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[[File:Jaws-movie-poster.jpg|thumb|Official movie poster.]] |
[[File:Jaws-movie-poster.jpg|thumb|Official movie poster.]] |
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| + | '''''Jaws''''' is the first film in a motion picture franchise which has so far spanned 4 feature films and a variety of novelizations and other ancillary media. '''''Jaws ''''' is commonly referred to as the first modern day 'Block-buster'. Setting box office records, the film was labeled a "''blockbuster" ''during its initial theatrical release during the summer of 1975.'' ''This term has been subsequently used to describe and market hit films, and is derived from the fact lines could be seen winding down and around city blocks. This phenomenon was in part due to limited theatrical runs and the lack of what would later become multiplex cinema theaters. ''Jaws'' stars [[Wikipedia:Roy Scheider|Roy Scheider]] as [[Martin Brody]], [[Richard Dreyfuss]] as [[Matt Hooper]] and [[Wikipedia:Robert Shaw (British actor)|Robert Shaw]] as [[Quint]]. |
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| − | '''''Jaws''''' is a 1975 American thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Peter Benchley's novel of the same name. The prototypical summer blockbuster, its release is regarded as a watershed moment in motion picture history. In the story, a giant man-eating great white shark attacks beachgoers on Amity Island, a fictional summer resort town, prompting the local police chief to hunt it with the help of a marine biologist and a professional shark hunter. The film stars Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as oceanographer Matt Hooper, Robert Shaw as shark hunter Quint, Murray Hamilton as the mayor of Amity Island, and Lorraine Gary as Brody's wife, Ellen. The screenplay is credited to both Benchley, who wrote the first drafts, and actor-writer Carl Gottlieb, who rewrote the script during principal photography. |
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| − | Generally well received by critics, Jaws became the highest-grossing film in history at the time, and it was the most successful motion picture of all time until Star Wars. It won several awards for its soundtrack and editing and is often cited as one of the greatest films of all time. Along with Star Wars, Jaws was pivotal in establishing the modern Hollywood business model, which revolves around blockbuster action and adventure pictures with simple "high-concept" premises that are released during the summer in thousands of theaters and supported by heavy advertising. It was followed by three sequels, none with the participation of Spielberg or Benchley, and many imitative thrillers. In 2001, Jaws was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". |
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==Plot== |
==Plot== |
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| + | A girl named [[Chrissie Watkins]] leaves a party on Amity Island and goes skinny dipping. While swimming out near a buoy, she is seized by something from below; it thrashes her around and drags her under the ocean. The shark then begins its personal vendetta against a family. |
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| − | A young woman named Chrissie Watkins leaves an evening beach party on New England's Amity Island to go skinny dipping, only to be dragged back and forth and then pulled under the water. Amity's police chief, Martin Brody, is notified that Chrissie is missing, and Deputy Hendricks finds her remains on the beach. The medical examiner informs Brody that she was killed by a shark. Brody plans to close the beaches but is overruled by Mayor Larry Vaughan, who fears that reports of a shark attack will ruin the summer tourist season, the town's primary source of income. The medical examiner consequently attributes the death to a boating accident. Brody reluctantly goes along with the explanation. |
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| − | + | Chrissie is reported missing and her remains are later found on the beach by the Deputy of police chief [[Martin Brody]]. The medical examiner informs Brody that she was killed by a [[Jaws (shark)|shark]]. Brody plans to close the beaches but is overruled by [[Larry Vaughn, Jr.|Mayor Larry Vaughn]], who fears that reports of a shark attack will ruin the summer tourist season, the town's primary source of income. The medical examiner consequently attributes the death to a boating accident. Brody reluctantly goes along with the explanation. The shark then kills a [[Alex Kitner|young boy]] swimming at the beach. His mother places a bounty on the shark, sparking an amateur shark-hunting frenzy and attracting the attention of local professional shark hunter [[Quint]], who offers to kill the shark for $10,000. Marine biologist [[Matt Hooper]] examines Chrissie's remains and determines that she was killed by a shark, not a boat. |
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| − | A large tiger shark is caught by fishermen, leading the townspeople to believe the problem is solved |
+ | A large tiger shark is caught by fishermen, leading the townspeople to believe the problem is solved. Hooper asks to examine its stomach contents, but Vaughn refuses. That evening, Brody and Hooper secretly open the shark's stomach and discover that it does not contain human remains. They head out to sea to find the shark, but instead find the wreckage of a boat belonging to local fisherman Ben Gardner. Hooper explores the vessel underwater and discovers a sizable shark's tooth protruding from the damaged hull before he is startled by Gardner's corpse, causing him to drop the tooth. Without evidence, Vaughn refuses to close the beaches or hire Quint. |
