Happy 50th birthday, Jaws!

[donbosco]

Duel is one of my favorite movies. As a child of the 70s who grew up in the era of Smokey and the Bandit, Movin' On, BJ and the Bear and the whole CB radio/trucker craze, it was because of the cool Peterbilt. Now, I just enjoy it as a darn good movie.

FYI, there is a guy who lives over in the Lincolnton area who actually owns an original tractor trailer from the movie.

Whoa - saw those Smokey & The Bandit flicks in The Yorktown in Sanford!!

What’s up with that name being so common for theaters anyway?

 

[hedge]

Duel is one of my favorite movies.

There's a long joke involving Dennis Weaver that benefits from the mention of Spielberg and Duel...

 

[breepf]

But telling the audience that a film was directed by Steven Spielberg meant nothing to them at the time. And it was incredibly ambitious project with its filming on the water and use of a giant mechanical shark.

And Coppola did have four feature films under his belt before he directed The Godfather, a couple of which garnered critical acclaim and/or award nominations. Not sure how they did at the box office relative to expectations, but the weren’t necessarily meant to be blockbusters. On the other hand, Universal viewed Spielberg’s Sugarland Express as a box office failure, though it did receive positive reviews.

But my point was really just that the majority of the movie-going audience didn’t really know who Spielberg was, and to them he was just another director whose name carried very little weight. They had no real expectation of what a “Steven Spielberg movie” might be like. Now his name is kind of like Walt Disney, where it’s almost more of a concept than it is the name of an actual person.

But yeah, anyone who saw Duel had to know that its director had to be a force to be reckoned with.

Besides the studio's sensitivities to ethnicity, I'd guess that Coppola probably got the nod for The Godfather on the basis of his screenwriting (Patton) more than his direction. The AIP movie doesn't really count, I wouldn't say, and neither You're a Big Boy Now nor The Rain People managed to generate the windfall profits of other youth-cult movies like The Graduate or Easy Rider; Finian's Rainbow was doomed to failure from the start. But I don't know the particulars of his relationship to Robert Evans off the top of my head. I will say that after The Godfather he got the financial go-ahead to form The Directors Company at Paramount and with Bogdanovich and Freidkin. Other than The Conversation, I think it only produced 1 other movie (Daisy Miller??) before fizzling out.

When Zanuck & Brown went with Spielberg, I think he had a sufficient reputation with Universal to get their ok. And, yes, I think the studio and production company weren't worried about selling a "Spielberg" movie because there was zero expectation that Jaws was going to blow up in that manner. And, ultimately, the ace-in-the-hole was Dede Allen, whom the powers-that-be trusted to cobble together a workable movie in the editign room.

 

[duluoz]

But telling the audience that a film was directed by Steven Spielberg meant nothing to them at the time. And it was incredibly ambitious project with its filming on the water and use of a giant mechanical shark.

And Coppola did have four feature films under his belt before he directed The Godfather, a couple of which garnered critical acclaim and/or award nominations. Not sure how they did at the box office relative to expectations, but the weren’t necessarily meant to be blockbusters. On the other hand, Universal viewed Spielberg’s Sugarland Express as a box office failure, though it did receive positive reviews.

But my point was really just that the majority of the movie-going audience didn’t really know who Spielberg was, and to them he was just another director whose name carried very little weight. They had no real expectation of what a “Steven Spielberg movie” might be like. Now his name is kind of like Walt Disney, where it’s almost more of a concept than it is the name of an actual person.

But yeah, anyone who saw Duel had to know that its director had to be a force to be reckoned with.

Duel was a lot of fun and screamed ‘70s road action like coming out of Easy Rider and Two Lane Blacktop and HAD to have inspired Death Proof.

It’s also become a very name droppy IYKYK movie. Not sure where I first saw it exactly but it was on TV sometime before streaming and I got into it and then found out afterward it was Spielberg. Kinda blew my mind.

 

[duluoz]

This was last year at intermission of Jaws played at Lincoln Center with the NY Phil playing the John Williams score live. It was f’ing phenomenal.

Unfair to compare it to other great cinema experiences but it was a singular live experience, I’ll never forget it.

 

[hedge]

Candygram!

I'm pretty sure any member of the SNL cast at that tiime would've opened the door immediately as soon as they heard the word "gram"...

 

[fourheels]

This was last year at intermission of Jaws played at Lincoln Center with the NY Phil playing the John Williams score live. It was f’ing phenomenal.

Unfair to compare it to other great cinema experiences but it was a singular live experience, I’ll never forget it.

We saw the Winston-Salem Symphony do this with Jurassic Park a while back. Also a phenomenal experience.

 

[Zoo_View]

I'm pretty sure any member of the SNL cast at that tiime would've opened the door immediately as soon as they heard the word "gram"...

Candy also referred to cocaine.

 

[BubbaOtis]

Saw that movie at the Yorktowne theater in Durham in the summer of 1975. My girlfriend and I were in a line that was quite long. It took us about 15 minutes to get inside the theatre . It was well worth the wait

My favorite line in the movie which I quote in various contexts :

" You're gonna need a bigger boat "

As opposed to "Here's to swimmin' with bow-legged women" ?

I remember thinking the shark looked pretty fake when I saw the movie but after seeing some in aquariums I thought better of it. Even live ones look kinda dead with those flat eyes.

 

[hedge]

Like a doll's eyes...

 

[an0maly]

Don Bosco addressed the movie Jaws’s 50th anniversary in the “This Day in History” thread, but the movie was such a cultural phenomenon, I felt it deserved its own thread today.

