Latest news with #Jaws@50:TheDefinitiveInsideStory
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
Nat Geo documentary explores cultural phenomenon of "Jaws" 50 years after its debut
Ginger Zee shares how the film changed movies and beach visits forever with National Geographic's upcoming documentary "Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story."
Hindustan Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Jaws turns 50: How Spielberg's shark thriller continues to terrify generations
Half a century since its release, Jaws remains one of the most iconic and terrifying films ever made. Steven Spielberg's 1975 thriller, which hit the 50-year mark on June 20, didn't just change how we watch movies. It changed how we think about the sea. The fear it instilled was so real that some viewers couldn't step into a pool, let alone an ocean, for years. And many still flinch at the idea of what lurks below. Jaws turns 50( This summer, the shark is back. All four Jaws films will stream on Peacock from June 15. NBC will air the original on June 20, with a special introduction by Spielberg. A theatrical re-release is also planned for August 29. For Spielberg, the film became both a breakthrough and a burden. At just 27, he faced constant setbacks on set-especially with the faulty mechanical shark known as Bruce. In the upcoming documentary Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story (July 11, Hulu/Disney+), Spielberg admits: 'There was nothing fun about making 'Jaws,'' per USA Today. Also read: Jab Steven Spielberg met Kareena Kapoor: 'Are you the girl in famous Indian film about three students?' Martha's Vineyard and lasting fear Experts say the film's impact remains because it taps into something primal. 'Sharks stand in perfectly for wild nature that's at the edge of where humans can go,' horror scholar Dawn Keetley told the outlet. The movie was shot with locals from Martha's Vineyard, many of whom still share stories. And even now, beachgoers around the world hesitate when stepping into the ocean - just in case something is waiting below the surface. One of the often-overlooked elements that gave Jaws its authentic feel was the number of Martha's Vineyard locals who appeared in the film. While the cast included Hollywood names like Roy Scheider, who played police chief Martin Brody, and Richard Dreyfuss as shark expert Matt Hooper, the majority of the supporting roles were filled by islanders. Their natural presence added a layer of realism that couldn't have been achieved with a full cast of seasoned actors on a studio set. Many of them continue to participate in 'Jaws' fan events.
Metro
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Steven Spielberg thought he had ‘a heart attack' on harrowing Jaws set
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Steven Spielberg once thought he was having a heart attack after suffering a 'full-blown panic attack' while filming Jaws. The 78-year-old has been behind huge hits over his decades-long career, but shared that his efforts behind the camera for the 1975 shark thriller – which was released 50 years ago today – was among his toughest projects. The legendary movie followed a star-studded cast led by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw, as a team on the hunt for a terrifying great white shark after it attacked beachgoers. The film grossed more than $475million worldwide, and has gone down as one of the biggest blockbusters of all time. Detailing his experience on set in a new National Geographic special to celebrate the milestone anniversary, titled new Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story, the filmmaker shared that he battled nightmares for 'years' afterwards. 'When the film wrapped in Martha's Vineyard, I had a full-blown panic attack,' he told the cameras. 'I couldn't breathe, I thought I was having a heart attack. I couldn't get a full breath of air. 'I kept going to the bathroom and splashing water on my face. I was shaking. And I was out of it – I was completely out of it.' Steven and co faced a number of issues during filming, including difficulties with the mechanical shark and going hugely over budget – which didn't help when Hollywood bosses kept a close eye on production. At the same time, they had to ease simmering tensions between the cast while having to contend with shooting on water for large periods of time – with the filmmaker admitting that he reshot some moments in a crew member's LA pool. Basically, an actual shark rocking up to shore sounds like it would have been the least of their problems… Despite only having a few projects under his belt at that point, Steven explained that, as the director, he felt responsible for every single person on set. 'I think it was everything I had experienced on the island…,' he continued. '[I] at least tried to not only hold myself together, I had to hold the crew together. 