of Jaws author Peter Benchley.
Dropping on Disney+ on July 11, Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story features never-before-seen home videos and rare outtakes from the personal archives of Spielberg and Benchley, new interviews with the cast, crew and such Spielberg contemporaries as George Lucas and James Cameron, and conversations with marine experts, including Philippe Cousteau, about the "Jaws effect" - the wave of shark fear unleashed by the film's famous frights.
Like many filmmakers, Aussie horror auteur Sean Byrne regards Jaws as a masterpiece and one of his favourite films.
But "it did a great disservice to the sharks," he says, "because every shark film that followed is about sharks hunting humans."
"Sharks have had a bad rap over the years - they're actually beautiful creatures," the Tasmanian director of The Loved Ones and The Devil's Candy said.
His new film, Dangerous Animals, in cinemas from June 12, is a gory addition to the long line of movies hunting Jaws-sized chills (think Deep Blue Sea, Sharknado, The Meg).
But Byrne reckons it's the first film "where the shark is not the monster - the man is the monster".
Starring Jai Courtney as a shark-obsessed serial killer, Dangerous Animals uses footage of real sharks blended with live-action shot off the Queensland coast.
Instead of fake, "videogamey" CGI sharks, "everything that you're seeing underwater is a real shark".
"In a way, it's Wolf Creek on water, but it absolutely takes its lead from Jaws in terms of suspense," Byrne said. "For me, shark fins are the definition of tension - you see them slicing the surface, never knowing when or where the attack will come."
Here are 50 bite-sized facts about Jaws - the mishaps, innovations and improvisation behind the movie that changed the movies:
1. Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown snapped up the film rights to Peter Benchley's novel Jaws before its February 1974 publication.
2. The first director they considered was Dick Richards but he didn't get the job after repeatedly calling the shark a "white whale". He'd later direct Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie.
3. Steven Spielberg, 26, had just finished debut feature The Sugarland Express but balked at directing Jaws. He'd already done 1971 TV movie Duel, about a truck terrorising a motorist. "Who wants to be known as a shark and truck director?" he once said.
4. Richard Dreyfuss initially declined the role of brash marine biologist Matt Hooper.
5. Spielberg's first choice for shark hunter Quint was Lee Marvin, who declined because he wanted to go fishing for real. With Dr Strangleove's Sterling Hayden unavailable, hard-drinking English actor Robert Shaw - who'd worked on 1973's The Sting with producer David Brown - was cast.
6. Charlton Heston wanted the part of police chief Martin Brody, but was too big a star. Roy Scheider suggested himself to Spielberg at a Hollywood party.
7. Veteran Shaw and rising star Dreyfuss clashed on set, enhancing their onscreen friction. "I do tend to drink when totally bored," Shaw said at the time. "Roy does exercises .. and Dreyfuss talks. Dreyfuss just talks interminably." Shaw died in 1978, aged 51.
8. Real-life fisherman Craig Kingsbury was hired to help Shaw with Quint's salty lingo. He also played ill-fated fisho Ben Gardner, whose severed, one-eyed head pops out of a sunken, shark-ravaged boat hull in one of the film's best jump scares.
9. Kingsbury, who died in 2002 aged 89, was Quint-style crusty about the scene featuring a grisly prop molded from his face: "How the hell that shark spit the head back in the boat after he bit it off, I'll never know!"
10. Carl Gottlieb was working on TV sitcom The Odd Couple before helping Spielberg with the Jaws script. He shares screenwriting credit with Benchley. He also played Amity Island's toadying local newspaper publisher. His superb book The Jaws Log chronicles the making of the movie.
11. Benchley cameos as a TV reporter in the holiday weekend beach panic sequence.
12. Spielberg is the coastguard voice heard over the radio on Quint's boat.
13. Three mechanical sharks were designed by art director Joe Alves and built by special effects artist Bob Mattey (who'd created giant squid for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). Nicknamed "Bruce" after Spielberg's lawyer, the 8-metre sharks were towed by submerged sleds but often malfunctioned in the seawater, causing extensive delays.
14. The camera-shy great white doesn't appear on screen until one hour and 21 minutes into the two-hour movie.
15. The slow reveal - now regarded as masterful suspense storytelling - wasn't intentional. The original script had 12 more shark scenes than we see in the final film. Spielberg has said mishaps with Bruce gave him "no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark". So, instead of loading up on Ray Harryhausen monster effects, he went for Alfred Hitchcock suspense: "It's what we don't see which is truly frightening".
16. Spielberg wanted ocean realism instead of a Hollywood studio tank, so Massachusetts resort Martha's Vineyard doubled as fictional holiday town Amity Island.
17. Several subplots were cut from Benchley's bestseller, including an affair between Brody's wife and Hooper. Spielberg wanted a "sea-hunt movie" with less "soap opera".
