{"id":93422,"date":"2025-08-25T00:20:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T00:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/93422\/"},"modified":"2025-08-25T00:20:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T00:20:10","slug":"jaws-at-50-how-the-1975-steven-spielberg-shark-thriller-became-a-commercial-and-cultural-phenomenon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/93422\/","title":{"rendered":"Jaws at 50: How the 1975 Steven Spielberg shark thriller became a commercial and cultural phenomenon"},"content":{"rendered":"

The tale of a resort town terrorised by self-serving bureaucrats after a visit from a great white shark, Jaws \u2014 or “Joes”, per Isabelle Adjani’s priceless Oscar line-reading<\/a> \u2014 is inarguably one of the most famous movies of all time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A commercial and cultural phenomenon, the film continues to resonate 50 years after the Mayor of Amity Island rang the dinner bell for his hungry guest.<\/p>\n

Even if you’ve never seen Steven Spielberg’s 1975 classic, you’ll have heard its ominous two-note musical motif, recognise its iconic key art \u2014 in which a saw-toothed leviathan hurtles up from the ocean depths toward a naked swimmer \u2014 or be familiar with its most memorable, if endlessly regurgitated line: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”<\/p>\n

Almost as legendary is the film’s notoriously troubled production, which sailed over budget and over schedule thanks to a months-long shoot on the open sea, a mechanical shark that consistently broke down, and an ambitious 26-year-old director who was convinced he’d gotten in way over his head.<\/p>\n

\"Steven<\/p>\n

Steven Spielberg didn’t think Jaws would be a success. (Supplied: IMDb)<\/p>\n

Jaws might have made Spielberg a household name, but it also left psychic scars that would take decades to heal.<\/p>\n

At a recent unveiling of a cinema named in his honour, the filmmaker recalled the times he would sneak into the Universal Studios Jaws tour after hours, and sit alone in the Orca, the boat from the movie.<\/p>\n

“I would sit there and I would just deal with what I couldn’t deal with at home or at the office. I could just let all the bad memories fly through me. Being in that environment was my therapy,” he told Deadline<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“I didn’t think it had much life expectancy when I was making it. I thought it was going to be stillborn, or it would be released and I would be stillborn. That’s how hard it was to make the film.”<\/p>\n

But as the story goes, the film’s malfunctioning shark forced Spielberg to get creative, ditching the planned monster mayhem and teasing the audience with glimpses of the beast that only added to Jaws’s sense of dread.<\/p>\n

By the time “Bruce”, as the production affectionately dubbed the rubbery great white, finally breaches the surface for his close up \u2014 an entire hour and 20 minutes into the film \u2014 it’s such a shocking moment that the audience is too terrified to notice his patently fabricated exterior.<\/p>\n

\"Bruce<\/p>\n

Jaws would have been a very different movie had Bruce the mechanical shark (pictured) not malfunctioned. (Supplied: IMDb)<\/p>\n

Bruce is loose<\/p>\n

“I was at my grandparents’ for the summer the first time I saw that shark, and I was so scared I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning in case Jaws was under there,” Los Angeles Times film critic<\/a> Amy Nicholson tells ABC News.<\/p>\n

“It didn’t matter that I was on the second storey of a house in Michigan, or that I’d actually only watched Jaws: The Revenge, the silly one where the great white swims to the Bahamas. That idea of invisible death under my bare feet was so visceral, so rooted in primal fears, that it short-circuited any sense of logic.”<\/p>\n

Fuelled by a then-unprecedented TV marketing campaign, and the highly unusual decision to debut the movie in more than 400 screens, Jaws was released in North America on June 20, 1975, to a public feeding frenzy.<\/p>\n

It quickly chewed through box-office records, generated a deluge of merchandise (who wouldn’t want a 6-foot inflatable shark to terrify their little sister<\/a> in the backyard pool?), and \u2014 together with 1977’s Star Wars, directed by Spielberg’s pal and fellow film brat George Lucas \u2014 set the summer blockbuster template that endures to this day.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

In the wake of Jaws, sharks were sensationalised as indiscriminate killers. (Universal Pictures\/Courtesy of Getty Images)<\/p>\n

When the film finally opened in Australia on November 27 \u2014 right on time to taunt the nation’s summer beachgoers \u2014 it was a similar success, tapping into a beach-going culture that was no stranger to shark attacks.<\/p>\n

“I grew up in the 70s in Perth, and I can’t remember when I first saw it, but it always felt like a movie that saw us,” says Jason Di Rosso, host of ABC Radio National’s The Screen Show.<\/p>\n

“Growing up anywhere coastal in Australia you know the ocean is both an idyll and a death trap, and you also know that coastal communities get overly obsessive about their local patch of beach. Spielberg’s film tapped in to something dark that I think we recognised, not just out there, but inside us.”<\/p>\n

Podcaster, critic, and Refused Classification<\/a> star Alexei Toliopoulos knows this all too well.<\/p>\n

“I spent a lot of my childhood in a small beach town in the Northern Rivers called Wooli, which was not too far removed from something like Amity Island,” he says.<\/p>\n

“My dad \u2014 a barely reformed hippy surfer type \u2014 had a genuine fear that if he let me see [Jaws], I’d be too afraid to join him in the surf ever again.”<\/p>\n

\"Susan<\/p>\n

Susan Backlinie as Chrissie Watkins, the shark attack victim in Jaws’s iconic opening scenes. (Supplied: IMDb)<\/p>\n

