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Jaws is a 1975 American thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg, based on the 1974 novel by Peter Benchley. It stars Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, who, with the help of a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a professional shark hunter (Robert Shaw), hunts a man-eating great white shark that attacks beachgoers at a summer resort town. Murray Hamilton plays the mayor, and Lorraine Gary portrays Brody's wife. The screenplay is credited to Benchley, who wrote the first drafts, and actor-writer Carl Gottlieb, who rewrote the script during principal photography.
Shot mostly on location at Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts from May to October of 1974, Jaws was the first major motion picture to be shot on the ocean and consequently had a troubled production, going over budget and schedule. As the art department's mechanical sharks often malfunctioned, Spielberg decided to mostly suggest the shark's presence, employing an ominous and minimalist theme created by composer John Williams to indicate its impending appearances. Spielberg and others have compared this suggestive approach to that of director Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Pictures' release of the film to over 450 screens was an exceptionally wide release for a major studio picture at the time, and it was accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign that heavily emphasized television spots and tie-in merchandise.
Regarded as a watershed moment in motion picture history, Jaws was the prototypical summer blockbuster and won several awards for its music and editing. It was the highest-grossing film of all time until the release of Star Wars two years later; both films were pivotal in establishing the modern Hollywood business model, which pursues high box-office returns from action and adventure films with simple high-concept premises, released during the summer in thousands of theaters and advertised heavily. Jaws was followed by three sequels (none of which involved Spielberg or Benchley) and many imitative thrillers. In 2001, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
In the New England beach town of Amity Island, a young woman goes for a late-night ocean swim during a beach party. An unseen force attacks and pulls her underwater. Her remains are found washed up on the beach the next morning. After the medical examiner concludes it was a shark attack, newly hired police chief Martin Brody closes the beaches; Mayor Larry Vaughn persuades him to reconsider, fearing the town's summer economy will suffer. The coroner, apparently under pressure, now concurs with the mayor's theory that it was a boating accident. Brody reluctantly accepts their conclusion until a young boy, Alex Kintner, is killed at a crowded beach. A bounty is placed on the shark, causing an amateur shark-hunting frenzy. Quint, an eccentric and roughened local shark hunter, offers his services for $10,000. Consulting oceanographer Matt Hooper examines the girl's remains, confirming that an abnormally large shark killed her.
When local fishermen catch a tiger shark, Vaughn declares the beaches safe. A skeptical Hooper dissects the tiger shark and, finding no human remains inside its stomach, concludes that the killer shark is still out there. While searching the night waters in Hooper's boat, Hooper and Brody find the half-sunken boat of Ben Gardner, a local fisherman. Hooper dons a scuba suit and goes underwater to check the boat's hull, where he finds a large shark tooth embedded into it. He accidentally drops the tooth in fright after encountering Gardner's corpse. Vaughn dismisses Brody and Hooper's assertions that a great white shark caused the deaths and refuses to close the beaches, allowing only increased safety precautions. On the Fourth of July weekend, tourists pack the beaches. The shark enters a nearby lagoon, killing a boater and coming close to killing Brody's son. Brody then convinces a guilt-ridden Vaughn to hire Quint.
Despite initial tension between Quint and Hooper, they and Brody head out to sea on Quint's boat to hunt for the shark. As Brody lays down a chum line, the shark suddenly appears behind the boat. Quint, estimating it is 25 feet (7.6 m) long and weighs 3 tonnes (3.0 long tons; 3.3 short tons), harpoons it with a line attached to a flotation barrel, but the shark pulls the barrel underwater and disappears.
At nightfall, Quint and Hooper drunkenly exchange stories about their assorted body scars. One of Quint's is a removed tattoo, and he reveals that he survived the attack on the USS Indianapolis, during which many US sailors were killed by sharks. The shark returns, ramming the boat's hull and disabling the power. The men work through the night, repairing the engine. In the morning, Brody attempts to call the Coast Guard, but Quint, obsessed with killing the shark without outside assistance, smashes the radio. After a long chase, Quint harpoons the shark with another barrel. The line is tied to the stern cleats, but the shark drags the boat backward, swamping the deck and flooding the engine compartment. As Quint is about to sever the line to save the boat's transom, the cleats break off. The barrels stay attached to the shark. To Brody's relief, Quint heads toward shore to draw the shark into shallower waters, but the overtaxed engine fails.