18. The script wasn't finished when filming began on May 2, 1974. Dreyfuss would later famously declare: "We started without a script, without a cast and without a shark".
19. For the opening night-time shark attack sequence, stunt performer Susan Backlinie wore a special rig of underwater cables so she could be dragged with sudden force. She wasn't warned when the violent jolts would come so her thrashing was real. Spielberg himself did the final death yank.
20. Backlinie's stunts were shot in daylight but filtered to look like night.
21. Recording her bloodcurdling screams as skinnydipper Chrissie Watkins, Spielberg had Backlinie tilt her head back as he poured water over her face. "Which is now known as waterboarding," Dreyfuss noted in 2010 doco Jaws: The Inside Story.
22. Backlinie, who died last year aged 77, recalled Spielberg telling her during the filming: "When your scene is done, I want everyone under the seats with the popcorn and bubble gum. I think we did that".
23. When Pipit the black labrador disappears while fetching a stick from the water just before Alex Kintner is attacked on his yellow inflatable raft, the dog's owner (played by her real owner, a Martha's Vineyard local) calls out her name. Pipit kept barking off camera when she was called so the dog was moved off the beach set.
24. Jeffrey Voorhees, another Martha's Vineyard local whose first and only acting role was playing young shark victim Alex Kintner, had two crew members in scuba gear pull him under the water when his inflatable raft is hit by the shark.
25. Lee Fierro took 17 takes to get the slap right when her grieving Mrs Kintner confronts Brody over the death of son Alex.
26. The youngest Brody boy sweetly mimicking his tormented father at the dinner table was not scripted. The local child cast in the role, Jay Mello, was copying Scheider between takes so they filmed it.
27. Local fishermen couldn't catch a big enough shark for the scenes in which Amity folk wrongly think they've caught the killer. The 4-metre tiger shark strung up on the dock ("A whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?") was caught 2500 kilometres away in Florida and flown in on a private plane. By the time cameras rolled, the carcass was decomposing. Filming with the increasingly ripe fish took four days.
28. That's raw chicken flesh hanging from the shark's teeth after Quint is eaten.
29. Quint's boat The Orca is supposed to sink at the end of the movie. It wasn't supposed to sink in real life too. The mishap part-way through the shoot sent two cameras to the sea floor. The waterlogged gear was flown to a lab in New York, where technicians salvaged the film inside.
30. The 55-day shoot went more than 100 days over schedule thanks largely to Bruce breakdowns, sending the $US4 million budget ballooning to $US12 million.
31. Before shooting Quint's speech about the wartime sinking of USS Indianapolis, Shaw told Spielberg he'd have a few drinks to make his grizzled delivery authentic. The actor got so drunk he had to be carried to the set for a performance Gottlieb politely described as "passionate but not accurate". Cold sober the next morning, Shaw nailed it.
32. Quint's monologue about sharks preying on sailors adrift in the ocean for days after the sinking was conceived by an uncredited Howard Sackler. Another Spielberg friend, John Milius, is said to have contributed, though Gottlieb credits Shaw - a playwright - as the true author of the speech after pulling all the drafts together into the dark, dramatic scene.
33. When boozy Quint and Hooper compare shark bites and other wounds, Brody lifts his shirt without speaking. Schieder said of his improv: "Here are these two guys showing huge scars and what've I got? There's a little tiny appendix scar".
34. The ominous Jaws theme by John Williams is as synonymous with film dread as Bernard Herrmann's Psycho. But Spielberg thought he was joking when he first heard it. "I was expecting something just tremendously complex, and it's almost like Chopsticks," he said in 2024 Disney+ documentary Music by John Williams.
35. The low two-note score gets more screen time in the movie than the shark. Spielberg: "His musical shark worked a lot better than my mechanical shark".
36. To make the real 4-metre great whites filmed in Australia by Ron and Valerie Taylor look more like the movie's 8-metre monster, jockey-sized stuntman Carl Rizzo was supposed to dive in a miniature cage as Hooper.
37. In the script, like the novel, Hooper is killed when the shark bites through the cage. Rizzo wasn't in the cage when the Taylors got some ferocious footage so the story was rejigged to let Hooper escape and make it to the end of the movie in one piece.
38. After filming wrapped, Spielberg wasn't satisfied with the severed head scare. Extra frames were shot in the backyard pool of editor Verna Fields, with milk used to replicate the murky depths of the ocean. The director said he'd pay for the re-shoot himself after Universal Pictures initially refused.
39. Scenes of the shark chomping down on Alex Kintner on his yellow raft - as well as its later lagoon attack witnessed by Brody's older son - were re-cut to reduce the violence and gore after audience members at early test screenings threw up.
40. Gottlieb and Spielberg would sneak into cinemas in LA "just to watch the sold-out audience visibly rise out of their seats with a collective shriek".
