Jaws (1975): The Summer Blockbuster Was Born From a Shark You Can't See

A young woman runs down a dark beach, peeling off her clothes, and swims out past the buoy while her drunk date passes out in the sand. Under the water, the camera glides up toward her kicking legs, and two low notes start to pulse. She jerks sideways, gets dragged across the surface, grabs for the buoy, screams, and is gone. For the whole sequence, we never see what took her.

That's the secret of Jaws, and it's my argument here: Steven Spielberg's film is a movie about not being able to see. Amity Island's mayor won't look at the danger. Chief Brody can't stop staring at the water. And the director himself was stuck with a mechanical shark that kept breaking down, so he had to hide it. Out of all that blindness came the first true summer blockbuster. Every July franchise weekend traces back to June 20, 1975, and to a shark that, for most of its own movie, isn't there.

Why It's a Masterpiece

Take away the shark and Jaws is a small-town story about a summer economy. A swimmer is killed, and Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) gets the coroner to call it a boating accident, because the Fourth of July weekend pays the island's bills. Brody (Roy Scheider), a New York cop who is afraid of the water, goes along. Then a boy dies at a crowded beach, and the film turns into a hunt: Brody, the young oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and the shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) head out on Quint's boat, the Orca.

The two halves feel like two different movies. On land, cinematographer Bill Butler shoots Amity in bright primary colors, taking cues from painters like Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. At sea, the film goes handheld; Spielberg has called it "the most expensive handheld movie ever made," and Empire's Ian Freer notes that camera operator Michael Chapman kept a 34-pound Panaflex steady on a pitching deck years before the Steadicam.

Mostly, though, it's great because of the way it hides its monster. As a media historian writing for The Conversation points out, the shark doesn't fully appear until the 81-minute mark of a 124-minute film. Until then it's a fin, a point-of-view shot sliding toward bare legs, yellow barrels, and John Williams's two notes, which Spielberg first took for a joke. The Library of Congress essay on the film puts it simply: the faulty effects forced Spielberg to be creative, and "the challenges made Spielberg a better filmmaker."

Behind the Scenes

Spielberg was 26 when he signed on, and according to the LOC essay he really wanted to make a Prohibition comedy called Lucky Lady until Universal's Sid Sheinberg steered him toward the shark. The production went to Martha's Vineyard, which had never hosted a major Hollywood shoot. Dreyfuss later summed up the start: "We started filming without a script, without a cast, and without a shark."

The crew built three full-size pneumatic sharks and named them Bruce, after Spielberg's lawyer. Salt water hated them. Variety reports the shoot was scheduled for 55 days and ran 159, and the budget doubled to $7 million. Spielberg has said the shark not working "was a godsend," because it made him more like Alfred Hitchcock than like Ray Harryhausen, the stop-motion monster wizard.

There's a strange rhyme in all this. WBUR reports that filming dragged on through the summer of 1974 and threatened the Vineyard's tourist season, which is exactly what keeps Mayor Vaughn up at night. The island lived the plot. Locals filled the movie, too; lobsterman Wayne Iacono told WBUR that Shaw borrowed Quint's mannerisms from Captain Roy Campbell, whose tugboat supported the crew.

Then there's the film's most famous speech, Quint's account of surviving the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in 1945 and the sharks that came for the men in the water. The Hollywood Reporter traces a long argument over who wrote it: Spielberg credits John Milius's words and Shaw's editing, while co-writer Carl Gottlieb insists Shaw merged all the drafts himself and performed the result at dinner. Whoever held the pen, it's Shaw's voice we remember. The LOC essay notes the speech revived interest in the real ship and helped lead to the exoneration of its court-martialed captain, Charles B. McVay III.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

