JAWS: The Father of All Blockbusters Turns 50

 

The saga of Hollywood lives and dies on the ripples of a thousand different choices. Hundreds of movies each year from hundreds of artists serving hundreds of markets creates a complex, interconnected ecosystem that can never really be explored in its totality.

Still, if there was one film, one moment, that trampolined Hollywood from one era into the next, it was in 1975 with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.

    Moviegoing had naturally been a part of the global industry since moving pictures stole everyone’s attention at the start of the century. Tentpole films were also very much a part of the program. But the treatment of movies like The Sound of Music and Ben-Hur was done with an eye for prestige, more comparable to how Oscar hopefuls handle things today. 

Theaters at this time were still generally accustomed to having sporadic releases across the country over a period of several weeks. Limited roadshow releases were how you signaled that a movie’s importance to the masses. This heightened the overall appeal of the product, inviting viewers to drive to “the city” for a night at the movies the way they might a night at the theater. (This was also a way to try diminishing the effect of bad word of mouth.) Movies only went into wide-release right off if studios had little faith in it. That all changed with when a certain killer shark took a major bite out of the box office.

The French Connection (1971)

    Hollywood in the 1970s was very much in a period of transition. (For more on this, see my essays on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Graduate.) The way films and filmmakers interacted with both distributors and markets was so fundamentally different from the days of the Nickelodeon. The introduction of streaming has created a similar sort of musical-chairs with Hollywood today. Even so, I’d still suggest that the breakdown of the studio system, the dissolution of the Hays Code, and the rise of the auteur, created even more of a vortex than what we are experiencing now. (Or, of course, that is wishful thinking from someone hoping that cinema gets to survive another century ...)

    The success of Jaws would open the gates for not only Spielberg's own cultural touchstones, but also the likes of James Cameron and George Lucas. It was here that film really started to organize itself into two branches: blockbusters and “high art.” And that's the state of the union ...

  Now, if I were to propose that maybe this very landscape of blockbusters has been corrupted and razed by a slew of soulless facsimiles that betrayed Spielberg’s vision for blockbuster cinema … well, I’d be showing less novelty than the guy trying to force-feed us another Pirates of the Caribbean movie. There is just no more revelation there.

    But at the same time, much of this war between "high art" and "popular art" has been self-imposed. Films that dare to drink from both wells are met with resistance from both camps, and critics who attempt to maintain a healthy balance stand to lose major clout. And it's really in looking back at Jaws that I get to see how ironic this whole situation is.

    The writing in the movie is sharp, yes, but not necessarily intricate--at least not compared to something like Arrival. Spielberg uses a few cool filmmaking tricks here and there, but more often than not, the secret is just a basic understanding of ground-level film language. The things you learn in Filmmaking 101. The position of the camera, the sound work, the editing, etc. all work to great effect. The key is that these things all work together to create something larger than the sum of its parts. For better or worse, the distance between Jaws and the awful blockbusters it inspired isn’t really that large.

I’ve written at length about what specifically Hollywood ought to fix, and what audiences can do to help them along, but I don’t think for a moment the answer is moving away from film as a service for popular entertainment--society needs things to rally behind. Both avenues of film can coexist within in a landscape, as seen in special cases like Jaws where they coexist within a single film.

 

Peter Benchley’s Jaws

The early 1970s saw a young writer, Peter Benchley, desperate to score a book deal that would support him and his young family. He shared with BBC, "In 1964 I saw a small item in the New York Daily News about a fisherman who caught a 4,550lb Great White off the beaches of Long Island. And I thought right then 'What if one of these things came round and wouldn't go away?"

Thus, in 1974, Jaws hit the shelf. The finished book received mixed reviews but was a hot-seller, with many finding a very twisted delight in the way Benchley created such a terrifying antagonist in this great big serial killer of a fish.