41. "You're gonna need a bigger boat", uttered in shock when the shark rises out of the water behind Brody, was a Scheider ad lib. In test screenings, audience reaction to seeing the shark drowned out the line, so the scene was re-cut to make it more audible.
42. The line ranks third among Hollywood Reporter's top 100 movie quotes (after Gone With The Wind's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" and Casablanca's "Here's looking at you, kid").
43. Scheider, who died in 2008 aged 75, once recalled the moment during filming when he realised that Jaws was going to be special: "I remember one day, they pulled the damn thing [shark] out and put it on the cables and ran it past the boat and it was as long as the boat and I said, 'Oh, my god, that looks great'. I remember that day. We all probably lit cigars!"
44. Bantam Books commissioned the now-famous image of a giant shark looming up beneath a lone swimmer for the paperback version of Benchley's novel because artist Paul Bacon's impressionistic shark for Doubleday's original hardcover looked "like a penis with teeth". So, illustrator Roger Kastel created a more lifelike and menacing shark, removed the swimmer's bikini and added the striking blue water and horizon.
45. Bantam let Universal Pictures use the image for free in its movie poster to help sell more books. The studio added the blood-red title above the waterline and obscured the swimmer's breasts with bubbles.
46. The shark painted by Kastel, who died in 2023 aged 92, is a mako not a great white.
47. Benchley became an advocate for shark protection, including campaigning against the mass production of shark fin soup. Not long before his death in 2006, aged 65, he said: "Knowing what I know now I could never write that book today. Sharks don't target human beings, and they certainly don't hold grudges". His wife Wendy remains on the board of wildlife conservation group WildAid.
48. The Jaws success helped Spielberg get backing for previously rejected Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It also gave him "final cut" on every subsequent movie.
49. Jaws won three Oscars in 1976, losing Best Picture to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but winning Best Editing, Best Score and Best Sound. Spielberg wasn't a Best Director nominee for Jaws but has been nominated in the category nine times, winning for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
50. The last link to "Bruce" is a fibreglass replica cast from the mold used for the three original prop sharks. It hangs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in LA, displayed with Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, tablets from The Ten Commandments and a space suit from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. And who lovingly restored the shark decades after Universal Studios sent its tourist showpiece to a junkyard? Greg Nicotero, The Walking Dead make-up effects wizard whose mum tried to cover his eyes as they watched Jaws when he was 12.
The theme music, the poster, the bloodcurdling screams of the opening scenes ... as Jaws turns 50, let's dive deep into the making of the original Hollywood blockbuster.
Robert Zemeckis, director of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump, says it "supercharged the language of cinema".
Steven Soderbergh, director of Erin Brockovich and Out of Sight, says watching the film at the age of 12 "started me thinking about a career in movies".
Greg Nicotero, movie effects and make-up maestro for The Walking Dead, also remembers seeing Jaws when he was 12.
"My mum tried to cover my eyes," he said of the climatic moment the giant shark devours Robert Shaw's salty sea captain Quint.
"She didn't want me to see it because she was afraid it would traumatise me, and it did. In a good way."
Fifty years ago, on June 20, 1975, Steven Spielberg's shark hunt thriller surfaced in cinemas for the US summer - forever changing the way movies are made, marketed and released and the way we feel about sharks.
The first film to sell $100 million worth of ticket sales at the box office, Jaws created the template for the Hollywood blockbuster - those shamelessly commercial popcorn entertainments hyped by saturation advertising, released on big screens everywhere all at once and promising crowd-pleasing spectacle and thrills.
By the time Jaws opened in Australia six months later, it had already surged past The Godfather to become the highest-grossing movie ever. Never before had so many people queued at the cinema to see the same movie - at least not until Star Wars in 1977.
For his film's 50th anniversary, Spielberg is going back into the water with a 90-minute National Geographic documentary produced with the family of Jaws author Peter Benchley.
Dropping on Disney+ on July 11, Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story features never-before-seen home videos and rare outtakes from the personal archives of Spielberg and Benchley, new interviews with the cast, crew and such Spielberg contemporaries as George Lucas and James Cameron, and conversations with marine experts, including Philippe Cousteau, about the "Jaws effect" - the wave of shark fear unleashed by the film's famous frights.
Like many filmmakers, Aussie horror auteur Sean Byrne regards Jaws as a masterpiece and one of his favourite films.
But "it did a great disservice to the sharks," he says, "because every shark film that followed is about sharks hunting humans."
"Sharks have had a bad rap over the years - they're actually beautiful creatures," the Tasmanian director of The Loved Ones and The Devil's Candy said.
His new film, Dangerous Animals, in cinemas from June 12, is a gory addition to the long line of movies hunting Jaws-sized chills (think Deep Blue Sea, Sharknado, The Meg).
But Byrne reckons it's the first film "where the shark is not the monster - the man is the monster".
Starring Jai Courtney as a shark-obsessed serial killer, Dangerous Animals uses footage of real sharks blended with live-action shot off the Queensland coast.
