Setting Template: ‘Jaws’ changed movies forever, but Hollywood could still learn from it

JAKE COYLE

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 an 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 theatres 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 theatres 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 by. 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.

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 of 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