Peter Benchley was born into an upper class family and attended an Ivy League school. Upon graduating he became a journalist and contributed to various newspapers and magazines, National Geographic among them. With a personal affinity for the marine world one of his assignments about sharks particularly appealed to him and provided the germ for what would later become his bestseller Jaws, the story of a great white shark that terrorizes a beach community.

One basis for his shark story may have been the actual Jersey Beach shark attacks of 1912 since the sequence of those historical attacks is similar to Benchely's story and certainly that of the resulting film. At first a swimmer was taken in the surf by a shark swimming along a warm shoreline. Then it ate a dog followed by a boy and, finally, it attacked a man in a tidal slough.

With this likely basis in real events Benchley's novel was an immediate literary phenomenon. It earned him a pretty penny, lent him an unusual authority among marine scientists and gave him a formula he's since plugged in subsequent novels like The Beast and White Shark, both of which seem like rip-offs of his original shark story.

Almost immediately after the novel's publication Benchley was approached by the movie producers David Brown and Richard D. Zanuck who optioned his book and secured the participation of wunderkind, Steven Spielberg, as director. Carl Gottlieb was assigned to adapt the novel and location crews were dispatched to the New England coast while casting choices were made to put the film into production.

Benchley had originally imagined the lead players of the movie adaptation as being Robert Redford, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. Although his choices were definitively top draw in 1975, the collective stardom, price and scheduling needs of these three stars made such a combination impossible.

Spielberg was open-minded about two of the leading roles but wanted Sterling Hayden for the part of Quint. Because the actor owed money to the IRS and had all his acting income heavily levied, however, he was approached with the scheme of listing him as screenwriter for a princely sum to avoid IRS penalties while also paying him union scale for his acting performance. Eventually less financially aggressive heads won the day and Hayden was put aside in favor of Robert Shaw who gave one of his distinguished career's most memorable performances.

Shot on location in Martha's Vineyard doubling for Amity, Long Island, Jaws is about a killer shark interrupting the summer tourist season and threatening the annual cash crop required by beach community residents. Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) is saddled with protecting the local population and is simultaneously urged to keep the shark problem quiet to encourage tourism for the benefit of troubled local businesses.

Needless to say, the shark is unconcerned with such issues and proceeds to make meals of several sea goers until Brody finally assembles a crew to find and kill the rampaging animal. Skippered by Quint (Shaw) with the ichthyologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) aboard to track and study the animal, the three men journey in Quint's fishing boat into unknown waters for a confrontation with the watery devil.

One by one each of their schemes to trap the animal turn on end as it seemingly begins to hunt them in open waters. Eventually Hooper descends into the briny depths to inject the animal with a lethal poison but is presumed lost. The shark sinks Quint's boat, killing him in the process, and is finally destroyed by Brody who manages to destroy it by exploding a scuba tank of compressed air.

With a budget of $12 million Jaws went on to earn $260 million in the United States and an additional $210 million abroad. Beyond 1972's The Godfather, also a significant hit, Jaws was the definitive 1970s blockbuster setting fire to box office records and creating a new standard for judging movies based on their commercial reach and storytelling technique that was confirmed two years later with George Lucas' Star Wars.

Significantly, the main strength of Jaws, beyond being a keynote of the 1970s, is its value as pure movie entertainment. With an opening sequence of a skinny dipping female swimmer being eaten by the rogue shark, including underwater footage of the big fish hunting, the movie cuts immediately into a whodunit like thriller about what killed the girl whose remains was ashore the next day. As the attack's impact is hysterically appraised by Brody's community, his troubles then multiply against the demands of keeping people safe but also of keeping the beaches open, otherwise the shark will choke the life out of its victims along with the community it's terrorizing.

This beach environment and sense of economic consequence, while closely based on the novel, differs significantly in one part that proves Gottlieb's adaptation a successful reworking of popular source material. Where Benchley was well aware of the financial implications of a shark scourge on any beach community, he was equally cynical about the ability of a local law official to combat the problem.

Thus his plotline about Chief Brody involves an adulterous wife and an added class distinction that makes his outsider quality that much more remarkable in light of the eventual shark problem. Gottlieb eschewed this back-story and propped Brody up with a loving wife named Ellen (Lorraine Gary) and two sons, Michael (Chris Rebello) and Sean (Jay Mello). The novel's class consciousness and concerns about the tourist economy were then embodied by the dollars first mentality of Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) who deliberately ignores the shark threat until it's nearly too late. In addition Hooper was made a sympathetic character rather than the boyfriend of Brody's straying wife thereby ensuring his affiliation with Brody and the effort to kill the shark rather than being a skirt chaser run amuck in a time of crisis.

