:IMAGE.half :INFO.half Jaws (1975) Three malfunctioning mechanical sharks turned a monster movie into a suspense film and invented the summer blockbuster. :STATS [icon:CLOCK] Runtime | 124 minutes [icon:STAR] Director | Steven Spielberg [icon:CHART] Budget | $9 million [icon:TRENDING_UP] Box office | $497 million worldwide [icon:FIRE] Score | John Williams :INFO A Failure That Became The Method The mechanical shark did not work in salt water. It sank, it corroded, its skin swelled, and a fifty five day shoot became a hundred and fifty nine. Spielberg's response was to shoot around it: a yellow barrel moving against the tide, a camera at water level, a severed leg dropping through green murk, and two notes from John Williams doing the work of a creature. The shark appears properly about eighty minutes in, by which point the audience has built something worse. The first half of the film is a municipal politics story about a town that cannot afford to close its beaches, and the second is three men on a boat that is too small, which is why the picture holds up as drama rather than spectacle. :JOURNEY Watching Jaws 4 Taken 3 Suppressed 5 Panicked 3 Hired 5 Recounted 5 Sinking :QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Chief Brody · Jaws · 1975] You're gonna need a bigger boat. :NOTE.half Universal opened it on over four hundred screens with a national television campaign, a strategy nobody had used for a serious release, and created the wide release summer model. :NOTE.half The Indianapolis speech was rewritten by Howard Sackler, expanded by John Milius and cut down by Robert Shaw himself the night before shooting. :NOTE The commercial consequence was enormous and not entirely good: the film's success taught the industry to bet on a small number of wide summer releases, which is still the structure of the business. The craft consequence was the opposite lesson, and the one Spielberg took forward. The film works because the threat is mostly implied, and every effective monster film since, from Alien to A Quiet Place, has been reverse engineering a broken rubber shark. :LINK https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073195/ Jaws on IMDb: full cast and crew