Instead of fake, "videogamey" CGI sharks, "everything that you're seeing underwater is a real shark".
"In a way, it's Wolf Creek on water, but it absolutely takes its lead from Jaws in terms of suspense," Byrne said. "For me, shark fins are the definition of tension - you see them slicing the surface, never knowing when or where the attack will come."
Here are 50 bite-sized facts about Jaws - the mishaps, innovations and improvisation behind the movie that changed the movies:
1. Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown snapped up the film rights to Peter Benchley's novel Jaws before its February 1974 publication.
2. The first director they considered was Dick Richards but he didn't get the job after repeatedly calling the shark a "white whale". He'd later direct Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie.
3. Steven Spielberg, 26, had just finished debut feature The Sugarland Express but balked at directing Jaws. He'd already done 1971 TV movie Duel, about a truck terrorising a motorist. "Who wants to be known as a shark and truck director?" he once said.
4. Richard Dreyfuss initially declined the role of brash marine biologist Matt Hooper.
5. Spielberg's first choice for shark hunter Quint was Lee Marvin, who declined because he wanted to go fishing for real. With Dr Strangleove's Sterling Hayden unavailable, hard-drinking English actor Robert Shaw - who'd worked on 1973's The Sting with producer David Brown - was cast.
6. Charlton Heston wanted the part of police chief Martin Brody, but was too big a star. Roy Scheider suggested himself to Spielberg at a Hollywood party.
7. Veteran Shaw and rising star Dreyfuss clashed on set, enhancing their onscreen friction. "I do tend to drink when totally bored," Shaw said at the time. "Roy does exercises .. and Dreyfuss talks. Dreyfuss just talks interminably." Shaw died in 1978, aged 51.
8. Real-life fisherman Craig Kingsbury was hired to help Shaw with Quint's salty lingo. He also played ill-fated fisho Ben Gardner, whose severed, one-eyed head pops out of a sunken, shark-ravaged boat hull in one of the film's best jump scares.
9. Kingsbury, who died in 2002 aged 89, was Quint-style crusty about the scene featuring a grisly prop molded from his face: "How the hell that shark spit the head back in the boat after he bit it off, I'll never know!"
10. Carl Gottlieb was working on TV sitcom The Odd Couple before helping Spielberg with the Jaws script. He shares screenwriting credit with Benchley. He also played Amity Island's toadying local newspaper publisher. His superb book The Jaws Log chronicles the making of the movie.
11. Benchley cameos as a TV reporter in the holiday weekend beach panic sequence.
12. Spielberg is the coastguard voice heard over the radio on Quint's boat.
13. Three mechanical sharks were designed by art director Joe Alves and built by special effects artist Bob Mattey (who'd created giant squid for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). Nicknamed "Bruce" after Spielberg's lawyer, the 8-metre sharks were towed by submerged sleds but often malfunctioned in the seawater, causing extensive delays.
14. The camera-shy great white doesn't appear on screen until one hour and 21 minutes into the two-hour movie.
15. The slow reveal - now regarded as masterful suspense storytelling - wasn't intentional. The original script had 12 more shark scenes than we see in the final film. Spielberg has said mishaps with Bruce gave him "no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark". So, instead of loading up on Ray Harryhausen monster effects, he went for Alfred Hitchcock suspense: "It's what we don't see which is truly frightening".
16. Spielberg wanted ocean realism instead of a Hollywood studio tank, so Massachusetts resort Martha's Vineyard doubled as fictional holiday town Amity Island.
17. Several subplots were cut from Benchley's bestseller, including an affair between Brody's wife and Hooper. Spielberg wanted a "sea-hunt movie" with less "soap opera".
18. The script wasn't finished when filming began on May 2, 1974. Dreyfuss would later famously declare: "We started without a script, without a cast and without a shark".
19. For the opening night-time shark attack sequence, stunt performer Susan Backlinie wore a special rig of underwater cables so she could be dragged with sudden force. She wasn't warned when the violent jolts would come so her thrashing was real. Spielberg himself did the final death yank.
20. Backlinie's stunts were shot in daylight but filtered to look like night.
21. Recording her bloodcurdling screams as skinnydipper Chrissie Watkins, Spielberg had Backlinie tilt her head back as he poured water over her face. "Which is now known as waterboarding," Dreyfuss noted in 2010 doco Jaws: The Inside Story.
22. Backlinie, who died last year aged 77, recalled Spielberg telling her during the filming: "When your scene is done, I want everyone under the seats with the popcorn and bubble gum. I think we did that".
23. When Pipit the black labrador disappears while fetching a stick from the water just before Alex Kintner is attacked on his yellow inflatable raft, the dog's owner (played by her real owner, a Martha's Vineyard local) calls out her name. Pipit kept barking off camera when she was called so the dog was moved off the beach set.
