Jaws (1975)

Jaws movie storyline. It’s a hot summer on Amity Island, a small community whose main business is its beaches. When new Sheriff Martin Brody discovers the remains of a shark attack victim, his first inclination is to close the beaches to swimmers. This doesn’t sit well with Mayor Larry Vaughn and several of the local businessmen. Brody backs down to his regret as that weekend a young boy is killed by the predator.

The dead boy’s mother puts out a bounty on the shark and Amity is soon swamped with amateur hunters and fisherman hoping to cash in on the reward. A local fisherman with much experience hunting sharks, Quint, offers to hunt down the creature for a hefty fee. Soon Quint, Brody and Matt Hooper from the Oceanographic Institute are at sea hunting the Great White shark. As Brody succinctly surmises after their first encounter with the creature, they’re going to need a bigger boat.

Jaws (1975) is a masterful, visceral and realistic science-fiction suspense/horror-disaster film that taps into the most primal of human fears – what unseen creature lurks below the dark surface of the water beyond the beach? The tagline for the tensely-paced film, “Don’t go in the water,” kept a lot of shark-hysterical ocean-swimmers and 1975 summer beachgoers wary (similar to the effect that Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) had on shower-taking).

The screenplay, mostly written by young, 27 year-old director Spielberg himself and Carl Gottlieb, was provided in part by Peter Benchley who wrote a trashy action novel by the same name (but originally titled A Stillness in the Water) about the fictional New England coastal town of Amity, Long Island – a summer resort that is terrorized by a menacing Great White Shark (known as the genus/species Carcharodon carcharias. Both Benchley’s best-selling book (released in the winter of 1973-74) and Spielberg’s film borrowed from various sources.

Jaws is a 1975 American thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel of the same name. In the story, a giant man-eating great white shark attacks beachgoers on Amity Island, a fictional New England summer resort town, prompting the local police chief to hunt it with the help of a marine biologist and a professional shark hunter.

The film stars Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, Robert Shaw as shark hunter Quint, Richard Dreyfuss as oceanographer Matt Hooper, Murray Hamilton as Larry Vaughn, the mayor of Amity Island, and Lorraine Gary as Brody’s wife, Ellen. The screenplay is credited to both Benchley, who wrote the first drafts, and actor-writer Carl Gottlieb, who rewrote the script during principal photography.

Shot mostly on location on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, the film had a troubled production, going over budget and past schedule. As the art department’s mechanical sharks suffered many malfunctions, Spielberg decided to mostly suggest the animal’s presence, employing an ominous, minimalistic theme created by composer John Williams to indicate the shark’s impending appearances.

Spielberg and others have compared this suggestive approach to that of classic thriller director Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Pictures gave the film what was then an exceptionally wide release for a major studio picture, over 450 screens, accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign with a heavy emphasis on television spots and tie-in merchandise.

Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary, Jeffrey Kramer, Murray Hamilton, Susan Backlinie, Jonathan Filley, Chris Rebello, Jeffrey Voorhees, Craig Kingsbury
Screenplay by: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb
Production Design by: Joe Alves
Cinematography by: Bill Butler
Film Editing by: Verna Fields
Set Decoration by: John M. Dwyer
Music by: John Williams
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Release Date: June 20, 1975