Where to watch Jaws (1975)

Trivia & production notes

• Producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown discovered Peter Benchley's unpublished novel through a brief mention in Cosmopolitan magazine, which was edited by Brown's wife Helen Gurley Brown.
• Zanuck and Brown purchased the film rights to Jaws before the book was even published for approximately $175,000, and Brown later admitted that reading the novel twice would have convinced them the project was too difficult to execute.
• Steven Spielberg was initially reluctant to direct Jaws because he feared being typecast as the 'truck and shark director' after his earlier film Duel, and wanted to work on Lucky Lady instead until Universal exercised its contractual right to veto his departure.
• Spielberg referenced his 1971 television film Duel while making Jaws, even repurposing the sound of the truck being destroyed as the death roar of the shark.
• Peter Benchley wrote three drafts of the screenplay before declaring himself 'written out' on the project, contributing primarily the plot mechanics and ocean sequences rather than character development.
• Spielberg removed an adulterous affair between Ellen Brody and Matt Hooper from Benchley's script because he worried it would undermine the camaraderie between the three men aboard the Orca.
• Carl Gottlieb was brought in for a one-week dialogue polish but ended up rewriting nearly the entire script over nine weeks during principal photography, with scenes typically completed the night before filming.
• Spielberg changed the shark's death from extensive wounds in the novel to a scuba tank explosion because he felt audiences would respond better to a more dramatic climax.
• Quint's backstory as a survivor of the USS Indianapolis disaster was created specifically for the film by playwright Howard Sackler, not from Benchley's original novel.
• Roy Scheider became interested in playing Brody after overhearing Spielberg describe a scene where the shark jumps onto the boat at a party, despite Spielberg initially worrying Scheider would play the character as a tough guy like his role in The French Connection.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Jaws (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.