    This was, of course, artistic license. As with most animal predators, real-life sharks actually think humans taste really bad because of all the processed junk humans put in their bodies. Sharks basically only attack us because we look a lot like seals from a certain angle, and they would certainly never go to the extraordinary lengths that the shark in this story does to target human prey. We are just not worth the effort. Benchley eventually felt the guilt of having demonized an entire species, and he would actually spend the last decades of his life as an advocate for ocean and shark conservation.

Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown actually came across the book by happenstance and acquired the film rights before the book was even published on the market. A young Steven Spielberg, who at this time only had a single film to his name, very much wanted to be part of the picture. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

    What Spielberg and his team did with Jaws opened the gates for a whole new territory of film. This movie essentially invented the summer blockbuster, fundamentally changed how we thought about the moviegoing experience (this was still about two years out from Star Wars). Jaws’ release pattern of launching everywhere all at once was somewhat unusual, but the film world would never be the same for it. For better or worse, Jaws trained studios to expect big investments to spur big returns–and always right off the bat. 

  The earliest signs of fraying came with the Jaws knock-offs that pitted human protagonists against some manner of animal antagonist. Two years later would see Richard Harris going head-to-fin with a rogue killer whale in Orca, the same year Day of the Animals and its totally scientific claim that climate change makes animals cranky. This trend would never fully die-off, and so I guess in a way we have Benchley and Spielberg to thank for both “Meg” movies. 

A good director always takes care of his actors

    Less than twenty-years on, Spielberg would get the chance to perfect the wheel when he adapted Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, setting the model for the summer blockbuster as the bedrock that would carry the entire film industry. But Jurassic Park was only ever going to be adapted into a certain kind of movie. Something that’s taken for granted is that the connection isn’t quite as tight for Benchley’s book. Its ultimate destiny might not have been as the pinnacle of summer blockbuster-ness.

Benchley’s novel sort of contemporary retelling of Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s cornerstone of high literature following one man’s obsession with killing a vengeful white whale. As with Moby Dick, Jaws taps into that human insecurity of being overpowered by ... something. The story personifies that in the form of some larger-than-life beast residing in that most unknowable of countries, the ocean, and has its protagonist confront its basest of fears in the home of the monster.

Chinatown (1974)

    The novel itself reads as closer to a crime-drama, the kind of book that thirty years before would have been adapted into a noir film. There’s a little more attention given to the seediness of the town itself. Crimes that go unresolved and unremarked upon. There’s also some thinly veiled subtext about Mayor Vaughn having some under-the-table dealings with crime lords, and a facet of his motivation to keep the shark attacks out of the papers is to not attract the exact kind of public scrutiny that might expose all this. (There’s even a bit where one of Vaughn’s “friends” kills Brody’s family cat to intimidate him into reopening the beaches.) The film tracks exactly what kind of community would be complicit in suppressing news about this dangerous entity that will viciously kill anyone who enters the water. The shark itself becomes more of a mirror of both the ravenousness and inhumanity within smalltown Americana. 

The 1970s was also the decade of the neo-noir—The French Connection, Chinatown, The Godfather movies, and so on—films with their finger on the pulse of American disenchantment with the status quo. There was easily a version of events where Jaws was adapted into something much more along those lines. But that wasn’t the movie Spielberg wanted to make.

         Spielberg came to movies through a deep love of movies. He’s specifically listed 1952’s The Greatest Show on Earth, a two-and-a-half hour spectacle about the lives of circus performers, as a profound influence on him from his childhood and one of his favorite movies. This is a movie about people who see their ultimate life mission as one of making the masses happy--such that when the circus tent gets wrecked, the performers band together and take the circus to the people. Seeing where Spielberg’s career would take him, and how he chose to adapt Benchley’s novel, you can see that he saw his obligation as a filmmaker to be first and foremost that of making entertainment for the masses. 

And this is where the conversation gets really interesting for me.

Is Jaws a “Deep Movie?” 

