<em>Jaws</em> Is Still (And Will Always Be) My Favorite Movie

I’ll never forget June 20, 1975. The date is permanently tattooed on my brain for two reasons. First, it was the day that I turned six. If I shut my eyes, I can still picture my birthday haul from that year: A brand-new three-speed and a factory-sealed box of Topps baseball cards. The bike is memorable mainly for being purple—a color I would have never chosen. The cards, however, were an absolute gold mine. I still remember that the last card in the last pack I ripped open was a holy-grail rookie card of my favorite player, Fred Lynn, who would go on to win 1975’s Rookie of the Year honors as well as being named the AL’s MVP. The second reason why I’ll never forget that day is what my family did after we polished off the last melting slices of my Carvel ice cream cake. We went to see a new movie called Jaws on opening day.

Again, I was six. I can still imagine the line of hyped-up, thrill-junkie teens snaking around the block to buy tickets at the Showcase Cinemas in Dedham, Massachusetts. The movie had been out in the world less than twelve hours and already the word had somehow spread that this was the movie you had to see. I can picture the poster with a leviathan-scaled Great White with teeth like daggers rising up to the ocean’s surface, where an unsuspecting female swimmer is about to get turned into chum. I can picture the blood-red letters spelling out J-A-W-S on the theater’s marquee. And I can picture the teenage usher shooting my parents an insinuating, I-don’t-know-if-this-is-the-best-idea look as he ripped our tickets. I didn’t know it at the time, but my life was about to change forever.

I remember the thrill of anticipation mixed with mild nausea as the lights started to dim in the theater. From that moment on, things get a little spotty. I know my heart was racing like a fucking greyhound as a young skinny-dipper stripped off her clothes and sprinted into the ocean for a moonlit swim. I know my stomach sank like cement block as John Williams’s iconic two-note da-duh…da-duh score kicked in. And I know that I splayed my fingers over my eyes as that skinny-dipper got bucked and thrashed around like a chewy rag doll. Not that that did anything to block out the screams, mind you. My God, those screams. I’m proud to say that I stuck it out until the end of the movie, but I’d be lying if I also said I didn’t spend most of it with my eyes squeezed shut. But it doesn’t matter because watching that movie was a rite of passage. A rite of passage that would mark the beginning of a fifty-year love affair that’s never lost an ounce of its primal, white-knuckle power.

Jaws’ young, 27-year-old director, Steven Spielberg, nearly suffered a nervous breakdown as the film ran into one fiasco after another.

A week after seeing Jaws, my parents rented a cottage in Scituate on Boston’s South Shore. It was two blocks from the ocean. Looking back, I now see that vacation as my folks’ last-ditch attempt to save their marriage before finally deciding to throw in the towel. And I think my mom also imagined a month of healing, carefree trips to the beach. Fun would be had, Coppertone would be slathered, Kodak moments would be made. But I never put so much as a toe into the water. How could I? I was still shattered and scarred by Jaws.

It didn’t matter that there weren’t any Great Whites within a hundred miles of Scituate. Reason and rational thought were luxuries six-year-old me couldn’t afford on my dollar-a-week allowance. I not only refused to go in the ocean, I also steered clear of swimming pools and bathtubs. I was convinced that Jaws would somehow find a way to squeeze through the tiny drain hole and do to me what he did to that skinny-dipper. Or little Alex Kintner on that inflatable yellow raft, spouting geysers of arterial spray like the fountain outside the Bellagio. Or poor Pipit the dog, who’s playfully fetching sticks in the surf one minute and nowhere to be found the next. Even Quint, an old salt who’d seen some serious shit and who’d spent five days fighting off sharks in the South Pacific after his ship, the USS Indianapolis, was torpedoed in the final days of WWII? He was helpless in the end, getting chomped in half, kicking and howling all the way. It was a rough summer for me. A rough summer without a lot of personal hygiene on my end since the shower was a danger zone, too.

