{"id":3408,"date":"2012-06-26T11:10:49","date_gmt":"2012-06-26T17:10:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=3408"},"modified":"2012-06-26T11:10:50","modified_gmt":"2012-06-26T17:10:50","slug":"jaws-the-shark-that-changed-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=3408","title":{"rendered":"Jaws: The shark that changed everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cIt’s all psychological,\u201d says Mayor Vaughn in Jaws, \u201cYou yell \u2018barracuda,\u2019 everybody says, \u2018Huh? What?\u2019 \u2013 you yell \u2018shark,\u2019 we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.\u201d<\/p>\n

Panic on the Fourth of July has become commonplace at the movies since Jaws was first released in 1975. As the film hits Toronto screens in advance of its Blu-ray release in August, it\u2019s right at home with box-office bait such as Prometheus and Spider-Man.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because Jaws, the tale of a great white shark that terrorizes a small seaside town, remains the template for summer blockbusters. Over the years, of course, there have been a few changes. Instead of three white men (Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw), our saviours might be African-Americans or women.<\/p>\n

But thanks to Jaws, the summer movie now means non-stop action, spectacle and suspense mixed with snippets of grim comedy. And thanks to Jaws, Hollywood now makes more than half of its revenues from May to August with just the kind of movies that have a natural kinship with the summer theme park rides they inspire.<\/p>\n

The film even evoked reactions suited to theme park rides. At a Dallas preview for Jaws, Steven Spielberg recalls, he saw a man rush out of the theatre after the scene where the shark kills a child. The nervous director assumed he was seeing the beginning of a mass exodus. Instead, the man vomited onto the lobby carpet, went to the washroom \u2013 and then returned to his seat.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s when I knew we had a hit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jaws was something more than just a hit, however, It represents a decisive turning point in Hollywood movie history, as big in its way as The Jazz Singer or Avatar.<\/p>\n

To start, it brought a decisive end to a five-year box office recession, becoming the first movie to earn $100-million (U.S.). It was also the first movie to be widely advertised on television (up to 35 spots a night). And the film\u2019s influence includes a steady stream of creature features \u2013 from Ridley Scott\u2019s Alien (pitched as \u201cJaws in space\u201d) to this year\u2019s spoof Piranha 3DD.<\/p>\n

More importantly, the movie ushered in the rise of the B-movie in Hollywood. When Peter Benchley, the author of the bestselling novel the movie is based on, sneered that Spielberg would be remembered only as a \u201cunit director\u201d of action sequences, he missed the point: Hit movies from then on would be primarily about action sequences.<\/p>\n

For some film lovers, in fact, Jaws is seen as the beginning of the end of auteur-driven New Hollywood, with Spielberg serving, as author Peter Biskind has put it, as the \u201cTrojan horse through which the studios began to reassert their power.”<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t necessarily an easy ride for the studios, though. In another now familiar pattern, the story of Jaws\u2019s tumultuous creation has become part of its marketing. Two books have been published about the making of the movie \u2013 one by an islander from Martha\u2019s Vineyard (where the film was shot), another by the film\u2019s scriptwriter. The upcoming Blu-ray will include four hours of material, including a new documentary, that gives fresh meaning to the clich\u00e9 of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. As Richard Dreyfuss said, \u201cWe began without a script, without a cast and without a shark.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were actually three mechanical sharks. But on the third day, one of them sank. The production was also shut down several times for shark repairs. A ten-week shooting schedule for a $3.5-million film soon turned into a five-and-a-half month shoot that ran closer to $10-million.<\/p>\n

Spielberg later said he finally had to resort to something that was foreign to him: \u201csubjugate absolute control to meaningful collaboration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, the first cut was reputedly a mess. Because the mechanical shark often looked phony, it became essential to cut around it, using implication rather than a physical object to create fear. John Williams\u2019s two-note Jaws theme, echoing the sound of a heartbeat, became the primary terror device. (Williams won an Academy Award for best dramatic score, with Jaws also picking up prizes for best editing and best sound.)<\/p>\n

Spielberg, of course, eventually went on to direct films both more weighty and more slight. With Jaws, though, he made his most purely successful entertainment \u2013 perhaps because he allowed himself to be subjugated to meaningful collaboration.<\/p>\n

A classic, wrote Raymond Chandler, is a piece of writing that \u201cexhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed.\u201d When it comes to a movie that mixes popular folksiness and sudden jolts of terror, Jaws is no doubt a classic. And for good and bad, we\u2019re still bobbing up and down in its giant wake.