Jaws Shot-By-Shot

Here is a video essay you might like for extra credit.

The 1970s

THE HOLLYWOOD BRATS

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Apocalypse Now (1979)

The Godfather (1972)

 
Taxi Driver (1976)

The French Connection (1971)

THE GAME CHANGERS

Jaws (1975)

Star Wars (1977)



EXPOITATION

Mad Max (1979)

Super Fly (1973)

Shaft (1971)

Five Deadly Venoms (1978)

1975: Best Picture Showdown

In 1975, five films were nominated for 'Best Picture' by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. They were:

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest won. Jaws did not. Jaws, for better or worse, spawned three direct sequels and, some would argue, changed the face of Hollywood forever. (Summer suddenly became the season to make money in movie theaters - a phenomenon that had never before occurred.)

Here is the question of the day:

Did Cuckoo's Nest rightfully win the 'Best Picture' award, or was Jaws robbed?

This will not be an online discussion. Instead, please answer the question in a multi-paragraph, 300 word essay. Please put the word count in the upper right hand corner along with your name. Please be sure that your essay is thoughtful and thorough, as well as grammatically correct. You will probably want to take into account and state the criteria by which you are making your determination. You should also back up your claims with specific evidence from each film.

Jaws: On the Beach

Here's a pretty good article that gives a bit of a history of Jaws and also details some of the lasting effects it's had on the American movie industry. Give it a read. Report below in an online class discussion. Your comments should be thoughtful and thorough. You will be graded on quality as well and quantity.

SUMMER FILMS: ON THE BEACH

The Movie That Created the 'Summer Movie'

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY (NYT)

Copyright New York Times Company Apr 30, 2000

Twenty-five years ago, Steven Spielberg's ''Jaws'' created the Summer Movie as we know it: the action-heavy ''thrill ride'' sort of picture, aimed at sensation-hungry younger audiences, which moves into theaters around Memorial Day and remains there, partying hard, until the school year starts up again in September. ''Jaws'' opened on June 20, 1975, and its phenomenal popularity -- it was the first movie to relieve American audiences of more than $100 million of their hard-earned money -- helped turn Hollywood into what is now largely a summer-business town, sort of like Amity, the New England beach resort where the film's dire events take place. Watching the picture today, you might interpret it as a kind of allegory, in which the business community of Amity, refusing to close the beaches after a couple of fatal shark attacks, eerily embodies the ethics and aesthetics of the entertainment industry. The distributors and exhibitors do not shut down the multiplex even when they know that something lethal -- a ''Speed 2,'' a ''Godzilla,'' a ''Wild, Wild West'' -- lurks within.

This is not to say (as some do) that ''Jaws'' is responsible for the ''blockbuster mentality'' that has held sway over the major studios for the past couple of decades. When did Hollywood not try for blockbusters? You can pin this rap on any enormously lucrative picture you happen not to like; just from the decade preceding ''Jaws,'' suspects include ''The Exorcist,'' ''The French Connection,'' ''Love Story'' and ''The Sound of Music.'' ''The Godfather'' has the alibi of obvious greatness; even if it were the culprit, not a court in the world would convict it. The worst you can say about ''Jaws,'' I think, is that its success suggested, to the beady-eyed studio marketers, a link between the kind of movie it so spectacularly was and the time of year when it was released.

When studio executives first saw ''Jaws,'' they must have reacted like those old cartoon characters whose eyes would pop open and turn into dollar signs. The movie proposed a solution to a problem that had been plaguing the suits since the late 60's -- how to tap into the big ''youth'' market, but reliably. The studios didn't quite understand the appeal of pictures like ''The Graduate,'' ''Bonnie and Clyde,'' ''Easy Rider'' and ''M*A*S*H'' and certainly couldn't replicate it. (For that matter, they couldn't even figure out how to clone ''Love Story.'') But ''Jaws'' was, on the face of it, entertainment of a type the studios knew how to produce. At that time, action pictures were mostly being marketed to older audiences, but ''Jaws'' showed Hollywood it could sell action to kids too, with a few adjustments -- a faster pace, a hipper kind of humor, a stronger sense of horror and no Charlton Heston. (Mr. Heston had in fact wanted to play the police chief in ''Jaws,'' but Mr. Spielberg wisely rejected him in favor of Roy Scheider.) And why not release that type of movie in the summertime, when -- for the middle-class young, at least -- the livin' is easy?

