Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water: Jaws turns 50, but still resonates — and terrifies​on May 22, 2025 at 11:00 am

Jaws producers also decided to go big with television advertising spots for the flick, which wasn’t a common practice 50 years ago. Newspaper advertising was also key and was a daily occurrence in many markets. Marketing for the movie showed that a massive distribution on an opening weekend, along with a healthy dose of advertising, could effectively move the needle in creating buzz and getting audiences to theatres.

For starters, the script was powerful; the characters were well written; and, the movie was well acted.

“It’s populated with characters that have been developed into human beings we get to know and care about,” Ebert once wrote.

Empire magazine agrees that “deeply layered” characters and compelling dialogue were key to the movie’s success, but says it was director Steven Spielberg himself who was the real star. Pointing to “mind-bending dolly zooms” and shots filmed from the shark’s point of view, Spielberg was called remarkable.

Benchley was involved in several drafts of the Jaws movie script, but eventually it was turned over to a number of other writers for further drafts and rewrites. Spielberg wanted to keep a number of the book’s sub-plots out of the movie and instead focus on the hunt for the great white shark. Benchley had a cameo appearance in the movie, acting as a news reporter on the beach in one scene.

When tasked with the complexities and special effects needed in Jaws, Spielberg quickly went over budget and shooting took much longer than expected. To make the movie look as realistic as possible, Spielberg wanted to do the ocean shots on the ocean, as opposed to using a more convenient inland body of water or even a water tank. That took time and patience. It also meant Jaws was the first big movie that was actually set on an ocean and shot on the ocean.

Spielberg told Time magazine that the process was a real pain, but necessary to achieve what he wanted to achieve: “I could have shot the movie in a tank or even in a protected lake somewhere, but it would not have looked the same.”

Another claim to fame for Jaws was its effective use of music. The theme song, based on the repetition of two notes being played one after another, became recognizable around the world. The composer, John Williams, won an Academy Award for the movie’s musical score and the American Film Institute many years later ranked it as the sixth-greatest movie score.

Other bits and bites from Jaws

• Jaws won a total of three Academy Awards; the aforementioned Best Original Dramatic Score award and the awards for Best Sound and Best Film Editing. It also garnered a nomination as Best Picture, but lost to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
• At one point before production on the movie started, producers debated the idea of trying to train and use a living great white shark in the movie. It quickly became apparent the idea would never work.
• Instead, the shark used in most of the scenes was actually one of three mechanical sharks, nicknamed Bruce. Up to 40 special effect workers spent time producing the sharks. Sometimes, those sharks didn’t work perfectly, leading some workers on the set to call the movie Flaws, according to a Roanoke Times article published on the 30th anniversary of the movie.
• The movie also contained footage of real sharks, filmed in Australia. To make sharks in that footage appear larger, a short actor in a smaller-than-usual shark cage was used in shots.
• The three principal actors in Jaws spent so much time on the water shooting scenes that they often got seasick.
• The movie was originally scheduled to shoot for 55 days. Instead, it took 159 days, leaving Spielberg to tell journalists it left him worrying this would ruin his career.
• Spielberg told costume and set designers on the movie to avoid using anything red in terms of backgrounds or the actors’ wardrobes so that when red blood would appear in a dramatic scene, it would be even more jarring to someone watching the flick.
• Spin-off merchandise from the movie has included everything from Jaws-theme purses and beach bags to tub toys and whisky glasses. One of the strangest items, a Japanese bath bomb, is shaped like a little blue boat, but as it dissolves in bath water a toy shark appears, along with an ample supply of blood-red liquid.
• In 2016, Tragically Hip lead singer Gord Downie sported a Jaws T-shirt for some performances during the band’s final tour before his death. Why? Well, some speculated the shark represented the cancer that would ultimately take his life. His stylist told media the T-shirt was a personal item that Downie decided to wear.
• Craving more shark content? Don’t worry. Discovery channel’s Shark Week is only a few weeks away, July 6-13, 2025.

Sources: Postmedia archives, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Empire Magazine, the Roanoke Times, the Academy of Motion Pictures, Time Magazine, Universal Pictures, and The Shark is Still Working.