Jaws, The Greatest Movie Ever Made, is Fifty Years Old This Summer.

I am well aware that by kicking this thing off with words like “greatest” and “ever,” I am wading into highly subjective waters. Anyone proclaiming that any one person or place or piece of pizza or work of art is the preeminent example of its kind, “of all time,” is either selling something, engaging in a bit of cheeky hyperbole, or else they’re probably just an asshole. Stirring the pot.

There is a decent chance this whole thing spirals into a diatribe and lands me firmly in the asshole column; but my intentions are to hit that hyperbolic middle.

I must admit I have a bit of a soft spot for hyperbole. Not all of it, of course. Not the dangerous, disinformation-tool kind, but the good kind. The kind that gets deployed over the course of a casual, friendly conversation, or a spirited bar debate; as a means of expressing one’s intense belief in the merits of say, a rock band or a book or the best taco stand in town, it can be a charming and effective version of the hard sell. Particularly at a time when the recommendations of friends and family have been de-valued by a glut of streaming content and the impersonal algorithms that sift through it all and feed it to us.

If you were to tell me you just watched a show so good it could make a blind man see, I would know, of course, you were exaggerating; but you would certainly have my attention.

So, in the spirit of friendly hyperbole, I repeat the first half of my opening statement:

Jaws. Is the greatest movie. Ever made.

It could make a blind man see.

Now, about that second part; the one with the big, round number …

FIFTY.

Jaws is fifty years old.

Take a moment to let that sink in if need be.

I’ll wait.

For some of you, I imagine that fact will land with all the subtlety of a fridge chucked off a bridge. Because regardless of your affinity for—or indifference to—the film itself, I’m willing to bet that quite a few of you remember that summer like it was yesterday. The lines outside the local theater. Everyone asking if you’ve seen it yet. The way a few of your friends or family members suddenly refused to wade too far out into the water in the wake of its release. Everyone was talking about it. It was in the zeitgeist.

Though it would go on to become the first film to gross more than $100 million and ultimately be seen as the genesis of a summer tentpole movie season that seemingly has no end, its massive success was anything but pre-destined. In fact, less than a year before its June 20, 1975 release, it wasn’t a sure bet the damned shark movie would even be finished at all.

Tales of the troubled production of Jaws have been recounted countless times in the half century since it was first loosed on the world, so, here they come again. Who am I to break with tradition?

One commonly held belief is that there is a direct correlation between the film’s crackerjack suspense and the fact that “Bruce”—the twentyfive-foot, three-ton, remote-controlled great white star of the film—rarely worked the way it was supposed to and often looked remarkably silly when it did. In fact, the very first day the shark was to be used on set, it immediately sank, like a slapfull toolshed, to the bottom of Nantucket Sound.

One unanticipated hiccup—a consequence of Bruce being tested exclusively in freshwater pools—was the destructive, abrasive effect of saltwater on the delicate monster. The ocean ran roughshod on the shark’s robotic guts, destroying its internal motors and forcing an on-the-fly, on-set, square-one redesign of all the little mechanisms tasked with making Bruce move and chomp and eat people. All of this, of course, couldn’t be addressed until he was fished up off the sea floor and drained like some salvaged chunk of shipwreck.

As a result of these constant setbacks, Spielberg was forced to imagine creative ways to suggest the presence of his predator. In lieu of giving him a big, toothy close-up, buoyant, bright yellow barrels and fishing docks torn from their moorings were dragged through the water in the “animal’s” wake, allowing the audience to fill in the terrifying gaps in their minds. Not only did it imply that the shark was nearby, but because it was pulling those barrels behind it, the implication was that it was even closer than it seemed. Film cameras were also housed in a specially designed, plexiglass box and half-submerged to put the viewer directly into the water.

And of course, there may be nothing in the entire film that more effectively insinuates the presence of the creature like John Williams’s iconic BA-DUM, Ba-DuM score … An iconic theme that Spielberg himself originally considered too simplistic, and which has since gone on to transcend language barriers the world over, becoming universally understood shorthand for “something is about to eat us.” Thankfully, the filmmaker would have full faith in the instincts of his once and future composer/collaborator, but in the summer of 1974, having taken over the Cape Cod island hamlet of Martha’s Vineyard, Steven Spielberg was not yet the wunderkind who would launch a thousand blockbusters.

And now, I will pause to allow you the opportunity to Choose Your Own Cheesy Water/Shark Analogy: The twenty-seven-year-old filmmaker …

(A): was in over his head. Or…

(B): had bitten off more than he could chew.

Either way, Spielberg, who had spent years in the television trenches, had just one previous, feature-length theatrical film to his name; the effective—if slight—Texas road trip crimedramedy “The Sugarland Express” (1974), starring a young Goldie Hawn. Texas, it would be fair to assume, was not a particularly helpful training ground regarding what might have been Spielberg’s most ambitious decision on the set of Jaws; his insistence on shooting it on the actual open ocean. You know, where there are big waves and stuff. And wind. And even real sharks.