On paper, the tale of Spielberg’s adaptation of Peter Benchley’s novel is the tale of a hotheaded youngster taking someone else's book only to kick-drop the psychological mumbo-jumbo in favor of making a creature-feature that would sell more tickets: they “dumbed down the book” to make it more palatable for mass consumption. 

And this is something that every critic has to wrestle with when celebrating this film. How do we make this movie’s “dumbed-down”-ness sound like a good thing? 

Medium wrote for the film’s 45th anniversary,

“Just as the shark kills and eats without any subtle motive, the makers of Jaws entertain simply because that’s what they do. That doesn’t mean it’s a dumb film. Indeed, the absence of any characteristics in the shark apart from hunger is a stroke of genius; nobody can ever accuse Jaws of anthropomorphising the way that they might King Kong, for example, though it does manipulate our bloodthirsty selves into rooting slightly more for the shark than for the people in the first half, at least.”

Deep Focus Reviews wrote in 2012,

“Whereas many great films contain a message or viewpoint that defines them as a product of their time or makes them stand out within their era, with Jaws it’s just the opposite. In making the film, the young Spielberg, then in his mid-twenties, had no particular motive except to make the best picture he could. It was someone else’s story, and he was tasked to bring it to the screen.”

    A question worth wrestling with here is something akin to … is Jaws in all its beautiful simplicity a “deep” film? If “no,” then what are the criteria for such movies? If yes, then what does that mean for all the other one-track movies that don’t get invited to the party over petty reasons?

Honestly, I’m going to say: yes, Jaws is a deep movie. Its motivations and methods are easily articulated, but if anything the film is all the better for it. The audience is able to more easily find itself in this universal story about a man trying to prove his merits against the elements. As in the title whale of Moby Dick, the shark as a centerpiece lends itself to all sorts of interpretation. Critics have compared it to everything from communism to Watergate to everything in between.

      One particularly potent reading that couldn’t have possibly been intended by Benchley or Spielberg has to do with the coronavirus shutdown. The way the islanders react to the possibility of the beach being closed honestly feels note for note taken from how the world reacted to the worldwide shutdown. The movie puts a thumb on the sheer recklessness the public shows in putting themselves in danger trying to pursue leisure in a time when it was unsafe to do so. The scene with the beaches reopening for the 4th of July and all the islanders looking over their shoulder as they enter the water looking for this invisible thing that might kill them … it feels different watching that in the 2020s. But because the framework is so user-friendly, it can be applied to a number settings and situations, revealing a new face to society wherever you lay it.

This movie could have easily been Chinatown, but Spielberg knew how to dial into the thrills inherent in this man vs beast story that worked so well on the big screen. Is that more base? Possibly. Does it work? Honestly, yes. 

And there was a time when cinema custodians understood this. Jaws was not only a megahit at the box office, it was a critical darling as well. Jaws would be nominated for Best Picture next to movies like Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, that year’s winner. Even more than the technical advances in filmmaking, the dual-citizenship this movie enjoyed is what really separates this era of Hollywood from what we know today. 

The modern outpost affords some membership for those films we’d call blockbusters. The last five years, we’ve seen auteur-driven pics like Wicked, Avatar: The Way of Water, and both DUNE movies land as Best Picture Nominees, but only after the range of nominees was expanded out to ten, widely considered an apology from The Academy for not nominating Dark Knight. And the blockbuster/ high-art discussion still generally puts these things in competition: Spiderman will never be nominated for Best Picture.

A part of what drove me to write about this film at this milestone is this sort of irony hanging over the conversation about blockbusters. Blockbusters have been “dumbing things down” for audiences since the beginning, and it worked just fine. That’s not really what modern audiences are tiring of. Narrative and thematic focus can work really well when the guy in the chair knows what he’s doing.

