JAWS REDUX: SPIELBERG SUMMER Continues!

Hello, friends!  Our little stroll through the Steven Spielberg films of the 1970’s resumes this week as The First Annual Spielberg Summer continues.

Today, we’ve reached the first truly bigger-than-life, overwhelming movie in his oeuvre.  JAWS is on the short list of most important movies ever made, even if you’re only measuring individual impact on the trajectory of Hollywood and filmmaking (and to be clear, JAWS stands on its own fins even when stripped of that context).  If you’re part of a certain generation of film fan, it’s almost certainly one of the movies that got you into movies in the first place.  

It’s possible some of you have been waiting for this article since Spielberg Summer began.  Perhaps you’ve been looking forward to a brief history of the famously-snakebitten production, and how Spielberg managed to turn chicken shit into chicken salad by allowing significant mechanical failures (say it with with me now, “they couldn’t get the shark to work”) to actually enhance the film’s drama, conflicts and terror, cloaking the titular beast in the shadows of the audience’s mind and imagination.  You likely are anxious to celebrate JAWS’ second-to-none cast, especially the main trio of Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw.  It’d be wise to talk about how fully developed Sgt. Brody really is, and how his fear of the water and his drive for integrity are constantly thrown into conflict by a never-ending set of exterior circumstances.  Hell, a good discussion could be had about how beautifully the largely land based first half informs the waterlogged second half, by establishing stakes and psychologies before sending everybody out to sea.

It’d be a good article to write this week.

Except, well….I’ve written it already.

Yeah, I’ve previously talked about JAWS, and it wasn’t even that long ago.  About two years ago, in this very (differently branded) space, I did a summer series on the entire JAWS franchise, including the famous 3D sequel, as well as the not-so-famous Italian knock-off sequel CRUEL JAWS.  I can’t speak to the actual quality of that article, although I was two years less good than I am now, so you can run your own math and make that determination for yourself.  My point is, what was created in 2022 is more or less the same article I would have written now.

It’s a mildly interesting conundrum I find myself in; this is the first time I’m writing a second article about a movie.  Obviously, I knew this was going to be a problem going into this first round of Spielberg retrospectives, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what fresh angle to take.  I tried to resist the idea of just rerunning that one under the Crittical Analysis brand, as that comes with an implied level of laziness there that I wasn’t ready to reconcile within myself.  But, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t coming up with a better alternative; after all, JAWS is a difficult movie to find new unique angles about fifty years later.  

But, then…the Monday before the Fourth of July, I had the opportunity to see JAWS in an actual, genuine movie theater for maybe the first time ever.  

And it was like seeing it for the first time.  

“Oh, new angle.”

This week’s article might be a little briefer than others in this series, and certainly a little different.  But my last experience with JAWS was a genuinely different one, and I would remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to document it.

So here it is.  JAWS!

JAWS (1975)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb

Starring: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton

Released: June 20, 1975

Length: 124 minutes

The ability to watch a classic film on the big screen is one of life’s amazing little treats.  It can often feel like the difference between seeing the Mona Lisa actually hanging in the Louvre and looking at a photo of it on your phone.  You get the idea either way, but actually being in Paris, seeing it at its actual intended size, surrounded by other human beings, all there to do the same thing…it’s just a whole different experience.

Unfortunately, the ability to actually see classic films in a theater often depends on where you live.  If you live in a major city, or at least within the proximity of one, you’re usually in good shape.  You will likely have the ability to throw a dart randomly at the newspaper movie listings* and land on the opportunity to see one of the greatest movies ever made, usually well within driving distance.

*I know that there are no such things as “movie listings” or “newspapers'' anymore, but I don’t think the dart metaphor works as well with a laptop or phone screen.  Don’t want anybody cracking their screens, ya know?  You’ll just have to indulge me on this one.

