As a great fan of John Ford, Steven Spielberg will forgive us for disingenuously quoting the last lines of that director’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. “This is the west, sir,” Carleton Young’s cynical journalist notes in the 1962 western. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
If you insist. Fifty years ago, Jaws destroyed American cinema.
From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, the industry passed through one of the most artistically fecund periods in its history. A swathe of hairy directors shook up the business with challenging films that showed the influence not just of golden-age Hollywood but also of the French new wave and Italian neorealism.
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Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider sounded the trumpet. Classics by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin followed in their wake. The studio heads were freaked by the gloomy, anti-heroic aesthetics. They were further freaked when the films became genuine hits.
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Then, in the summer of 1975, Jaws came along and made everything all right again. Here was a big, noisy, popcorn smash that had its shocking moments but still ended with the defiant saviours sailing (paddling, to be more accurate) towards a hopeful horizon. It was flashy, funny and ferocious. And the studio heads didn’t need their teenage children to talk them through any drug references.
Two years later Star Wars offered an even more comforting endorsement of traditional Hollywood values. It beat the record Jaws had set for highest-grossing feature ever. Its sequels were also smashes. Merchandise was as important a revenue generator as ticket sales.
Half a century on, the victory could hardly be more complete. Virtually every major blockbuster released this summer is a sequel or a reboot: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Jurassic World: Rebirth, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Superman, and on and on.
Joseph Kosinski’s F1 feels, among big-budget releases, the closest to an original production, but even that leans heavily on the good will generated by the same director’s Top Gun: Maverick. Franchise titles currently generate 82 per cent of the US box office.
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Thanks a bunch, Spielberg. Without Jaws we’d have a summer packed with the descendants of Taxi Driver, Chinatown and Nashville. Jaws destroyed American cinema. Right?
If you’ll allow a spoiler for a 63-year-old film, it was John Wayne, not Jimmy Stewart, who shot Liberty Valance. The myth about Jaws annihilating postclassical cinema is just that. It is certainly true that certain business decisions encouraged a wider swing into more populist cinema. The studio took a gamble on releasing in a season hitherto considered too balmy and outdoorsy for big-budget titles. Ever since, the summer has been considered US blockbuster-season.
More daring still, they ditched the then common practice of beginning with a limited release before edging the film out to the wider nation. Jaws landed in a then-unprecedented 409 cinemas on opening day. (Though it didn’t arrive in Ireland until after Christmas.) Huge wide release is now seen as a way of counteracting bad word of mouth. By the time the reviews land, punters have already parted with their money.
This was not the case with Jaws. Audiences shrieked and the tills clanged. Merchandising brought in more cash. Innovative TV ads fuelled pester power.
So, yes, it helped change the business. We are still living in the shadow of Jaws. But the studios were always going to manage a shift back to easily marketable popcorn entertainment. Not least because the postclassical movies were more divisive than is now understood.
Quentin Tarantino, in his book Cinema Speculation, acknowledges that division. “Regular moviegoers were becoming weary of modern American movies,” he writes. “Was everything a drag? Was every movie about some guy with problems?” Jaws was merely the instrument of an inevitable readjustment.
The myth is also worth debunking because it offers a misleading impression of the film itself. Featuring naturalistic dialogue, using craggy character actors as its leads, working in a subplot about local governmental corruption, Jaws sits as comfortably in the world of Scorsese and Friedkin as it does with the more fantastic entertainments Spielberg went on to deliver. After that famously horrifying opening, it demands our patience as it works slowly towards the next outbreak of carnage.
One more thing – a small thing maybe – distances the film from present-day cowardice. The screenplay is happy to hugely alter the plot of a novel that, by the time of film’s release, every literate human on the planet had read. The romantic subplot is ditched. Different people die. Different people survive. Try that with the upcoming Harry Potter series and you’d have a billion nerds complaining that it wasn’t “book accurate”.
Justice for Jaws. It didn’t kill anything that wasn’t going to die unassisted.