| + | Many tourists arrive on the Fourth of July. The children's prank causes panic at the main beach while the shark enters a nearby estuary and kills a man. Brody's son [[Michael Brody|Michael]], who narrowly escapes the attack, goes into shock. Brody finally convinces Vaughn to hire Quint, and Quint reluctantly allows Hooper and Brody to join the hunt. The three set out to kill the shark aboard Quint's vessel, ''[[Orca (boat)|The Orca]]''. |
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| ⚫ | Brody is given the task of laying a chum line |
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| ⚫ | Brody is given the task of laying a chum line but an enormous great white looms up behind the boat, and the trio watch it circle the Orca. Quint estimates its size as twenty-five feet in length, with a weight of over three tons. He harpoons it with a line attached to a flotation barrel, but the shark pulls the barrel underwater and disappears. |
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| ⚫ | The men retire to the |
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| ⚫ | The men retire to the cabin, where Quint relates his experience with sharks as a survivor of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. The shark returns, damages the hull and slips away. It reappears in the morning. Brody attempts to call the U.S. Coast Guard, but Quint destroys the radio, enraging Brody. After a long chase, Quint harpoons two more barrels to the shark, and the men tie them both to the stern, but the shark drags the boat backwards, forcing water onto the deck and flooding the engine. Quint severs the line to prevent the transom from being cut. He then heads toward shore, hoping to draw it into shallow waters and suffocate it. In his obsession to kill the shark, Quint burns out the Orca's engine. |
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| ⚫ | With the boat immobilized, the trio attempt a desperate approach: Hooper dons scuba gear and enters the ocean inside a shark proof cage, |
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| ⚫ | With the boat immobilized, the trio attempt a desperate approach: Hooper dons scuba gear and enters the ocean inside a shark proof cage, intending to lethally inject the shark with a hypodermic spear filled with strychnine. The shark attacks and demolishes the cage from behind, causing Hooper to drop the spear before he can inject it. When the shark becomes entangled in the wrecked cage, Hooper escapes and hides in the seabed. The shark then leaps onto the boat and attacks it directly, crushing the transom. Quint slides down the deck and is devoured alive by the shark. When the shark attacks again, Brody shoves a pressurized scuba tank into its mouth, then takes Quint's rifle and climbs the sinking Orca's mast. The shark, with the tank still in its mouth, begins swimming toward Brody, who shoots the tank, causing it to explode and blowing the shark to pieces. Hooper swims to the surface and he and Brody use the barrels to swim back to shore. |
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==Production== |
==Production== |
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| − | ===Development=== |
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| − | 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". 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. They purchased the movie rights in 1973, before the book's publication, for approximately $175,000. 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. |
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| − | To direct, Zanuck and Brown first considered veteran filmmaker John Sturges—whose résumé included another maritime adventure, The Old Man and the Sea—before offering the job to Dick Richards, whose directorial debut, The Culpepper Cattle Co. had come out the previous year. However, they grew irritated by Richards's habit of describing the shark as a whale and soon dropped him from the project. Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg very much wanted the job. The 26-year-old had just directed his first theatrical film, The Sugarland Express, for Zanuck and Brown. At the end of a meeting in their office, Spielberg noticed their copy of the still-unpublished Benchley novel, and after reading it was immediately captivated. He later observed that it was similar to his 1971 television film Duel in that both deal with "these leviathans targeting everymen." After Richards's departure, the producers signed Spielberg to direct in June 1973, before the release of The Sugarland Express. |
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| − | Before production began, however, Spielberg grew reluctant to continue with Jaws, in fear of becoming typecast as the "truck and shark director". 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. Brown helped convince Spielberg to stick with the project, saying that "after [Jaws], you can make all the films you want". 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. |
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| − | ===Writing=== |