I watch it in its entirety at least once every year (always in the late spring or summer, usually before I go to the beach), and watch bits and pieces several times a year.

Unlike many mainstream popcorn movies from the 1970s, it holds up in so many ways. The cinematography and acting are vastly superior to that of most mainstream popcorn films of the time. The dialogue is sharp. The writers did a great job of incorporating a good amount of witty humor into what could have otherwise been a very dark movie. (The book was much darker). John Williams’s score is brilliant. He has obviously composed a number of iconic film scores, but the Jaws theme may be the one that has remained the most ubiquitous.

Even though the mechanical shark looks fake when seen for extended periods and the inclusion of the footage of a real great white shark was a major continuity blunder that wouldn’t work with contemporary audiences, you still have to marvel at the special effects considering the era in which the movie was made and the challenges to making such a film at the time (particular challenges experienced during the filming have been well-documented).

Of course Spielberg’s decision not to initially show the shark has been lauded over and over again. But the build-up really is great. With the first attack, we don’t see any part of the shark at all. And it’s terrifying. With the next attack (not including the off-screen devouring of Pipit, the dog who goes missing while fetching a stick in the ocean), we very briefly see only what appear to be the shark’s pectoral fins during its horrifying attack on poor Alex Kintner. (Before it was cut, it originally showed the mechanical shark opening its mouth wide and then chomping down on Kintner). Then there is the near attack where we see a portion of a dock that the shark pulled apart chasing a man who was trying to catch the shark. We then see a little bit more of the shark during the final attack before Brody, Hooper, and Quint set out to hunt the shark down. We see the dorsal fin and tail fin as the shark makes its way through the “pond” where a man on a rowboat and a group of boys on a sailboat are. Then we see the dorsal fin as it approaches the man on the rowboat, preparing its attack. The next thing we see is absolutely terrifying, as an aerial view shows what looks like a fairly realistic shark underwater biting the man’s leg. Later, when we finally see the shark up close, it’s a brilliant introduction. Its head suddenly pops out of the water about 15 feet from Brody as he chums the ocean from Quint’s boat. And Roy Scheider, as Brody, delivers the classic line, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” brilliantly mixing humor with horror and adventure.

The next few times we see the mechanical shark, it so clearly looks fake (and again, there’s that continuity blunder with the footage of the real shark), but by then we’re so invested in the movie and the story, it doesn’t much matter.

What we end up with is a great two part movie: The first part is a horror flick and the second part is an adventure flick. Spielberg and the writers did a masterful job of allowing the story to unfold and developing the characters. The audience is able to connect with the main characters and root for them, even as they come into conflict with one another (though they continue to share the same overarching goal). I feel like most movies today wouldn’t take as much time to develop the characters with such care. Instead, a contemporary version would likely focus more on the action. But what makes Jaws so great is not so much the action sequences, but the story and characters surrounding those sequences.

It’s amazing to think that Jaws was directed by a relatively unknown twenty-something-year-old director with very little experience directing feature films. It obviously served as a springboard to the most commercially successful career of any film director.

Jaws went on to have a few sequels. Jaws 2 was pretty fun, though nowhere close to the original. The last two sequels were incredibly bad. No one has attempted a sequel since the spectacularly bad Jaws the Revenge in 1987.

With what we currently understand about sharks, you may not be able to make Jaws today. But you can definitely still enjoy and appreciate what came out 50 years ago.

This is a great post, thanks for it.

I recall so many things about seeing it in the theater back then. I saw it opening night as a kid, and I remember popcorn flying up in the air here and there all over the theater when the head comes out of the boat. A thousand jump scares have been put into films since that one, but none really as good. I also remember people in extreme distress at the death of Quint, many ducking way down in their seats and push their legs up against the chair in front, trying to "escape" as Quint was doing. The audience did not just cheer at the shark exploding, some stood up cheering and applauding. Very, very few films impact the emotions of a whole theater audience on this kind of level; I can only compare it to the first viewings of Alien in a theater. Because matinées were so cheap I went back again and again, and for weeks the lines kept on going all the way around the theater building.

Later I read a lot about the production, and one of the amazing things to me was that the initial choice for Quint was Sterling Hayden (General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove). He would have been great too, to my mind even a bit better than Robert Shaw. He would have been so different: a larger physique, a darker, more fierce, even more fanatical Quint. His personality was far more a real life Quint than any other actor. That said, Shaw was sensational.

Totally agree with the idea of the three characters who don't fit in with each other at all, learning to work with each other, then about each other--as the menace they face seems ever more unbeatable--in Spielberg's direction makes for the ultimate adventure film. There's a strange mythopoeic element in nature against the bomb (that Quint helped deliver). The scene where Quint details that Indianapolis story could be the best scene in Spielberg's career, direction, acting, visual, music, although I'm sure he'd prefer it to be from something like Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan instead. The music is a primary player in all this as well, and John Williams' career also exploded into deserved prominence with this film. The scene where the shark first make the long run towards the boat (from the "need a bigger boat" moment onward), marries great music with great adventure cinema probably the best that has ever been done.

Spielberg, never was better than with this kind of movie, knew what he was doing from early on. He had a charmed life as a kid allowed onto the Universal Studio lot, and then allowed to direct TV. His first true breakthrough was with the best episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery, at 21 years old and directing Joan Crawford! That led to Duel, and Duel led to getting the chance with Jaws.

 

[Blurb]

Saw it in Morehead, I was 9 years old. Didn't spend much time in the water that summer...

My parents took me because they couldn’t get a sitter. I was 3.

It was years before I swam in the ocean.