If you live in a mid-to-small market like I do, however, you’re usually at the mercy of the small handful of revival houses that you have.  I can only speak for myself, but in Sacramento, CA, there are three places in town and one of them (The Dreamland Cinema) is teeny-tiny.  That leaves The Tower and The Crest for your revivals and that is literally it.  Oh, sure, we have lots of regular movie theaters, but most of the chain mega-plexes in town have stopped doing Flashback Features long ago.  So it’s just these three locations holding down the fort right now.  At least two of them feel under constant threat of closure.

Luckily, I live down the street from one of them (the Tower), and they seem to be relatively awake at the wheel.  Not only is there a consistent stream of repertory screenings throughout the year, they appear to be paying attention to the time of year in which they’re screening.  It’s how people in town can see a whole festival of Hitchcock movies in October.  It’s how my wife and I got to see WHEN HARRY MET SALLY… on New Year’s Eve last year.  It’s also what allowed us to see JAWS on a big screen the week of July 4th.

We had seen other classic screenings at this theater before, and we had never been in danger of being the only people there or anything, but it truly shocked me at just how many people showed up to JAWS that night.  It probably shouldn’t have been a surprise; after all, we’re talking about one of the most famous and popular movies ever made even to this day, the movie that more or less invented the “summer blockbuster”*.  But, really, I had never seen the Tower lobby that full before that night.  Again, this was a Monday night.  That was the first sign that we were potentially in for a special night.

*Yes, this means you can technically draw a straight line between JAWS and DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE.  Whether this is a mark for it or a knock against it, I’ll leave for you to determine.

The second sign that magic was in the air came relatively early on, when the entire town of Amity gathers in the police station following the gruesome death of little Alex Kintner, crowding around Sheriff Brody (Scheider) and Mayor Larry Vaughn (Hamilton), demanding an explanation and plan of action from their leadership.  As Brody struggles to wrangle the masses, the nasty sound of fingernails scratching across a chalkboard cuts through the din.  Everyone turns around to see the grizzled shark hunter Quint (Shaw).

The scene becomes dead silent.

In the movie theater, however, the room filled with the sound of something like four beers all cracking open at once.

The crowd was locked in.  Summer had begun.

It really is something to watch a classic crowd-pleaser work its magic and…well…please the crowd!  What follows is a list of just ten of the endless amounts of JAWS moments that absolutely crushed that night:

• Brody telling a fellow beach-goer “That’s some bad hat, Harry.”

• The guy who exclaims “A whaaaaat?”

• The corpse popping out of the busted hull of that sunken ship (no, seriously, this one killed.  Screams in the audience and everything).

• Brody filling his glass near the brim with red wine.

• “Michael, did you hear your father?  Get out of the water now!”

• Quint crushing his beer can with one hand, followed by Hooper weakly crushing his styrofoam cup.

• Hooper screaming “aye aye” to Quint in that intensely sarcastic pirate voice.

• The USS Indianapolis speech (the room was dead silent, no beer cracking this time).

• “Smile, you son of a…” BANG

• Pretty much every Quint rendition of “Farewell and Adieu”.

It all reminded me of two things: one, I reflected back on the Big Important Issue in the far-away year of 2019, where Martin Scorsese declared Marvel movies as not cinema, but theme parks.  As you may remember, this triggered responses from James Gunn and Joss Whedon (back when Whedon felt compelled to make a statement about anything at all).  It also drew ire from superhero fans all across the Internet; it still appears to be a sore spot for some to this day.

And, look, I’m not here to re-litigate a wound.  Although I do find the reaction overblown relative to what is ultimately just a qualified opinion (as far as I know, Scorsese didn’t say “and you’re all dipshits for watching them”, he just said they weren’t cinema to him), I get that it can be annoying to devote your free time to something that gets dismissed so broadly by somebody with authority.  That said, speaking as someone who has found enjoyment in both the MCU and Scorsese films, the reason I never got worked up about Marty’s comments is because “theme park attraction” is neither an inaccurate description of what modern superhero movies ultimately are, nor does it need to be a pejorative term in and of itself, so long as the movie in question is a well-built and thoughtfully constructed roller coaster.