I can’t count how many times I’ve seen Jaws since that summer. Fifty? A hundred? Probably more. I’ve seen in theaters around the world. I’ve seen it in drive-ins. I’ve seen it on VHS and Laserdisc and DVD and Special Edition Blu-ray. But when I first watched it, I had no clue about its backstory. How its young, twenty-seven-year-old director, Steven Spielberg, nearly suffered a nervous breakdown as the film ran into one fiasco after another. How “Bruce,” the mechanical shark, rarely worked for more than a few seconds at a time before ending up on the bottom of the Atlantic. How the film’s budget ballooned from $3.5 million to $9 million. How it went so over schedule that Universal was thisclose to firing Spielberg from the picture. How Robert Shaw was unable to deliver his famous USS Indianapolis speech on the planned day because he was blind drunk. How Roy Scheider chanced upon the role of Chief Brody because he bumped into Spielberg at a party. How Richard Dreyfuss initially turned down the role of Hooper, but later begged to get it back after being freaked out by a poorly received early screening of his previous film, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. I would learn all of that stuff later reading everything I could get my hands on about the film, in particular screenwriter Carl Gottlieb’s fantastic on-set diary, The Jaws Log (I highly recommend it).

During Jaws’ opening weekend, theater owners were taking in babysitting money hand over fist. Universal opened it on a then-staggering 465 screens, making it one of the very first “wide releases,” along with the Charles Bronson action stinker Breakout. By the end of its first weekend, Jaws had raked in $7 million. After a month, it was at $49.5 million. By the end of its initial run, it had pulled in $260 million and change, making it the highest-grossing movie of all time. Hollywood conventional wisdom says that Jaws marked the birth of the modern blockbuster. No argument there. But it also pins the death of the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls New Hollywood golden age on Spielberg’s film. That feels less fair. Personally, I’ve always believed that Jaws fits in perfectly with those maverick auteur-driven films. The only thing it can truly be blamed for is its success—an opinion that Spielberg, perhaps unsurprisingly, was quick to agree with when I asked him about it several years ago.

During Jaws’ opening weekend, theater owners were taking in money hand over fist.

Jaws was too much of a popular phenomenon to ever expect to get a fair shake from some critics who were too blinded by the film’s box office to see it for the masterpiece it is. That may seem churlish, but we critics can be a churlish bunch. In time, Spielberg’s Great White blockbuster would spawn a wave of knockoffs and wannabes—Joe Dante’s Piranha, James Cameron’s Piranha II: The Spawning, Michael Anderson’s Orca (starring a miserable-looking Richard Harris), Ovidio G. Assonitis’ Tentacles (featuring the dream-team pairing of John Huston and Shelley Winters), Lewis Teague’s Alligator (actually pretty fun) and William Girdler’s Grizzly (woof!), not to mention a long, lurid list of European copycats stuffed with bargain-bin effects and more-than-ample nudity like 1977’s Tintorera. One of them, an Italian cheapie called Great White (aka The Last Shark, aka L’ultimo Squalo), was such shameless bit of larceny that Universal ended up suing (and winning) to prevent its release in the US. Perhaps worst of all, though, were the sanctioned Jaws sequels themselves. I tracked down all of them in the mom-and-pop video shops that were once as ubiquitous as toadstools after a heavy rain. Only later did I realize that I was chasing a high I’d never be able to duplicate.

As a film critic, I get asked all the time what my favorite movie is. And every time, I feel like I should say something smart like Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game or Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels or Federico Fellini’s 8 ½. Don’t get me wrong, all of those movies are fantastic. But I always end up going with honesty. It’s Jaws. It will always be Jaws. With any luck, it will be my kids’ favorite movie one day too. As for me, my Jaws memories are as permanently etched as the sound of the Ahab-like Quint singing “Farewell and Adieu to You Fair Spanish Ladies.” It’s a movie that, even fifty years later, continues to nourish me and inspire me and make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and salute when I hear that two-note theme. I wish I could say the same about that Fred Lynn rookie card, but my mom tossed it into the trash in a spring-cleaning purge a long time ago. For the record, I recently made the mistake of going onto eBay to find a replacement. It now sells for $7,500.