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| − | For the adaptation, Spielberg wanted to stick with the novel's basic concept, while removing Benchley's many subplots. He declared that his favorite part of the book was the shark hunt on the last 120 pages, and told Zanuck when he accepted the job, "I'd like to do the picture if I could change the first two acts and base the first two acts on original screenplay material, and then be very true to the book for the last third." When the producers purchased the rights to his novel, they promised Benchley that he could write the first draft of the screenplay. Overall, he wrote three drafts before the script was turned over to other writers; delivering his final version to Spielberg, he declared, "I'm written out on this, and that's the best I can do." One of his changes was to remove the novel's adulterous affair between Ellen Brody and Matt Hooper, at the suggestion of Spielberg, who feared it would compromise the camaraderie between the men on the Orca. (During the film's production, Benchley agreed to return and play a small onscreen role as a reporter.) |
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| − | 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 turned down the offer. Columbo creators William Link and Richard Levinson also declined Spielberg's invitation. 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. |
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| − | Spielberg wanted "some levity" in Jaws, jokes 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. Spielberg sent Gottlieb a script, asking what the writer would change and if there was a role he would be interested in performing. 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. |
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| − | While the deal was initially for a "one-week dialogue polish", Gottlieb eventually became the primary screenwriter, rewriting the entire script during a nine-week period of principal photography. 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, most notably Roy Scheider's ad-lib of the line "You're gonna need a bigger boat." John Milius contributed dialogue polishes, and Sugarland Express writers Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood also made uncredited contributions. Spielberg has claimed that he prepared his own draft, although it is unclear to what degree the other screenwriters drew on his material. 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." The director estimated the final script had a total of 27 scenes that were not in the book. |
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| − | Benchley had written Jaws after reading about sport fisherman Frank Mundus's capture of an enormous shark in 1964. According to Gottlieb, Quint was loosely based on Mundus, whose book Sportfishing for Sharks he read for research. Sackler came up with the backstory of Quint as a survivor of the World War II USS Indianapolis disaster. The question of who deserves the most credit for writing Quint's celebrated monologue about the Indianapolis has caused substantial controversy. Spielberg described it as a collaboration between Sackler, Milius, and actor Robert Shaw, who was also a playwright. According to the director, Milius turned Sackler's "three-quarters of a page" speech into a monologue, and that was then rewritten by Shaw. Gottlieb gives primary credit to Shaw, downplaying Milius's contribution. |
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| − | ===Casting=== |
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[[File:Jawscast.jpg|150px|thumb|The cast of JAWS.]] |
[[File:Jawscast.jpg|150px|thumb|The cast of JAWS.]] |
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| + | In May of 1974 production of a feature film, "[[Jaws]]", began quietly on what is known as South beach on the coast of Martha's Vineyard. JAWS was later released to overwhelming critical acclaim during the sumer of 1975, now referred to as 'the summer of the shark'. Besides being plagued with countless production problems including a malfunctioning shark and a sinking camera boat, the crew endured and the film was miraculously completed. |
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| − | Though Spielberg complied with a request from Zanuck and Brown to cast known actors, he wanted to avoid hiring any big stars. He felt that "somewhat anonymous" performers would help the audience "believe this was happening to people like you and me", whereas "stars bring a lot of memories along with them, and those memories can sometimes ... corrupt the story." The director added that in his plans "the superstar was gonna be the shark". The first actors cast were Lorraine Gary, the wife of then-president of Universal Sid Sheinberg, as Ellen Brody, and Murray Hamilton as the mayor of Amity Island. Stuntwoman-turned-actress Susan Backlinie was cast as Chrissie as she knew how to swim and was willing to perform nude. Most minor roles were played by residents of Martha's Vineyard, where the film was shot. One example was Deputy Hendricks, played by future television producer Jeffrey Kramer. The role of Brody was offered to Robert Duvall, but the actor was interested only in portraying Quint. Charlton Heston expressed a desire for the role, but Spielberg felt that Heston would bring a screen persona too grand for the part of a police chief of a modest community. Roy Scheider became interested in the project after overhearing Spielberg at a party talk with a screenwriter about having the shark jump up onto a boat. Spielberg was initially apprehensive about hiring Scheider, fearing he would portray a "tough guy", similar to his role in The French Connection. |
