Steven Spielberg sits down to watch JAWS for the 'first time'
It may have taken him 50 years, but Steven Spielberg has finally sat down and watched JAWS as an audience member.
He took a seat in an empty private theater on the Universal lot on June 20 2025, 50 years to the day since the film opened wide to US cinemagoers, changing film, pop culture and our perception of swimming in the water ever since.
Back on that date in 1975 Spielberg was being driven round LA by his good friend Martin.Scorsese so they could see the queues of people snaking round the block - hence the term blockbuster - for the shark film.
Although Spielberg had seen the film in the cinema he's previously been viewing through the eye of a director, even deciding in one early preview screening that he needed one more jump for the audience which resulted in the Ben Gardner head sequence, which was shot in editor Verna Fields'swimming pool no less.
Five decades later Spielberg could finally see Bruce the shark and co as a film for fun, but after so long and after having had something of a love/hate relationship with the movie due to its exhausting and elongated filming schedule, was he gonna need a bigger attention span to enjoy it as a viewer?
The legendary director of Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park, said : "I wanted to see the movie on the day it originally opened and see if I could get through the movie, get to the end of the movie without reliving the nightmares of making the movie. And I have to say, by the time I got to the end it was the first time I ever watched Jaws as an audience, not as a filmmaker.”
And, so what did he think once the credits started rolling and Brody (Roy Scheider) and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) were kicking their way to shore with the help of some yellow barrels from the sunken Orca. He said: "I liked it."
To paraphrase Mayor Vaughn, we are pleased and happy to repeat the news that he liked it. After 50 years as viewers we could have told him that those proportions were indeed correct.