Two Backlot members reviewed Jaws this month. Both gave it a perfect five. In July.
There is a reason for that. Jaws is the movie that made summer mean something at the movies. June 1975, Universal releases a shark film about a New England beach town that refuses to close its beaches. It changed how studios thought about summer. Every summer movie since has been chasing that feeling.
If you have not watched it in a few years, this is the weekend. Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss on a tiny boat against a mechanical shark that kept breaking. The shark almost never appears. Spielberg learned to make you afraid of what you cannot see.
After: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg right after Jaws, 1977. The same feeling: something huge is coming and you just do not know what.


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