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Fifty years after ‘Jaws’ made swimmers flee the ocean, CU Boulder cinema scholar Ernesto��Acevedo-Muñoz explains how the 1975 summer hit endures as a classic

On June 19, 1975, it wasn’t such a terrible thing to feel something brush your leg while frolicking in the ocean. It was startling, sure—humans’ relationship with the ocean has long harbored a certain element of fear, says University of Colorado Boulder Professor Andrew Martin—but the rational mind could more quickly acknowledge that it was probably seaweed.

That changed the following day, when a film by a young director named Steven Spielberg opened on screens across the United States. On June 20, 1975, to feel something brush your leg in the ocean was to immediately think, “SHARK!”

Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz, a CU Boulder professor of cinema studies and moving image arts, regularly teaches "Jaws" in Introduction to Cinema Studies.

In the 50 years since “Jaws” made people flee the water for fear of sharks, the film has become widely recognized as a cinematic landmark.

“’Jaws’ is a movie I teach regularly in Introduction to Cinema Studies—yes, it’s��that��important,” says Ernesto��Acevedo-Muñoz, a CU Boulder professor of cinema studies and moving image arts, adding that “Jaws” also is an important case study for misconceptions, including the evolution and de-evolution, of the term “blockbuster.”

A disaster-horror movie

The cinematic landscape in which “Jaws” arrived was one of greater daring and a transition away from the focus on producers in the classical Hollywood era to a focus on a new cohort of directors—“mostly men, mostly white,” Acevedo-Muñoz acknowledges—who studied cinema in college and were greatly influenced by the French New Wave.

“With the collapse of the Hollywood studio system, suddenly there’s more opportunity for creativity, for edgy content,” he says. “In the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, you have some movies that really were trailblazers in what’s unofficially called the American New Wave. ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ 1967, comes to mind—nobody had seen that kind of romanticization of violence and graphic violence before.”

Young directors like Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese were more in touch with the counterculture of the time, and old-guard producers, recognizing these young mavericks might be lucrative, green-lit projects like “The Godfather,” “Mean Streets” and “Jaws,” Acevedo-Muñoz says.

“There’s incentive to be risky in that juncture of the ‘60s to the ‘70s,” he notes. “Then to that context you add the economic crisis of the early 1970s, the recession and unemployment, plus the end of the Vietnam War, heads are getting hot and people are angry.

“The crises of the 1970s are one of the reasons why we have the flourishing of the disaster film at that time. I would point first to ‘The Poseidon Adventure,’ which is the best of them all, and ‘The Towering Inferno,’ ‘Earthquake.’ And to a certain extent, ‘Jaws’ is a hybrid of the classic horror monster movie and the 1970s disaster movie.”

The dire economic background of the early 1970s was important to “Jaws” and other disaster films, Acevedo-Muñoz says, because “a disaster movie, like a horror movie, tells us we are going through a really rough time, but if we all work together and we make a few sacrifices, we’re going to get out of this OK. If we follow the lead of Paul Newman or Steve McQueen or Gene Hackman, we’ll eventually get out of this all right.”

Driving the buzz

“Jaws” is often called the original summer blockbuster, but relentless repetition of this idea does not make it true, Acevedo-Muñoz says: “There’s no one movie we can point to as the original summer blockbuster.”

In fact, he adds, the term “blockbuster” really refers to the end of a classic Hollywood distribution and exhibition practice called block booking: If theaters wanted to show big-draw feature films, they also had to book smaller, cheaper, shorter films that came to be known as “B movies," which "were made quickly by 'B units' that often reused sets or even costumes from the big movies to cut costs. But scholarship on B movies has argued that because the studios weren’t paying too much attention to those units, some of the B movies were rather edgy and interesting."

Block booking meant that the producers and distributors controlled a lot of what was in exhibition venues, "but there were occasionally movies that may have broken that pattern, and those were in some ways the original blockbusters—as in busting the block of block booking practice," he says.

While “Jaws” did break box-office records of the time, it’s also noteworthy in cinema history as one of the first miracles of marketing, he says. It was based on a mega-bestselling book by Peter Benchley, one that was optioned for film while still in galleys, and the film marketing piggy-backed on the name recognition of the book.

Further, “Jaws” was one of the first films to intentionally create buzz as part of the overall publicity and marketing plan, including strategically leaked tidbits from the film’s set on Martha’s Vineyard.

On its June 20, 1975, opening day, “Jaws” was one of the most prominent films to benefit from a practice called “front loading,” which meant making more prints of the film and showing it in as many theaters as possible, rather than the previous practice of rolling openings from largest to smallest markets.

“The marketing and distribution team of Universal Pictures also decided to take a front-loading approach with ‘Jaws,’ so that it was playing everywhere,” Acevedo-Muñoz says. “Or almost everywhere. It still took months to get to my hometown, but we knew it was coming, and that anticipation was building.

“So, ‘Jaws’ is important because it was this consolidation of these different practices of marketing, creating buzz, creating anticipation, creating tie-ins—it put all these things in one place that were practices that had been around before the summer of ’75 but afterwards became the model.”

As for the film’s effect on moviegoers and their summer vacation plans? “I know a lot of people,” Acevedo-Muñoz says, “who refused to go swimming after they saw ‘Jaws.’”��

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