‘Jaws @ 50' shows why Spielberg's blockbuster changed movies forever

San Francisco Chronicle​

07-07-2025

Without 'Jaws,' we might never have gotten the summer movie blockbuster season, Steven Spielberg's career or 'Shark Week.'
To commemorate, National Geographic has 'Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story,' premiering Thursday, July 10. It's the centerpiece for the cable network's annual Sharkfest programming event.
Co-produced with Spielberg's Amblin Documentaries, this golden anniversary tribute to the movie that changed Hollywood covers much of the ground (and water) that previous documentaries have, including director Laurent Bouzereau's 1995 'The Making of 'Jaws.'' New material includes excerpts from a recent interview with Spielberg, not to mention a who's who of other filmmakers — James Cameron, George Lucas, Guillermo del Toro, Steven Soderbergh, Robert Zemeckis, Jordan Peele, Quentin Tarantino, J.J. Abrams — who testify how the shark movie changed their lives.
Other fresh perspectives come from talks with Martha's Vineyard residents who participated in the notoriously troubled production. Special effects maven Greg Nicotero describes how he rescued the mechanical shark Bruce from a junkyard and restored the 26-foot monster that now hangs at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles. There's previously unseen archive footage and scenes from Bouzereau's recent ' Music by John Williams ' film too. Shark and oceanographic experts abound.
But 'Jaws @ 50' is mainly noteworthy as a comprehensive, if sometimes surface-skimming, compendium of everything there is to know about Peter Benchley's bestselling source novel, the 1975 movie, its phenomenal box office and cultural impact and why it remains relevant — as well as a near-perfect fright film — today.
Some of the most compelling moments are the emotional ones, like when Spielberg reveals how his aesthetically confident 27-year-old self was nonetheless riddled with anxiety as the open-water shoot dragged on and busted his budget, while Bruce, which was built for fresh water use, kept malfunctioning in the salty Atlantic. The director claims he had post-traumatic stress disorder for years afterward.
Archive clips of stars Richard Dreyfuss and the late Roy Scheider and Robert Shaw show how the human elements — most of which Spielberg chose to cut from Benchley's book — found their way into this template for modern mechanized movie mayhem. We've heard about it a million times, but it remains fascinating to see how Shaw's USS Indianapolis monologue and Scheider's 'You're gonna need a bigger boat' line were crafted to leave such indelible impressions.
But we shouldn't get carried away like a naked moonlight swimmer with humanistic stuff. The most interesting aspects of 'Jaws' have always been technical, logistical and scary.
'Without these people, you wouldn't give a hang about the shark,' Spielberg says, dubiously, about the (admittedly sometimes memorable) hundreds of local extras and bit players who portray the film's townsfolk and beach-going chum. But c'mon, Steve, it was always the shark.
Zemeckis — a Spielberg acolyte who achieved massive success himself with techno breakthroughs 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit,' 'Forrest Gump' and the 'Back to the Future' trilogy — accurately notes that 'Jaws' 'supercharged the language of cinema.' Still, at no point in this triumphal, authorized documentary is it suggested that the film's unprecedented, nine-figure commercial success may have done some cultural damage.
Sure, 'Jaws' made movies fun again, as they hadn't been for some time before. But along with 'Star Wars' two years later, it set Hollywood on a path away from a decade of challenging artistic work and toward less demanding, digestible entertainment.
Bob Strauss is a freelance writer.