24. Jeffrey Voorhees, another Martha's Vineyard local whose first and only acting role was playing young shark victim Alex Kintner, had two crew members in scuba gear pull him under the water when his inflatable raft is hit by the shark.
25. Lee Fierro took 17 takes to get the slap right when her grieving Mrs Kintner confronts Brody over the death of son Alex.
26. The youngest Brody boy sweetly mimicking his tormented father at the dinner table was not scripted. The local child cast in the role, Jay Mello, was copying Scheider between takes so they filmed it.
27. Local fishermen couldn't catch a big enough shark for the scenes in which Amity folk wrongly think they've caught the killer. The 4-metre tiger shark strung up on the dock ("A whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?") was caught 2500 kilometres away in Florida and flown in on a private plane. By the time cameras rolled, the carcass was decomposing. Filming with the increasingly ripe fish took four days.
28. That's raw chicken flesh hanging from the shark's teeth after Quint is eaten.
29. Quint's boat The Orca is supposed to sink at the end of the movie. It wasn't supposed to sink in real life too. The mishap part-way through the shoot sent two cameras to the sea floor. The waterlogged gear was flown to a lab in New York, where technicians salvaged the film inside.
30. The 55-day shoot went more than 100 days over schedule thanks largely to Bruce breakdowns, sending the $US4 million budget ballooning to $US12 million.
31. Before shooting Quint's speech about the wartime sinking of USS Indianapolis, Shaw told Spielberg he'd have a few drinks to make his grizzled delivery authentic. The actor got so drunk he had to be carried to the set for a performance Gottlieb politely described as "passionate but not accurate". Cold sober the next morning, Shaw nailed it.
32. Quint's monologue about sharks preying on sailors adrift in the ocean for days after the sinking was conceived by an uncredited Howard Sackler. Another Spielberg friend, John Milius, is said to have contributed, though Gottlieb credits Shaw - a playwright - as the true author of the speech after pulling all the drafts together into the dark, dramatic scene.
33. When boozy Quint and Hooper compare shark bites and other wounds, Brody lifts his shirt without speaking. Schieder said of his improv: "Here are these two guys showing huge scars and what've I got? There's a little tiny appendix scar".
34. The ominous Jaws theme by John Williams is as synonymous with film dread as Bernard Herrmann's Psycho. But Spielberg thought he was joking when he first heard it. "I was expecting something just tremendously complex, and it's almost like Chopsticks," he said in 2024 Disney+ documentary Music by John Williams.
35. The low two-note score gets more screen time in the movie than the shark. Spielberg: "His musical shark worked a lot better than my mechanical shark".
36. To make the real 4-metre great whites filmed in Australia by Ron and Valerie Taylor look more like the movie's 8-metre monster, jockey-sized stuntman Carl Rizzo was supposed to dive in a miniature cage as Hooper.
37. In the script, like the novel, Hooper is killed when the shark bites through the cage. Rizzo wasn't in the cage when the Taylors got some ferocious footage so the story was rejigged to let Hooper escape and make it to the end of the movie in one piece.
38. After filming wrapped, Spielberg wasn't satisfied with the severed head scare. Extra frames were shot in the backyard pool of editor Verna Fields, with milk used to replicate the murky depths of the ocean. The director said he'd pay for the re-shoot himself after Universal Pictures initially refused.
39. Scenes of the shark chomping down on Alex Kintner on his yellow raft - as well as its later lagoon attack witnessed by Brody's older son - were re-cut to reduce the violence and gore after audience members at early test screenings threw up.
40. Gottlieb and Spielberg would sneak into cinemas in LA "just to watch the sold-out audience visibly rise out of their seats with a collective shriek".
41. "You're gonna need a bigger boat", uttered in shock when the shark rises out of the water behind Brody, was a Scheider ad lib. In test screenings, audience reaction to seeing the shark drowned out the line, so the scene was re-cut to make it more audible.
42. The line ranks third among Hollywood Reporter's top 100 movie quotes (after Gone With The Wind's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" and Casablanca's "Here's looking at you, kid").
43. Scheider, who died in 2008 aged 75, once recalled the moment during filming when he realised that Jaws was going to be special: "I remember one day, they pulled the damn thing [shark] out and put it on the cables and ran it past the boat and it was as long as the boat and I said, 'Oh, my god, that looks great'. I remember that day. We all probably lit cigars!"
44. Bantam Books commissioned the now-famous image of a giant shark looming up beneath a lone swimmer for the paperback version of Benchley's novel because artist Paul Bacon's impressionistic shark for Doubleday's original hardcover looked "like a penis with teeth". So, illustrator Roger Kastel created a more lifelike and menacing shark, removed the swimmer's bikini and added the striking blue water and horizon.
45. Bantam let Universal Pictures use the image for free in its movie poster to help sell more books. The studio added the blood-red title above the waterline and obscured the swimmer's breasts with bubbles.
