“The shark is not working.”
These words rang across Martha’s Vineyard in the mid-1970s. At the time, Steven Spielberg had set up shop on the small island to film a cinematic adaptation of Peter Benchley’s hit novel, “Jaws.” It was to be a true test for the young filmmaker, tasked with directing what would become accepted as the first blockbuster film in Hollywood history.
Yet the filming of “Jaws” became fraught, a cautionary tale of sea-sickness, missed deadlines and mechanical sharks that just refused to work properly. Every step of this process has been immortalized at the Los Angeles-based Academy Museum of Motion Pictures through “Jaws: The Exhibition,” a gallery detailing the creation and legacy of “Jaws” that opens Sept. 14. On Wednesday, it was announced that a full retrospective exhibition focused on Spielberg’s career would be added to the museum in 2028.
“I thought my career was virtually over halfway through production on ‘Jaws,’” Spielberg told the crowd at the press day for the Academy Museum exhibition. “Everybody was saying, ‘You are never going to get hired again. This film is way over budget and way over schedule, and you are a real liability as a director, and you are not going to get hired again.’ So I thought that I better give this my all because I’m not working in the industry again after they see this movie.”
“Fortunately, fortune smiled on us,” he added.
The legacy of “Jaws” endures 50 years later, surviving its myriad problems in the production process. The Academy Museum exhibition is a testament to both its struggles and its ultimate success, detailing the legend of a film that went from catastrophe to classic after its release.
With modern blockbusters rushing into production without a full script and studios opting to patch mistakes with post-production visual effects, it’s a legend Hollywood still has a lot to learn from.
An exhibit 50 years in the making
As visitors walk through the exhibition at the Academy Museum, they are taken through the production pipeline of “Jaws,” progressing alongside the film’s story. The opening title card, projected in a dark entry room with walls that ripple like the ocean, signals the start of the experience. As you move through key moments in the story — the discovery of Chrissie Watkins’ body, the Alex Kintner massacre, the introduction of Quint, the voyage of the Orca — you too travel through the production process, from scripting to shooting to scoring to editing to sound mixing and beyond.
It’s a vast display of re-creations, interactive exhibits and artifacts. Visitors can gather around the Orca’s dining table to watch Quint’s haunting speech about surviving the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. They can look in horror at the prop head of Ben Gardner, an image that provided the film an enduring jump scare (the head is kept in a re-creation of editor Verna Fields’ pool, where the scene was shot). The exhibition allows you to play the iconic two-note John Williams theme and manipulate a scale recreation of the shark (this one does work). Once the central characters have embarked on their ocean-set hunt, visitors likewise find themselves leaving land, with the walls around the exhibit designed to look like waist-deep water.
“Jaws” is an important film to Hollywood and, more specifically, the Academy Museum. Since the museum’s opening in 2021, Bruce the Shark (named during “Jaws’” filming after Steven Spielberg’s lawyer) has hung above the fourth-floor escalators for visitors to see. Here it remained for the new exhibition, as if to welcome people to the exhibit before they even enter.
Jenny He, the senior exhibitions curator at the Academy Museum, said that the exhibit has been many years coming. It was a natural next step for the museum to tackle what is often dubbed the first blockbuster in the year of its 50th anniversary.
Fortunately, a lot of the props were still floating around.
“In curating exhibitions on films, sometimes an object is so unique, right? Let’s think about the spaceships from ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’: You’re not really going to be using that again,” Jenny He said. “But a fighting chair, or a buoy, or an anchor — all these objects could be reused, and that’s what they did. After production ended, they sold off all of these objects, production did, to Martha’s Vineyard locals. So a lot of it stayed on the Vineyard, and fans over the years made pilgrimages to the island and really picked it clean of anything that appeared on ‘Jaws.’”
These props and recreations flood the exhibit as fans work their way through the production. The central trio’s costumes, Hooper’s backpack, a lone fin, Quint’s gun, a gnawed-through anti-shark cage and a “BEACH CLOSED” sign intermingle with scripts, production notes, an editing machine, a clapperboard and more from the behind-the-scenes process. It’s a “Jaws” fan’s dream, bustling with items even the director himself had forgotten.
“People have a chance to come to the Academy Museum and live for the first time some of the experiences I’m trying to relive for you here,” Spielberg said. “I’m just so proud of the work they’ve done. What they’ve put together, this exhibition here, is just awesome. Every room has the minutiae of how this picture got together, and proves that this motion picture is really, truly a collaborative art form. No place for auteurs.”
There have been plenty of other chances to relive “Jaws” over the years. Like many, Jenny He said she can’t remember when she first saw the film.
“I wish I could tell you the answer,” she said. “Whenever I talk to anybody about ‘Jaws,’ whether they’re a fan or they worked on the film or they’re a collector or a lender, I always ask, ‘How old were you when you first watched ‘Jaws?’ Interestingly enough, my anecdotal data is ages five to 12.”
50 though it may be, “Jaws” still swims its way into new viewers’ minds to this day. For the anniversary, theaters across the world rereleased “Jaws” for a limited engagement, reeling in nearly $15 million in just over a week. During the weekend of its rerelease, “Jaws” ranked second at the domestic box office, coming in just $2 million behind “Weapons.”