 

The Spielberg Effect Pt. 1: Filmmaking

Spielberg has repeated many times about how if he had known up front just how technically difficult it would be to make this film, he never would have made it, especially not as a blossoming filmmaker on like his second movie. He was just a kid making the ultimate gamble of his career when it was still in its earliest stages. He shared,

“I was panicked. I was out of my mind with fear—not of being replaced, even though people were trying to fire me, but of letting everybody down. I was twenty-six, and even though I actually felt like a veteran by that time, nobody else felt that way about me. I looked younger than twenty-six. I looked seventeen, and I had acne, and that doesn’t help instill confidence in seasoned crews.”

         A lot of the tension was owing to the technical hangups that came with operating a giant mechanical shark that had to pop in and out of the water on cue. It is pop culture scripture that the darn shark just would not work. Spielberg described in an interview for Vanity Faire,

“I was only getting two shots on some days. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make this movie, sitting around for seven, eight hours, waiting for the shark to work, or waiting for the barrels to sink without coming right back up. I was getting one shot before lunch and one shot before five o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Jaws was a fun movie to watch but not a fun movie to make. It was made under the worst of conditions. People versus the eternal sea. The sea won the battle—but where we won was with audiences in every country.”

There’s a lot of material out there tracking all the technical challenges of bringing this film to life. Lotsa' documentaries and whatnot about how the shark kept sinking to the bottom of the ocean. My interests with this blog tend to be more thematic, and so this is another one of those times where we’re going to look at the artistic implications of the filmmaking decisions. 

         The parts of the filmmaking that, understandably, get the most attention circle around the filming of the actual shark attacks. I’m going to illustrate terror of this movie by drawing a comparison to arguably the first Jaws copycat, Grizzly.

Like Jaws, the first attack in Grizzly puts us in the POV of the killer monster. But with Jaws we not only can’t see the creature, we can’t hear it either. You can naturally intuit that we aren’t following the POV of like an angelfish or something, but the situation allows us to project a sort of supernaturality to the entity that’s about to take out this poor girl. We don’t get that chance hearing Mr. Bear snorting every step he takes. You honestly almost imagine the poor guy’s just finished a marathon or something. This also makes it harder for us to believe that this girl wouldn’t hear this 1,000 ton predator stomping around through the trees. 

Sharks also do their best work underwater where we can’t see them. Grizzly doesn’t have that luxury, and so it tries to compensate by heightening the situation with flying body parts and whatnot blood that look like melted crayon. These are very cheap tricks to try manufacturing terror that aren't being supplied by the filmmaking. It’s part of the magic of Jaws that the shark doesn’t have to show itself to make us feel violated with terror. All it takes is the performance of Susan Backlinie, and the two rapidly alternating notes from John Williams’ iconic film score.

    Watching the first murder scene with no context, you honestly wonder if you're watching this girl being attacked by some satanic water demon. The situation has the feel of something like the first murder in Nightmare on Elm Street, where you honestly don't know what's happening to this poor girl and can't even begin to anticipate how you would defend yourself against something that doesn't feel like it's from this world.

    And that’s what made Jaws so effective. So terrifying. It painted a picture of this nightmare threat that could kill us without ever even showing its face--and told us that this thing lived in our backyard. That first murder scene lets you think Freddy Krueger is down there making this poor girl squeal the way she is. In Spielberg’s words, 

“I thought it would be very scary not to show it at all. If the shark had come out of the water, it would have been spectacular but there would have been nothing primal about it—it would have just been another monster moment that all of us had already seen in other films. I wanted the jerking motion of the first victim to trigger our imagination about what was going on below. I felt that was stronger than showing the snout or even a glimpse of fin.

Even after the shark has had its first peek-a-boo, most of the tension is generated by anchoring the camera on images of … basically anything but the shark. Floating barrels. Disappearing floating barrels. The back of the boat being swamped with water as the shark drags it over the surf. Part of this was creative necessity–the mechanical shark not cooperating–but it worked to mystify the threat the characters are combatting. That's nothing to say of segments like the Indianapolis monologue which invokes the terror of the shark during a moment of relative tranquility. Spielberg found creative applications of film language to convey his point and draft an entertaining playground for the audience.