'I had a great crew, and yet I felt responsible for everybody there. And I felt really responsible for keeping them there for as long as we had to stay. I think I just lost it.' Although he had nothing to fear, as Jaws premiered to huge acclaim, broke box office records and won three Oscars, Steven still struggled to let his experience go. In fact, he would sneak on board the Orca boat used in the film when it was eventually moved to the Universal tour, and sometimes 'sob'. 'I had a real tough time when I finished the movie,' he said. 'The success was fantastic but it didn't stop the nightmares, it didn't stop me waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, where the sheets would be soaking wet. 'We didn't have the words PTSD in those days, and I had consistent nightmares about directing Jaws for years afterwards. 'I was still on the movie and the film was never-ending.' 'I had nothing to cry about,' he added. 'The film was a phenomenon, and I'm sitting here shedding tears because I'm not able to divest myself of the experience. 'The boat helped me to begin to forget. That Orca was my therapeutic companion for several years after Jaws came out. More Trending 'Jaws was a life-altering experience. On the one hand, it was a traumatizing experience for me that was mostly about survival. And I think all of us feel we survived something. 'Jaws, also, I owe everything to.' This article was first published on June 18. Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story premieres July 11 at 8pm on National Geographic, and streams the same day on Disney+ Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Escape this weekend's heatwave to binge all 8 episodes of 'tear-jerking' Amazon Prime thriller MORE: Netflix's rudely axed Mindhunter could be returning with a twist MORE: 10 zombie films to watch after 28 Years Later including 100%-scored 'masterpiece'
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
'Jaws' changed movies forever, but Hollywood could still learn from it
NEW YORK -- Fifty years after 'Jaws' sunk its teeth into us, we're still admiring the bite mark. Steven Spielberg's 1975 film, his second feature, left such a imprint on culture and Hollywood that barely any trip to the movies, let alone to the beach, has been the same since. Few films have been more perfectly suited to their time and place than 'Jaws,' which half a century ago unspooled across the country in a then-novel wide release accompanied by Universal Pictures' opening-weekend publicity blitz. 'Jaws' wasn't quite the first movie to try to gobble up moviegoers whole, in one mouthful (a few years earlier, 'The Godfather' more or less tried it), but 'Jaws' established — and still in many ways defines — the summer movie. That puts 'Jaws' at the birth of a trend that has since consumed Hollywood: the blockbuster era. When it launched in 409 theaters on June 20, 1975, and grossed a then-record $7.9 million in its first days, 'Jaws' set the template that's been followed ever-after by every action movie, superhero flick or dinosaur film that's tried to go big in the summer — a sleepy time in theaters before 'Jaws' came around. And yet the 'Jaws' legacy is so much more than being Hollywood's ur-text blockbuster. It's not possible to, 50 years later, watch Spielberg's film and see nothing but the beginning of a box-office bonanza, or the paler fish it's inspired. It's just too good a movie — and too much unlike so many wannabes since –— to be merely groundbreaking. It's a masterpiece in its own right. 'It supercharged the language of cinema,' the filmmaker Robert Zemeckis says in the upcoming documentary 'Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story,' premiering July 10 on National Geographic. That documentary, with Spielberg's participation, is just a small part of the festivities that have accompanied the movie's anniversary. Martha's Vineyard, where 'Jaws' was shot, is hosting everything from concerts to 'Jaws'-themed dog dress-ups. 'Jaws,' itself, is streaming on Peacock through July 14, along with a prime-time airing Friday on NBC, with an intro from Spielberg. The 'Jaws' anniversary feels almost more like a national holiday — and appropriately so. But if 'Jaws' is one of the most influential movies ever made, Hollywood hasn't always drawn the right lessons from it. 'We need a bigger boat' has perhaps been taken too literally in movies that have leaned too much on scale and spectacle, when neither of those things really had much to do with the brilliance of Spielberg's classic. For the film's 50th anniversary, we looked at some of the things today's Hollywood could learn from 'Jaws" 50 years later. Every time I rewatch 'Jaws' — which I highly recommend doing on some projected screen, even a bedsheet, and preferably with an ocean nearby — I marvel at how much it gets from its Martha's Vineyard setting. Where U.S.-made film productions are shot has been a hot button issue lately. Various incentives often determine movie shooting locations, with set dressings, or CGI, filling in the rest. But 'Jaws' shows you just how much more than tax credits you can get from a locale. Spielberg was convinced the adaptation of Peter Benchley's novel — inspired by Benchley's childhood summers on Nantucket — shouldn't be done in soundstages. After looking up and down the Atlantic coast, he settled on Nantucket's neighboring island. Like his first film, the Mojave Desert-set 'Duel,' Spielberg wanted his mechanized shark to swim in a real, definable place. 