Altogether these changes streamlined the novel's story and made the movie a more manageable proposition. Brody, Hooper and Quint were more clearly made heroes whereas capitalistic impulses, elsewhere the source of some considerably impressive scholarly interpretation, were made the brunt of evil as embodied by the rogue white shark eating innocent people as so many meals on the way to being sated. As is now well known the movie was a vehicle for Spielberg's directorial skills then honed to a sharp edge that differed enough from Benchley's source that the author was thrown off the set after objecting to the film's climax.

Aside from the dramatic tension of chasing the shark and then seeing our heroes being chased by it, Jaws is noteworthy for its depiction of the central three-man triangle, each point of which symbolize differing aspects of manhood. On the one point is Quint, the most obviously callous and vulgar aspect of traditional masculinity at once action-oriented and demanding yet also buffered by long experience with the sea. Hooper is a new kind of man tempered by the sensitivity of education and worldly refinements while also being firmly able to negotiate the natural world with its many threats of bodily harm. Between these two poles is Brody who is the civilized man without the polish of a fine education or the trust of his instinct.

He is the most complex character in the film and the source of our identification. At once scared of the water, Brody is tasked with protecting the people on shore even though he's been softened and domesticated by the feminine virtues of wife and family when he's in particular need of steely nerve as he enters the primordial soup better organized for men like Quint and Hooper. That he's the character most able to evolve through layers of breeding makes him the eventual hero although this transition is definitely a crucible by fire.

Since the three men together form the film's triangulated protagonist easily contrasted with the impersonal demon shark, the three also give Jaws its touches of humor and historical detail. The famous USS Indianapolis sequence when the men retire to the ship's mess to drink and tell jokes is illustrative in that Hooper and Quint exchange stories about their scars while Brody looks on, envious and uninvolved. Then Quint launches into his monologue about surviving the sinking of the Indianapolis in shark-infested waters during the closing days of World War II. Most of his cohort was eaten alive leaving his weather beaten face to betray sadness before the three break into song and are forced to reengage with the shark as it turns to attack them.

Also significant about Jaws were the headaches created by trying to film a movie at sea and with a remarkable reliance on special effects monsters. Legion are the stories of sea sickness affecting cast and crew while shooting the movie but so are the various ways the manmade sharks proved ineffective for use in the finished film.

Part of the movie's genius, however, is the way these deficiencies were turned into thrills. Without being able to depict the full shark attacking and eating people, as might have been originally intended, live shark footage taken from the Seal Rocks in Australia was intercut with close-ups of the fake sharks. In similar fashion the attacks were largely imagined off-screen through suggestive shots of being eaten alive rather than graphically depicting this brutality on-screen.

Nominated as it was for Best Picture against One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon and Nashville, Jaws lost the top award but picked up three technical citations for Verna Fields' editing, the film's sound design and John Williams' score. Though retrospect tells us Jaws would have been picture of the year had Milos Forman's masterpiece not been released, the picture's influence has since been confirmed through three sequels and the thrum of Williams' theme.

This connection between Bruce the shark, so named by Spielberg in tribute to his lawyer, and the pulsing, manipulative score further cemented a standing connection between John Williams and movie soundtracks. Pitched as one of the luminaries in his field alongside such yesteryear legends as Alfred Newman and current composers like Jerry Goldsmith, Williams is himself an entertainment industry.

Having written dozens and dozens of movie scores dating back through nearly 50 years of effort in film, television and as an orchestral conductor, Williams has won 29 Academy Award nominations alongside five wins for his scores with an additional five nominations for his songs. Added to these totals are two Emmy Awards, fifteen Golden Globe nominations with three wins for his scores and an additional nomination for one of his songs. Then there is the impressive sum of four Grammy Award nominations, nine Grammy Awards and a single nomination for song writing.

Altogether this measure of accomplishment means John Williams is that brand of crewmember whose work polishes a movie into being a fully formed movie-going experience. His music compliments on-screen actions, occasionally comments on them, more rarely diverges to provide a separate contrapuntal view and generally creates themes that stay in memory long after his movies are finished.

First hearing the strings of his shark theme in the film's opening frames, one is reminded of these facts just as one is allowed to wander through the big screen joy of crackerjack filmmaking from first to last. Jaws is one of the greatest films ever made and this status is unquestionably the result of many factors, not least of which is John Williams as the maker of music and writer of songs.