46. The shark painted by Kastel, who died in 2023 aged 92, is a mako not a great white.
47. Benchley became an advocate for shark protection, including campaigning against the mass production of shark fin soup. Not long before his death in 2006, aged 65, he said: "Knowing what I know now I could never write that book today. Sharks don't target human beings, and they certainly don't hold grudges". His wife Wendy remains on the board of wildlife conservation group WildAid.
48. The Jaws success helped Spielberg get backing for previously rejected Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It also gave him "final cut" on every subsequent movie.
49. Jaws won three Oscars in 1976, losing Best Picture to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but winning Best Editing, Best Score and Best Sound. Spielberg wasn't a Best Director nominee for Jaws but has been nominated in the category nine times, winning for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
50. The last link to "Bruce" is a fibreglass replica cast from the mold used for the three original prop sharks. It hangs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in LA, displayed with Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, tablets from The Ten Commandments and a space suit from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. And who lovingly restored the shark decades after Universal Studios sent its tourist showpiece to a junkyard? Greg Nicotero, The Walking Dead make-up effects wizard whose mum tried to cover his eyes as they watched Jaws when he was 12.
The theme music, the poster, the bloodcurdling screams of the opening scenes ... as Jaws turns 50, let's dive deep into the making of the original Hollywood blockbuster.
Robert Zemeckis, director of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump, says it "supercharged the language of cinema".
Steven Soderbergh, director of Erin Brockovich and Out of Sight, says watching the film at the age of 12 "started me thinking about a career in movies".
Greg Nicotero, movie effects and make-up maestro for The Walking Dead, also remembers seeing Jaws when he was 12.
"My mum tried to cover my eyes," he said of the climatic moment the giant shark devours Robert Shaw's salty sea captain Quint.
"She didn't want me to see it because she was afraid it would traumatise me, and it did. In a good way."
Fifty years ago, on June 20, 1975, Steven Spielberg's shark hunt thriller surfaced in cinemas for the US summer - forever changing the way movies are made, marketed and released and the way we feel about sharks.
The first film to sell $100 million worth of ticket sales at the box office, Jaws created the template for the Hollywood blockbuster - those shamelessly commercial popcorn entertainments hyped by saturation advertising, released on big screens everywhere all at once and promising crowd-pleasing spectacle and thrills.
By the time Jaws opened in Australia six months later, it had already surged past The Godfather to become the highest-grossing movie ever. Never before had so many people queued at the cinema to see the same movie - at least not until Star Wars in 1977.
For his film's 50th anniversary, Spielberg is going back into the water with a 90-minute National Geographic documentary produced with the family of Jaws author Peter Benchley.
Dropping on Disney+ on July 11, Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story features never-before-seen home videos and rare outtakes from the personal archives of Spielberg and Benchley, new interviews with the cast, crew and such Spielberg contemporaries as George Lucas and James Cameron, and conversations with marine experts, including Philippe Cousteau, about the "Jaws effect" - the wave of shark fear unleashed by the film's famous frights.
Like many filmmakers, Aussie horror auteur Sean Byrne regards Jaws as a masterpiece and one of his favourite films.
But "it did a great disservice to the sharks," he says, "because every shark film that followed is about sharks hunting humans."
"Sharks have had a bad rap over the years - they're actually beautiful creatures," the Tasmanian director of The Loved Ones and The Devil's Candy said.
His new film, Dangerous Animals, in cinemas from June 12, is a gory addition to the long line of movies hunting Jaws-sized chills (think Deep Blue Sea, Sharknado, The Meg).
But Byrne reckons it's the first film "where the shark is not the monster - the man is the monster".
Starring Jai Courtney as a shark-obsessed serial killer, Dangerous Animals uses footage of real sharks blended with live-action shot off the Queensland coast.
Instead of fake, "videogamey" CGI sharks, "everything that you're seeing underwater is a real shark".
"In a way, it's Wolf Creek on water, but it absolutely takes its lead from Jaws in terms of suspense," Byrne said. "For me, shark fins are the definition of tension - you see them slicing the surface, never knowing when or where the attack will come."
Here are 50 bite-sized facts about Jaws - the mishaps, innovations and improvisation behind the movie that changed the movies:
1. Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown snapped up the film rights to Peter Benchley's novel Jaws before its February 1974 publication.
2. The first director they considered was Dick Richards but he didn't get the job after repeatedly calling the shark a "white whale". He'd later direct Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie.
3. Steven Spielberg, 26, had just finished debut feature The Sugarland Express but balked at directing Jaws. He'd already done 1971 TV movie Duel, about a truck terrorising a motorist. "Who wants to be known as a shark and truck director?" he once said.
4. Richard Dreyfuss initially declined the role of brash marine biologist Matt Hooper.
5. Spielberg's first choice for shark hunter Quint was Lee Marvin, who declined because he wanted to go fishing for real. With Dr Strangleove's Sterling Hayden unavailable, hard-drinking English actor Robert Shaw - who'd worked on 1973's The Sting with producer David Brown - was cast.
