Right up until the first audience saw the film Joe Alves, the production designer, worried that they would not be scared.
Throughout the shoot the key mechanical props had struggled with saltwater corrosion and even when they did work the strange noises that they made often reduced the crew to fits of giggles.
“I thought people were going to laugh,” Alves, 89, recalled of that 1975 test screening. “But they screamed.”
Jaws, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, was about to alter the course of Hollywood history. The film featured a great white shark preying upon a New England beach town and the unlikely team made up of a police chief, marine biologist and half-crazed fisherman sent to capture it.
It made a star of Steven Spielberg, its 28-year-old director, terrified a generation of moviegoers into staying out of the water and invented the summer blockbuster as a cultural phenomenon.
However, before all that happened Alves found himself on a ferry in Massachusetts.
He was attached to Jaws before Spielberg. David Brown, the producer, handed him the galleys of Peter Benchley’s thriller (which went on to be a bestseller) and asked him to draw up some illustrations of scenes from the book to help pitch a screen adaptation to a studio.
Spielberg, who had been planning a pirate film, eventually chose Jaws. He and Alves agreed that to do the project justice they had to shoot on the open ocean with a 25ft mechanical shark.
“It’s never been done before,” Alves recalled. “The Old Man and the Sea [released in 1958] with Spencer Tracy, they had this big marlin and it just lays there in the lake in the back lot. It just looked terrible.”
During a meeting at Universal, Alves recalled a special effects expert insisting a shark of that scale could not be built. The expert was working on a much more important project: The Hindenburg, a disaster movie based on the 1937 airship crash.
“Jaws could be a bigger movie than The Hindenburg,” Marshall Green, a producer at Universal, told the meeting. The room burst into laughter.
“It was treated like a dumb shark movie and they had a young kid who was gonna direct it,” Alves recalled.
Around November 1973, Alves was told by the studio that the model sharks he had designed had to be ready in two months. A team under the guidance of the legendary special effects artist Robert Mattey got to work.
In the meantime, Alves was hunting for a location to stand in for the fictional Amity Island. Benchley suggested Nantucket. It may well have appeared in Jaws, had bad weather not intervened.
Alves was on the ferry to Nantucket but the captain turned back owing to a winter storm. Martha’s Vineyard is only seven miles off the coast of Cape Cod and the boat was still running.
Alves hopped aboard. “It was perfect,” he said of Martha’s Vineyard. “All these little white picket fences, just a beautiful community.”
Jeffrey Kramer was a young actor when he read in a local newspaper that producers were hiring for a new movie. His agent secured him a meeting with Spielberg in Boston.
Kramer left the room certain he had got the job. “I’ve never done that before, nor since,” the 79-year-old, later a successful producer, said. He played Deputy Hendricks, a colleague of Roy Scheider’s Chief Brody.
Kramer loved working with Spielberg but the troubled production frayed the cast and crew’s nerves.
“The rumours were going around as we were doing it, because we were way over budget, that they were going to pull the plug,” Kramer said.
The on-set problems have entered Hollywood folklore and even inspired a stage play. The production went over by more than 100 days and the initial budget of $4 million doubled.
Robert Shaw, who starred as the grizzled shark hunter Quint, took a dislike to Richard Dreyfuss, who portrayed the enthusiastic scientist Hooper.
“[Shaw] really thought Dreyfuss needed a slapping down, [that he was a] young punk with no stage experience,” Scheider once told a documentary.
Spielberg was pushed to his limits. “The experience of making Jaws was horrendous for me,” he told the writer of a retrospective of his career.
Martha’s Vineyard may have been perfect when Alves visited in December but during the summer when Jaws was filmed the ocean was filled with pleasure boats.
Spielberg would wait for hours for the horizon to clear only to find the current had dragged the film boats wildly out of place. It could take hours to get back to their original position.
Some days ended with no usable material. Then there were the three mechanical sharks, all called “Bruce”, after Spielberg’s lawyer.
“Salt water and mechanics do not get along,” Alves noted. The sharks suffered buoyancy issues and mechanical problems.
During an early camera test in front of producers Richard Zanuck and Brown, one of the sharks breached the water as designed. Celebrations were cut short when it then began sinking to the bottom of the ocean.
Sid Sheinberg, the CEO of Universal, offered Spielberg the chance to cut his losses and scrap Jaws midway through production.
Instead the problems contributed to the greatness of the movie. Spielberg was forced to improvise and show less of the shark, a tactic which ultimately boosted Jaws’s sense of foreboding.
But no one could be sure during production that audiences would actually be terrified.
Alves recalls the test screening as the moment he knew Jaws was a success, when John Williams’s now-legendary score ensured that no one would be laughing like the crew had.
Even so the production designer was still taken aback by the scale of what happened on its release.
“I went on a little vacation, I came back and I couldn’t believe it — lines around the block to see Jaws,” he said.
Kramer had a friend who let him into a theatre every night to watch the audience’s reaction to the jump scare where a shark victim’s head pops out of a boat.
“From the back [of the cinema] you could see the entire audience rear backwards and popcorn and soda would fly into the air,” he said. “It was so exciting, I’ve never seen a movie affect people like that.”
Jaws was a phenomenon that changed Hollywood forever. It grossed $476.5 million, a record surpassed two years later by Star Wars, and became the first summer blockbuster.
The film’s success was fuelled by a massive promotional push that began long before Jaws’s release.
Zanuck and Brown sent early copies of Benchley’s novel to influential readers of the day, according to a 1975 article in the Hollywood Reporter, as part of a word-of-mouth campaign to make the book a bestseller.
“We created an aura of excitement,” Zanuck, who died in 2012 aged 77, said.
Zanuck and Brown turned up at the Cannes film festival a year ahead of Jaws’s release to further boost the movie’s profile.
As the big day approached, the producers saturated the domestic market. In the two weeks before Jaws opened in American cinemas, Spielberg, Benchley, Zanuck and Brown toured 11 US cities.
Shaw made appearances on major television shows including Today and The Mike Douglas Show. Jaws made the cover of Time magazine, a major coup which Brown credits with “the building of the phenomenon of Jaws.”
The studio flooded local TV with adverts in the three days before release. Williams’s score featured heavily in the commercials.
Universal spent a reported $2 million on marketing Jaws, a huge sum at the time. The tactic has since become commonplace for blockbusters.
Jaws changed Hollywood, according to Professor Jonathan Kuntz, a film historian at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The film industry had been losing significant chunks of its audience to television since the 1950s and responded by focusing on young people with time to go to cinemas. Executives realised that this audience had most spare time in the summer, making it the prime slot for major releases.
“This really helped Jaws be a smash hit,” Kuntz said. It is a trend that has endured, with studios still releasing films over the summer and Christmas holidays.
Alongside The Godfather (1972) and The Exorcist (1973), Jaws pulled Hollywood out of a slump and ushered in a new era.
Those films “were kind of the opening guns of the new Hollywood,” Kuntz said, “stating that the old Hollywood may be dead, but there’s a new Hollywood run by new filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who are closer in age to the target audience”.
As he looks forward to his 90th birthday next year, Alves still regularly speaks about Jaws and released a book about the movie. He also features with Spielberg in the forthcoming documentary Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story.
When by a twist of fate he stepped onto a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard in December 1973, not for a second did he suspect it would result in perhaps the most famous film in Hollywood history.
“We had no idea, we were just trying to make a really good movie,” he said. “I worked really hard on some movies and they just opened and closed. So you never know.”
