This summer marks the 50th anniversary of the now-classic film that made us afraid to go into the ocean: Jaws, the story of a monster shark that terrorizes a New England beach town.
Directed by a very young Steven Spielberg, Jaws may be scary to watch, but it was even scarier for the people who made it. Bad weather, fickle tides and malfunctioning mechanical sharks plagued Spielberg and his crew and sent the film spiraling over budget and months over schedule.
Now you can experience just how hard it was to bring Jaws to the big screen with a new exhibit at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, full of iconic props (the shattered shark cage!), script pages with Spielberg's handwritten notes and even a scale replica of the mechanical shark that visitors can operate themselves.
Revisiting the boat at the heart of Jaws
At the center of the exhibit sits a recreation of the film's doomed fishing boat, the Orca, and the red leather booth where, after dinner, stars Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw hiked their legs onto the table to compare scars. Imagine my surprise when Spielberg himself sits down in the booth beside me and playfully hikes his leg onto the table.
"God, this is a high table," he laughs, reliving the scene. "Remember?" he asks.
Who could forget?
Fifty years after Jaws, Spielberg is arguably the country's most important living filmmaker — a national treasure — but the exhibit makes clear: Jaws nearly devoured his young career much as the shark eats a swimmer in the film's famous opening.
I ask Spielberg how it feels to walk through the exhibit and see so many reminders of the shoot that he has previously likened to "living out my worst nightmare."
"This is total therapy," Spielberg says. "This was a very hard experience. When we seriously did not know how many weeks or months we were going to be in Martha's Vineyard shooting."
Filming was originally set to take 55 days. Instead, it took 159 days.
Spielberg remembers, "I would have the crew come up to me and say, 'Look, I have a wife and I'm supporting my mom and I've got kids in school. When are we going to get to go home?' And it was the toughest thing on me, having to answer that question honestly by saying, 'I don't know. I can't tell you.' "
The benefit of all that time
But the film's overlong shoot also gave Spielberg, the actors and one of the film's screenwriters, Carl Gottlieb, an advantage: months more to hone the story and its characters. It's possible the film wouldn't be the classic it is without that extra honing.
With a script by uncredited screenwriter Howard Sackler, who Spielberg is quick to note "found the structure that exists to this day," the cast would gather at Spielberg's house in the evenings.
"We would just riff on the pages that we were going to shoot the next couple days, and then we'd go beyond the pages. Everybody would explore their own characters and [improvise], and then they'd leave and me and Carl Gottlieb would stay behind, because we were all living under the same roof, and we'd cherrypick from the improv lines that would work in the existing structure."
One famous line that came out of these improv sessions: "It's only an island if you look at it from the water," Chief Brody's retort when the oceanographer, Hooper, points out that it doesn't make much sense for a man who's afraid of the water to live on an island.
An iconic monologue
Since Spielberg and I are sitting in the museum's recreation of the Orca, I ask him about filming at that table, where Robert Shaw delivered one of the most iconic monologues in film history: the speech that explains why his character, Quint, hates sharks and how he narrowly survived the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis during World War II.
It turns out, this scene is Spielberg's favorite in the film, and, in the museum's Orca, it plays silently on a large-screen television behind us.
The speech itself, Spielberg says, was not improvised. It was a complex collaboration, beginning with Sackler, who introduced the idea that the Indianapolis incident could "explain why Quint's so dead-set on becoming the modern-day Ahab, going after this great white shark. And so he created the speech, but it was three-quarters of a page."
Spielberg remembers he then sent this relatively short speech to his friend, writer-director John Milius, who turned it into a ten-page monologue.
"I brought the [Milius] monologue and showed it to Robert Shaw, who himself was a playwright. Robert said, 'You mind if I take this home and work on it?' And about two days later, Robert shows up and hands me five pages. He had edited the whole speech, and word for word, I used Robert Shaw's edited, five-page cut-down of Milius' ten pages, based on Howard Sackler's three-quarters of a page."
As powerful as that scene is, Spielberg says, he had to re-do it.
"The first time I attempted to shoot the scene, Robert had asked me permission. He said, 'Can I have just a drink?' And I foolishly at 26 years old said to Robert Shaw, 'Yes.'
"About two hours later, we were getting ready to shoot the scene in the afternoon, and I saw three crew carrying Robert onto the set, escorting him, holding his arms."
Spielberg says he tried to film the scene but eventually stopped rolling when he realized, "Robert was sort of in another space."
