Jaws: It's All About The Little Things

It’s the Little Things

Jaws is all about size.

Examples of this are all over the place.

First of all we have Bruce himself, he’s massive. “25, 3 tons of him”.

By contrast, the poor old Orca really needs to be bigger.

Then Hooper comes along and ruins everyone’s day by pointing out that the bite marks on Chrissie Watkins are bigger than the tiger shark’s mouth.

Finally we have Larry Vaughn, a man with an ego so colossal, he drives the most improbably proportioned automobile on the planet - a 1974 Cadillac Coupe De Ville.

But underneath all these issues with size, Jaws is actually a movie that concerns itself with the little details.

And it’s the key to its enduring success.

Let’s examine Amity to start with. It a small place - a world away from its big neighbour New York City.

Amity’s all sweetness and light on the surface but those cherry-tree lined streets and olde world charm hide a hard and flinty populace.

Just look at that tableau of faces at the town hall meeting, would you mess with them? And the ‘small town-ness’ of the place is even articulated when Ellen Brody asks when she might be accepted as a true islander.

“Ellen, forget it. You’re not born here you’re not an islander.” It’s one of the initial small details that set out the parameters of the Jaws universe. It’s also the first time we see Spielberg’s ‘small town America’ on screen and in Jaws he’s looking beyond the pretty clapboard houses and quaint surroundings. Benchley made sure the reader saw how mean spirited the inhabitants were but Spielberg adds subtlety to the idea.

Our next piece of minutiae is all about careful movie making. It’s very quick but brilliantly effective.

The phone rings in the Brody kitchen. Martin picks up but it’s the wrong one. Why are there two phones? Is one just for work? We don’t find out and maybe it doesn’t matter but it’s a nice touch. Another filmmaker would want to just get to the action but Spielberg is world building here, it makes the scene feel more ‘everyday’. We’re being welcomed into the sunny Brody kitchen and shown how well they all get along. Ellen is the easy-going, loving mother who you can tell is the one who really runs the house and Martin is a quiet family man, just trying to navigate life the best he can. Via the detail with the phone we see the human side to him. He’s not just the Chief of Police who we suspect will eventually get things done, he’s also an average guy who sometimes picks up the wrong phone in the kitchen.

steven spielberg on the first day of shooting JAWS — Steven Spielberg on the first day of shooting JAWS

Now let’s talk marketing and THAT poster.

Simplicity has never looked so good.

Yes, there are more minimalist designs out there (Hitchcock’s thrillers used lots of block colours and stark graphics to great effect) but with Jaws we saw a return to the traditional photo-real painted image but using only 4 distinct colours.

It was painted by Roger Kastel and it tells you all you need to know about the movie. Kastel designed the original book jacket too but had dark waters (a front runner for the title of the book at one point) contrasting with the white underbelly of the shark, but for the movie Kastel changed things up.

Pre-Jaws, the horror movie market was awash with lurid colours and crowded images. Hammer chose garish greens and reds whereas for something like ‘The Exorcist’ the look was an eerie monochrome. Kastel went for bright blues when he painted the sea and a blank white sky. For the single word title, he made it pop even more. He threw out the white lettering and replaced it - appropriately enough - with blood red. These tiny changes turned an eerie, otherworldly design into a summery, mass-market piece of work. It signalled to the audience that the attacks could happen to them when they went to the beach. It brought it home in a frighteningly realistic way - even before they’d seen the movie.

Before Jaws there were a handful of posters that possibly inspired Kastel’s work - all of them minimalist in approach. ‘A Clockwork Orange’ - the letter A looms out of the image like the shark and the knife resembles Bruce’s teeth quite dramatically. Hitchcock’s ‘Frenzy’ has the woman’s face, mouth open and teeth bared, reaching for the man, gets even closer to the Jaws brand. But the one that’s near bang-on is ‘Deliverance.’ There’s water, three men in a (little) boat and instead of a shark coming to get them, there’s a pair of arms brandishing a sawn-off shotgun.

Our next small detail is a character who’d probably recoil at the very thought of being included in an article about ‘little things’. Yes, it’s time to talk about Larry Vaughn and his amazing anchor jacket. At first glance it just looks like your average bit of terrible 70s menswear, but really it’s so much more.