6. Charlton Heston wanted the part of police chief Martin Brody, but was too big a star. Roy Scheider suggested himself to Spielberg at a Hollywood party.
7. Veteran Shaw and rising star Dreyfuss clashed on set, enhancing their onscreen friction. "I do tend to drink when totally bored," Shaw said at the time. "Roy does exercises .. and Dreyfuss talks. Dreyfuss just talks interminably." Shaw died in 1978, aged 51.
8. Real-life fisherman Craig Kingsbury was hired to help Shaw with Quint's salty lingo. He also played ill-fated fisho Ben Gardner, whose severed, one-eyed head pops out of a sunken, shark-ravaged boat hull in one of the film's best jump scares.
9. Kingsbury, who died in 2002 aged 89, was Quint-style crusty about the scene featuring a grisly prop molded from his face: "How the hell that shark spit the head back in the boat after he bit it off, I'll never know!"
10. Carl Gottlieb was working on TV sitcom The Odd Couple before helping Spielberg with the Jaws script. He shares screenwriting credit with Benchley. He also played Amity Island's toadying local newspaper publisher. His superb book The Jaws Log chronicles the making of the movie.
11. Benchley cameos as a TV reporter in the holiday weekend beach panic sequence.
12. Spielberg is the coastguard voice heard over the radio on Quint's boat.
13. Three mechanical sharks were designed by art director Joe Alves and built by special effects artist Bob Mattey (who'd created giant squid for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). Nicknamed "Bruce" after Spielberg's lawyer, the 8-metre sharks were towed by submerged sleds but often malfunctioned in the seawater, causing extensive delays.
14. The camera-shy great white doesn't appear on screen until one hour and 21 minutes into the two-hour movie.
15. The slow reveal - now regarded as masterful suspense storytelling - wasn't intentional. The original script had 12 more shark scenes than we see in the final film. Spielberg has said mishaps with Bruce gave him "no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark". So, instead of loading up on Ray Harryhausen monster effects, he went for Alfred Hitchcock suspense: "It's what we don't see which is truly frightening".
16. Spielberg wanted ocean realism instead of a Hollywood studio tank, so Massachusetts resort Martha's Vineyard doubled as fictional holiday town Amity Island.
17. Several subplots were cut from Benchley's bestseller, including an affair between Brody's wife and Hooper. Spielberg wanted a "sea-hunt movie" with less "soap opera".
18. The script wasn't finished when filming began on May 2, 1974. Dreyfuss would later famously declare: "We started without a script, without a cast and without a shark".
19. For the opening night-time shark attack sequence, stunt performer Susan Backlinie wore a special rig of underwater cables so she could be dragged with sudden force. She wasn't warned when the violent jolts would come so her thrashing was real. Spielberg himself did the final death yank.
20. Backlinie's stunts were shot in daylight but filtered to look like night.
21. Recording her bloodcurdling screams as skinnydipper Chrissie Watkins, Spielberg had Backlinie tilt her head back as he poured water over her face. "Which is now known as waterboarding," Dreyfuss noted in 2010 doco Jaws: The Inside Story.
22. Backlinie, who died last year aged 77, recalled Spielberg telling her during the filming: "When your scene is done, I want everyone under the seats with the popcorn and bubble gum. I think we did that".
23. When Pipit the black labrador disappears while fetching a stick from the water just before Alex Kintner is attacked on his yellow inflatable raft, the dog's owner (played by her real owner, a Martha's Vineyard local) calls out her name. Pipit kept barking off camera when she was called so the dog was moved off the beach set.
24. Jeffrey Voorhees, another Martha's Vineyard local whose first and only acting role was playing young shark victim Alex Kintner, had two crew members in scuba gear pull him under the water when his inflatable raft is hit by the shark.
25. Lee Fierro took 17 takes to get the slap right when her grieving Mrs Kintner confronts Brody over the death of son Alex.
26. The youngest Brody boy sweetly mimicking his tormented father at the dinner table was not scripted. The local child cast in the role, Jay Mello, was copying Scheider between takes so they filmed it.
27. Local fishermen couldn't catch a big enough shark for the scenes in which Amity folk wrongly think they've caught the killer. The 4-metre tiger shark strung up on the dock ("A whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?") was caught 2500 kilometres away in Florida and flown in on a private plane. By the time cameras rolled, the carcass was decomposing. Filming with the increasingly ripe fish took four days.
28. That's raw chicken flesh hanging from the shark's teeth after Quint is eaten.
29. Quint's boat The Orca is supposed to sink at the end of the movie. It wasn't supposed to sink in real life too. The mishap part-way through the shoot sent two cameras to the sea floor. The waterlogged gear was flown to a lab in New York, where technicians salvaged the film inside.
