The Shark That Didn't Work

The most terrifying thing in Jaws is a shark you barely see. That wasn't an artistic choice. It was a mechanical failure so severe that it accidentally invented the modern thriller.

Spielberg's crew built three full-size animatronic sharks, each about 25 feet long, each costing roughly a quarter of a million dollars. They named them all Bruce, after Spielberg's lawyer. All three were designed to be towed through salt water, which turned out to be the problem: salt water destroyed the electronics, the skin absorbed water and sagged, and the pneumatic systems seized. One shark sank on its first test. Another was so waterlogged it had to be hoisted out by crane.

The production was scheduled for 55 days. It ran to 159.

So Spielberg did the only thing left. He hid the shark. He shot from the surface of the water, so the audience could never see below it. He replaced the monster with a yellow barrel, a fin cutting the surface, and John Williams' two-note motif — which, famously, Spielberg initially thought was a joke. He showed the shark fully in exactly one moment, near the end, when the audience had been wound so tight that any reveal would work.

The result is a film where the threat is mostly imagined, and therefore worse. Audiences fill the empty water themselves, and the human imagination is a better special-effects department than any workshop.

There's a neat irony here. The film that convinced Hollywood that effects could sell tickets was saved by the failure of its effects. Every director since who has chosen restraint over a reveal — the unseen monster, the offscreen kill — is quietly following a decision Spielberg made because a machine wouldn't cooperate.