Of course, this is all just the dressing. Audiences don’t connect with camera tricks or match cuts. Where Spielberg’s genius really shone was in the literal storytelling. 

The Spielberg Effect Pt 2: Writing

Spielberg admitted that his biggest gripe with the book was that the characters were all unlikable. Hence, one of his central contributions was making these guys a few shades more endearing.

    The movie’s biggest deviation is probably in the character of Hooper, who plays a very different function in the source material. He’s still our science guy in the book, yes, but Benchley’s Hooper was more of a “hot nerd,” and he’s also much more haughty and arrogant. Hooper’s relationship with Brody is more of a rivalry. He tests Brody’s sense of masculinity the same as the shark. Hooper enters the scene after Brody’s moment of disgrace, when Brody is being fired upon for having not closed the beaches, and swoops in to save the day like a hero.

Oh, and he also sleeps with Brody's wife.

In the book, it’s made clear that Ellen married below her class to be with Brody, and some ten years into their marriage, these are things they are thinking about. And so when this hot lifeguard swings into town and reminds Ellen of the kind of life she used to have, things happen … 

    That subplot was one of the first things to be dropped in adaptation, which goes a long way to make everyone more likeable. Ellen and Chief Brody actually have a very healthy relationship. Ellen acts as the focal point for Brody's home base--the thing he gets to return to if he succeeds in killing the shark. I suppose a consequence of this is that Ellen’s character has less to do in the film, which I guess is a problem for your leading female character. But at the same time, if the most important thing your female lead does is cheat on her husband …

Hooper also eventually meets a grizzly end in Benchley’s book. The shark cage episode does not go well for him, but the circumstances in the book were also much different. The motivation for Hooper getting into the cage in the book has more to do with scientific narcissism than necessity. Hooper wants to get pictures of the thing to take back and show his buddies at school, and that recklessness is what puts him in the position to be taken out by the shark. Brody is only willing to let Hooper try out this stupid idea after he figures out that he’s screwing his wife and he just decides, “You know what, dude? Who am I to stop you …”  

    The movie has him jumping down specifically to try injecting it to fulfill their original goal of killing this son of a fish. It’s still a bit of a suicide mission, but unlike in the book, it is a motivated one, a necessary risk he’s taking to try solving the problem. There isn’t that same level of hubris that needs punishing. Nor is Hooper the kind of character who would do something so reckless if there were any alternative.

         A huge improvement he made upon the source material was in adding in some necessary emotional pay-off to the story. A large part of this was humanizing these characters and smoothing over certain character actions, but a lot of that was simply turning our attention to the fact that these are human beings existing in a system.

    I don’t know anyone who considers Jaws to be a “tender” film, but Spielberg still inserted a human element that gave the movie some emotional underpinning. The mirroring interaction between Brody and his son was not in the script. Spielberg had merely noticed the child actor mimicking Roy Scheider and asked if they would do that again with the camera rolling. This goes a long way to help give Brody some necessary human qualities.

Good heroes do their most important work out of their element, and that’s very much true of Brody going out onto the water to stop this shark. The movie adaptation drops the marital stress and instead puts the locus of tension on Brody’s sense of displacement in the community he is supposed to be protecting. He has legal authority, yes, but he doesn’t have the respect of the community he is charged with keeping safe.

Something to note is that Brody doesn’t really appear to be motivated by approval. He’s not doing any of this hoping that the townsfolk or the mayor will give him a parade. But in the absence of any kind of support, he appears to lack the fuel to follow through with his convictions. And this is what has him go along with the mayor’s very bad idea to keep the beaches open with a killer shark parked just outside. And this is where making Hooper more likable goes a long way to bolster the story. 

