40 Fascinating Facts About The Movie 'Jaws'

Jaws is inspired by Peter Benchley's 1974 novel of the same name.

It won best sound, best film editing and best music in 1976. It was also nominated for best picture.

Three? RUN!

You probably thought the shark in Jaws didn't have a name (or maybe that he was just called Jaws). In fact, the pneumatically-powered prop sharks were known by the cast and crew as "Bruce", after Stephen Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce Raimer. Presumably he was an attorney with bite...

When Police Chief Brody finally sees the shark, he turns to Captain Quint and says, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat”. The line was improvised by Roy Scheider on the day of shooting.

Simple.

To give audiences the sense of treading water. A pretty tiring business.

Author Peter Benchley considered dozens of titles for his novel, including A Stillness in the Water, A Question of Evil, Jaws of Despair, Dark White, Squam, The Edge of Gloom and What Have We Done?

One mechanical shark actually sunk to the bottom of the ocean, having not been tested in water before filming began. Not so scary now, eh?

An accident during filming resulted in the Orca beginning to sink. The film camera was submerged and its film had to be flown to a New York camera lab where technicians were able to save the film.

While sound man John Carter held his tape recorder over his head, shouting “F*** the actors, save the sound department!”

Every night, they had to be drained, scrubbed, and repainted...

... were actually a result of the mechanical shark spending much of the filming time broken.

The prop arm wasn't convincing enough, so a female crew member was buried beneath the sand with only her arm exposed. Standard day at the office.

The area in Massachusetts doubled as Amity Island, because of sand banks which created shallow waters far out to sea.

Dick Richards was initially approached to direct but was dropped after referring to the story's "whale" one too many times...

And it had had a troubled journey that far, with four different writer and five rewrites.

Unhappy with one shot, Spielberg re-filmed it in Verna Fields' swimming pool, using powdered milk to make the water look like the ocean

It comes in at number nine, after the likes of Gone With the Wind, Avatar, Star Wars, Titanic, The Sound of Music and E.T.

Actress Susan Backlinie's screaming sounds were taped in post-production. Spielberg stood above the actress with a baby bassinet full of water and poured it over her mouth as she yelled.

The shark's first full appearance in the two-hour film occurs at the 1:21 mark.

He'd directed a couple of films before: Duel and The Sugarland Express.

He later said: "The score was clearly responsible for half of the success of that movie."

In the book, Hooper is killed by the shark but in the film he escapes relatively unscathed...

A second unit were filming footage of real sharks in Australia. They captured film of a great white attacking an empty cage and Spielberg wanted to use it, so the scene was rewritten to let Hooper escape.

The grieving mother who slapped Chief Brody in the movie was played by actress Lee Fierro. She had a difficult time faking the slap and instead hit Scheider for real over and over during the many takes needed to get the scene right.

After Jaws opened, Spielberg and screenwriter Gottlieb have admitted to sneaking into screenings in LA and standing at the back of the movie theaters "just to watch the sold-out audience visibly rise out of their seats with a collective shriek."

He was conducting the orchestra during the 1976 Academy Awards, so when he won the Oscar for best score he had to run up to the podium to accept his Oscar and then run back down to continue conducting.

But it actually took 155...

Delays in production resulted in the film being pushed back to June, a time previously considered too risky for a big release

"I thought my career as a filmmaker was over. I heard rumors ... that I would never work again because no one had ever taken a film 100 days over schedule," he has said.

He'd heard that the crew were planning to throw him in the water when the scene was done so, wearing his most expensive clothes, he headed back to shore before anyone could.

Director Steven Spielberg gave himself a high five in Jurassic Park, by giving Jaws a little cameo. You'll have to look closely on Nedry's left screen to spot it. As if one killer animal wasn't enough, eh?

So that's that.

Benchley called the money "the moon" at the time.

The idea was soon dismissed, because, well... it's obviously ridiculous.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were good pals and often helped out on each other's projects. During a set visit to Jaws, Lucas put his head in 'Bruce The Shark's mouth and Spielberg closed the jaws for a laugh. The joke capsized quickly when the prop malfunctioned and Lucas got stuck. Seems a bit fishy to us...

Spielberg's dog Elmer appears in the movie. He's also had cameo appearances in The Sugarland Express, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1941.