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| − | Nine days before the start of production, neither Quint nor Hooper had been cast. The role of Quint was originally offered to actors Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden, both of whom passed. Zanuck and Brown had just finished working with Robert Shaw on The Sting, and suggested him to Spielberg. Shaw was reluctant to take the role since he did not like the book, but decided to accept at the urging of both his wife, actress Mary Ure, and his secretary—"The last time they were that enthusiastic was From Russia with Love. And they were right." Shaw based his performance on fellow cast member Craig Kingsbury, a local fisherman, farmer, and legendary eccentric, who was playing fisherman Ben Gardner. Spielberg described Kingsbury as "the purest version of who, in my mind, Quint was", and some of his offscreen utterances were incorporated into the script as lines of Gardner and Quint. |
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| − | For the role of Hooper, Spielberg initially wanted Jon Voight. Timothy Bottoms, Joel Grey, and Jeff Bridges were also considered for the part. Spielberg's friend George Lucas suggested Richard Dreyfuss, whom he had directed in American Graffiti. The actor initially passed, but changed his decision after he attended a pre-release screening of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which he had just completed. Disappointed in his performance and fearing that no one would want to hire him once Kravitz was released, he immediately called Spielberg and accepted the role in Jaws. Because the film the director envisioned was so dissimilar to Benchley's novel, Spielberg asked Dreyfuss not to read it. As a result of the casting, Hooper was rewritten to better suit the actor, as well as to be more representative of Spielberg, who came to view Dreyfuss as "my alter ego". |
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==Legacy== |
==Legacy== |
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[[File:1.jpg|thumb|Two fin fans from Georgia meet production designer Joe Alves]] |
[[File:1.jpg|thumb|Two fin fans from Georgia meet production designer Joe Alves]] |
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| − | Jaws was key in establishing the benefits of a wide national release backed by heavy television advertising, rather than the traditional progressive release in which a film slowly entered new markets and built support over time. Saturation booking, in which a film opens simultaneously at thousands of cinemas, and massive media buys are now commonplace for the major Hollywood studios. According to Peter Biskind, Jaws "diminish[ed] the importance of print reviews, making it virtually impossible for a film to build slowly, finding its audience by dint of mere quality. ... Moreover, Jaws whet corporate appetites for big profits quickly, which is to say, studios wanted every film to be Jaws." Scholar Thomas Schatz writes that it "recalibrated the profit potential of the Hollywood hit, and redefined its status as a marketable commodity and cultural phenomenon as well. The film brought an emphatic end to Hollywood's five-year recession, while ushering in an era of high-cost, high-tech, high-speed thrillers." |
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| − | Jaws also played a major part in establishing summer as the prime season for the release of studios' biggest box-office contenders, their intended blockbusters; winter had long been the time when most hoped-for hits were distributed, while summer was largely reserved for dumping films thought likely to be poor performers. Jaws and Star Wars are regarded as marking the beginning of the new U.S. film industry business model dominated by "high-concept" pictures—with premises that can be easily described and marketed—as well as the beginning of the end of the New Hollywood period, which saw auteur films increasingly disregarded in favor of profitable big-budget pictures. The New Hollywood era was defined by the relative autonomy filmmakers were able to attain within the major studio system; in Biskind's description, "Spielberg was the Trojan horse through which the studios began to reassert their power." |
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| − | The film had broader cultural repercussions, as well. Similar to the way the pivotal scene in 1960's Psycho made showers a new source of anxiety, Jaws led many viewers to fear going into the ocean. Reduced beach attendance in 1975 was attributed to it,[184] as well as an increased number of reported shark sightings. It is still seen as responsible for perpetuating negative stereotypes about sharks and their behavior, and for producing the so-called "Jaws effect", which allegedly inspired "legions of fishermen [who] piled into boats and killed thousands of the ocean predators in shark-fishing tournaments." Benchley stated that he would not have written the original novel had he known what sharks are really like in the wild. Conservation groups have bemoaned the fact that the film has made it considerably harder to convince the public that sharks should be protected. |
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| + | As a result, fans of the film (or 'fin fans'), continue to flock to the island to relive the initial fear that kept so many out of the ocean during the summer of the film's release. In line with this move by the chamber of commerce, an event (''Jawsfest: Tribute'') took place on the Island during the summer of 2012, and a new Blu-ray release of the film was released following extensive restoration of the original negatives.[http://godzilla.wikia.com/wiki/Thread:152354] |