The discovery of the action-youth-summer nexus is a stirring myth for marketing departments, a Grail legend for M.B.A.'s. Ordinary moviegoers, however -- and especially those over 25 -- tend to view this achievement as rather a mixed blessing. What if, some pleasant evening in July, you want to go to the movies, but just don't feel like a blow-you-through-the-back-wall-of-the-theater experience? You're out of luck, and that could make you a tad resentful toward ''Jaws'' and its spawn. But that feeling should be resisted, because ''Jaws,'' like ''The Godfather,'' is a great film. And it, too, deserves immunity from prosecution for the crimes of present-day Hollywood.

In order to grant ''Jaws'' the coveted ''Godfather'' exemption, though, it may be necessary for film historians and the higher-minded segment of the film audience to overcome a few prejudices about genre. ''Jaws'' is, after all, fundamentally a horror movie. There's a rugged, nautical-adventure component to the second half of the picture, in which the three main characters -- Police Chief Brody, an icthyologist named Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and the salty old shark-hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) -- roam the coastal waters in search of the giant homicidal fish. But the movie has a lot more in common with ''Dracula'' than with ''Moby-Dick.'' This great white shark is no Great White Whale, gorging on metaphor; it's a monster, pure and simple, and its sole purpose is to generate fear.

That's the essence of the horror genre -- in fact, the only way of defining it that connects supernatural thrillers about ghosts and vampires with sci-fi monster movies (''The Thing,'' the ''Alien'' series), and also with slasher and serial-killer sagas (''Halloween,'' ''The Silence of the Lambs'') that don't require the viewer to believe in occult forces, life after death, the Devil, or extraterrestrial organisms. The shark of ''Jaws,'' as conceived by Peter Benchley, the author of the best-selling 1973 novel, is a natural predator exaggerated just enough to turn it into an acceptable horror-story nemesis: it's described as a ''rogue,'' with atypical feeding patterns that almost suggest a purpose, a malevolent will; and it's larger than normal, making it, of course, that much harder to kill. Those are the characteristics requisite to a monster: a whiff of evil and an aura of invincibility.

And Mr. Spielberg, who had successfully attributed those very qualities to, of all things, a big truck in the television movie ''Duel'' (1971), knew even more than Mr. Benchley did about the mechanics of producing fear. One of the reasons the film is so much better than the book is that Mr. Spielberg is more single-minded in his dedication to scaring us silly; he eliminated the novel's distracting subplots, and his editing rhythm is so unsettling that the audience never gets the chance to relax, even during apparent lulls and scenes of comic relief. We're always aware of something awful under the placid surface.

How much an individual viewer actually enjoys that unremitting tension is, I suppose, a matter of temperament. What makes a horror movie more disturbing than other kinds of suspense thrillers and action movies -- police dramas, say, or the international intrigue Tom Clancy serves up -- is that the anxiety it generates is magnified by a sense of helplessness: you're up against a force that can't be mastered by reason. Many adults, especially those of the well-educated, professionally accomplished variety, don't like that feeling one bit and may complain about having been manipulated by a genuinely scary movie like ''Jaws.'' (If there's manipulating to be done, they're going to be the ones to do it.) Those of us who don't feel quite so masterly are a good deal more comfortable with the horror experience. Teenagers get it in a big way.

Two years after ''Jaws'' opened, Mr. Spielberg himself sounded a little sheepish about what he'd done, almost apologetic about the film's effectiveness. ''I have very mixed feelings about my work on that picture,'' he said. ''I saw it again and realized it was the simplest movie I had ever seen in my life. It was just the essential moving, working parts of suspense and terror.'' He was unfair to himself. Of the thousands of suspense-and-terror machines constructed for the movies in the medium's first century, only a few have made their ''moving, working parts'' function so smoothly. (Even though the movie's mechanical shark, famously, didn't work very well at all.) But Mr. Spielberg didn't want to be known as, in his words, ''a shark-and-truck director,'' perhaps in part because, like all young virtuosos -- he was 28 when ''Jaws'' opened -- he had a tendency to get bored with his own facility, to undervalue the skills that other artists would sell their souls for.