What are theme park rides, after all?  They are mechanisms for us to take a break from our lives, even if just for a little bit, in order to put ourselves in some artificial danger and generate some thrills and emotions together, even if we’re all walking in as strangers.  It’s something for us to enjoy together as people.  The best ones work even if you’ve ridden it over and over.  At their finest, movies are roller-coasters.  

JAWS is a pitch-perfect example of that.  On July 1st, 2024, a bunch of people filed into the main room of the Tower Theatre with just one commonality (“I wanna watch JAWS tonight!”), paying to see a movie we all probably already owned at home and had almost certainly all seen multiple times since childhood.  And, you know what?  The roller coaster was just as fucking good today as it was when we all first rode it decades ago.  In truth, it hits all the more when you have a forged, temporary community to ride it with.  

(Of course, JAWS isn’t just mindless thrills and chills, it’s also well-built in terms of setting up its characters and stakes, which makes us as an audience care, which makes the moments of action and terror hit all the more because we’re bought in, but now I’m getting into first article territory here.  I just bring it up because this is the element that some of the MCU movies lack, especially some of the latter-day ones, after characters got firmly established and the ability to coast on good vibes became available.  Again, just in my opinion as a fan.  Anyway.) 

That brings me to my second thing: it’s more fun to see a movie in theaters.  It just is.  And there so many things currently working against the in-person experience right now.  For one, watching movies at home has never become more technically convenient; even the ability to afford one or two streaming services gives you access to a never-ending array of movies of all types, age, and quality.  For two, movie tickets have obviously skyrocketed in price, just in time for inflation to grow out of control and wages to seemingly stagnate across the board, making a trip to the movies an easy luxury to cut in tough times (especially if you have a child or two).  

For three (and, I think, final…I know I’m currently in a numbered list within a numbered list, I promise I’m going somewhere), the in-person experience just may not be available depending on where you live.  Going back to the beginning of this article that is technically about JAWS, especially when it comes to classic cinema, you may just be completely fucked if there’s no house in town that screens them.  This can be especially brutal considering, if you run in any sort of cinephile circles for more than ten minutes, you’ll run into the common piece of wisdom that “if you didn’t see [insert movie], you didn’t see it right”.  It’s a frustrating thing to come across when your options are to watch a movie on the Criterion Channel at home, or not see it at all.

My point being…if you have the opportunity to see a beloved movie from any decade, and it even slightly works for you in terms of time, distance, and finance…grab it with all ten fingers and just do it.  You’ll be very unlikely to regret it.  JAWS on July 1st, 2024 was a good illustration as to why.  Here is a movie playing out in front of me, one that I had seen probably a dozen times in my thirty-six years on Earth, and it was like a brand new adventure.  People were screaming.  Hooting and hollering.  Cracking open their beers when something cool as fuck was happening.

There was nothing like it.  It was clear as day at that moment why JAWS and Steven Spielberg helped change Hollywood filmmaking forever.  

I can’t wait to do it again.  After all, the damn thing is turning fifty next year.

But until then….farewell and adieu.

Jabbin’ About JAWS: A New Summer Series!

One of the strange, ironic anomalies about American film in the 1970’s is that, mixed in with some of the strongest and most daring independent voices Hollywood would ever produce, the decade includes the definitive starting data points of where the industry stands now, a sequel-and-IP-driven industry that has done a ton to choke out those very same independent voices.

The same decade that gave us ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, TAXI DRIVER, DOG DAY AFTERNOON, AMERICAN GRAFFITI, CHINATOWN, BARRY LYNDON, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and, oh yeah, the first two GODFATHER films also gave us THE EXORCIST, ALIEN and the very first STAR WARS. Through those kinetic crowd-pleasers, we can track the birth of the “blockbuster” all the way to today, where we are practically drowning in Marvel and Lucasfilm streaming content (to almost inarguably diminishing returns).

Of course, the first “real” blockbuster, at least the one that popularized the term for all intents and purposes is Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller JAWS. Based off the 1974 Peter Benchley novel, JAWS was an immediate sensation, making $472 million against a $9 million budget, made generations of people irrationally afraid of sharks (on the whole, not that interested in people!) and, most importantly, sparked a major change in movie studio priorities. Slow-burn, expensive character dramas were out. Populist popcorn flicks were in, the more special effects, the better.

