In 1975, in Hollywood, a joke became fashionable: "What has white teeth, earns millions of dollars, devours women and is not Warren Beatty?", the answer was Jaws, Steven Spielberg's film about the killer shark that attacked bathers who were innocently swimming in the sea. This February 18th Shark 50 years ago. It's been half a century since its premiere. A film that caused a turning point in the way we consume cinema and that became an icon of popular culture.
Now, on Movistar + it has just been released Fifty years of Jaws, a French documentary that is nothing out of this world, but it goes into the inner workings of the film to understand its success. Some of the protagonists or their relatives participate, because the impact went beyond the screen. The children of some of the actors remember the most domestic anecdotes of the entire filming. Wendy Benchley, the widow of Peter Benchley, author of the novel that inspired the script of the film, also explains the adaptation process and the message of the story. When her husband told her that he wanted to write a novel about a great white shark, she tried to get him out of his head. The documentary includes a collection of old interviews with Steven Spielberg that show the director's intentions in the creation process and his attitude behind the camera at only twenty-eight years old. Producers, scriptwriters and fans talk about their experiences during the filming and everything they wanted to tell with a film that talked about an underwater monster. All of this alternates with the most emblematic scenes of the film to build a global portrait that goes beyond a cinematographic production. Fifty years of Jaws It tells us about an era, a social and political context and another Hollywood that no longer exists, but that received a push to become what it is today.
Despite the box office success and the ability to become a cult film, it was a catastrophic shoot, with multiple accidents and major disagreements within the team of protagonists. The conflicts were so obvious that in the current interviews for the documentary, some of the witnesses do not hide the rivalries or the lack of harmony. It is as if, fifty years later, part of the virtues of the film had their origin in the environmental tension during the filming.
In the documentary there are some very curious images of the premiere. With a night vision camera they recorded the faces of the spectators in the movie theater watching Jaws for the first time. The scares, the suffering and the expressions of anguish reveal a gaze that was not yet accustomed to the horror narrative that the film proposed. Shark, despite the fear of the fin and the extraordinary soundtrack by John Williams that alerts us to the threat, perhaps the beast is not the most monstrous element. Jaws He speaks subtly about capitalism and perhaps that is what has guaranteed him this long life that he can celebrate by watching the film again.
