STORY OF THE SHOT
Jaws
BLONDE VS. SHARK
WORDS IAN FREER
Alamy, Imago, Netflix
THE ORIGIN
In Peter Benchley’s smash-hit novel, the great white shark appears in the opening line: “The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.” In Steven Spielberg ’s 1975 adaptation, however, it has to wait for its grand entrance — and not because Bruce the mechanical shark wasn’t working properly.
“The book does describe the shark approaching but I thought it would be scary not to show it at all,” Spielberg told biographer Laurent Bouzereau. “If the shark had come out of the water, it would have been spectacular, but there would have been nothing primal about it —it would have been just another monster moment that all of us had seen already in other films.”