But in an era where blockbusters fill theater lineups and fewer younger generations venture into “old movies,” what has placed “Jaws” as a cut above the rest?
Trusting the process
You’d never know it just by watching the film, but “Jaws” was a movie created out of limitations. Its central prop, the fake shark named Bruce, rarely functioned. Back then, there was no digital trickery or “Fix it in post” mindset that could fully salvage that issue.
So they had to get creative.
J.D. Connor, an associate professor in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California, served on an advisory committee for the Academy Museum exhibition. When the Museum was looking for “the ‘Jaws’ person” at USC, he was the one who got the call.
“The movie is constantly, utterly in control of what you see and what’s not visible,” Connor said. “The entire movie was really this story of figuring out how to pay attention to what you see and what you don’t. So the aesthetic aim of this movie, about what’s surfacing, what’s breaching the edges of the beach, is also the narrative aim of the movie.”
In lieu of being able to see the shark full-tilt, Spielberg and company famously pulled back on how visible the central creature of “Jaws” would be. Instead, they played into the mystique of the shark, showing audiences signifiers of the creature while rarely portraying the beast in its full glory. Underwater barrels, a rogue dock and fishing line all at one point or another let audiences know where the shark is without actually seeing it.
Williams’ score becomes an auditory sign of doom, always heralding the arrival of the underwater beast. You may not see the shark very often, but the score makes it feel as if it’s right before your eyes. Tricks like this fill a shark-shaped hole at the center of this film, likely better than a functioning mechanical shark ever could. Were Spielberg and crew able to fill the gaps with digital effects, these narrative tricks would surely become far less potent.
“I am very resolute in saying this: Without those challenges, ‘Jaws’ would not have been as successful as it was,” Jenny He said. “Those challenges made Steven Spielberg and his team think and pivot. They had to rely on creative problem-solving. In the best of times, when you’re making a great film, it’s great. But 27-year-old Steven Spielberg proved that he can make an extraordinary film in the worst of times.”
Part of this comes from an extreme commitment to the screenplay and narrative aspects of “Jaws.” Connor said that whenever “Jaws” faced delays, due to weather, malfunctions or complications with the regular events of Martha’s Vineyard, they would further hone the story at the center of their film.
“They let people who really were committed to the screenplay work on it,” he said. “The Indianapolis speech probably doesn’t play with 8- and 10- and 12-year-olds, but it plays with the whole family audience this movie was geared toward, and it’s great because they all got to work on it more.”
Likewise, Connor cited the immense faith “Jaws” put in its craftspeople — not to fix issues down the road, but to craft the blockbuster as a film rather than a joyride. Fields, the editor who won an Oscar for her work on the film, received a heap of his praise. Both Fields’ and Robert L. Hoyt’s Oscars are on display at the exhibition. Hoyt was part of a crew with Roger Herman Jr., Earl Madery and John Carter that won Best Sound at the 1976 Academy Awards. “Jaws” additionally won Best Music (Original Score) and was nominated for Best Picture (losing to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”).
“All movies are made in the editing, but this one maybe more than any other had to be remade in the editing, not because the bones of the story were bad, but because the actual shark was a disaster,” Connor said. “That’s both legend and true, so I’m very pleased that … people will have a chance to see what kind of professional assurance was necessary to make this thing go.”
A strong core
“Jaws” is, at its core, a film about three men from different walks of life. More than that, it’s about home. Quint (Robert Shaw), who recounts his nightmarish experience aboard the USS Indianapolis, feels at home chasing sharks, forever hunting the emblem of his horror. Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) feels at home on the sea, a lifelong ocean-lover who must constantly prove that his wealthy upbringing doesn’t undermine his oceanographic contributions.
And Brody, played by Roy Scheider, doesn’t feel at home anywhere. He’s a man who fears the water yet is tasked with keeping an island community that rejects him safe. He is still new to this town, unfamiliar with how the sun shines into his own home during different seasons. The shark is an almost supernatural embodiment of his fears and insecurities, a beast he must hunt down so he can finally return to his family and say, “I’m home.” It’s a finely-tuned, well-crafted story — one far from being a basic vehicle for shark attack sequences.
“It’s a richer social portrait than we’re usually given in these movies,” Connor said. “That richness is one of the things that people like about it.”
But, with some exceptions, this isn’t where Hollywood is at. Blockbusters are practically built on an assembly line, without the kind of care that went into Jaws. As a result, franchises like Marvel and Pixar — recently seen as some of the few sure things at the box office — have faced repeated disappointment.
Still, Connor cited other recent blockbusters that evoke a similar level of craftsmanship. In “Barbie,” he noted that the adventure has a soundness in narrative, that “When one act door closed and the next one opened, it was a solid sound.” Some of Warner Bros.’s surprise successes this year, including “Sinners,” and “Weapons” were creator-driven passion projects that got strong word-of-mouth.
“Jaws” was a complex production, one mired by difficulties and challenges that made success seem impossible. Spielberg said the shoot “certainly cost me a pound of flesh, but gave me a ton of career.” It was a 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a movie — yet, when their creatives took their time to assemble correctly, the picture could not have been clearer. In the modern era, studios have increasingly become comfortable with leaving pieces out and trust audiences to get the idea.
It’s hard to imagine those movies getting exhibits 50 years down the road.
