Steven Spielberg stepped in to direct the shark horror movie Spielberg's most rewatchable movies.
The Jaws movie franchise features multiple killer sharks, and while Jaws demonstrates a similar central plot to the rest of the movies in the franchise, it is significantly different from its sequels. On first viewing, Jaws is a movie about a shark, but it is actually about the way the small town reacts to the threat, with the mayor brushing the danger under the carpet. The multiple story threads and infamously troubled production have kept Jaws (and Spielberg's direction of the movie) under discussion. That said, Spielberg was not the first director associated with Jaws.
Jaws' First Director Kept Calling The Shark A Whale (& It Got Him Fired)
The Shark In Jaws Is A Great White Shark
Jaws was originally set to be directed by the celebrated filmmaker Dick Richards, but despite him being enthusiastic about making the movie, he repeatedly referred to the shark in the story as a whale (via FarOut). This irritated the Jaws producers and Peter Benchley, who wrote the Jaws novel, so much that Richards was fired from the project. It appears that Richards may have been confusing Jaws with Moby Dick, which is about a whale. Sharks and whales are not the same, and to repeatedly get such a basic detail wrong is a major error, so he was replaced with Spielberg.
How Steven Spielberg Parodied The Iconic Jaws Opening Scene Four Years Later
Jaws' opening scene is now part of pop culture, and Spielberg himself parodied it four years later in a comedy movie that wasn't as big as Jaws.
While Jaws is not based on a real shark attack, the shark is modeled on a real species: the great white. Great white sharks look intimidating, with large triangular teeth, black eyes, and a clear distinction between their white bellies and grey backs. The shark on the poster for Jaws is an exaggerated version of a great white shark, and its teeth are much larger in proportion to its mouth than a real great white shark's. Still, while sharks and whales are distinctly different, Jaws features many references to a famous story about a whale.
For A Movie About A Shark (Definitely Not A Whale), There Are A Lot Of Moby Dick References In Jaws
Quint Shares The Same Fate As A Moby Dick Character In The Original Novel
Jaws and Moby Dick might not share a main threat, but the stories share some key details. They are both based on books, wherein the monster is not the point of the story. While Jaws is about prioritizing profit over safety, Moby Dick is about Captain Ahab's desire for revenge on a whale. A shop on Jaws' Amity Island shares its name with a harpooner in Moby Dick, while the boat "The Orca" is named after animals often called "killer whales." Even Jaws' Quint (Robert Shaw) is very similar to Ahab, as the two men share the same fate in the Jaws novel.
Jaws was originally going to show Quint watching Moby Dick in his first scene.
Quint is meant to resemble Captain Ahab. Both are consumed by their revenge mission, which ends up killing them in the end. That said, while Quint is killed by the shark in the movie's goriest scene, the Jaws novel depicts Quint getting tangled in a line, which pulls him into the sea to drown. This is the same ending that Captain Ahab has in Moby Dick, and Jaws was originally going to show Quint watching Moby Dick in his first scene. However, this scene was later cut in favor of Quint's iconic blackboard scratch.
Jaws
- Release Date
- June 20, 1975
- Runtime
- 124 minutes
- Director
- Steven Spielberg
Cast
Roy ScheiderBrody
Robert ShawQuint
WHERE TO WATCH
Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg, follows the residents of Amity Island as they face terror from a menacing great white shark. The town's police chief, a marine biologist, and a seasoned shark hunter forces to track and kill the predator threatening their coastal community. Released in 1975.
- Writers
- Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb
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