Jaws Is Scarier Because the Shark Kept Breaking

Production designer Joe Alves built three full-size, 25-foot mechanical sharks for Steven Spielberg's Jaws. They were powered by pneumatic rams and steered along an underwater rail off Martha's Vineyard. The crew nicknamed them Bruce, after Spielberg's lawyer Bruce Ramer.

Bruce did not work. The fiberglass skin absorbed seawater. The hydraulics corroded. In tests off the Vineyard in May 1974, one shark sank to the bottom of Nantucket Sound on its first immersion. The film, originally budgeted at $3.5 million on a 55-day schedule, ran to roughly $9 million across 159 days. Spielberg later said he assumed his career was over.

The shark's unreliability forced him to write around it. The first hour of the picture is mostly shark-as-implication — yellow barrels surfacing, John Williams's two-note motif, a girl yanked under the water without a glimpse of what took her. The shark itself doesn't fully appear until 81 minutes in, with the line 'You're gonna need a bigger boat.' The reviewer Pauline Kael wrote that Spielberg's withholding 'turns the audience into accomplices.'

Jaws opened on 20 June 1975 across an unprecedented 464 screens. It grossed about $260 million domestically and $470 million worldwide on initial release, becoming the highest-grossing film to that point — until Star Wars two years later. The release strategy, with wide opening and saturation TV advertising, defined the modern summer-blockbuster pattern. The aesthetic — that you frighten an audience more by what you don't show — was less a directorial choice than a corroded gearbox.