'Jaws': Half a Century of Fear in the Water

Steven Spielberg attended the premiere of 'Jaws' on March 26, 1975, at the Medallion Theater in Dallas. Under the influence of Valium, the director stood at the back of the room, nervously glancing from the screen to the audience. After one of the initial scenes, where the shark tears apart a child on a raft, a viewer in the front row ran out and vomited on the lobby carpet. He then returned to his seat. "At that moment, I knew the film would be a success," the director would later confess.

Fifty years ago, 'Jaws' made swimming at the beach a different experience. The film industry also changed after June 20, 1975 (in Spain, it premiered on December 19), when Universal released Steven Spielberg's third feature film in 409 theatres across the United States, almost as many as 'The Godfather' three years earlier. Today, it's not surprising for a blockbuster to open in thousands of cinemas, but back then, it was typical to reach a few screens and remain in theatres week after week. The change was significant: distribution and marketing costs increased, most revenue was earned in a few days, and the role of critics was diminished.

The summer blockbuster was born, a period that studios previously ignored. Spielberg also proved that young audiences didn't need stars to go to the cinema. The initial cast included Charlton Heston, Jeff Bridges, and Sterling Hayden, but the 'ET' director insisted on Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw: the star was the giant man-eating white shark. 'Jaws' also marked the beginning of the strategy to heavily advertise films on television. Universal spent over $700,000, an exorbitant amount for the time, on ads aired during the highest-rated programmes.

Planeta has reissued Peter Benchley's bestseller, published a year before the film. In addition to Javier Calvo's new translation, the volume includes additional content from the author's personal archives, reproductions of the original manuscript, and photographs from the set.

"The most spectacular film I've ever seen on screen," announced a double-page spread in EL CORREO on December 19, 1975. The now-defunct Astoria cinema in Bilbao, known for grand occasions, scheduled morning sessions on weekends due to the overwhelming public demand. Available on various platforms, here are seven reasons why 'Jaws' has become a cinematic legend.

The planned 55 days of shooting extended to 159. The final budget, close to $10 million, tripled initial estimates. The culprits were the residents of idyllic and posh Martha's Vineyard, who sabotaged the filming, and the three mechanical sharks built with the nickname Bruce, in honour of Spielberg's former lawyer, "terrifying and very expensive." Their hydraulic motors failed in the water, and the polyurethane skin looked fake. The director insisted on filming at sea and discarded footage of real fish. When he saw the poor results of the special effects, he chose not to show the creature until well into the film (it only attacks four times in two hours). The suggested threat proved to be a thousand times more terrifying.

As Peter Biskind notes in his essential essay 'Easy Riders, Raging Bulls', Jaws is a post-Watergate film about government corruption. The three protagonists are archetypes: the right-wing macho, the family man, and the left-wing intellectual Jew; a mariner and expert harpooner, the local sheriff, and an oceanographer/ichthyologist, who try to hunt a shark that empties the beaches of a tourist town. Spielberg always denied political symbolism, despite the existence of the character of the Amity mayor, an official who hides a threat from the citizens while heroes avert the danger: "'Jaws' was designed and made to scare as many people as possible, any political reference is purely accidental. Even the mayor's character enters the story not so much to give a negative image of power, but to increase suspense before the final drama," he defended.

Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, who had already worked with Spielberg on his debut film, 'The Sugarland Express', knew that the director was the right person to transform a mediocre airport novel into a roller coaster that leaves the audience breathless. First sequence. A couple, drunk on beer and lust, frolics on the beach at night. The girl waits for him naked and vulnerable in the water. Only the bell of a nearby buoy breaks the silence. The shark attacks provoke both anticipation and terror. Spielberg had already demonstrated his storytelling prowess and mastery of suspense on television in 'Duel'. For the late critic José Luis Guarner, this is "one of the most effective cinematic experiences of audience manipulation in the cinema of the seventies."

There are two pieces of music that evoke terror, both from string instruments: Bernard Herrmann's stabbing violins in 'Psycho' and John Williams' ominous double basses and cellos from the depths in 'Jaws'. In the excellent documentary 'The Music of John Williams', available on Disney Plus, composer and director review their relationship, which began with 'The Sugarland Express'. Spielberg had temporarily used another Williams soundtrack, 'Images', by Robert Altman, full of screeches and scary effects. But the musician conceived 'Jaws' as a nautical adventure, a pirate story, something that didn't convince the director. One day, Williams played the terrifying score's first notes to Spielberg with two fingers on the Steinway at his home. You heard the 'ostinato' and saw the shark even if it wasn't shown. "You feel something dangerous coming towards you, low notes in an atmosphere they don't belong to," defines the composer. Spielberg was surprised, but after listening several times, he understood the genius: "I had a shark that didn't work. And I had no idea John was going to give me a musical shark that worked better than the mechanical one."

The shadow of 'Jaws' extends to this day. At the ongoing Cannes Film Festival, two films pay homage to the classic: the Brazilian 'The Secret Agent', featuring an amputated leg and a child from the era obsessed with watching Spielberg's film, and the Australian 'Dangerous Animals', about a serial killer who films his victims being devoured by sharks. After the global success in 1975, sequels were inevitable. There were spurious ones, like 'Orca, the Killer Whale', with a declining Richard Harris, and 'Tentacles', an Italian production with John Huston and Henry Fonda, but also 'legal' ones. 'Jaws 2' again featured Roy Scheider as Brody, but in 'Jaws 3-D', no original cast members returned, and its hook was being shot in 3D. In 'Jaws: The Revenge', Michael Caine appeared, earning a million dollars for two weeks of work, with which he bought his mother a house. It was so bad that Universal abandoned the franchise.

After watching 'Jaws', swimming in the sea was never the same. Peter Benchley recounts in the 50th-anniversary edition of 'Jaws' that he carried a 1964 'New York Daily News' clipping in his wallet for years, reporting the capture of a two-ton great white shark off Long Island. The thousands of viewers who filled American cinemas in the summer of 1975 caught the fear of sharks, and beach hotel bookings suffered. Studies from the time indicate that many beaches, particularly on the US east coast (especially in Martha's Vineyard), experienced a drop in visitor numbers. The media amplified the 'Jaws effect', although shark attacks remained extremely rare. Thus, the International Shark Attack File shows that there was no significant increase in real incidents that year, although collective hysteria undermined swimmers' confidence. Spielberg has always regretted "the frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that occurred after 1975," as he recalled in an interview last year. "I'm not afraid of being eaten by a shark, but that sharks are angry with me."

A year before the release, cinemas were already showing a trailer with a voiceover that sounded like a documentary: "It's as if God created the devil and gave him... jaws (the film's original title)." Universal bombarded television with thirty-second ads and launched merchandising products like T-shirts, turning the audience into walking advertisements. The film ended up breaking the world box office record with 415 million euros, surpassing 'The Godfather' by 200 million. And all in the summer, a time that was previously a wasteland in theatres. The event film emerges, the one that must be seen and monopolises conversations. 'Jaws' received a rating for all audiences because, according to the committee in charge of the decision, "a shark has never mugged anyone." It won three Oscars (editing, score, and sound) and also deserved bad reviews, like that of the 'New York Times': "A noisy and confused film, with fewer thoughts than a child on a beach."