The Origin of Steven Spielberg's Jaws: From Newspaper Article to Novel to Summer Blockbuster
The story of Jaws began when fisherman Frank Mundus caught a great white shark weighing more than two tons.
It's true that without director Steven Spielberg, the world would have never been introduced to the concept of the summer blockbuster 50 years ago. However, the story of Jaws becoming a global phenomenon actually began about a decade before the now-celebrated filmmaker got his big Hollywood break.
Let's take a closer look at the origins of Jaws, from an inspiring newspaper article to the very first summer blockbuster.
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The newspaper article that inspired Peter Benchley to write Jaws
The origin of the shark-based saga can be traced back to 1964, when reporter-turned-novelist Peter Benchley apparently found himself inspired by a news article about Frank Mundus, a fisherman who had caught a great white shark weighing over two tons off the coast of Montauk, New York. This further built on Benchley's existing childhood memories of catching sharks while on Nantucket fishing trips with his father.
In 1971, Benchley sold his first work of fiction — a novel about a quiet seaside town terrorized by a man-eating predator of the deep — to Doubleday. According to Laurent Bouzereau's Jaws @ 50 documentary (set to premiere next month from National Geographic), the writer played around with several potential titles, including Leviathan Rising and Terror of the Deep, before settling on Jaws. The book hit shelves in 1974 and was an immediate sensation with readers, staying atop bestseller lists for close to a year.
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"Jaws keeps its pace; it is a fluid entertainment," proclaimed Andrew C.J. Bergman of The New York Times.
"Benchley keeps it moving, fulfills all expectations," echoed Eliot Fremont-Smith in New York magazine. "[He] provides just enough civics and ecology to make us feel good, and tops it off with a really terrific and grisly battle."
How Jaws went from a bestselling novel to a blockbuster movie
Confident in the book's potential as a movie, Hollywood producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown chomped down on the film rights before it had even been published. Something similar would happen two decades later when a very influential Steven Spielberg optioned Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park before its publication.
While finishing post-production on his theatrical debut, The Sugarland Express, young Spielberg came upon an early copy of Benchley's book in Zanuck's office and read it over a single weekend. He was instantly hooked, seeing Jaws as the perfect companion piece to his TV movie Duel, in which a man (Dennis Weaver) is terrorized by a truck, whose driver is never seen. The rising director was eager to tackle the project, but the producers already had another person in mind for the job, Dick Richards (The Culpepper Cattle Co.), who was ultimately passed over when he kept referring to the shark as a whale.
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Zanuck and Brown then offered the job to Spielberg — and the rest is cinema history. The resultant adaptation credited to Benchley and Carl Gottlieb (though there were contributions from Howard Sackler, Matthew Robbins, John Milius, and even Robert Shaw) removed or tweaked a number of seedier elements from the source material, including an affair between Hooper and Brody's wife, the revelation that Mayor Vaughn owes money to local underworld figures, and the final battle with the shark itself.
Despite an arduous production that saw the movie go wildly over schedule and budget, none of the behind-the-scenes troubles were apparent when Jaws finally took a bite out of theaters on June 20, 1975 by way of Universal Pictures. The film was an instant hit with audiences, going on to become the highest-grossing release of all time until Star Wars shattered the box office record two years later.
Such runaway success gave Benchley's book an even bigger boost, solidified Spielberg as a major industry talent, and ushered in a new era of studio thinking. The only downside to the whole thing was the way in which Jaws negatively contributed to the public's perception of great white sharks.
"I couldn't write Jaws today," Benchley told Time magazine in 2001 (via CBS News). "It used to be believed that great white sharks did target humans; now we know that, except in the rarest of instances, great white shark attacks are mistakes."
"That’s one of the things I still fear. Not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975," Spielberg admitted in 2022. "To this day, I regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film. I really, truly regret that."
All four Jaws movies will begin streaming on Peacock Sunday, June 15 for the summer. In the meantime, you can rent and/or purchase them from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, along with a special 50th Anniversary edition of Jaws.