And he probably suspected, too, that as a director of horror movies he would never be taken entirely seriously as a filmmaker and might even wind up looking faintly disreputable. (The career of his friend Brian De Palma would, over the next 10 years, provide confirmation of that suspicion.) Mr. Spielberg could have used some of the magisterial confidence of Alfred Hitchcock, who was always inordinately proud of ''Psycho'' -- the ''Jaws'' of 1960 -- precisely because it was the film in which he exercised the most absolute control over viewers' responses. The master of suspense wasn't apologetic about creating fear, because it's a potent emotion, and he was fortunate (or, if you will, cynical) enough to believe that for a filmmaker no emotion was better than any other.

Hitchcock may not have been right about that. The sheer terror of ''Psycho'' is less complex, and less rewarding for the audience, than the metaphysical dread that informs ''Vertigo.'' And fear, it should be said, is potentially more dangerous than many other emotions: wielded by demagogues and propagandists, it can be hugely destructive. But it doesn't have to be, and it doesn't have to be moronically simple, either. ''Jaws'' is the proof.

Although Mr. Spielberg's technical prowess is ideally suited to the horror genre, his temperament really isn't. He brings a rather sunny outlook to extremely dark material, a contrast that weirdly enhances the paradox at the center of Mr. Benchley's story: the juxtaposition of summertime fun and sudden, violent death. (In ''Jaws,'' a day at the beach isn't exactly a day at the beach.) Mr. Spielberg doesn't merely juxtapose those elements but seems rather to unite them; they meet, somehow, at the horizon.

What struck me as I watched ''Jaws'' again recently (there's a good letterboxed video but no DVD yet) is how much more humor and beauty Mr. Spielberg brings to it than it really needs to be an effective genre piece. The interplay of the three men in the boat is often hilarious (think, for example, of the improvised-looking scene in which they drunkenly compare scars), and even the most shocking bits of carnage are so elegantly conceived that they have a sort of perverse wit. For all the relentless, terrifying momentum ''Jaws'' builds up, it's an unusually companionable horror picture: it doesn't oppress viewers with claustrophobic atmosphere or try to wow them with special effects. As far as I can tell, there isn't a single process shot in the movie. The ocean and the clear sky are allowed to be themselves, and so are the three sensibly apprehensive men who move through this gorgeous setting in search of the beast. ''Jaws'' makes fear look natural -- which of course, it is. In this picture, we understand terror so well we can even laugh at it.

I don't mean to denigrate ''Jaws'' by making it sound profound. This is not the sort of picture that wants the audience to think too hard. It's a visceral-experience movie, and its distinction, I believe, is that it's truer to the experience of physical fear than any other horror movie, before or since. I also wouldn't want to claim that the film's influence hasn't been a little pernicious. We'd all give a lot, I'm sure, to have been spared the overbearing action-and-horror fests of the past 25 summers (including, prominently, Mr. Spielberg's own ''Jaws'' knockoff ''Jurassic Park''). But it's time to let ''Jaws'' off the hook. Like the great white, it is what it is, and does what it does with extraordinary efficiency and power. And so what if most of its descendants have been terrible? If every summer movie were as good as ''Jaws,'' none of us would ever get to the beach.

Got teeth?

Here is some documentary footage about Jaws if you are interested. Watch a few and post below for extra credit.

Jaws: On the Beach

Here's a pretty good article that gives a b it of a history of Jaws, and also details some of the lasting effects it's had on the American movie industry. Give it a read and check back in with me at the end.

SUMMER FILMS: ON THE BEACH;

The Movie That Created the 'Summer Movie'

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY (NYT)

Copyright New York Times Company Apr 30, 2000

Twenty-five years ago, Steven Spielberg's ''Jaws'' created the Summer Movie as we know it: the action-heavy ''thrill ride'' sort of picture, aimed at sensation-hungry younger audiences, which moves into theaters around Memorial Day and remains there, partying hard, until the school year starts up again in September. ''Jaws'' opened on June 20, 1975, and its phenomenal popularity -- it was the first movie to relieve American audiences of more than $100 million of their hard-earned money -- helped turn Hollywood into what is now largely a summer-business town, sort of like Amity, the New England beach resort where the film's dire events take place. Watching the picture today, you might interpret it as a kind of allegory, in which the business community of Amity, refusing to close the beaches after a couple of fatal shark attacks, eerily embodies the ethics and aesthetics of the entertainment industry. The distributors and exhibitors do not shut down the multiplex even when they know that something lethal -- a ''Speed 2,'' a ''Godzilla,'' a ''Wild, Wild West'' -- lurks within.