Prior to 1974, the majority of ocean-set films were shot in tanks, with controllable elements and matte-painted backdrops. Shooting Jaws at sea would no doubt lend the finished film a level of verisimilitude that wouldn’t have been possible in a big swimming pool. It was also a major factor contributing to the schedule ballooning from its initial fifty-five days, to a hundred and fifty-nine days. Three times the amount of shoot days agreed upon by the studio, and a constant point of contention that, on numerous occasions, nearly cost Spielberg his job.

As a consequence of its going wildly over schedule, it soon became apparent—much to the chagrin of the suits in the studio back on the West Coast—that Jaws was never going to make its intended, prime holiday release slot in the winter of 1974.

As a result, they were forced to push the film’s opening a full six months. A move which would drop it directly into the heart of a season that had long been reserved for the outcasts. Pictures the studios had lost faith in, that had tested poorly, or that no amount of reshoots or re-edits ever seemed to salvage. The bad bets, the favors, and vanity projects. Movies that the marketing departments had no idea how to sell or who to sell them to. Jaws was, by dint of simple necessity, doomed to either sink or make its splash in a square of the calendar traditionally considered to be Hollywood’s dumping ground … Summertime.

Whether or not it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, borne out by the quality of product that was typically released over the summer months; the numbers, historically, did in fact confirm the widely held belief that audiences simply had better, sandier, sunnier shit to do in the time between days Memorial and Labor, then hole themselves up in the dark of an auditorium.

Jaws would be, to the tune of nine figures, the exception that proved the rule. It proved the ever-loving holy shit out of it. Its unprecedented success would rattle an American filmmaking landscape that had only recently found its artistic footing, and it would signal a seismic change in the movie industry that—for better and worse—remains business as usual to this day. A full half a century later.

One of the truly unfortunate legacies attributed to Jaws, is the unkillable and oft-repeated belief that it was directly responsible for killing thoughtful, mid-budget, director-driven cinema in America for good. The studio system, for little more than a decade prior, had reluctantly resigned its livelihood to a generation of longhaired, dope-smoking, left-wing hippies.

A burgeoning interest in foreign cinema—the French New Wave, the Italian spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, and post-war Japanese filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa—had begun to take hold in Hollywood. The moviegoing public had begun to skew younger— the majority being under thirty years old—they were also more educated, curious, and socially conscious. Suddenly, chaste, technicolor musicals and lavish historical epics like “Mary Poppins” (1964), “Doctor Zhivago” (1965), and “The Sound of Music” (1965) were proving difficult to repeat and riskier to bankroll.

For the first time in America, for a brief, beautiful decade, filmmakers, as opposed to financiers and studio fat cats, were given the keys to the kingdom. Quite suddenly, directors were being acknowledged as the driving artistic authors of the films being made, marketed, and released across the country.

And then Jaws swam up and scared up a hundred million dollars and swallowed up the auteur movement and shit out five decades of loud, big budget, four-quadrant trash cinema.

This is, of course, a wild oversimplification.

It would be willfully ignorant not to at least acknowledge how it might seem that way on the surface, but to stop there insinuates, absurdly, that Jaws represented a hard stop. A line in the sand between the thoughtful cinema of the 70s and the excess of the 80s. On one side, there was Hal Ashby and “Easy Rider” (1969), and Altman and Malick and “The Deer Hunter” (1978) and “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), “The Long Goodbye” (1973) and Bogdanovich and “The Last Picture Show” (1971) and “The Last Detail” (1973) and “Five Easy Pieces” (1970) and “Harold and Maude” (1971) and then BAM—Big Shark, Eat People, Go Boom, Make Money.

The irony is that Jaws has far more in common with the films and filmmakers it was accused of killing, than it does with any of the four-quadrant popcorn comic book cash grabs it was credited with unleashing. One need only watch the damned thing with this in mind to see it for the thoughtful arthouse flick it truly is.

Most of my favorite scenes in my favorite film don’t involve a shark at all. And not because it wasn’t working, but because they allow little moments of humanity and pathos, and levity to breathe.

Roy Scheider’s put upon sheriff Brody, playing a quiet game of copycat with his young son at the dinner table before leaning in and grumbling, “give us a kiss” because he desperately needs it.

Richard Dreyfuss’ Hooper showing up unannounced with a bottle of both red and white wine because “I didn’t know what you were serving” and then tucking into a plate of food before anyone can answer his neurotic “Is anyone eating this?”

Brody popping the red wine bottle and glugging a pint glass full of it as Hooper exclaims, futilely, “you might wanna let that breathe.”

The characters in Jaws constantly talk over one another, forcing the audience to choose which conversation to pay attention to, a technique utilized so often by another of the new Hollywood auteurs of the 70s that it has become known as simply AltmanEsque, after Robert Altman, director of “Nashville” (1975), “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1971), and “M*A*S*H” (1970), among others.

