Bitesize Facts

While Jaws was mostly filmed in the prestigious American holiday resort Martha's Vineyard, most of the actual shark footage used in the film came from waters off of Florida and Australia because the crew couldn't find footage of a large enough shark in the Vineyard area.

Several things went wrong during the filming of Jaws, so much so that the crew who worked on the film started to call it "Flaws". One specific problem was the mechanical sharks that were used. Three identical mechanical sharks  were employed and they malfunctioned constantly. One of the sharks, which was not tested in water before filming, sunk as soon as it was put in the water.

Jaws is regarded by most as the first-ever blockbuster film. It also sparked the "summer blockbuster" trend, through which studios and distributors plan their entire annual marketing strategy around a big release by the beginning of July.

The locals of Martha's Vineyard were all paid $64 a day to become extras and run about the beach screaming. But the real money came from tourism which went up by 10,000 people a year.

Perhaps the most famous shot of the movie is the "forward tracking, zoom out," which closes up on Brody's face on the beach. It is now taught in film school as the "Jaws shot", but is itself a reverse of a "forward zoom and reverse tracking" shot from Hitchcock's Vertigo.

Chief Brody's classic line, "You're gonna need a bigger boat," was not originally in the script and was improvised on set by Roy Scheider.

Although it is considered a thriller-horror classic, the film is widely recognized as being responsible for perpetuating negative stereotypes about sharks and their behaviour. Author Peter Benchley stated that he would not have written the original novel from which the film was based on had he known what sharks are really like in the wild. Benchley later wrote Shark Trouble, a non-fiction book about shark behaviour, and Shark Life, another non-fiction book describing his dives with sharks.

Jaws is actually inspired by a true story. In July 1916 a series of shark attacks along the coast of New Jersey resulted in four people being killed and one injured. Since 1916, scholars have debated which shark species was responsible, with the great white shark and the bull shark most frequently being blamed. Local and national reaction to the attacks involved a wave of panic that led to shark hunts aimed at eradicating the population of supposedly man-eating sharks and steel nets being erected along several public beaches.