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| − | Jaws set the template for many subsequent horror films, to the extent that the script for Ridley Scott's 1979 science fiction film Alien was pitched to studio executives as "Jaws in space." Many films based on man-eating animals, usually aquatic, were released through the 1970s and 1980s, such as Orca, Grizzly, Mako: The Jaws of Death, Barracuda, Alligator, Day of the Animals, Aatank, Tintorera and Eaten Alive. Spielberg declared Piranha, directed by Joe Dante and written by John Sayles, "the best of the Jaws ripoffs". Among the various mockbusters based on Jaws American or foreign, three came from Italy: Great White, which inspired a plagiarism lawsuit by Universal and was even marketed in some countries as a part of the Jaws franchise; Monster Shark, featured in Mystery Science Theater 3000 under the title Devil Fish; and Deep Blood, that blends in a supernatural element.[196] The 1976 film Ape pitted the titular giant ape against a huge great white shark, meant to take a shot at Jaws. The 1995 thriller film Cruel Jaws even has the alternate title Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws, and the 2009 Japanese horror film Psycho Shark was released in the United States as Jaws in Japan. |
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| + | == Trivia == |
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| − | Martha's Vineyard celebrated the film's 30th anniversary in 2005 with a "JawsFest" festival, which had second edition in 2012. An independent group of fans produced the feature-length documentary The Shark is Still Working, featuring interviews with the film's cast and crew. Narrated by Roy Scheider and dedicated to Peter Benchley, who died in 2006, it debuted at the 2009 Los Angeles United Film Festival. |
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| + | * Jaws is the very first Summer Blockbuster to ever be created. |
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| + | * The movie is the first one to ever make $100 million dollars at the Box Office. |
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| + | * The shark was nicknamed after Steven Spielberg's Lawyer, Bruce M. Ramer. |
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| + | * The news reporter (who's reporting about the recent Shark Attacks) is played by Peter Benchley, The author of the Jaws Novel and Co-Screenwriter of the movie. |
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| + | * The line "You're gonna need a bigger boat." never was in the script. Roy Scheider came up with it while filming the scene. |
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| + | * The stunt double for Hooper in the Cage Scene was Richard Warlock - who played Michael Myers in Halloween 2. |
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| + | * The scene where Bruce got caught in the Rope of the Cage was actual shark footage that was shot off the Coast of Australia. It originally went wrong but they wanted to use it for something, so they added it into the film. |
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| + | * Ben Gardener’s jump scare didn’t originally have the best impact on the audience, so Steven Spielberg spent his own money for it to be reshot to get the scene just right and have the audience the most scared. |
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[[Category:Movies]] |
[[Category:Movies]] |
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[[Category:1975]] |
[[Category:1975]] |
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| + | [[Category:Production]] |
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| + | [[Category:Deaths]] |
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Revision as of 01:59, 2 May 2020
Official movie poster.
Jaws is the first film in a motion picture franchise which has so far spanned 4 feature films and a variety of novelizations and other ancillary media. Jaws is commonly referred to as the first modern day 'Block-buster'. Setting box office records, the film was labeled a "blockbuster" during its initial theatrical release during the summer of 1975. This term has been subsequently used to describe and market hit films, and is derived from the fact lines could be seen winding down and around city blocks. This phenomenon was in part due to limited theatrical runs and the lack of what would later become multiplex cinema theaters. Jaws stars Roy Scheider as Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper and Robert Shaw as Quint.
Plot
A girl named Chrissie Watkins leaves a party on Amity Island and goes skinny dipping. While swimming out near a buoy, she is seized by something from below; it thrashes her around and drags her under the ocean. The shark then begins its personal vendetta against a family.
Chrissie is reported missing and her remains are later found on the beach by the Deputy of police chief Martin Brody. The medical examiner informs Brody that she was killed by a shark. Brody plans to close the beaches but is overruled by Mayor Larry Vaughn, who fears that reports of a shark attack will ruin the summer tourist season, the town's primary source of income. The medical examiner consequently attributes the death to a boating accident. Brody reluctantly goes along with the explanation. The shark then kills a young boy swimming at the beach. His mother places a bounty on the shark, sparking an amateur shark-hunting frenzy and attracting the attention of local professional shark hunter Quint, who offers to kill the shark for $10,000. Marine biologist Matt Hooper examines Chrissie's remains and determines that she was killed by a shark, not a boat.