When the men compare their scars in the belly of the Orca, there is a lovely, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment that occurs as Hooper and Quint are drunkenly recounting their respective run-ins with “big, fat Chinese fellas” and various sea creatures. Perhaps feeling left out of the first moment of genuine camaraderie since setting foot on the boat, Brody lifts his shirt and quietly considers his appendectomy scar, before deciding it isn’t really a story worth sharing.

And of course, few, if any blockbusters in the fifty years since have stopped their story dead in its tracks to allow for a monologue as harrowing and heartbreaking as Quint recalling his experience during the sinking of the USS Indianapolis near the end of World War II.

Everything we have seen him do to this point, and will see him do after, suddenly makes perfect sense. By the time he smiles and says, “So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb,” we know everything we need to know about him.

The Greatest Movie Ever Made.

So that about covers it. At least to the extent that I could manage to cover it under the crushing weight of a self-imposed responsibility I felt to give due credit to a film that has given me so much.

If you’re interested in a more thorough, nose-totail examination of the entire production, I can’t recommend Carl Gottlieb’s book, “The Jaws Log,” highly enough. His detailed, almost diary-entry style account of the production was informed by the fact that he was there, on the island, on set, keeping an actual diary, and even sharing a bungalow with Spielberg for the entirety of the shoot.

If you’ve hit your reading quota this week and prefer a more visual option, “The Shark is Still Working” (2007) from filmmaker Erik Hollander, is a charming, thorough documentary covering both the making of the film, as well as its enduring cultural impact.

Or, for a more social, tactile experience, mark July 17 down on your calendars and come celebrate 50 years of the best movie ever made with me, at Grove Roots Brewing. I’ll be on hand to introduce the film. There might even be some Jaws trivia, Narragansett, and even some new merchandise to mark the occasion.

EPILOGUE …

When I was first offered the opportunity to write this article, to reshuffle those same, oft-repeated stories in a way that might read as even remotely fresh, I was reluctant. What could I possibly add to fifty years of analysis, from every conceivable angle, by bellyflopping onto the top of that pile?

The honest answer is, not much.

There is, however, one way that I can write about Jaws that has never been written before. As briefly as possible, I would like to tag this appreciation piece with just a few of the examples of what Jaws has meant to me personally.

I made up my mind, nearly fourteen years ago now, (wow…) that if I was ever going to make a movie of my own, the first thing I needed to do, was to stop saying I was going to.

Instead, anytime anyone would ask, I began telling them we were set to start shooting on August 1. It was an entirely arbitrary date that I had plucked from the ether, and it happened to be less than two months away from the moment I first blurted it out.

I had decided, in a single, certainly beer-greased instant, that I would no longer be The Boy Who Cried Movie. By creating a deadline and stamping it on the calendar, I was committing to becoming something new. Something different. In sixty days, I would either fly or I would fail spectacularly; but one way or another, I was going to crawl my way out of that goddamned “someday” chrysalis. And though I’m certain I chewed up far too much of my word count waxing at the outset, about my affinity for it, it is not hyperbole when I say that Jaws informed and inspired my first film from the earliest spark of the story, until the day, years later, that we locked the final cut.

Because I knew I would be working with a microscopic budget of just $6,000, I crafted the story from word one as though my shark already wasn’t working. Because I had settled on a zombie film, I purposely structured the narrative so that the main characters actively avoided populated areas, thus allowing the audience to focus on the men at the heart of the story, and our crew of only five people to steer clear, as often as possible, from expensive makeup, special effects and hungry extras.

The entire third act would be an extended riff on that sequence below deck in the Orca, complete with a drunken sing-along of “Show Me the Way to Go Home.”

My character’s name in the movie is Ben. My last name is Gardner.

Ben Gardner is the name of the missing fisherman whose severed head makes an unforgettable appearance in one of Jaws’ most iconic jump scares.

I bonded with an absolute indie horror filmmaking legend at a bar in Midtown Manhattan over too much whisky and our shared love of Jaws. The very next day, he read my script and became influential in eventually getting it made.

Mostly, Jaws reminded me that movies about monsters are only as good as the people trying to slay them. Jaws does that better than any other example, period.

For me, the shark has always worked. Even when it didn’t.

Jeremy Gardner is the writer, director, and star of “The Battery” (2012) and “After Midnight” (2019). He has played supporting roles in numerous films. “The Battery” won the Audience Award for Best Feature and also received awards for Best Screenplay, Best Music, and Best Poster at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival (2013); The Audience Award for Best Feature at Dead by Dawn, Scotland’s International Horror Film Festival (2013); The Silver Scream Award at the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival (2013); Awarded Best Zombie Film at Fantaspoa; Nominated for Best Limited Release/Directto-Video Film at the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards (2015); won the Audience Award at Festival Mauvais Genre; and won Best Film at the Málaga International Week of Fantastic Cinema (2013). We wait, as some of his biggest fans, for his next film.