A Watershed Moment in Film History: The 50th Anniversary of Jaws - Part 1

By the Book -  How "Jaws" Swam from Page to Screen

Left to right: The cover of the first edition

of the novel Jaws, and the Jaws movie poster.

by Michael Lyons

Movies changed forever on June 20, 1975. That's the day Jaws debuted in theaters.

The iconic story of a great white shark terrorizing the waters of the small New England town of Amity Island transformed the movie industry and how we go to the movies forever.

Hard as it is to believe, this June marks the 50th anniversary of Jaws. This momentous milestone deserves to be celebrated in a big way. With that, this is the first of a five-part article looking back at Jaws and its impact on film history and pop culture. This initial article starts with where Jaws began - as a book and how it made its way to the screen.

"Might make a good movie." With that statement, David Brown, who co-produced Jaws with Richard D. Zanuck, first discovered Peter Benchley's book. Brown's wife, Helen Gurley Brown, was the editor of Cosmopolitan, and Jaws the book was being reviewed by the magazine. "Might make a good movie," was how the book editor described Jaws on a small card that Brown came across.

Zanuck and Brown immediately sought out Benchley's book. Each read it in a single day and secured the rights in 1973, a year before Jaws was published.

The novel was Benchley's first, and before it was published, the author noted in a 2005 introduction to his book that he had anything but high hopes for his work: "As Jaws was being readied for publication, my ambitions for it were modest, to say the least. I knew it couldn't possibly be commercially successful. For one thing, it was a first novel, and, with rare exceptions like Gone with the Wind, first novels tended to languish, unread, on bookstore shelves. For another, it was a first novel about a fish, and I couldn't think of any novels about fish that had achieved critical or commercial success. Furthermore, I knew for certain that no one would ever make a movie from the book because it was impossible to catch and train a great white shark, and movie-making technology was nowhere near good enough to create a believable model or mechanical version."

Not only would that movie be made, but Benchley would adapt his book into the film's screenplay. However, when a young filmmaker by the name of Steven Spielberg came aboard the project, he wanted to jettison many of the novel's subplots - such as the mob taking over Amity Island and an affair between Hooper and Mrs. Brody - and focus on the shark.

After several other writers declined to work on the script revisions for Jaws, Spielberg turned to his friend, Carl Gottlieb, who, up to this point, had worked mainly on TV sitcoms like The Odd Couple and All in the Family.

In his book, The Jaws Log, which details the making of the film, Gottlieb wrote about his reaction after reading the initial draft of the script: "...I sent Steven a long note, outlining my reactions. I thought it would make a great popular entertainment. I expressed fears that it would turn into another Poseidon Adventure or Airport, with cardboard characters doing plastic things, and I expressed hope that if it realized its full potential, the oceans of the world would be as devoid of swimmers as showers were after Alfred Hitchcock had Janet Leigh stabbed to death in the Bates Motel in Psycho."

Gottlieb, also an actor, would play the role of newspaper reporter Harry Meadows in Jaws, which was shot on location in Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts in 1974.

Hollywood would invade that tiny island just south of Cape Cod. The great white shark and the film's production are memories that Martha's Vineyard still embraces to this very day.

But, that's a story for Part 2, next week... 

For more of my articles, podcasts and books, head over to Words From Lyons !

Sources: Benchley, Peter, Jaws, Random House, 1974, 2005

               Gottlieb, Carl, The Jaws Log, Newmarket Press, 1975