    Far from rivals, Hooper and Brody in the movie are cut from the same cloth. Like Brody, Hooper has no roots on Amity Island and is not received well by the community—even as he is working to serve it. They are both swimming upstream trying to get the town to take the necessary measures to eliminate this shark problem. Brody’s partnership with Hooper, and the findings they uncover together, spur him to take greater action and overcome the resistance in place until they go out to confront the shark on his home territory.

Brody resolves this part of the equation midway through when the beach is reopened for the 4th of July and the shark strikes again. This is when Brody is finally venerated for opposing Vaughn’s terrible idea to keep serving up the beachgoers as appetizers. This is when the majority of the plot threads start to come together--this is when it feels like we're going to get our climax. I’ve always felt there’s a version of events where the story ends during that fourth of July beach attack. The default storytelling instinct might be to house the final confrontation here when you have the greatest potential for casualties.

But there’s still an hour of story still to go. So I guess the question is … why? Why not kill the shark earlier? What internal character stuff still needs resolving? How does it serve the narrative to take the center of action out here with just these three? 

    Part of it is that there’s something poetic about going out to meet the monster on its own territory, but the second half of the story also takes all the tension between Brody and the community and focalizes it through the dynamic between Brody and Quint, and this gives Brody a much more pronounced opportunity to self-actualize. 

Quint has everything Brody does not. He has authority. He’s fierce. And what’s more, he belongs here. The first time we see Quint is when he announces himself at the town hall meeting and steals everyone’s attention, and all without even needing to get up from his seat. Watching that scene, you get the idea that he had been there all along, or maybe he just sprouted from the mortar of the town itself. Quint offers his services to kill the shark right after the attack on the Kintner boy, but no one takes him up on his offer. That doesn’t happen until after Brody comes into himself and demands that the problem be confronted head-on. It’s sort of set-up as a plausibility that signing Quint on is going to be the thing that saves the day. 

    And so we spend half the film thinking that Quint is this secret weapon that’s going to kill the shark for us. He’s at home on the open seas. Moreover, he’s just tough. This is reinforced with how the camera frames him heroically across their ocean hunt.

But turns out, not even Quint is any match for old Bruce. His maniacality that we thought portended mad genius was actually just madness. In the end, Quint gets to be the film’s final sacrifice. That part of the story was always going to come from Brody.

This is also why it makes sense that Hooper survives in the finished film. His thesis doesn’t need disproving. But his presence has been a sort of safety blanket that Brody has floated on through most of this film, which is why he needs to check out for the final confrontation between Brody and the shark. (Spielberg actually did intend to kill Hooper in the cage, but the live shark they used to film this sequence ended up busting up the model cage before they could get the dummy in there, so they just used what they had.) 

    Brody needs to prove to himself that he can do this on his own. His ability to act is not dependent on possessing the right allies or the blessing of a clueless mayor. Even when his lifeboat is literally sinking from under him, his conviction is enough.

“The Masses”

Another observation that I kept returning to was how for a movie that made basically built film pop culture, the film actually plays to a very low expectation of how the masses behave. The water is the one place—the only place—where the shark can get you, and the townsfolk express profound entitlement to jump headfirst in their skivvies. When the townspeople aren't serving themselves up for shark bait on the beaches, they’re romping around the bay in paddle boats like a bunch of dodos. And when the science guy comes in to tell them they’re being dum-dums, they react with hostility.

  This has root in the source material which frames the shark problem as mostly a government cover-up problem, as well as the town’s willful ignorance with such matters. In adaptation, that all mostly gets reorganized to focus on the town’s entitlement for leisure.

    Most noteworthy I guess is how the film explores leisure and indulgence from the vantage point of adults who are settled. We enter the world through the eyes of college kids who are kind at that age of endlessly pursuing pleasure, but we soon get to find out that this is more of a system error than something experienced specifically by kids. Our main characters aren’t teenagers. These aren’t college kids. These are working class adults who feel entitled to their measure of indulgence. When Brody tries to take away their toys, they throw a tantrum. And this makes the film relatively unique against the blockbusters that would follow in its tracks.  

