Steven Spielberg had no idea about sharks, he was afraid of the water, the actors were on the verge of mutiny . . . and yet "Jaws" made film history

"The White Radish" – it rises unmistakably from the depths to just below the water's surface, its tapered, conical snout crowned with some trimmed greenery: the Hiltl restaurant chain is advertising itself at the 2017 Zurich Film Festival with a pretty cinematic allusion that makes the carnivorous horror smile in a vegetarian way.

Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" not only immediately spawned a whole series of more or less uncouth offspring, but has long since become a classic, enduring countless adaptations and mockeries. Although the box office records of the time were soon surpassed, June 20, 1975, remains the day that ushered in Hollywood's blockbuster era and the "teenage summer movie" bonanza.

Filming, however, was tough for the 27-year-old Spielberg, who was making his second feature film on Martha's Vineyard, where the local population is also becoming increasingly reluctant to accept all the commotion. The actors seem to have been on the verge of mutiny – Roy Scheider rolls his eyes in front of the local television camera, and Richard Dreyfuss regrets "the mistake."

What should have taken 65 to 70 days of filming ended up being 159. The producers threatened to pull out before Sidney Sheinberg, the president of Universal Pictures (and husband of Lorraine Gary, who played the police chief's wife), intervened and doubled the budget.

It all began with the book, which, although a bestseller, would soon be swallowed up by the success of the movie monster. Surprisingly, the cover of the very first American edition of Peter Benchley's "Jaws," published in 1974, features neither fish nor girl. When the two appear later that year, the shark, remarkably, keeps its mouth closed.

It wasn't until the film poster the following year that the gaping mouth and wild fangs became iconic. The book shares the basic features of the film, but has a much broader focus. Benchley contributed as a writer to only the first of the numerous script versions; in the film, he makes a brief appearance as a television reporter.

If this still gripping film made history, it's also because it implemented horror not merely as mass entertainment, but – a key Spielberg trait – explicitly as a family film. Benchley's film, on the other hand, features protagonists who also have sex lives, something the film knows nothing about. Also interesting is the economic dimension of the devastation to the fictional Amity Island that the shark's appearance brings. Given the backdrop of the 1970 recession, this dimension is significantly more serious than the behavior of "greedy profiteers" that the film denounces.

Benchley clearly knows less about the living conditions of his protagonists than about those of the main character, a male animal unlike in the film. Science, however, was nowhere near where it would be just a quarter of a century later—spurred not least by the enormous interest in sharks that the film subsequently brought in its wake.

Spielberg's dramatic ingenuity has rightly been praised, with which he turned the technical glitches that caused his three lousy shark dummies to constantly fail into an advantage: by staging the shark as an invisible, threatening disaster beneath the water's surface – suspense à la Hitchcock.

When Spielberg named his shark dummies "Bruce," after his lawyer, it didn't just give the shark in "Finding Nemo" its name: it also recalls a 19th-century aperçu that referred to lawyers as "land-sharks." Spielberg had no idea about sharks, and two years later he expressed "mixed feelings" about "Jaws": the "simplest film I've ever seen in my life." In any case, this didn't help him overcome his oft-expressed fear of water.

How did Benchley come up with the material? According to Frank Mundus, a Long Island fisherman who inspired the character of the shark hunter Quint in the novel, "Big Daddy" gave the author the idea: the two-ton great white shark (the zoologically correct German name), which he caught in 1964. But something else probably provided the impetus.

The third member of the group of shark hunters, alongside Quint and police chief Brody, is the marine biologist Hooper, who in the novel tells of an undertaking – what wouldn't he have given to have been able to be part of it: Peter Gimbel, a New York adventurer and former investment banker, had documented his search for the phantom great white shark, which became the 1971 film "Blue Water, White Death".

What Hooper doesn't mention is that there's also a book about it – Peter Matthiessen's superb account "Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark," about the project marked by endless failures and frustrations. Under the title "Blue Water, White Death," the hour-and-a-half-long film was shown in Zurich a year later. At the Rex cinema on Bahnhofstrasse, "Jaws" ran under the patronage of the WWF for four weeks in March/April, with three screenings a day in the afternoon for ages 12 and up. So, everyone was prepared when, almost four years later, at the end of January 1976, "Jaws" hit Zurich's cinemas (the Apollo Cinerama and the Luxor) and stayed for a good two months.

The great white shark has been called "the quintessential shark," the epitome of a shark. Benchley begins by having the giant fish swim idly through the night sea, its "small, primitive brain" registering nothing of note. According to John Williams, the composer who wrote the music for almost all of Spielberg's films, the evocative two-note ostinato that propels the shark forward at the opening, skillfully working with the contrast between sound and silence, was meant to be explicitly "brainless."

We now know better. Sharks have very large, well-developed brains. Experiments with lemon sharks, for example, have shown that they solve tasks eighty times faster than rabbits or cats. Accordingly, they have a good memory. And sharks have even been observed playing.

Sharks have everything "a scientist dreams of," Hooper says in the novel; they are beautiful "like an incomprehensibly perfect mechanism" and "as mysterious as any animal on earth." Eventually, however, the shark will have pulled him out of the underwater cage, and he will be hanging lifeless on either side of the giant mouth (while the film leaves him alive).

The film's most substantial expansion over the book is the cabin scene in which, while waiting for the fish at night, Quint and Hooper try to outdo each other with their injuries. Then Brody asks Quint about a scar on his arm, whereupon Robert Shaw launches into his fabulous long, mumbled monologue. It is the remnant of a tattoo that commemorated Quint's service on the USS Indianapolis – and thus the sinking of the cruiser, which was sunk by a Japanese submarine and had recently transported components for the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Quint was one of the 317 survivors of the original crew of 1,196, dozens of whom are believed to have fallen victim to oceanic whitetip sharks while drifting in the open sea for four days. Since then, Quint hates sharks and has never worn a life jacket again.

In a 1990 satire for the New York Times that struggled to be original, Peter Benchley looked back on his experiences in the film business. Titled "Loved Ahab. Hated the Whale," he imagines himself as Herman Melville in contemporary Hollywood. What he finds most painful is that "Moby Dick, my Leviathan, my evocation of the scourge of God, has been turned into a fish."

Benchley pays homage to Melville's novel by depicting the hunt as the final showdown. As in Melville's novel, it lasts three days. Where Moby Dick slams the whaler, the nameless shark sinks the boat, the "Orca," and, like Ahab the whale, now drags Quint into the depths. While in the book the shark spared Brody, in the film Brody will cause him to explode in a cathartic explosion.

Peter Benchley died in 2006. In 2015, Etmopterus benchleyi , a small shark species in the lanternshark family, was first described and named in his honor.