"I just went over to Robert, gave him a hug, and he thought he had finished the scene. And he said, 'How was that?' I said, 'Robert, you were great. I'm going to wrap the company. It's great. It's all I need.' And I sent Robert home."
The next morning at 3 a.m., Shaw called Spielberg.
"He was panicked [and said] 'I don't remember the day. What happened? Did I embarrass you?' He was more concerned that he had embarrassed me," Spielberg remembers.
"And I said, 'Robert, no. You had more than one drink.' Robert said, 'Well, I want to do it [again] tomorrow morning first thing. Can we just hit the ground running first thing in the morning?' Which we did. And he knocked it out of the ballpark."
Jaws haunted Spielberg for years
Years after the movie had become a runaway success and Spielberg with it, the director says he struggled with nightmares about the shoot, "waking up with all the sheets wet because I would sweat through all my clothes at night. I had serious PTSD for years."
What helped him through it, he says, was the Orca itself. After the film was a hit, Universal Studios brought the boat to its backlot, in Los Angeles, for tourists to see.
"I would sneak onto the boat without the tourists seeing me," Spielberg says, "and I would just sit in that little cabin — where we're sitting right now — and I would just work it out, having an emotional reaction to my memories. And when I felt good about it, after a good cry or a good laugh, I would get back in my golf cart and go back to my office."
One day, Spielberg says, he went to visit the Orca, but it was gone.
"An inspector had come up to the boat and found that it was riddled with termites. And [the studio] destroyed the Orca."
Spielberg was distraught. But he did salvage at least one artifact: the boat's steering wheel, now part of the Academy Museum exhibit.
A jump-scare, preserved for visitors
One of the strangest artifacts from the film sits tucked away in a far corner of the exhibit, out of view of younger visitors. It comes from perhaps the film's biggest jump-scare — when oceanographer Hooper, played by Dreyfuss, dives to the wrecked hull of a boat belonging to a fisherman named Ben Gardner. As Hooper plucks a large shark's tooth from a hole in the hull, Gardner's grotesque head floats into view, one eye socket stuffed with creepy-crawlies.
Spielberg famously shot the scene after filming had wrapped, using the swimming pool of his editor, Verna Fields. And he says he kept Gardner's prosthetic head.
"I took the head and brought it home. It's been living with me all these years!"
When I ask where he kept it, Spielberg laughs and vows, "Nowhere near my kids! I don't want them traumatized by it."
Now on display: the shark itself
The Orca isn't even the most iconic prop lost to history after being thrown away by the studio. That distinction belongs to the film's three mechanical sharks, collectively nicknamed Bruce, all left to rot on the Universal backlot after filming.
When the studio realized its mistake, it used the original mold to make one last identical shark. That Bruce hung by his tail at Universal Studios until 1990.
Then, the studio threw him out, too, leaving devoted Jaws fans to whisper in online forums about where the shark had gone and whether it was still intact.
Fifteen years ago, in 2010, I reported one of my very first stories for NPR, tracking down this little-known, fourth shark by cold-calling Southern California junkyards until I found the one that had received the shark in 1990. It turns out, the junkyard owner had loved the shark and tucked him away in a grove of palm trees and loquat plants.
After that story, many Jaws fans descended on the site, and the owner eventually donated the shark to the Academy Museum.
This junkyard Bruce, as he's lovingly known, got a terrifying restoration in 2019 from special effects master Greg Nicotero and now hangs at the end of this brand new exhibit marking the film's 50th anniversary, open until next beach season. As in the movie, if you want to see the shark, you have to wait till the very end.
But what a finale.
Spielberg and I leave our booth in the Orca and, together, make the short walk through a pair of double doors and find ourselves eye-to-eye with the shark, now suspended by wires four stories up, sun-dappled in the museum's glass atrium.
I ask Spielberg how he felt when he heard that this junkyard Bruce had been saved.
"I loved it," he says.
Yes, the sharks had been difficult to work with, constantly breaking down in the salt water, but Spielberg says he's made peace with Bruce.
I ask if the man has anything to say to the shark. Spielberg laughs and, without hesitation, offers:
"Thank you for a robust career," he tells the shark. "Without you, you know, I don't know what I would've — certainly my next three or four movies wouldn't have been those same movies. Because Jaws gave me the chance to make anything I wanted to make."
Spielberg adds, "It kicked my ass for nine months, but it gave me a lifetime career."
Copyright 2025 NPR