This is not to say (as some do) that ''Jaws'' is responsible for the ''blockbuster mentality'' that has held sway over the major studios for the past couple of decades. When did Hollywood not try for blockbusters? You can pin this rap on any enormously lucrative picture you happen not to like; just from the decade preceding ''Jaws,'' suspects include ''The Exorcist,'' ''The French Connection,'' ''Love Story'' and ''The Sound of Music.'' ''The Godfather'' has the alibi of obvious greatness; even if it were the culprit, not a court in the world would convict it. The worst you can say about ''Jaws,'' I think, is that its success suggested, to the beady-eyed studio marketers, a link between the kind of movie it so spectacularly was and the time of year when it was released.

When studio executives first saw ''Jaws,'' they must have reacted like those old cartoon characters whose eyes would pop open and turn into dollar signs. The movie proposed a solution to a problem that had been plaguing the suits since the late 60's -- how to tap into the big ''youth'' market, but reliably. The studios didn't quite understand the appeal of pictures like ''The Graduate,'' ''Bonnie and Clyde,'' ''Easy Rider'' and ''M*A*S*H'' and certainly couldn't replicate it. (For that matter, they couldn't even figure out how to clone ''Love Story.'') But ''Jaws'' was, on the face of it, entertainment of a type the studios knew how to produce. At that time, action pictures were mostly being marketed to older audiences, but ''Jaws'' showed Hollywood it could sell action to kids too, with a few adjustments -- a faster pace, a hipper kind of humor, a stronger sense of horror and no Charlton Heston. (Mr. Heston had in fact wanted to play the police chief in ''Jaws,'' but Mr. Spielberg wisely rejected him in favor of Roy Scheider.) And why not release that type of movie in the summertime, when -- for the middle-class young, at least -- the livin' is easy?

The discovery of the action-youth-summer nexus is a stirring myth for marketing departments, a Grail legend for M.B.A.'s. Ordinary moviegoers, however -- and especially those over 25 -- tend to view this achievement as rather a mixed blessing. What if, some pleasant evening in July, you want to go to the movies, but just don't feel like a blow-you-through-the-back-wall-of-the-theater experience? You're out of luck, and that could make you a tad resentful toward ''Jaws'' and its spawn. But that feeling should be resisted, because ''Jaws,'' like ''The Godfather,'' is a great film. And it, too, deserves immunity from prosecution for the crimes of present-day Hollywood.

In order to grant ''Jaws'' the coveted ''Godfather'' exemption, though, it may be necessary for film historians and the higher-minded segment of the film audience to overcome a few prejudices about genre. ''Jaws'' is, after all, fundamentally a horror movie. There's a rugged, nautical-adventure component to the second half of the picture, in which the three main characters -- Police Chief Brody, an icthyologist named Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and the salty old shark-hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) -- roam the coastal waters in search of the giant homicidal fish. But the movie has a lot more in common with ''Dracula'' than with ''Moby-Dick.'' This great white shark is no Great White Whale, gorging on metaphor; it's a monster, pure and simple, and its sole purpose is to generate fear.

That's the essence of the horror genre -- in fact, the only way of defining it that connects supernatural thrillers about ghosts and vampires with sci-fi monster movies (''The Thing,'' the ''Alien'' series), and also with slasher and serial-killer sagas (''Halloween,'' ''The Silence of the Lambs'') that don't require the viewer to believe in occult forces, life after death, the Devil, or extraterrestrial organisms. The shark of ''Jaws,'' as conceived by Peter Benchley, the author of the best-selling 1973 novel, is a natural predator exaggerated just enough to turn it into an acceptable horror-story nemesis: it's described as a ''rogue,'' with atypical feeding patterns that almost suggest a purpose, a malevolent will; and it's larger than normal, making it, of course, that much harder to kill. Those are the characteristics requisite to a monster: a whiff of evil and an aura of invincibility.