• The Vertigo shot. About 24 minutes in, as Brody watches the beach, the camera pushes in while the lens zooms out, and the world seems to stretch away behind his face. Empire notes the trick was invented by Irmin Roberts for Hitchcock's Vertigo and is now often called "the Jaws shot." Spielberg uses it once.
• People keep walking in front of Brody. In that same scene, beachgoers block his view, and each time one crosses the frame, Spielberg cuts a little closer to Scheider's face. We get as twitchy as he does.
• Fences everywhere. Critic Nigel Andrews, cited by Empire, spotted fences all over the film: around Brody's house, along Amity's streets, even Hooper's shark cage. A fence, Freer adds, looks a lot like a row of teeth.
• Seven months apart. The Kintner attack and the crowd's reactions were shot seven months apart; editor Verna Fields made them one seamless panic and won one of the film's three Oscars.
• The head in the pool. Ben Gardner's head bursting out of his wrecked boat was a reshoot after a preview, filmed in Fields's own swimming pool with evaporated milk clouding the water. Universal wouldn't pay for it, so Spielberg spent $3,000 of his own money.
• The line you almost didn't hear. Test audiences screamed so loudly when the shark surges up behind Brody that they drowned out "You're gonna need a bigger boat," so the reaction shot was lengthened and the line turned up.

The Director's Genius Moment

The Kintner attack runs about four minutes, and Freer points out the key choice: a lesser director would have made it the boy's scene. Spielberg makes it Brody's. We see what he sees from his beach chair: a boy on a yellow raft, a dog with a stick, a woman floating, a couple splashing. The sound is thin, just waves and a tinny transistor radio, as if Brody has tuned out everything but the water.

Then the attack comes, a fountain of red where the raft was, and the dolly zoom lands on Brody's face. The shot isn't about the shark. It's about a man who suspected this would happen, said nothing, and now has to live with it. That's why the next confrontation hurts: Mrs. Kintner (Lee Fierro), in mourning black, walks up to Brody on the dock and slaps him. The LOC essay counts that moment among the scenes with a moral complexity missing from the film's many imitators.

Another Way to See It

The LOC essay frames Jaws as a bridge between the cynical, morally murky New Hollywood of the early '70s and the crowd-pleasing spectacle that took over afterward. Mayor Vaughn, in his anchor-print blazer, is a pure '70s villain, a public official lying to protect business; the hunt that follows is pure popcorn. The essay also notes that during the COVID-19 pandemic, commentators kept comparing Amity's handling of the shark to America's handling of the virus. Watch it that way and the scariest thing in the water is the decision not to look.

It changed the business, too. The Conversation notes that summer was then where studios put movies without strong reviews, and that films usually rolled out city by city. Universal instead bought what a Variety ad from April 1975 called "the biggest national prime-time T.V. spot campaign in motion picture history": 30-second spots on 23 shows, from Happy Days to The Waltons. Variety is careful to say Jaws didn't invent the wide release; it opened in 409 U.S. theaters. What set it apart was staying power. It grew to 954 screens by day 59, when it passed $100 million, and became the biggest moneymaker in Hollywood history to that point. Two years later Star Wars confirmed the formula.

Under all that history, though, the film knows something simple about fear: it lives in ordinary places. A summer beach. A kid's yellow raft. The gentlest scene in the movie is Brody slumped at the dinner table while his little son copies every gesture he makes, until Brody asks the boy for a kiss because he needs one. That's what is really at stake: not the town's books, not even the shark, but a frightened father who has to go out on the water so his kids won't have to.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, and if you can, with a crowd; the screams are part of the design, as that "bigger boat" fix proves. It's rated PG, but a 1975 PG, with a severed leg and a head in a boat, so think twice before showing it to young kids. Streaming homes change, but Universal put all four Jaws movies on Peacock for the 50th anniversary in 2025, so check there before you rent.

On your rewatch, watch the bodies crossing in front of Brody in the Kintner scene and notice how much of the terror comes from what he can't make out. Then, if three mismatched men on a boat leave you wanting more, read our review of Seven Samurai, the team-up movie that taught everyone how to assemble a crew. And the next time you hear those two notes, notice that you still haven't seen a thing.