'I felt the same way about 'Jaws,'' Spielberg says in the documentary. 'I wanted to go to the natural environment so there was some kind of verisimilitude. So it needed to be in the ocean, out to sea.' It wasn't easy. The budget for 'Jaws' nearly tripled to $9 million and the shoot extended from 55 to 159 days. Spielberg would never again be under financial pressure on a picture, but the tortured 'Jaws' production put him under a microscope. An AP report from 1975 began: 'It is news when a 26-year-old film director goes $2 million over budget and two and a half months over schedule and manages to avoid getting fired.' More than any other time in his career, Spielberg fretted. ''Jaws' was my Vietnam,' he told Richard Schickel. 'It was basically naive people against nature and nature beat us every day.' It also infused every inch of the frame with smalltown New England flavor in the way that no soundstage, or CGI, ever could. When Spielberg was ready to start filming, his star attraction wasn't. The mechanized shark, nicknamed 'Bruce' after the director's attorney, suffered frequent failures that forced Spielberg to find different approaches to shooting his shark scenes early in the film. 'Jaws' instead became, to Spielberg, a kind of homage to Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho.' The suspense came less from the shark than the fear of the unknown and that spine-tingling question: What's in the water? Spielberg, with the significant aid of John Williams' instantly iconic score, delayed the appearance of his Great White until well into the film. 'The visual ellipsis,' the critic Molly Haskell wrote, 'created far greater menace and terror, as the shark is nowhere and everywhere.' Spielberg once estimated that Bruce's mechanical delays added $175 million to the movie's box office. On its initial run, 'Jaws' grossed $260.7 million domestically in 1975. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $1.5 billion. Nowadays, the shark would almost certainly be done, like most movie creatures, with computer animation. But 'Jaws' showed that often the most powerful source of dread is our imagination. This is the time of year when the fate of the world often hangs in the balance. All manner of summer movies have had no bones about destroying cities for a mere plot point. Yet for all its terror, 'Jaws" features only a handful of deaths. All of its drama is human-scaled. Compared to more swaggering blockbusters today, 'Jaws' would be considered a modest, mid-budget movie. That's partially why you have to almost remind yourself that the movie has only three main characters in Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Quint (Robert Shaw). Casting director Sherry Rhodes peopled the cast with locals from the island, many of whom inject the film with little moments of day-to-day humanity. 'Jaws,' in that way, feels more like a community than a cast. On the one hand, 'Jaws' had little to do directly with its times. The Vietnam War had just ended. Watergate had just led to the resignation of President Nixon. The heart-stopping story of a shark off the Massachusetts shoreline promised escapism. Yet 'Jaws' has endured as a parable of capitalism, pulled out time and time again to illustrate those endlessly repeating clashes of cash versus social safety. 'Amity is a summer town,' says Amity's mayor, Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) in the film. 'We need summer dollars.' The shark gets the theme song and the movie poster, but the real villain of 'Jaws' wears a pinstripe suit and smiles for the cameras. 'As you can see, it's a beautiful day and the beaches are open,' he says. More than the predator in the ocean, he, and the town, feast on human flesh. There are boatloads of movies — including the three sequels that followed after — that have tried in vain to capture some of the magic of 'Jaws.' But what happened in June 1975, let alone on Martha's Vineyard the year before, isn't repeatable. Even the greatest movies are products of a thousand small miracles. That title? Benchley came up with it minutes before going to print. The iconic poster came from Roger Kastel's painting for the book. Scheider, for instance, learned about the movie by overhearing Spielberg at a party. Williams relied on just two notes for one of the most widely known film scores in movie history. But no ingredient mattered more on 'Jaws' than the man behind the camera. Filmmaking talents like Spielberg come around maybe a couple times a century, and in 'Jaws,' he emerged, spectacularly. What's maybe most striking about 'Jaws' 50 years later is how much it still doesn't look like anything else. Jake Coyle has been writing about movies for the AP since 2013. He's seen 'Jaws' at least a dozen times, and screened it for his kids when they were debatably too young for it.