This, of course, feels like the absolute wrong lesson for studios to have pulled from JAWS. This is because, nearly fifty years on, after the movie no longer has any ability to scare you, so familiar are its tropes and beats, Spielberg’s first major break still stands out due to the actual legitimate character work that it does, giving us three fully realized human beings as the stars of the film, as opposed to a shark that ominously (and accidentally) is rarely seen onscreen.

It’s a JAWS summer, y’all! Let’s dig in.

JAWS (1975)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb

Starring: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary

Released: June 20, 1975

Length: 124 minutes

JAWS is a surprisingly difficult movie to talk about in 2022, if only because it feels like everything that can be said about it, has. It’s even a couple years older than the original STAR WARS, maybe the most single over-analyzed movie in the history of American film. JAWS’ troubled production history is well-documented, with its profound technical failures planting the seed for the movie’s single most important contribution to film: the ominous, minimalist score by John Williams serving as superior substitute for actually seeing the shark.

Compounding the issue, ironically, is the fact that JAWS still holds up! Oftentimes, big broad masterpieces like this speak for themselves, making it kind of difficult to break down what makes it fun without getting into the territory of the obvious (“the scene where the shark explodes was exciting!”). But I think it’s worth it to try, mainly since…well, I have to. It’d be profoundly weird to start a month-long JAWS series by skipping the one everybody has seen. But it’s also worth it to remind people that big ol’ blockbusters can still come with a considerable amount of craft behind them. JAWS also serves as a great way to advocate for arbitrary restrictions in film-making to allow for creativity to flourish.

JAWS is a movie that operates in two halves. The first half of JAWS feels like a broader character study of the psychological makeup of a small seaside town. Martin Brody (Scheider) is working his first summer as sheriff of Amity Island when he receives word that a young woman, Chrissy Watkins, has gone missing after going swimming. After her partial remains are found on the beach and a subsequent medical examination reveals injuries consistent with a shark attack, Brody finds himself in the middle of what is right and what is convenient. The beaches obviously have to be closed, but Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) stands in the way of this, since the upcoming Fourth of July weekend is the biggest of the year for the town’s economy.

The arrival of young oceanographer Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss) adds to the tension, as he deflates the excitement of the recent capture and killing of a large tiger shark that seemed to put an end to the vicious threat. He asserts, judging from the bites on the bodies, that the town is being terrorized by a great white, and Amity now needs to figure out what it’s going to do. Do we keep the beaches open, or close them? How do we end our shark trouble once and for all? Local fisherman and Captain Ahab stand-in Quint (Shaw) offers his expertise and services to kill the shark….if Vaughn will put up $10,000 as a reward.

Of course, the parallels between Amity’s reaction to an unseen threat endangering the economy and “our current times” can’t be ignored. In fact, it’s already been discussed in some detail over the past couple of years. Suffice to say, however, government officials valuing the safety of the economy over its populace, the dismissal of experts as nerdy kill-joys, the belief that a natural threat can be negotiated with or is interested in working on a human timeframe….it all would be aggravatingly on-the-nose if JAWS hadn’t predated current reality by over forty-five years. So, yeah, the emotions and motivations being tracked amongst our principals in Amity 100% track.

Act I of JAWS contains most of the movie’s super-signature moments. There’s that famous dolly zoom on Brody’s face as Alex Kintner bites the dust. There’s the infamous “that’s some bad hat, Harry” line that should sound familiar to anyone who’s watched an episode of House to completion. There’s that fisherman corpse jump-scare. And the scene where Brody pours himself an entire Collins glass of red wine. And that shot of Brody reading up on sharks, where we see him flipping through the pages via the lenses of his glasses, almost as if we can see him absorbing the information into his brain in real time. And, of course, we hear the iconic John Williams bass notes right in the opening seconds. On and on and on, it goes.

