The secret tribute at the beginning of Jaws explained?
Ever since it’s release in 1975, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws has been hailed a modern classic, continuing to influence and inspire. With today’s filmmakers picking up the baton and creating their own character driven creature features paying homage to Jaws - see John Krasinski’s ‘A Quiet Place’.
However, at the very beginning of Jaws, it’s Steven Spielberg who pays a very subtle tribute to a filmmaker who inspired him and heavily influenced the finished movie.
The first image we see when watching Jaws is the iconic Universal Studios logos. We zoom through space, and a pair of Van Allen radiation belts start to form. The rotating earth globe appears in the distance, and as we get closer to it, the word "UNIVERSAL", in a bold, planetary font (named Futura Bold), fades in close-up to us and zooms out to a comfortable distance. When the word and the globe are in position, the byline "AN MCA COMPANY", fades in below it, in a bold yellow font (named Eurostile Bold). Two Van Allen belts surround the globe.
A studio’s logo appearing in a movie’s pre-titles / titles is nothing out of the ordinary but the sounds we hear during their appearance in Jaws are. What we are hearing is distorted audio-pickup of squawking birds over the Universal logo of the 1970's. This is a direct homage to Alfred Hitchcock's opening for "The Birds", which uses the same sounds over the Universal logo from that era.
In ‘The Birds’, a wealthy San Francisco socialite pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town that slowly takes a turn for the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people. The producers of Jaws had thought they could train a Great White shark to perform on cue, but quickly changed their minds after speaking with experts.
During the troubled production of Jaws, the biggest problem being the shark not working, Spielberg had to change tact and ‘make the water scary’ by employing some of the tricks of Hitchcock, who Spielberg considered the master of suspense.
“The shark not working was a god send. It made me become more like Alfred Hitchcock. When I didn’t have control of my shark it made me kind of rewrite the whole script without the shark.”
Spielberg attempted to meet the Vertigo and Psycho filmmaker on the set of his final film Family Plot, which would be released one year later but Hitchcock refused multiple requests.
“Isn’t that the boy who made the fish movie? I could never sit down and talk to him ... because I look at him and feel like such a whore.”
At the end of Jaws, Spielberg takes things one step further and pays homage to himself. Jaws' death scene and the final scene in Duel use a sound clip from a 1957 Dinosaur movie called The Land Unknown. Spielberg did this to show what he felt was the kinship between the two movies.
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