Jaws (1975), and how Hitchcock influenced Spielberg
With The Fabelmans nominated for seven Oscars, I thought it might be fun to look at one of Steven Spielbergs undisputed masterpieces: Jaws, and how it was influenced by Alfred Hitchcock.
At the 1976 Academy Awards, Jaws won three Oscars: for best sound, editing (by Verna Fields) and the score by John Williams. It was also nominated for Best Picture, but that award went to another classic: One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Milos Forman.
Jaws is probably the most Hitchcockian movie that Spielberg ever made. For me it is one of the reasons it still holds up so well.
Jaws, based on the novel by Peter Benchley, is basically The Birds but with a shark instead of birds, scaring the wits out of the population of a small coastal town.
(Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws - all pictures: Universal)
Having seen both movies again in the last couple of months I’m just amazed how much the two towns - Hitchcock’s on the west coast, Spielberg’s in the east - look alike. That can’t be a coincidence!
Spielberg was always an admirer of the Master of Suspense, but initially Jaws was going to be more like a typical creature feature, with the shark having a strong physical presence in the film.
It was only when the three mechanical sharks that were used during production started to malfunction that Spielberg decided to rely more on suggestion than on actual horror - even though the finished film contained more than enough of that for most audiences.
‘The shark not working was a godsend,’ Spielberg would later say in an interview. ‘It made me become more like Alfred Hitchcock. When I didn’t have control of my shark it kind of made me rewrite the whole script without the shark.’
To which he added: ‘The film went from a Japanese Saturday matinee horror flick to more of a Hitchcock, the-less-you-see-the-more-you-get thriller.’
Jaws itself went on to become the most successful movie of all time, at least until it was replaced by Star Wars two years. Together, these two movies laid the foundation for the modern blockbuster, where movies with a relatively simple high concept draw in massive crowds over the summer period.
‘We’re a summer town. We need summer money,’ mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) tells police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) in the movie, explaining why the beaches of Amity have to stay open, even with a giant killer on the loose.
It is as if the movie predicts the future of Hollywood, as a monster that needs to be fed - also a theme that runs through Jordan Peele’s recent and very Spielbergian Nope.
At another point in the movie the shark is described as ‘a perfect engine’, only made for eating people and producing little sharks.
When Benchley’s book came out, it was seen as a reaction to the Watergate scandal that rocked the world in the early seventies.
For me, however, it is impossible to watch the movie - especially with the people and their kids in the water - and not think about the term ‘swimming with sharks’ that is often used to describe Hollywood.
Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but seeing it with fresh eyes I get the feeling that the first Hollywood blockbuster was also meant as a metaphor on the way that Hollywood has always lured people in before eating them alive.
At least, Spielberg, like Hitchcock before him, not only survived but thrived in Hollywood.
Sadly, Spielberg and Hitchcock never got to meet. Spielberg tried to approach his hero on the set of his last movie, Family Plot, but was turned away with some flimsy excuse about not being able to meet with the guy who made the ‘fish movie.’
Which was ironic as Spielberg had made Jaws for Universal, where Hitchcock served on the board of directors, and made a ton of money for the company.
My guess is that Jaws was the kind of movie that Hitchcock would have loved to have made had he been a young director on the rise instead of a legendary filmmaker near the end of his career.
Perhaps Hitch felt a little upstaged, and who can blame him? With Jaws, Spielberg took a page out of Hitchcock’s playbook and added another chapter to it.