And Mr. Spielberg, who had successfully attributed those very qualities to, of all things, a big truck in the television movie ''Duel'' (1971), knew even more than Mr. Benchley did about the mechanics of producing fear. One of the reasons the film is so much better than the book is that Mr. Spielberg is more single-minded in his dedication to scaring us silly; he eliminated the novel's distracting subplots, and his editing rhythm is so unsettling that the audience never gets the chance to relax, even during apparent lulls and scenes of comic relief. We're always aware of something awful under the placid surface.

How much an individual viewer actually enjoys that unremitting tension is, I suppose, a matter of temperament. What makes a horror movie more disturbing than other kinds of suspense thrillers and action movies -- police dramas, say, or the international intrigue Tom Clancy serves up -- is that the anxiety it generates is magnified by a sense of helplessness: you're up against a force that can't be mastered by reason. Many adults, especially those of the well-educated, professionally accomplished variety, don't like that feeling one bit and may complain about having been manipulated by a genuinely scary movie like ''Jaws.'' (If there's manipulating to be done, they're going to be the ones to do it.) Those of us who don't feel quite so masterly are a good deal more comfortable with the horror experience. Teenagers get it in a big way.

Two years after ''Jaws'' opened, Mr. Spielberg himself sounded a little sheepish about what he'd done, almost apologetic about the film's effectiveness. ''I have very mixed feelings about my work on that picture,'' he said. ''I saw it again and realized it was the simplest movie I had ever seen in my life. It was just the essential moving, working parts of suspense and terror.'' He was unfair to himself. Of the thousands of suspense-and-terror machines constructed for the movies in the medium's first century, only a few have made their ''moving, working parts'' function so smoothly. (Even though the movie's mechanical shark, famously, didn't work very well at all.) But Mr. Spielberg didn't want to be known as, in his words, ''a shark-and-truck director,'' perhaps in part because, like all young virtuosos -- he was 28 when ''Jaws'' opened -- he had a tendency to get bored with his own facility, to undervalue the skills that other artists would sell their souls for.

And he probably suspected, too, that as a director of horror movies he would never be taken entirely seriously as a filmmaker and might even wind up looking faintly disreputable. (The career of his friend Brian De Palma would, over the next 10 years, provide confirmation of that suspicion.) Mr. Spielberg could have used some of the magisterial confidence of Alfred Hitchcock, who was always inordinately proud of ''Psycho'' -- the ''Jaws'' of 1960 -- precisely because it was the film in which he exercised the most absolute control over viewers' responses. The master of suspense wasn't apologetic about creating fear, because it's a potent emotion, and he was fortunate (or, if you will, cynical) enough to believe that for a filmmaker no emotion was better than any other.

Hitchcock may not have been right about that. The sheer terror of ''Psycho'' is less complex, and less rewarding for the audience, than the metaphysical dread that informs ''Vertigo.'' And fear, it should be said, is potentially more dangerous than many other emotions: wielded by demagogues and propagandists, it can be hugely destructive. But it doesn't have to be, and it doesn't have to be moronically simple, either. ''Jaws'' is the proof.

Although Mr. Spielberg's technical prowess is ideally suited to the horror genre, his temperament really isn't. He brings a rather sunny outlook to extremely dark material, a contrast that weirdly enhances the paradox at the center of Mr. Benchley's story: the juxtaposition of summertime fun and sudden, violent death. (In ''Jaws,'' a day at the beach isn't exactly a day at the beach.) Mr. Spielberg doesn't merely juxtapose those elements but seems rather to unite them; they meet, somehow, at the horizon.

What struck me as I watched ''Jaws'' again recently (there's a good letterboxed video but no DVD yet) is how much more humor and beauty Mr. Spielberg brings to it than it really needs to be an effective genre piece. The interplay of the three men in the boat is often hilarious (think, for example, of the improvised-looking scene in which they drunkenly compare scars), and even the most shocking bits of carnage are so elegantly conceived that they have a sort of perverse wit. For all the relentless, terrifying momentum ''Jaws'' builds up, it's an unusually companionable horror picture: it doesn't oppress viewers with claustrophobic atmosphere or try to wow them with special effects. As far as I can tell, there isn't a single process shot in the movie. The ocean and the clear sky are allowed to be themselves, and so are the three sensibly apprehensive men who move through this gorgeous setting in search of the beast. ''Jaws'' makes fear look natural -- which of course, it is. In this picture, we understand terror so well we can even laugh at it.

