on June 20th in 1975, one of the most iconic films of all time was released. Even if you weren't alive (and I presume most of you weren't,) you are familiar with this very iconic and unusual horror / thriller film.
As you might be able to imagine, technology in 1975 wasn't exactly cutting-edge, especially when it came to special effects such as creating a massive shark that doesn't exist and most likely wouldn't read the script if it did. Therefore, with a paltry budget of $12 million dollars Spielberg had to make it work. (the film ended up costing much more than this because of massive delays as filming took 3x as long as planned) Some (me) would argue that he was triumphantly successful in accomplishing this.
The opening scene is one of the most famous in all cinema and it haunts you, it sticks with you, it makes you afraid to get into even a swimming pool at night. The film achieved its horror, even though we don't often even see the shark in the film, so effectively that people were afraid to go into the ocean in the late 70's for quite some time.
Due in part to this film, I was afraid of deep ocean water for most of my life until I became a dive professional and I found out that a vast majority of ocean life has exactly zero interest in intentionally harming you and you should consider yourself lucky if you ever see a shark because there are so few of them.
CGI, for the most part, didn't exist in '75 and any attempts made at including it actually kind of cheapened the look of the film. Therefore, most of the time our pal "Jaws" isn't even shown on screen, and when he is, he is a machine made to look like a giant shark. The very first time they put the machine in the ocean, it sank straight to the bottom, and spent most of its time in the water, broken. At a cost of $250,000 each, this was a very frustrating situation but the failure of the machines is what ultimately lead to most of the footage to being from Jaw's first person perspective rather than seeing the whole shark. Many people will state that this "accident' is the reason why the film ended up being so creepy, so scary, so good.
Jaws was actually nicknamed "Flaws" by the crew because everything went wrong but this is not surprising since filming underwater wasn't exactly something that was done all that often and the giant machines being broken more often than not is probably the greatest reason why this movie was so great. If it weren't for that, the footage would probably seem hokey and fake. Some times things break for a reason!
