JAWS: Ocean Craft

Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb
Actors: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton
Runtime: 124 mins.
1975

Spielberg was the Trojan Horse through which the studios began to reassert their power.
-Peter Biskind

Scene: a watercraft, floating in the ocean. Despite Brody's warnings, Hooper dons his scuba equipment and dives into the water to investigate an abandoned fishing boat. This vessel without a captain must have been attacked by the great white shark that has been causing trouble in the small island community of Amity. As Hooper sinks beneath the waves and approaches the boat, the audience also has a sinking feeling. Surely this would be the ideal time for the shark to attack? Hooper is totally vulnerable in the water. We mentally berate him for attempting this investigation while the boat's hull comes into view. A large chunk twice as big as a human head is missing. Hooper stares into the blackness for a while, sees nothing... but discovers an enormous tooth lodged at the edge of the hole. He examines this tooth and begins spinning about in the water, looking over both shoulders, making sure nothing unsavory is approaching. We become nervous, but we see nothing. Nothing but a close-up of that black gaping hole, the only place from which the shark surely cannot emerge. We hold the shot for a few moments... and a waterlogged human head bursts into frame, accompanied by a drastic musical sting. Hooper panics and lets the tooth drop into the depths of the ocean.

I've just described one of the most sublime jump scares I have ever encountered. If you haven't seen the movie, I hope That doesn't ruin anything for you, but the truth is even folks who have seen Jaws countless times can't help but jump out of their shoes when they see this part. I describe it so minutely not because I think I can recreate the experience in any meaningful way, but because I wanted to illustrate all of the tiny details that contribute to making this scare work. Everything in this scene is constructed to play our expectations like a fiddle. We know something scary is going to happen in the water. We have a precise series of expectations during the scene, each of which is foiled in turn. We think the shark will show up? It doesn't. We think something will pop out of the hole? It doesn't... yet. The discovery of the tooth puts us off the scent. Hooper's flailing puts us off the scent. The pacing puts us off the scent. Then, finally, much like the cold-blooded titular menace itself, the film pounces on us when we are most vulnerable. This is superb genre filmmaking at its crackling best. This is vintage Spielberg.


The funny thing is, the notorious scene almost didn't get made. At least, not in the form that we know it. After gauging audience reactions in early test screenings, the filmmakers made edits to let a few key moments breathe. Spielberg, however, wanted to make a more ambitious alteration. In his words, he was "greedy for one more scare." He wanted to reshoot the above scene so that the pacing and angle would be perfect. The studio turned him down.

He grabbed $3,000 of his own money and did it anyway. Spielberg poured milk in his editor Verna Fields's swimming pool to make the water appropriately murky, and refilmed the scene there. Thus Jaws gained that much more movie magic. Spielberg was so proud of his adjustment, in fact, that he and writer Carl Gottlieb would sneak into the back of movie theaters around the time they knew the scare was coming, watch 100 heads jump, and laugh before going out on the town.

I wanted to emphasize the incredible amount of care and craft that Steven Spielberg injected into this film before I make another point that might sound contradictory: The perfection and subsequent success of Jaws is one of the most happenstance yet influential achievements in film history.

Nothing about Jaws was preordained to be as it is. The folks who made the film were far from the producers' first choices. The movie pursued a bunch of screenwriters before accidentally settling on Carl Gottlieb. Two of the three major characters weren't cast until days before filming began. Even Steven Spielberg, at that point an unproven youngster with boundless energy, wasn't the first choice for the director's chair. Apparently the producers fired one of the previous directorial candidates because he wouldn't stop referring to the shark as a "whale." To say the cast and crew were cobbled together would be understatement.

There are countless examples of external events altering the content of the movie. Even the ending manifested at the mercy of chance. Hooper's character was originally killed when the shark attacks him in the underwater cage. His life was saved by a real shark; Spielberg encountered some recent footage of a great white attacking an empty shark cage and found it so compelling that he had to use it. The trouble was, you couldn't have Hooper die in the cage and use the real life footage. So Spielberg let Hooper escape and float to the sea floor. That great white shark rewrote the original ending of the film.

Of course, the more famous example of a major screw-up that had massive historical ramifications is the shark itself. Three mechanical sharks named Bruce, to be precise. This was before CGI, and these mechanisms were to be the source of all the film's special effects. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), Spielberg decided to film Jaws out in the real life ocean, which did not agree with the sharks. They would bulge, they would break, and they would generally be out of commission. Principle photography was scheduled to take 55 days, but thanks to the malfunctioning equipment it clocked in at 159. Jaws became one of the most overtime and overbudget films of its era. Spielberg thought he'd never work in Hollywood again. He may have overshot his $3.5 million budget by $5.5 million, but that doesn't matter so much when your film shoots past The Godfather to become the highest grossing film at the North American box office, with an initial domestic total of $123.1 million.

Perhaps the production's crippling issues were actually its saving grace. The many empty days during which filming was impossible allowed the crew to continually refine the script, touch up the dialogue, and let their creative choices breathe. The unreliability of the animatronic sharks also forced Spielberg to be more creative and coy with the aquatic antagonist. Less of the shark was shown in the movie, and more of the suspense was built with clever camerawork and Williams' iconic score (for a better write-up of that score than I could deliver, go here). Spielberg's malfunctioning equipment forced him to emulate Alfred Hitchcock more desperately than he would have otherwise. The result is a film that rewrites the book on suspense cinema--a film that is streamlined, pure, and damn near perfect.

Fate or fluke? The only thing more amazing than Jaws' addled production history is the story of Jaws' universal cinematic impact.