As the boat takes on water, the trio attempt a riskier approach. Hooper suits up and enters a shark-proof cage, intending to lethally inject the shark with strychnine via a hypodermic spear. The shark viciously attacks the cage, causing Hooper to drop the spear. While the shark destroys the cage, Hooper escapes to the seabed. The shark leaps onto the boat's stern, subsequently devouring Quint. Trapped on the sinking vessel, Brody shoves a scuba tank into the shark's mouth and, climbing onto the crow's nest, shoots the tank with a rifle. The resulting explosion kills the shark. Hooper resurfaces and he and Brody paddle back to Amity Island, clinging to the remaining barrels.
Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, producers at Universal Pictures, independently heard about Peter Benchley's novel Jaws. Brown came across it in the literature section of lifestyle magazine Cosmopolitan, then edited by his wife, Helen Gurley Brown. A small card written by the magazine's book editor gave a detailed description of the plot, concluding with the comment "might make a good movie".[3][4] The producers each read the book over the course of a single night and agreed the next morning that it was "the most exciting thing that they had ever read" and that they wanted to produce a film version, although they were unsure how it would be accomplished.[5] They purchased the film rights in 1973, before the book's publication, for approximately $175,000 (equivalent to $1,200,000 in 2023).[6] Brown claimed that had they read the book twice, they would never have made the film because they would have realized how difficult it would be to execute certain sequences.[7]
Before production began, Spielberg grew reluctant to continue with Jaws, in fear of becoming typecast as the "truck and shark director".[9] He wanted to move over to 20th Century Fox's Lucky Lady instead, but Universal exercised its right under its contract with the director to veto his departure.[10] Brown helped convince Spielberg to stick with the project, saying that "after [Jaws], you can make all the films you want".[9] The film was given an estimated budget of $3.5 million and a shooting schedule of 55 days. Principal photography was set to begin in May 1974. Universal wanted the shoot to finish by the end of June, when the major studios' contract with the Screen Actors Guild was due to expire, to avoid any disruptions due to a potential strike.[11]
Spielberg, who felt that the characters in Benchley's script were still unlikable, invited the young screenwriter John Byrum to do a rewrite, but he declined the offer.[9] Columbo creators William Link and Richard Levinson also declined Spielberg's invitation.[17] Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Howard Sackler was in Los Angeles when the filmmakers began looking for another writer and offered to do an uncredited rewrite; since the producers and Spielberg were unhappy with Benchley's drafts, they quickly agreed.[5] At the suggestion of Spielberg, Brody's characterization made him afraid of water, "coming from an urban jungle to find something more terrifying off this placid island near Massachusetts."[13]
Spielberg wanted "some levity" in Jaws, humor that would avoid making it "a dark sea hunt", so he turned to his friend Carl Gottlieb, a comedy writer-actor then working on the sitcom The Odd Couple.[14] Spielberg sent Gottlieb a script, asking what the writer would change and if there was a role he would be interested in performing.[18] Gottlieb sent Spielberg three pages of notes, and picked the part of Meadows, the politically connected editor of the local paper. He passed the audition one week before Spielberg took him to meet the producers regarding a writing job.[19]
While the deal was initially for a "one-week dialogue polish", Gottlieb eventually became the primary screenwriter, rewriting nearly the entire script during a nine-week period of principal photography.[19] The script for each scene was typically finished the night before it was shot, after Gottlieb had dinner with Spielberg and members of the cast and crew to decide what would go into the film. Many pieces of dialogue originated from the actors' improvisations during these meals; a few were created on set just prior to filming. John Milius contributed other dialogue polishes,[20] and Sugarland Express writers Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood also made uncredited contributions.[21] Spielberg has claimed that he prepared his own draft, although it is unclear to what degree the other screenwriters drew on his material.[20] One specific alteration he called for in the story was to change the cause of the shark's death from extensive wounds to a scuba tank explosion, as he felt audiences would respond better to a "big rousing ending".[22] The director estimated the final script had a total of 27 scenes that were not in the book.[15]
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