I don't mean to denigrate ''Jaws'' by making it sound profound. This is not the sort of picture that wants the audience to think too hard. It's a visceral-experience movie, and its distinction, I believe, is that it's truer to the experience of physical fear than any other horror movie, before or since. I also wouldn't want to claim that the film's influence hasn't been a little pernicious. We'd all give a lot, I'm sure, to have been spared the overbearing action-and-horror fests of the past 25 summers (including, prominently, Mr. Spielberg's own ''Jaws'' knockoff ''Jurassic Park''). But it's time to let ''Jaws'' off the hook. Like the great white, it is what it is, and does what it does with extraordinary efficiency and power. And so what if most of its descendants have been terrible? If every summer movie were as good as ''Jaws,'' none of us would ever get to the beach.

Mr. Cowlin here again. Here's my question: Three decades after Jaws was first released, do you think the legacy it has left has made the world of entertainment a better place, or not? (Please answer in a thoughtful, thorough answer. Please refer to the article to support your claims. Please also note that this entry will be worth 10 points instead of the usual 5, so give yourself some time to really think about this one.)

Invaded, Snatched, and Captured...by the Frame

I watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers this weekend with my two youngest. It was released in 1956, and, boy, does it sure hold up. For those of you unfamiliar with Invasion, here’s a quick plot synopsis: A small town doctor discovers that aliens are taking over earth by replacing humans one by one with human-looking pod people grown from alien seed pods. After a point, the doctor doesn’t know who to trust. Anyone could be an alien, but how can you tell? The film, of course, is famous for mimicking the communist scare that was sweeping America at the time. How can we protect ourselves from outsiders who wish to change our very way of life when those outsiders look just like you or me? Who can we trust? No one, that’s who!

I was afraid my kids wouldn't like the movie because it doesn't actually show any alien lifeforms...just human-looking pod people duplicates. In part, this was done for budgetary restrictions. It is, after all, much cheaper to film a guy dressed as a policeman and say he's an alien invader rather than putting him in a mask and suit sitting at a futuristic control panel and show that he's an alien invader.

But this lack of special effects actually adds to the film’s effectiveness. Kind of like how the mechanical shark used in Jaws never worked properly, so Spielberg fashioned his story around a monster the audience rarely saw. Spielberg himself has said numerous times that he thinks this adds to the terror of the shark, and if the shark had worked the way it was supposed to, the movie would have turned out far inferior.

But back to Invasion. Here we have a doctor and his girlfriend running around, trying to get out of town, all the while being chased and hunted by creatures that resemble their friends and neighbors. And here’s what struck me this time while watching the film: director Don Siegel uses the camera’s frame itself to hunt and capture the characters along with the aliens. Just look at this shot:

See how the buildings and cars on either side of them create visual walls through which the characters cannot escape? Even the reflection of light in the center of the frame is like a path leading them in only one direction. And that direction is totally illuminated. They can run, but they can’t hide. Here’s another:

It’s almost the identical shot, only this time it’s a tight hallway, with only one way to go. And when they finally get to the door at the end…

It’s locked. And they have to head back towards the camera. Heck, the camera doesn’t even follow them down the hall. Why? Because it knows the door is locked and that they’ll be coming back. The camera becomes, to some degree, the eyes of the hunters. More evidence to support this claim? The camera is placed behind the subjects so they run away from us, not towards us. Here's one more:

Great shot, huh? Pretty claustrophobic, right? These shots combined create a great sense of paranoia. In this way, the subject of the film becomes not alien invaders scaring us, but the fear itself. The film is about being afraid. There’s more ofthese shots, but I don’t want to ruin the movie for you.

So here’s a question: Can you think of a film where the framing is used to create a similar sense of claustrophobia and paranoia? Or, can you think of examples of just the opposite, films in which the framing creates a sense of freedom and openness?