Although he didn’t get a Best Director nomination, there’s little flourishes like this that made it obvious the 26 year old Spielberg was someone to keep your eye on. And the movie often looks gorgeous. But it wasn’t just Spielberg that makes this first half sing. No, an equal amount of credit goes to the script, more or less cowritten by Benchley and Carl Gottlieb. Benchley did the first three drafts before tapping out and handing the script over to other screenwriters. He ultimately provided the plot’s structure and a lot of the “mechanics” of the sailing and oceanography. Playwright Howard Sackler (who was absolutely not one of those Sacklers, I already checked) did an uncredited rewrite, who focused in on characterization, including the crucial detail of Brody being afraid of water.

In an attempt to add some levity, Spielberg asked his friend Carl Gottlieb what he would change were it up to him. Three pages of notes later, he ended up becoming the primary screenwriter the rest of the way, with much additional dialogue pulled from improvisations generated from cast and crew dinners. John Milius provided some dialogue additions, and SUGARLAND EXPRESS writers Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood did some uncredited contributions.

But all this work, and facilitation of multiple contributors, paid off. Why the first half of JAWS works so well is because the script deals with the fallout of the shark’s destruction honestly. As just one example, both Mayor Vaughn’s early insistence on keeping the beaches open and Brody’s ultimate reluctance to stand up to him, have deadly consequences. The aforementioned death of Alex Kintner serves as the turning point for Brody (although, notably, not a turning point for Vaughn, who I am convinced eventually became the President of the United States in the JAWS-iverse). In the fallout of the tense, brutal, pulse-pounding death of Kintner, and as the subsequent capture of the wrong shark is being heavily celebrated by the town, the movie still adds a touch that most movies nowadays might have skipped altogether.

Brody is approached by Kintner’s mourning mother who has nothing but a slap to the face and admonishing words for the sheriff. He knew the waters were dangerous, and that a girl had already been killed by whatever it is out there. And he let the beaches stay open anyway. How could he?

I think this is a scene that would have been excised for being too “dark” or something if JAWS were made today. After all, it makes us directly question the integrity of our lead character, something that legitimately might be considered too complicated to get into now. Because the thing of it is….Kintner’s mom is right. She’s not just an unfair obstacle for us to get upset at. Brody fucked up. Yes, yes, there’s the reflex of saying, “it’s actually Vaughn’s fault! HE’S the one who was forcing him to keep the beaches open!” Which is true. But the buck falls on the man whose job it is to keep people safe. And Brody knows it.

That’s why the moment resonates so hard. And it’s part of what motivates him from here on out.

For all that, though, the second half is really where the movie shines, and the fact that it works so well is a testament to how JAWS bakes in its exposition and character building through action. Brody, Quint and Hooper all band together to take Quint’s boat the ORCA out to kill the great white once and for all. Simply put, there’s nothing for the movie to set up about these three once they get on the boat. We’ve learned everything we need to know while we were busy being scared in the first half. Brody is the lawman who hates the water, Hooper is a steadfast and sarcastic expert, and Quint is the eccentric wild-card.

Notably, there are a few things two of the three characters have in common; for instance, Brody and Quint are the adults on the boat, while Quint and Hooper have the maritime experience (and scars to show for it) that Brody simply lacks. Most telling of all, Brody and Hooper don’t have the personal connection to a rogue shark that Quint ultimately does. But there’s nothing to unify the trio as a team as we set sail.

The real bonding moment between the three is Quint’s famous speech detailing the real-life horrors endured by the members of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, a moment that many have identified as the true heart of JAWS. This monologue, delivered during an otherwise quiet dinner between the three below deck, sets up the true terror inherent in a shark, maybe more than any other moment, sequence or visual in the movie. For those not familiar, the U.S.S. Indianapolis was a naval ship that was returning from delivering the initial parts of the atomic bomb before getting nailed by a Japanese missile. Those who survived the initial blast, however, found themselves sitting ducks for a series of brutal shark attacks. Of a crew of about 1,000, only about 300 survived.