An anchor signals lack of movement. It tethers a ship, holding it in place. Vaughn is a man who hates moving with the world, he loves tradition and is suspicious of change - he fits Amity perfectly. Conversely, he probably also sees himself as a maverick, a disruptor and go-getter. Larry is all about conservatism and this is his ANCHOR. As far as he’s concerned, the world should stay still, not move on (unless it moves in the direction he wants). He is the town’s saviour, the man who won’t let it be swept away by all this hysteria about a fish! No shark’s gonna ruin his 4th July - that’s for damn sure. He clings to the ideals that tether him but eventually the chain breaks and the anchor is lost - the storm of protest from the town and its Chief of Police has become too great.

We see in the hospital scene after the estuary attack, the anchor jacket has gone. Larry is now a wreck. He’s broken, incoherent and confused. He mutters and mumbles, as he’s pulled along by Brody (who symbolises the current of change Vaughn so despises) towards an empty cubicle where the ‘Mayor of Shark City’ is forced to capitulate and sign the voucher.

Mayor Larry Vaughn anchor jacket Jaws — Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) in iconic anchor jacket

Costume choices for other characters are also vital in explaining who they are, the little touches telling us so much.

Ellen Brody is mostly draped in sunny, floaty beach gowns and summer housecoats, except for her blue roll neck and white flares in the evenings. She is a fierce protector of her children and also a warm, soft gentle soul. She’s happy to leave the grime and violence of New York behind her for this world of sand dunes and salty air where she finally feels free.

Hooper’s arrival in Amity sees him dressed as a denim-clad Beatnik scientist. He chuckles at the yahoos overloading their boats and his bramble-patch hair and scruffy beard hide his boyish face. Hooper dresses in the clothes of a working man but he comes from money.

Martin starts the film in his crisp cop’s uniform, desperate to make a good impression as his first summer starts. His clothes are more costume than anything else though. He skips onto Main Street like a little boy but when reality hits, his uniform becomes less starched, less buttoned up. He begins to smoke more too - and drink. Other than his comical outfit when boarding the Orca, he morphs slowly into jeans and black t shirt wearing hero.

Now we move from the details of the picture to those of the sound.

Obviously, we have John Williams’ score - scary, soft, melodic and at times even playful but alongside it there’s also a fair bit of gurgling, screaming and thrashing going on. As the monster hunts its prey, the audience hears the dull, muted shouts and chatter of the swimmers on the surface. The voices punching in and out of the soundtrack as water laps against the lens. To accentuate the soundtrack, ADR (automated dialogue replacement) was used on a number of scenes.

Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie), the first shark attack victim in Jaws

Richard Dreyfuss remembers Spielberg directing Susan Backlinie with the director ‘pouring a jug of water down Backlinie’s throat’ and asking her to make ever more grotesque vocalisations. Dreyfuss concluded this was ‘a much more enjoyable way to spend an afternoon’ than any work he had planned. Sound is one of the ‘biggest little things’ in Jaws and it’s fair to say the trend of collecting libraries of original sound effects gathered pace as the years went by. John R Carter and Robert L Hoyt are credited with the work on Jaws but have many really heard of them? It’s a shame, because their work is as vital to the movie as any other.

Later blockbusters like ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ or ‘Star Wars’ employed the same approach - but in even more detail. Scrupulously amassing sounds, giving the movies their own unique voice. Previously, if you needed the sound of a punch or a laser blast, a director would just send a runner to the library to grab one off the shelf. Listen to old westerns, or science fiction movies, the same sounds crop up over and over.

The desire to be original was what made these movies stand out, and in part it began with features like Jaws.

Nowadays, many films have reverted to the quicker method of established sound effects, but it is at the expense of originality.

The sound of a light sabre being activated or the crack of a bullwhip bring to mind the movie heroes holding them. If you just use the same old bangs and crashes, your movies become stale and forgettable.

Filming on location.

Spielberg happily admits to being naive when he made Jaws and choosing to film on the Atlantic was a brave move. He also holds fast to this seemingly inconsequential detail adding enormous weight to Jaws a piece of cinema. Universal wanted him to film on the backlot and use water tanks but he knew this would make it look like lots movies that had come before.

This idea was to make the audience feel out of their comfort zone. They would be in the animal’s territory and this was something that landlocked executives could never have predicted to be so effective.

Spielberg knew if he wanted to have a career in directing - making movies he really wanted to - he couldn’t be just another workaday helmsman. He had to stamp his identity on Jaws (by paying attention to the details) but also make a big popcorn movie about a killer shark that brought in the big bucks.

And he did that by remembering that the big picture is made up of lots and lots of tiny details.

The little things.

Words by Tim Armitage

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