“You open the beaches on the 4th of July, it’s like ringing the dinner bell for Christ’s sakes.”
“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
-
Some memorable lines from the movie Jaws
A Brief Ode To A Movie By Doug Draper
Posted June 20th, 2025 on Niagara At Large
An image of original movie poster
The closest I came to thinking I was going to drown was 50 years ago on a warm sunny day in the summer of 1975.
The waters off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where I was staying at the time, were fluorescent blue and I decided to take a quick swim across a narrow inlet between two spits of sandy beach along the Atlantic Ocean.
Everything was fine and then, suddenly, half way across I heard that pulsating soundtrack in that movie I recently say and I became almost paralyzed with fear that I was going to be attacked by a shark. Had it not been for a nearby wooden pole holding up a nearby wooden bridge that I managed to cling to until I shook off the fear, they might have been fishing my body out of the water.
That movie happened to be Jaws that – believe it or not – was first released in theatres across North America 50 ago this June 20th, just in time for summer.
A scene, featuring the Great White Shark, in the movie Jaws
Produced and directed by a very young Steven Speilberg, Jaws had such a big bite on audiences that many who saw it for the first time expressed fear about “getting in the water,” which was a phrase used by a number of characters in the movie.
The most tragic outcome of the film is that it super charged an already an destructive drive in we humans to demonize sharks which are, in fact, incredible creatures and vital to the survival of the web of life on this planet, and to mercilessly hunt down and kill them where ever they could be found.
That led to Peter Benchley, the author of the book which the movie was based on, to become a vocal advocate for saving sharks for the rest of his life. Sometime before he died in 2006, he told one interviewer that he “regretted ever writing the book.”
The movie, however, lives on through one generation to the next and continues to screen in theatres around the world until this day.
To watch the original trailer for Jaws, click on the screen immediately below –
- Stay Safe, Doug Draper, Niagara At Large – and to paraphrase a line on a t-shirt with an image of a shark on it that I bought a few years ago while visiting friends on Cape Cod Cod and the Islands where Jaws was filmed, “Catch you later for lunch at the beach.”
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