30. The 55-day shoot went more than 100 days over schedule thanks largely to Bruce breakdowns, sending the $US4 million budget ballooning to $US12 million.
31. Before shooting Quint's speech about the wartime sinking of USS Indianapolis, Shaw told Spielberg he'd have a few drinks to make his grizzled delivery authentic. The actor got so drunk he had to be carried to the set for a performance Gottlieb politely described as "passionate but not accurate". Cold sober the next morning, Shaw nailed it.
32. Quint's monologue about sharks preying on sailors adrift in the ocean for days after the sinking was conceived by an uncredited Howard Sackler. Another Spielberg friend, John Milius, is said to have contributed, though Gottlieb credits Shaw - a playwright - as the true author of the speech after pulling all the drafts together into the dark, dramatic scene.
33. When boozy Quint and Hooper compare shark bites and other wounds, Brody lifts his shirt without speaking. Schieder said of his improv: "Here are these two guys showing huge scars and what've I got? There's a little tiny appendix scar".
34. The ominous Jaws theme by John Williams is as synonymous with film dread as Bernard Herrmann's Psycho. But Spielberg thought he was joking when he first heard it. "I was expecting something just tremendously complex, and it's almost like Chopsticks," he said in 2024 Disney+ documentary Music by John Williams.
35. The low two-note score gets more screen time in the movie than the shark. Spielberg: "His musical shark worked a lot better than my mechanical shark".
36. To make the real 4-metre great whites filmed in Australia by Ron and Valerie Taylor look more like the movie's 8-metre monster, jockey-sized stuntman Carl Rizzo was supposed to dive in a miniature cage as Hooper.
37. In the script, like the novel, Hooper is killed when the shark bites through the cage. Rizzo wasn't in the cage when the Taylors got some ferocious footage so the story was rejigged to let Hooper escape and make it to the end of the movie in one piece.
38. After filming wrapped, Spielberg wasn't satisfied with the severed head scare. Extra frames were shot in the backyard pool of editor Verna Fields, with milk used to replicate the murky depths of the ocean. The director said he'd pay for the re-shoot himself after Universal Pictures initially refused.
39. Scenes of the shark chomping down on Alex Kintner on his yellow raft - as well as its later lagoon attack witnessed by Brody's older son - were re-cut to reduce the violence and gore after audience members at early test screenings threw up.
40. Gottlieb and Spielberg would sneak into cinemas in LA "just to watch the sold-out audience visibly rise out of their seats with a collective shriek".
41. "You're gonna need a bigger boat", uttered in shock when the shark rises out of the water behind Brody, was a Scheider ad lib. In test screenings, audience reaction to seeing the shark drowned out the line, so the scene was re-cut to make it more audible.
42. The line ranks third among Hollywood Reporter's top 100 movie quotes (after Gone With The Wind's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" and Casablanca's "Here's looking at you, kid").
43. Scheider, who died in 2008 aged 75, once recalled the moment during filming when he realised that Jaws was going to be special: "I remember one day, they pulled the damn thing [shark] out and put it on the cables and ran it past the boat and it was as long as the boat and I said, 'Oh, my god, that looks great'. I remember that day. We all probably lit cigars!"
44. Bantam Books commissioned the now-famous image of a giant shark looming up beneath a lone swimmer for the paperback version of Benchley's novel because artist Paul Bacon's impressionistic shark for Doubleday's original hardcover looked "like a penis with teeth". So, illustrator Roger Kastel created a more lifelike and menacing shark, removed the swimmer's bikini and added the striking blue water and horizon.
45. Bantam let Universal Pictures use the image for free in its movie poster to help sell more books. The studio added the blood-red title above the waterline and obscured the swimmer's breasts with bubbles.
46. The shark painted by Kastel, who died in 2023 aged 92, is a mako not a great white.
47. Benchley became an advocate for shark protection, including campaigning against the mass production of shark fin soup. Not long before his death in 2006, aged 65, he said: "Knowing what I know now I could never write that book today. Sharks don't target human beings, and they certainly don't hold grudges". His wife Wendy remains on the board of wildlife conservation group WildAid.
48. The Jaws success helped Spielberg get backing for previously rejected Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It also gave him "final cut" on every subsequent movie.
49. Jaws won three Oscars in 1976, losing Best Picture to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but winning Best Editing, Best Score and Best Sound. Spielberg wasn't a Best Director nominee for Jaws but has been nominated in the category nine times, winning for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
50. The last link to "Bruce" is a fibreglass replica cast from the mold used for the three original prop sharks. It hangs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in LA, displayed with Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, tablets from The Ten Commandments and a space suit from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. And who lovingly restored the shark decades after Universal Studios sent its tourist showpiece to a junkyard? Greg Nicotero, The Walking Dead make-up effects wizard whose mum tried to cover his eyes as they watched Jaws when he was 12.