After the coroner concludes she was the victim of a shark attack, Amity police chief Martin Brody closes the beaches; Mayor Larry Vaughn persuades him to reconsider, fearing the town's summer economy will suffer.

[9] To direct, Zanuck and Brown first considered veteran filmmaker John Sturges—whose résumé included another maritime adventure, The Old Man and the Sea—before offering the job to Dick Richards, whose directorial debut, The Culpepper Cattle Co., had come out the previous year.

[7] He also revealed in "The Making of Jaws" documentary on the 2012 DVD release that he directly referenced Duel by repurposing the sound of the truck being destroyed as the death roar of the shark.

[19] Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Howard Sackler was in Los Angeles when the filmmakers began looking for another writer and offered to do an uncredited rewrite; since the producers and Spielberg were unhappy with Benchley's drafts, they quickly agreed.

"[15] Spielberg wanted "some levity" in Jaws, humor that would avoid making it "a dark sea hunt", so he turned to his friend Carl Gottlieb, a comedy writer-actor then working on the sitcom The Odd Couple.

[22] One specific alteration he called for in the story was to change the cause of the shark's death from extensive wounds to a scuba tank explosion, as he felt audiences would respond better to a "big rousing ending".

"[47] Martha's Vineyard was also chosen because the surrounding ocean had a sandy bottom that never dropped below 35 feet (11 m) for 12 miles (19 km) out from shore, which allowed the mechanical sharks to operate while also beyond sight of land.

"[26] Gottlieb said that "there was nothing to do except make the movie", so everyone kept overworking, and while as a writer he did not have to attend the ocean set every day, once the crewmen returned they arrived "ravaged and sunburnt, windblown and covered with salt water".

Shaw also fled to Canada whenever he could due to tax problems,[61] engaged in binge drinking, and developed a grudge against Dreyfuss, who was getting rave reviews for his performance in Duddy Kravitz.

The underwater scene was shot in Fields's swimming pool in Encino, California,[75] using a lifecast latex model of Craig Kingsbury's head attached to a fake body, which was placed in the wrecked boat's hull.

[90] A direct reference to these similarities may be found in Spielberg's draft of the screenplay, which introduces Quint watching the film version of Moby-Dick; his continuous laughter prompts other audience members to get up and leave the theater.

[102] Andrew Britton contrasts the film to the novel's post-Watergate cynicism, suggesting that its narrative alterations from the book (Hooper's survival, the shark's explosive death) help make it "a communal exorcism, a ceremony for the restoration of ideological confidence."

[106] Britton sees the film more as concerned with the "vulnerability of children and the need to protect and guard them", which in turn helps generate a "pervasive sense of the supreme value of family life: a value clearly related to [ideological] stability and cultural continuity".

[107] Fredric Jameson's analysis highlights the polysemy of the shark and the multiple ways in which it can be and has been read—from representing alien menaces such as communism or the Third World to more intimate dreads concerning the unreality of contemporary American life and the vain efforts to sanitize and suppress the knowledge of death.

"[108] He views Quint's demise as the symbolic overthrow of an old, populist, New Deal America and Brody and Hooper's partnership as an "allegory of an alliance between the forces of law-and-order and the new technocracy of the multinational corporations ... in which the viewer rejoices without understanding that he or she is excluded from it.

[125] After Universal chairman Lew Wasserman attended one of the screenings, he ordered the film's initial release—planned for a massive total of as many as 900 theaters—to be cut down, declaring, "I want this picture to run all summer long.

At the time, wide openings were associated with movies of doubtful quality; not uncommon on the exploitation side of the industry, they were customarily employed to diminish the effect of negative reviews and word of mouth.

[131] (A month earlier, Columbia Pictures had done something similar with a Charles Bronson thriller, Breakout, though that film's prospects for an extended run were much slimmer, and it is today a common misconception that Jaws was the first to use an ad saturation strategy.

)[132][133][134] Universal president Sid Sheinberg reasoned that nationwide marketing costs would be amortized at a more favorable rate per print relative to a slow, scaled release.

[170][171] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars, calling it "a sensationally effective action picture, a scary thriller that works all the better because it's populated with characters that have been developed into human beings.

"[175] Writing for New York magazine, Judith Crist described the film as "an exhilarating adventure entertainment of the highest order" and complimented its acting and "extraordinary technical achievements".

[179] Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin disagreed with the film's PG rating, saying that "Jaws is too gruesome for children, and likely to turn the stomach of the impressionable at any age. ...

[181] William S. Pechter of Commentary described Jaws as "a mind-numbing repast for sense-sated gluttons" and "filmmaking of this essentially manipulative sort"; Molly Haskell of The Village Voice similarly characterized it as a "scare machine that works with computer-like precision. ...

[175] The most frequently criticized aspect of the film has been the artificiality of its mechanical antagonist: Magill declared that "the programmed shark has one truly phony close-up",[181] and in 2002, online reviewer James Berardinelli said that if not for Spielberg's deftly suspenseful direction, "we would be doubled over with laughter at the cheesiness of the animatronic creature.

"[85] Halliwell's Film Guide stated that "despite genuinely suspenseful and frightening sequences, it is a slackly narrated and sometimes flatly handled thriller with an over-abundance of dialogue and, when it finally appears, a pretty unconvincing monster.

"[182] Jaws won three Academy Awards, those being for Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score, and Best Sound (Robert Hoyt, Roger Heman, Earl Madery, and John Carter).

This release was an elaborate box-set that included deleted scenes and outtakes, a new two-hour documentary on the making of the film directed and produced by Laurent Bouzereau, a copy of the novel Jaws, and a CD of the soundtrack by John Williams.

[208] According to Peter Biskind, Jaws "diminished the importance of print reviews, making it virtually impossible for a film to build slowly, finding its audience by dint of mere quality.

[216] It is still seen as responsible for perpetuating negative stereotypes about sharks and their behavior,[217] and for producing the so-called "Jaws effect", which allegedly inspired "legions of fishermen [who] piled into boats and killed thousands of the ocean predators in shark-fishing tournaments.

[184] Nonetheless, he did consider taking on the first sequel when its original director, John D. Hancock, was fired a few days into the shoot; ultimately, his obligations to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which he was working on with Dreyfuss, made it impossible.