50 fun facts about 'Jaws' as the movie celebrates the big 5-0
50 fun facts about 'Jaws' as the movie celebrates the big 5-0
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Athlete marks 'Jaws' 50th anniversary with 60-mile swim
Swimmer Lewis Pugh circumnavigated Martha's Vineyard to mark the 50th anniversary of the movie "Jaws" and draw attention to the plight of sharks.
Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear. And he showed them, pearly white, exactly 50 years ago this June − when the movie "Jaws" made its sensational splash.
Remember the screams in the theater as Chrissie (Susan Backlinie) was dragged under the water in that harrowing first sequence? Remember the banter of those three men in a boat (Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss) as they track down the monster responsible for destroying tourist season on the fictional Amity Island?
"Jaws," released June 20, 1975, is often cited as the film that launched modern Hollywood: the summer blockbuster that established Steven Spielberg as one of the twin peaks of the new Hollywood (George Lucas' "Star Wars" would come out two years later).
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But "Jaws" could just as easily be called the last hurrah of the old Hollywood. It was one of the last big films of the pre-CGI era: The special effects had to be welded, hammered and bolted together. And that led directly to the happiest accident of the film. The mechanical shark, nicknamed "Bruce," turned out to be such an unwieldy, unconvincing Edsel of a contraption that Spielberg was obliged to keep it offscreen for most of "Jaws."
That, as it turned out, was the making of the movie. The audience's imagination provided a far more fearsome shark than Spielberg could have.
"Jaws" has also gotten the blame for making America shark-crazy − as phenomena like Discovery Channel's "Shark Week" and the "Sharknado" TV movies attest. The late "Jaws" author Peter Benchley came to regret his share in the vilification of the great white shark, an animal now on the endangered species list.
"Twenty-five years ago, nobody knew anything about great white sharks," Benchley told The (Bergen, N.J.) Record in 1999. "The concept of a rogue shark that has a taste for human flesh −people believed it."
50 interesting facts about 'Jaws' for the shark movie's 50th anniversary
Here's a mouthful of "Jaws" facts − 50 in all − for the film's 50th anniversary:
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