San Francisco Chronicle
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
'Jaws' changed movies forever, but Hollywood could still learn from it
NEW YORK (AP) — Fifty years after 'Jaws' sunk its teeth into us, we're still admiring the bite mark. Steven Spielberg's 1975 film, his second feature, left such a imprint on culture and Hollywood that barely any trip to the movies, let alone to the beach, has been the same since. Few films have been more perfectly suited to their time and place than 'Jaws,' which half a century ago unspooled across the country in a then-novel wide release accompanied by Universal Pictures' opening-weekend publicity blitz. 'Jaws' wasn't quite the first movie to try to gobble up moviegoers whole, in one mouthful (a few years earlier, 'The Godfather' more or less tried it), but 'Jaws' established — and still in many ways defines — the summer movie. That puts 'Jaws' at the birth of a trend that has since consumed Hollywood: the blockbuster era. When it launched in 409 theaters on June 20, 1975, and grossed a then-record $7.9 million in its first days, 'Jaws' set the template that's been followed ever-after by every action movie, superhero flick or dinosaur film that's tried to go big in the summer — a sleepy time in theaters before 'Jaws' came around. And yet the 'Jaws' legacy is so much more than being Hollywood's ur-text blockbuster. It's not possible to, 50 years later, watch Spielberg's film and see nothing but the beginning of a box-office bonanza, or the paler fish it's inspired. It's just too good a movie — and too much unlike so many wannabes since –— to be merely groundbreaking. It's a masterpiece in its own right. 'It supercharged the language of cinema,' the filmmaker Robert Zemeckis says in the upcoming documentary 'Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story,' premiering July 10 on National Geographic. That documentary, with Spielberg's participation, is just a small part of the festivities that have accompanied the movie's anniversary. Martha's Vineyard, where 'Jaws' was shot, is hosting everything from concerts to 'Jaws'-themed dog dress-ups. 'Jaws,' itself, is streaming on Peacock through July 14, along with a prime-time airing Friday on NBC, with an intro from Spielberg. The 'Jaws' anniversary feels almost more like a national holiday — and appropriately so. But if 'Jaws' is one of the most influential movies ever made, Hollywood hasn't always drawn the right lessons from it. 'We need a bigger boat' has perhaps been taken too literally in movies that have leaned too much on scale and spectacle, when neither of those things really had much to do with the brilliance of Spielberg's classic. For the film's 50th anniversary, we looked at some of the things today's Hollywood could learn from 'Jaws" 50 years later. Local Color Every time I rewatch 'Jaws' — which I highly recommend doing on some projected screen, even a bedsheet, and preferably with an ocean nearby — I marvel at how much it gets from its Martha's Vineyard setting. Where U.S.-made film productions are shot has been a hot button issue lately. Various incentives often determine movie shooting locations, with set dressings, or CGI, filling in the rest. But 'Jaws' shows you just how much more than tax credits you can get from a locale. Spielberg was convinced the adaptation of Peter Benchley's novel — inspired by Benchley's childhood summers on Nantucket — shouldn't be done in soundstages. After looking up and down the Atlantic coast, he settled on Nantucket's neighboring island. Like his first film, the Mojave Desert-set 'Duel,' Spielberg wanted his mechanized shark to swim in a real, definable place. 'I felt the same way about 'Jaws,'' Spielberg says in the documentary. 'I wanted to go to the natural environment so there was some kind of verisimilitude. So it needed to be in the ocean, out to sea.' It wasn't easy. The budget for 'Jaws' nearly tripled to $9 million and the shoot extended from 55 to 159 days. Spielberg would never again be under financial pressure on a picture, but the tortured 'Jaws' production put him under a microscope. An AP report from 1975 began: 'It is news when a 26-year-old film director goes $2 million over budget and two and a half months over schedule and manages to avoid getting fired.' More than any other time in his career, Spielberg fretted. ''Jaws' was my Vietnam,' he told Richard Schickel. 