Jaws turns 35

June 20, 2010 will mark the 35th anniversary of one of the most influential, significant, and kick-ass movies of all time. That's right, it was 35 years ago this week that Steven Spielberg's Jaws was released to movie theaters everywhere. And while this anniversary hardly fits in the sports category, it does fit in the history category. And since this is Inhistoric, the sports history blog, and since June is a fairly slow month (EDIT: it actually isn't but I wrote this months ago, when I thought it would be), I figure there's no harm in separating the sports and focusing on the history. Here's a look back at what makes Jaws such an important piece of cinema...

For those of you who don't know, Jaws was a 1975 film about a killer shark that prays on the citizens of a seaside town. Because the shark is bad for tourism, what with the eating and the murdering, the town's chief enlists the help of a fisherman to hunt down and kill the man-eater. But of course, killing such an epic creature is easier said than done.

The film was based off a novel of the same name by Pete Benchley, who was later brought on to write the screenplay. Jaws, both as a book and as a film, was an enormously popular story. In the theaters, it broke all kinds of movie records. It became the highest-grossing film of all time and was the first to eclipse the $100 million-mark. It was the first movie to have a simultaneous wide release, the first to have a major marketing promotion. It was the first summer blockbuster, the first high-concept, easy premise popcorn film.

Jaws had a thousand effects of the movie industry. The first thing it did was a create a name for Steven Spielberg, who at the time had only directed two feature films, and John Williams, whose timeless theme for the shark has been emulated a million times. Spielberg would go on to direct classics such as E.T., Saving Private Ryan, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Williams went on to produce a plethora of themes and soundtracks, including the Sunday Night Football theme for NBC. Both became the most influential and highly-respected men in their crafts, and it all started with Jaws.

A lot of people, however, cite Jaws as one of the worst things to ever happen to the movie industry because it put more of an onus on making money, and less on producing a masterpiece. William Goldman, the screenwriter for All the President's Men and Misery, told Charlie Rose in 1997: "Jaws changed everything in 1975. In the 60's, you could make movies that weren't expected to make fortunes. ... Jaws made more money more quickly than all those greedy studio heads out there dreamed possible."

Benchley himself later came to criticize his work, though for different reasons. Jaws was responsible for creating an anti-shark fear that kept many people out of the ocean, the same way Psycho kept many people out of the showers. He also didn't like that sharks were painted as ruthless killing machines, when in fact shark-related deaths were almost nonexistent among humans. "[T]he shark in an updated Jaws could not be the villain," he later said. "It would have to be written as the victim, for, world-wide, sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors."

Jaws would have three sequels before the series mercifully came to a close. In fact, Jaws is notable for being the first movie series to become so overridden with sequels that the fans pleaded for them to stop. Jaws 2, which was released three years after the first movie, received mixed reviews from critics but was otherwise good enough to become the highest-grossing sequel ever (it lost this claim to Star Wars: Episode V two years later). The film retained pretty much everybody from the first film and featured one of the most famous tag lines ever: "Just when you thought it was safe to back in the water..."

Then there was Jaws 3-D, one of several 3-D horror films to be made in the 1980's. Movie No. 3, like its predecessor, did not have Spielberg directing it. It also lacked John Williams' score and the entire cast from the first two films. The premise was that a shark was running rampant at a theme park and that it needed to be killed. It was a lame movie and was rightfully skewered by movie reviewers.

Finally there was Jaws: The Revenge, a film so bad that it killed the franchise once for all. Ellen Brody, the widow of the star of the first two films, claimed that a new shark was stalking her and that it, like the other ones, needed to be killed, predictably by a giant explosion that occurred near the end of the film. Jaws 4 received scathing reviews from critics and is generally considered one of the worst movies ever made.