A large tiger shark is caught by fishermen, leading the townspeople to believe the problem is solved. Hooper asks to examine its stomach contents, but Vaughn refuses. That evening, Brody and Hooper secretly open the shark's stomach and discover that it does not contain human remains. They head out to sea to find the shark, but instead find the wreckage of a boat belonging to local fisherman Ben Gardner. Hooper explores the vessel underwater and discovers a sizable shark's tooth protruding from the damaged hull before he is startled by Gardner's corpse, causing him to drop the tooth. Without evidence, Vaughn refuses to close the beaches or hire Quint.
Many tourists arrive on the Fourth of July. The children's prank causes panic at the main beach while the shark enters a nearby estuary and kills a man. Brody's son Michael, who narrowly escapes the attack, goes into shock. Brody finally convinces Vaughn to hire Quint, and Quint reluctantly allows Hooper and Brody to join the hunt. The three set out to kill the shark aboard Quint's vessel, The Orca.
Brody is given the task of laying a chum line but an enormous great white looms up behind the boat, and the trio watch it circle the Orca. Quint estimates its size as twenty-five feet in length, with a weight of over three tons. He harpoons it with a line attached to a flotation barrel, but the shark pulls the barrel underwater and disappears.
The men retire to the cabin, where Quint relates his experience with sharks as a survivor of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. The shark returns, damages the hull and slips away. It reappears in the morning. Brody attempts to call the U.S. Coast Guard, but Quint destroys the radio, enraging Brody. After a long chase, Quint harpoons two more barrels to the shark, and the men tie them both to the stern, but the shark drags the boat backwards, forcing water onto the deck and flooding the engine. Quint severs the line to prevent the transom from being cut. He then heads toward shore, hoping to draw it into shallow waters and suffocate it. In his obsession to kill the shark, Quint burns out the Orca's engine.
With the boat immobilized, the trio attempt a desperate approach: Hooper dons scuba gear and enters the ocean inside a shark proof cage, intending to lethally inject the shark with a hypodermic spear filled with strychnine. The shark attacks and demolishes the cage from behind, causing Hooper to drop the spear before he can inject it. When the shark becomes entangled in the wrecked cage, Hooper escapes and hides in the seabed. The shark then leaps onto the boat and attacks it directly, crushing the transom. Quint slides down the deck and is devoured alive by the shark. When the shark attacks again, Brody shoves a pressurized scuba tank into its mouth, then takes Quint's rifle and climbs the sinking Orca's mast. The shark, with the tank still in its mouth, begins swimming toward Brody, who shoots the tank, causing it to explode and blowing the shark to pieces. Hooper swims to the surface and he and Brody use the barrels to swim back to shore.
Production
The cast of JAWS.
In May of 1974 production of a feature film, "Jaws", began quietly on what is known as South beach on the coast of Martha's Vineyard. JAWS was later released to overwhelming critical acclaim during the sumer of 1975, now referred to as 'the summer of the shark'. Besides being plagued with countless production problems including a malfunctioning shark and a sinking camera boat, the crew endured and the film was miraculously completed.
Legacy
Two fin fans from Georgia meet production designer Joe Alves
As a result, fans of the film (or 'fin fans'), continue to flock to the island to relive the initial fear that kept so many out of the ocean during the summer of the film's release. In line with this move by the chamber of commerce, an event (Jawsfest: Tribute) took place on the Island during the summer of 2012, and a new Blu-ray release of the film was released following extensive restoration of the original negatives.[1]
Trivia
- Jaws is the very first Summer Blockbuster to ever be created.
- The movie is the first one to ever make $100 million dollars at the Box Office.
- The shark was nicknamed after Steven Spielberg's Lawyer, Bruce M. Ramer.
- The news reporter (who's reporting about the recent Shark Attacks) is played by Peter Benchley, The author of the Jaws Novel and Co-Screenwriter of the movie.
- The line "You're gonna need a bigger boat." never was in the script. Roy Scheider came up with it while filming the scene.
- The stunt double for Hooper in the Cage Scene was Richard Warlock - who played Michael Myers in Halloween 2.
- The scene where Bruce got caught in the Rope of the Cage was actual shark footage that was shot off the Coast of Australia. It originally went wrong but they wanted to use it for something, so they added it into the film.
- Ben Gardener’s jump scare didn’t originally have the best impact on the audience, so Steven Spielberg spent his own money for it to be reshot to get the scene just right and have the audience the most scared.