The "Jurassic" movies have a similar kind of interest, but they never really grill the consumer base. The onus of error is generally on some higher-up for being greedy. Some millionaire overlord who’s taking advantage of the appetites of the many. The first Jurassic World probably shows the masses at their most entitled, but even there, it's the bankrollers and military dudes who are shown to be puppeteering this mess. Here, the townsfolk are as much to blame as Mayor Vaughn for keeping the beaches open. 

    And so the film draws a weird parallel between the kind of summer entertainment the beach patrons expect from being allowed to swim in the water and the summer entertainment the theater patrons desire from seeing people getting chomped on in the water. Really, it’s our own need to be indulged, entertained, that’s on trial here. There’s something very Hitchcock to the way Spielberg commandeers the medium for entertainment to expose our own appetite for leisure. It’s a weird wrinkle in this movie’s fabric that this fixture of popular entertainment effectively shames its own audience for having such ravenous appetites for amusement.

    So, what? Was Spielberg just playing a joke on us all the while? Are we now complicit in our own walk of shame? I wrestled with this for a while, even during the writing of this essay, but I don't think it's quite that simple.

The movie gets away with probing its own consumer base by stressing Brody himself as a sort of everyman, a working-class gent who gets thrown into extraordinary circumstances and gets to rise to the occasion. This is maybe the film trying to have it both ways, trying to gain credence by exposing some sin of the proletariat only to placate it into a state of submission. But the film also commits to its principles in one way that I find very telling.

Brody doesn’t really get a “hero’s welcome.” We don’t see the townspeople like throwing him a party as he lands on the beach. Nor do we really miss it. We don’t particularly value their opinion, and we don’t need them to validate Brody’s victory. This isn’t a story about an everyday man ascending to wealth or popularity in his circle: this is him coming to terms with his responsibilities and his capabilities. The film creates a very closed circuit: Brody takes care of business, then he and Hooper get to paddle home and go home. Brody, to his wife and kids. Hooper, to his oceanographic institute. What other ending could a guy like Brody ask for? 

Some twenty years after Jaws, a period which saw him weaving between realms of high art and popular entertainment, Spielberg described his own drive as a filmmaker by sharing,

“I began wanting to make people happy from the beginning of my life. As a kid, I had puppet shows—I wanted people to like my puppet shows when I was eight years old. My first film was a movie I made when I was twelve, for the Boy Scouts, and I think if I had made a different kind of film, if that film had been, maybe, a study of raindrops coming out of a gutter and forming a puddle in your back yard, I think if I had shown that film to the Boy Scouts and they had sat there and said, ‘Wow, that’s really beautiful, really interesting. Look at the patterns in the water. Look at the interesting camera angle’—I mean, if I had done that, I might have been a different kind of filmmaker. Or if I had made a story about two people in conflict and trying to work out their differences—which I certainly wouldn’t have done at twelve years old—and the same Boy Scout troop scratching the little peach fuzz on their chins had said, ‘Boy, that had a lot of depth,’ I might have become Marty Scorsese. But instead the Boy Scouts cheered and applauded and laughed at what I did, and I really wanted to do that, to please again.”

  

A Bigger Boat

Gold Rush (1925)

    We are fifty years out from this film. If we wanted to flip that time scale around and jump fifty years before Jaws, that puts us right in the midst of the silent film era. This was before Dorothy ever went to Oz. Before Humphrey Bogart ever told Ingrid Bergman, “We’ll always have Paris.” Before John Wayne ever rode a horse over the Wild West.

