‘Jaws' at 50: How Steven Spielberg's shark movie changed my life and cinema forever
' Jaws ' was released on June 20, 1975, a seismic event in moviegoing. Few films can be said to have changed cinema, but Steven Spielberg's early masterpiece is one. With an unprecedented marketing campaign, an unusually wide initial release and crowds packing showings from its opening weekend, the shark thriller literally invented the summer blockbuster season.
It also happened to be the first 'adult' movie I ever saw in a theater. At age 9 and growing up in Indianapolis, I might have been too young to see it; my sister Kristin, four years younger, certainly was. Before 'Jaws,' the only films we'd seen in theaters were Disney-type fare. Perhaps our parents couldn't get a babysitter, or maybe they didn't care. Like the rest of America, they wanted to be where the action was.
I likely would have fallen in love with movies anyway at some point, but you could connect the dots directly from that viewing to this column, the latest in a career spent in the dark.
If it hadn't been then, it likely would have been in 1977, when the summer movie season became a full-blown phenomenon. Of course, there was George Lucas' ' Star Wars,' which 11-year-old me saw seven times, but there was also the 'Jaws'-inspired 'The Deep,' the Burt Reynolds car chase action comedy 'Smokey and the Bandit' and the James Bond film 'The Spy Who Loved Me.'
I could go on: 'Grease' and 'Revenge of the Pink Panther' in 1978; 'Alien' and 'Moonraker' in 1979; 'The Empire Strikes Back' and 'Airplane!' in 1980. You get the idea — I saw them all.
In 1981, at age 15, I broadened my horizons. I spent the summer watching the Spielberg-Lucas 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,' fantasy films 'Time Bandits' and 'Clash of the Titans' as well as the box office bomb 'Megaforce,' a terrible action movie starring Barry Bostwick that for some reason sticks in my mind to this day.
In the fall, I ventured into more sophisticated fare, what we'd call Oscar bait today. 'Chariots of Fire,' the eventual best picture winner; then 'Reds,' 'Ragtime' and many others. By college I was consuming the French New Wave and film noir, and the rest is personal history.
However, the summer box office season of big scale adventures, eye-popping special effects, jump scares and belly laughs still holds an allure for me after all these years. I'm obviously not alone; the recent Memorial Day box-office weekend, led by ' Lilo & Stitch ' and ' Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,' was the best ever for that holiday. This summer is shaping up to be the best since at least 2019, the last before the pandemic.
Spielberg calls such genre movies 'films of imagination,' although one has to say that character-driven comedies and dramas from 'Casablanca' to ' Anora ' are also imaginative, but I know what he means. Science fiction and action films have a way of transporting the viewer into another realm — alternate universes, if you will — more than conventional comedies or dramas do.
Yet, what is the future of the summer movie season? Despite its current viability, home viewing habits in general and higher movie theater ticket prices present obstacles. The legacy of 'Jaws' has lasted 50 years. Will it last 60?
I think so, but who knows. ' How to Train Your Dragon ' is going strong, Pixar's ' Elio ' and the zombie sequel ' 28 Years Later ' just opened to high expectations, and 'Jurassic Park Rebirth,' a new 'Superman' and 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' loom.
Still, few of these movies reach the sublime level of 'Jaws,' which is quite simply not just the greatest summer movie, but one of the best suspense films ever made, not only in its visual splendor and memorable performances, but also the character-driven script by Carl Gottlieb and Peter Benchley from Benchley's novel, Verna Fields' kinetic editing and John Williams' legendary score.
Its troubled production, mainly stemming from the fact that the mechanical shark often didn't work properly, is the stuff of legend. Spielberg, then only 27, had to invent on the fly. With the shark, nicknamed Bruce, unavailable much of the time, scenes with humans became more important.
With its brooding battle of wills, Robert Shaw's classic USS Indianapolis monologue and a clash between civilization and the elements, 'Jaws' became the '70s version of 'Moby Dick,' a man vs. nature parable that was almost operatic in its humans' obsession with the destruction of an unstoppable predator.
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