Before Jaws there was no such thing as a summer blockbuster. Summer was a cinematic dead zone. The highest profile films came out around the holidays, and if they were successful they would earn a staggered release schedule that eventually brought them to theaters across the country. If you wanted to see a movie, you were at the mercy of whatever's playing at the local cinema.

Jaws kicked off one of the biggest sea changes in cinema history with its bold advertising campaign and release strategy. An unprecedented $700,000 was spent on television spots, and the movie was released simultaneously in nearly 500 theaters. Previously, the social function of film critics had been to see the movies that not everybody had access to, and either build or kill the anticipation so that the production companies and movie theaters knew whether to expand the release. Jaws ripped away the power of the film critic, and transferred it to the studio system. The bigwigs realized it doesn't matter what sort of movie they have on their hands; as long as it is heavily advertised, has a surface-level flashy concept, and is made widely available, they will likely recoup their production costs. Thus the summer blockbuster was born.

It would be fascinating to observe a world without Jaws. Would the summer blockbuster have arisen by different means as film became increasingly ubiquitous? Or would the cinema of today be more fractured and niche, with less money thrown around and less bureaucratic interference? Either way, we can attribute today's massive summer franchise bloat to Jaws, but we can't exactly blame it; as usual, Hollywood absorbed the wrong takeaways from this streamlined creature feature, and you can't fault the creatives behind a movie for doing the best they could. It's clear that changing the course of film history was far from the first thing on their minds.

Here I am a million words into the review, hardly having said a thing about the actual movie. Jaws begins with a classic stinger, one of the more risque scenes in Spielberg's typically sexless oeuvre. A bunch of teenagers are having a good party time on the beach, drinking and smoking up to their pubescent hearts' content. Two of the teens make bedroom eyes at each other, then rush off to an isolated area to do some skinny dippin. The boy is having a hard time keeping up and only manages to get as far as the shore, where he passes out with the waves lapping at his ankles. The girl, however, gets far enough out to sea that she has no recourse when something begins yanking at her from the deep. This scene smacks us with all the best tools at Spielberg's disposal: Williams' dangerous score, some sinister shark POV camerawork, unsettling imagery, and an ultimate bloody crescendo followed by deafening silence as we linger over the scene, once an erotic midnight hideaway, now a watery grave.

From there we are introduced to the island town of Amity and set in the perspective of local everyman sheriff, Brody (Roy Scheider). Brody is terrified of the water, and the sudden spike of aquatic attacks have transformed that terror into a private obsession. Brody makes the wise call to shut down the beaches, but he is blocked at every front by Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), who insists that the beaches must stay open for the upcoming holiday weekend, or else Amity's primary annual source of tourist income goes down the tubes. Of course, matters escalate from there, until we are introduced to our other protagonists: Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), a wealthy marine biologist who insists that the perpetrator of the attacks is no garden variety great white, and Quint (Robert Shaw), an anachronistic fisherman straight out of the pages of Hemingway and Melville who insists he is the man the town must hire to take this behemoth down.

That covers the first two thirds of the film. The final act is an extended hunt, with our three protagonists slowly and deliberately wearing the shark down from the dubious safety of Quint's fishing craft, the Orca.

That final act is no more nor less than a stroke of absolute unadulterated genius. It's a master class in pacing and manipulation of tension. Sometimes you're made tense by the shark's absence, sometimes you're put at ease by the shark's presence, and vice versa. The film clearly sets up the visual language of the hunt, meticulously making sure the audience understands the herculean task in front of these characters, and exactly how they will slowly accomplish it. The logic of the hunt involves harpooning the shark to attach buoyant yellow barrels. The function of these barrels is to exhaust the shark, keep track of its location, and keep it from diving. This simple system splinters into a wealth of problems and surprises, all without overexposing the shark itself and losing the power of its actual appearances. The action is spectacular without being overreliant on spectacle.

It's a testament to the film's deep tissue quality that its most spellbinding scene has nothing to do with the shark, instead featuring three dudes drinking and talking to each other in the hull of the ship. The scene begins with Hooper and Quint comparing scars, then transitions into one of cinema's most famous monologues: Quint recounting his traumatic encounter with sharks after his warship sank in World War II. Finally, the three men gleefully sing a sea shanty together. Every moment of this sequence is electric, even as the camera remains as static as the characters, simply sitting with them and observing the interaction. We met these men in a more modern social context, but over the course of their journey of vengeance they have stepped out of modernity and into the annals of masculine mythology. They've been transported to another time and another world.

Brody, Hooper, and Quint are perfect foils for one another, characters who have received incisive but unflashy attention by the filmmakers, an uncommon practice in blockbuster cinema. When's the last time a big budget franchise film did more than the bare minimum to humanize and dynamize its characters?

Very little of Jaws is what you would call flashy. There are no exploding buildings or whip pans or smash cuts. Spielberg uses long takes to tremendous effect, but they are so subtle and character-focused that they barely register. Nevertheless, Jaws has something better than pizzazz: it has craft. I was fortunate enough to see the film on a big screen for its recent 40th anniversary re-release, and I can't think of a better way to experience Jaws. It may seem quaint in our current culture of spectacle fatigue, but every moment of Spielberg's breakthrough hit is far more visceral and engaging than any moment in Jurassic World. Spielberg rewrote the rules countless times, from Raiders of the Lost Ark to E.T. to Jurassic Park and beyond, but this is where his career, and modern blockbuster filmmaking, got their start.

4.5 / 5  BLOBS