There’s just such abundance of wealth on either side of the divide that the thought that there could be waves of golden ages yet to come, it’s enough to make a guy like me go a little crazy. Enough to make him hop on his keypad and reach through the computer screen to grab readers by the jugular and shake as they demand, “Watch movies in the theater, you cowards!” With the film world hanging on as thinly as it is—facing such challenges as the streaming wars, corporate greed, or YouTubers who say they want studios to start making original films but only ever give attention to remakes and sequels—it is fair to have a measure of trepidation. 

Fantastic 4: First Steps (2025)

I’m publishing this piece here at the start of the 2025 summer movie season: what many are praying will be the season that finally gets the industry back on its feet after the surprise twist of the COVID shutdown and the double strikes of 2023. That remains to be seen. The potential is there–it always has been–but there will be shared responsibility from both audiences and distributors to carry this ark to its final destination. At the start of the year, Deadline surveyed a host of theater chain owners for their opinion on the state of the union, and there were some bits that I thought were very telling, 

"If there’s a threat to moviegoing, it’s in the major studios’ failure to support more movies on the big screen. In an effort to turn a quick profit, some studios will underspend in a film’s campaign, or flat out fail in reaching an audience, thus sending a film into homes at a rapid rate. While such results are great for the studio, it takes a toll on a leading star’s commercial reputation. Moviegoing begets moviegoing, and if there’s a slew of titles opening to single digits, or even low double digits, how do we begin to spread more word of mouth?"

    Just this last week, actress Dakota Johnson, spelled it out in even more dire terms, saying, “I think it’s hard when creative decisions are made by committee and it’s hard when creative decisions are made by people who don’t even really watch movies or know anything about them, and that tends to be what’s occurring a lot." 

So, yes, there's a lot of reordering up top that needs to go down if cinema is to have a future. But this only comes together if filmmakers and audiences alike come together and ask the honest questions about what makes the cinema such an essential part of culture. I'm not here to downplay the responsibility that producers and distributors have in cultivating a healthy creative landscape, but the influence that critics and audiences have in guiding this current goes severely underdiscussed, to everyone's detriment.

Vertigo (1958)

    I'm also not here to say we should be ignoring other threads in the film ecosystem, like international and independent markets. Those absolutely deserve and require our continual attention. Modern audiences also need to do their part to engage with classical cinema--the part of cinema that existed before Spielberg. (I've written about that as well.) I'm not discounting any of that. Rather, I'm just drawing attention to what happens when modes of film are needlessly put in competition with one another.

    And maybe this is better suited for a whole new essay (or maybe just my retrospective on the Jurassic World trilogy), but it's in reading the critical appraisals celebrating how straightforward or simple Jaws is that ... I find myself thinking that a large part of the reason that Hollywood is in the situation it is because a large segment of critics (and wannabe critics) choose to penalize films for doing exactly what Spielberg did not just with Jaws, but most of his career.

The Greatest Showman (2017)

    There are some very pronounced examples of critics choosing to reject a perfectly fine movie simply because it plays too much to popular sensibilities. They do this ignoring that history has shown us that even "popular films" can have intricate craftsmanship and be vessels for insight. Sometimes these movies persevere, sometimes they don't. These critics punish movies for doing exactly what Jaws did ... and then wonder why we don't get more movies like Jaws.

    Yeah, Jaws opened the gates for some real duds, but it also lit the beacon for many social touchstones--and we've always had the ability to tell the difference. It's no head scratcher why audiences respond to something like A Quiet Place over something like Grizzly, both of which were very much inspired by what Spielberg did back in 1975.

         Part of what makes Jaws such an essential document is the way it exposes how this divide between high art and pop art has always been tenuous at best, arbitrary at worst. Spielberg himself has swam between “high” and “popular” art at his own leisure many times in the decades since. He would launch Jurassic Park the same year as Schindler’s List. One became the highest-grossing film of the day, the other won Best Picture. And he’s also gone to bat for the Oscars a couple of times this century as well. (Seriously, why did none of you fools see West Side Story?) There is room for both. 

    There always has been.

                --The Professors