'It was basically naive people against nature and nature beat us every day.' It also infused every inch of the frame with smalltown New England flavor in the way that no soundstage, or CGI, ever could. Less is more When Spielberg was ready to start filming, his star attraction wasn't. The mechanized shark, nicknamed 'Bruce' after the director's attorney, suffered frequent failures that forced Spielberg to find different approaches to shooting his shark scenes early in the film. 'Jaws' instead became, to Spielberg, a kind of homage to Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho.' The suspense came less from the shark than the fear of the unknown and that spine-tingling question: What's in the water? Spielberg, with the significant aid of John Williams' instantly iconic score, delayed the appearance of his Great White until well into the film. 'The visual ellipsis,' the critic Molly Haskell wrote, 'created far greater menace and terror, as the shark is nowhere and everywhere.' Spielberg once estimated that Bruce's mechanical delays added $175 million to the movie's box office. On its initial run, 'Jaws' grossed $260.7 million domestically in 1975. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $1.5 billion. Nowadays, the shark would almost certainly be done, like most movie creatures, with computer animation. But 'Jaws' showed that often the most powerful source of dread is our imagination. Human-scale This is the time of year when the fate of the world often hangs in the balance. All manner of summer movies have had no bones about destroying cities for a mere plot point. Yet for all its terror, 'Jaws" features only a handful of deaths. All of its drama is human-scaled. Compared to more swaggering blockbusters today, 'Jaws' would be considered a modest, mid-budget movie. That's partially why you have to almost remind yourself that the movie has only three main characters in Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Quint (Robert Shaw). Casting director Sherry Rhodes peopled the cast with locals from the island, many of whom inject the film with little moments of day-to-day humanity. 'Jaws,' in that way, feels more like a community than a cast. Escapism with something to say On the one hand, 'Jaws' had little to do directly with its times. The Vietnam War had just ended. Watergate had just led to the resignation of President Nixon. The heart-stopping story of a shark off the Massachusetts shoreline promised escapism. Yet 'Jaws' has endured as a parable of capitalism, pulled out time and time again to illustrate those endlessly repeating clashes of cash versus social safety. 'Amity is a summer town,' says Amity's mayor, Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) in the film. 'We need summer dollars.' The shark gets the theme song and the movie poster, but the real villain of 'Jaws' wears a pinstripe suit and smiles for the cameras. 'As you can see, it's a beautiful day and the beaches are open,' he says. More than the predator in the ocean, he, and the town, feast on human flesh. 'Jaws' is untouchable There are boatloads of movies — including the three sequels that followed after — that have tried in vain to capture some of the magic of 'Jaws.' But what happened in June 1975, let alone on Martha's Vineyard the year before, isn't repeatable. Even the greatest movies are products of a thousand small miracles. That title? Benchley came up with it minutes before going to print. The iconic poster came from Roger Kastel's painting for the book. Scheider, for instance, learned about the movie by overhearing Spielberg at a party. Williams relied on just two notes for one of the most widely known film scores in movie history. But no ingredient mattered more on 'Jaws' than the man behind the camera. Filmmaking talents like Spielberg come around maybe a couple times a century, and in 'Jaws,' he emerged, spectacularly. What's maybe most striking about 'Jaws' 50 years later is how much it still doesn't look like anything else. ___ Jake Coyle has been writing about movies for the AP since 2013. He's seen 'Jaws' at least a dozen times, and screened it for his kids when they were debatably too young for it.