Man versus shark<\/p>\n

While Jaws might have driven audiences from the ocean, its success didn’t exactly do any favours for sharks, who were sensationalised in the culture as bloodthirsty hunters. (Peter Benchley, the author of the novel on which the movie is based, subsequently dedicated himself to shark conservation).<\/p>\n

Still, anyone paying attention knows the great white is far from the movie’s villain \u2014 that would be mankind, in all of its self-serving hubris, who Spielberg films in his signature mix of wonder and terror.<\/p>\n

The film’s most horrifying moment isn’t the shark chowing down on its human lunch, or even the spectral head that emerges from the darkness of an underwater boat’s hull.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It comes at the end of shark hunter Quint’s (Robert Shaw) grisly monologue about the USS Indianapolis, the ship torpedoed by Japanese subs \u2014 and sunk in shark-infested waters \u2014 as it made its way back from Hiroshima: “Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”<\/p>\n

It’s a measure of humanity’s chilly capacity for cruelty \u2014 more calculated and sinister than any monster of the deep.<\/p>\n

\"Scores<\/p>\n

The real villain in Jaws isn’t the shark, but humankind. (Supplied: IMDb)<\/p>\n

“Jaws has mature layers that set it apart from other monster movies,” says Nicholson.<\/p>\n

“As I’ve grown up with it, I’ve become more interested in the backbiting on land than in the water, in people’s desperate need to claim that everything is okay. Most B-pictures would have punished the mayor by making sure he got chomped. But this script doesn’t patronise us. It treats the audience like grown-ups, not kill-happy popcorn-munchers who just want to cheer for some blood.”<\/p>\n

The film’s satirical screenplay came about when Spielberg brought his friend and comedy writer Carl Gottlieb on board, with whom he and the actors would convene to hash out dialogue during principal photography.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The result is characters who feel lived-in, whose dialogue often has the freewheeling rhythm of a Robert Altman ensemble. Especially across its first half, Jaws plays less as horror than outright comedy.<\/p>\n

Think of the flotilla of big-game bozos who set out to hunt the shark, armed with sticks of dynamite and rocks for brains; the way Quint drags his nails across a chalkboard to interrupt a town meeting; or that great moment when Roy Schieder’s police chief Brody snaps at Murray Hamilton’s clueless town official, “The summer is over, you’re the mayor of shark city.”<\/p>\n

\"Robert<\/p>\n

Robert Shaw, who played shark hunter Quint in Jaws, is responsible for the film’s most terrifying line: “Anyway, we delivered the bomb.” (Supplied: IMDb)<\/p>\n

Return of the fin<\/p>\n

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water \u2014 to borrow the tagline of its dismal 1978 sequel \u2014 Jaws is swimming back to cinemas this month to mark its 50th anniversary, ready to hook a new generation of audiences.<\/p>\n

“I first saw Jaws in one of my undergrad screen studies classes, naively expecting the practical effects for Bruce the shark to feel outdated and clunky,” says Tiia Kelly, critic and co-editor of Australian film publication Rough Cut<\/a>, who first encountered the movie in the late 2010s.<\/p>\n

“But I ended up finding it totally terrifying. The film’s framing, editing, and sound build tension together in such wonderfully innovative ways. It remains an exemplar of what’s possible in blockbuster filmmaking when high concept ideas are executed by skilled craftspeople.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The way we view Jaws may have changed, but its status as a terrifying movie has not.\u00a0 (Getty Images: Universal Pictures)<\/p>\n

ABC film critic Jamie Tram agrees.<\/p>\n

“Even as audiences have shifted their sympathies towards Spielberg’s great white villain, Jaws still succeeds in feeding on our primal fears,” she says.<\/p>\n

“The outside world feels increasingly hostile; the sense that nature is turning against us has only intensified. Jaws doubles down on this brilliantly simple, yet evocative threat, and cuts through our current era of blockbuster bloat.”<\/p>\n

How the Jaws theme evokes fear<\/a><\/p>\n

The 1975 thriller Jaws earned composer John Williams his second of five Oscar wins. But what makes this iconic piece of music work?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Put simply, it’s a movie that never loses its bite, possessed of an endless power to both entertain and terrify.<\/p>\n

“I love that even though I have watched it so many times I still get scared,” says Kate Fitzpatrick, senior programmer at the Melbourne International Film Festival<\/a>, “especially the Ben Gardner boat scene. I saw it at the Astor about 10 years ago and my boyfriend at the time was amazed I could still be scared by it \u2014 but it has that pull over me.”<\/p>\n

Even Spielberg seems to have come around to his career-making work, after all those years of torment and theme park therapy.<\/p>\n

On the occasion of the film’s 50th anniversary, June 20, 2025, the director sat alone \u2014 much as he’d done in the Orca \u2014 and ran a print of Jaws.<\/p>\n

“I wanted to see if I could get through the movie, get to the end of the movie without reliving the nightmares of making the movie,” he recalled to Deadline<\/a>. “I liked it.”<\/p>\n

Jaws is in cinemas from August 28 in celebration of its 50th anniversary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The tale of a resort town terrorised by self-serving bureaucrats after a visit from a great white shark,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93423,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,134,57956,69255,69256,69260,69254,69258,69259,10492,69257],"class_list":["post-93422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-jaws","tag-jaws-50-year-anniversary","tag-jaws-at-50","tag-jaws-director","tag-jaws-movie","tag-jaws-watch","tag-jaws-where-to-watch","tag-steven-spielberg","tag-steven-spielberg-jaws"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}