It’s a harrowing, fucked-up story that’s just as chilling when you remember that it’s 100% true (also, it feels notable that the script changes the date of the sinking of the Indianapolis from July 30 to June 29, the same day and date of the fictional death of Alex Kintner). Thus, the decision to anchor Quint’s character as having lived through this real-life horror show makes his quest to kill the great white all the more understandable, perhaps the ultimate example of “raising the stakes” for a character.

What punctuates Quint’s speech even further in JAWS, however, is how the scene slowly transitions back to the three of them having drunken revels, banging on the table, singing sea shanties, and forgetting about their trouble ahead. Then, BOOM! The shark has returned and is pounding on the side of the ORCA. The danger detailed in Quint’s speech starts flooding back to the characters, and us, and the cost of failure has never felt so high.

The second half is also where all those clever work-arounds to cover for the mechanical shark not working come into play. As alluded to previously, one of the biggest, most famous pains in Spielberg’s ass during the making of JAWS was the fact that, among other things, the big mechanical sharks that had been created (in place of an actual trained shark, which was the original plan, holy shit) kept getting waterlogged and short-circuiting. I’d argue that Robert Shaw getting wasted all the time was as big of an issue as the shark, but I understand that JAWS is a hard movie to film without, you know, Jaws.

Brody, Quint, and Hooper eventually realize attaching buoyant barrels to the shark is their only chance at being able to keep tabs on its location. It’s a logical decision by the characters, and you figure, for the filmmakers, it’s a hell of a lot easier to control a bunch of empty barrels than it is a giant mechanical shark. However, this decision also sets up the barrels as the real visual signifier for us in the audience. It’s always cool when a movie works it out so a normal, benign object all of a sudden becomes terrifying.

JAWS barrels towards its exciting and famous conclusion, and it struck me that the movie is so self-contained (and, like many movies that are over thirty years old, just ends once it reaches its natural stopping point! No prolonged wrap-ups of subplots, no set-ups for potential sequels…the shark dies, movie over!) that I don’t even think I realized there were sequels to JAWS until I was a teenager. And that’s the sign of a great one. You can get off here, or you can keep driving down the Highway of Diminishing Returns. It’s up to you!

So why does JAWS not receive the same kind of world-ending ire that some of its other early blockbuster contemporaries do? Well, part of it is that it hasn’t watered itself down as much over the years. Yes, up until 2002, there were just as many JAWS movies as there were STAR WARS movies, which is bizarre to think about. However, the non-serialized format of the JAWS series has left its sequels as more obscure and less popular than its original, which allows it to stand above the rest of the series. This stands opposed to STAR WARS, where at least one of its sequels is arguably more beloved than the original (that sequel being, of course, THE RISE OF SKYWALKER).

Also, for whatever reason, JAWS has never been a property that anybody has tried to reclaim as fresh IP. We had the three sequels, one unofficial international follow-up/ripoff (okay, there are actually hundreds and hundreds, but only one that anybody really cares about), and…that’s it. No Saturday morning cartoon, no legacy sequel, no limited series on Peacock (at least not yet). Hollywood has, for whatever reason, seen fit to leave JAWS be.

Finally, I think JAWS is arguably the strongest of its imitators simply because of all the work they did to focus on human characters, so that when the shark starts snacking, we’re invested. It’s not quite the same thing, but it’s the problem that a lot of the American GODZILLA movies fail to understand, and I see audience expectations shifting in kind; I hear a lot of people say, “who cares about the humans at all? It’s a movie called Godzilla!” Well, actually, the human stories are vital for us to have an entry point into the destruction, but so often, movie studios want to cynically half-ass that part. Maybe because it’s hard? Maybe because it’s easier to pour money into the CGI than the writer’s room? Regardless, it would suit most studios to go back to the basics for awhile.

It’s a shame that, in the wake of JAWS’ undeniable success, the instinct was to replicate, and expand upon, the fireworks and thrills WITHOUT including the exquisite writing that makes everybody involved feel like a recognizable human soul, which only helps to increase the stakes. After all, what good is a shark eating somebody if I don’t care about them?

Next week: Brody and Mayor Vaughn return for 1978’s JAWS 2!