It’s been 50 years since Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” took over Martha’s Vineyard and transformed it into Amity Island. Back then, the summer before its 1975 Hollywood debut, the real Vineyard was a much simpler place. The year-round Island population, only about 4,800, swelled with tourists and seasonal residents over the summer then as it does now, but the summer din was much quieter. And, if a summer tourist season failed, it could be a long, cold winter for locals. The makers of “Jaws” got that tension between the summer tourist season and the year-round locals who need to sustain themselves long after the summer crowds have packed up and gone: a great white shark could indeed kill a summer.
But, just ahead of the 1974 season, 50 years ago in late April, as Memorial Day was fast approaching, Universal Studios, with a mechanized shark named Bruce, was actually pouring money into local coffers to make the movie. The making of “Jaws” could even be considered the Vineyard’s Hollywood “close-up,” putting the Island on the map across America and around the world.
Locals lucky enough to become extras were getting up to $150 dollars a day as cast members. When the word went out that they needed “a powerful [female] swimmer willing to swim nude” as Crissie Watkins in the opening shark attack scene, larger than life local Susan Backlinie stepped up. In that scene ominous music builds, and to this day it haunts the minds of just about anyone who has seen “Jaws.” Universal spent big that summer of ’74 — $700,000 (1975 dollars) for the marketing budget alone, for the nationwide release. “Jaws” opened in over 400 theaters, and its global receipts were over $2.8 billion in today’s dollars. Martha’s Vineyard, a real place with real people, was on the map, and Amity Island, a fictitious place named for a town on Long Island, was born. (National Geographic is premiering a behind-the-scenes documentary, “Jaws @ 50,” at the M.V. Regional High School’s Performing Arts Center in Oak Bluffs on June 20. See below.)
“Jaws” is, at its core, a tourism and fishing story, a tale of the tensions that run through a small island where locals who have fished for generations contend with the rich and famous arriving for the summer to have fun. At the time of filming the year-round Vineyard was indeed a tourism, fishing (and farming) Island.
Turning the lens on local people and their impact, the Martha’s Vineyard Museum starts the season off with their own “Jaws at 50,” opening May 24. The M.V. Museum celebrates many of the onscreen and behind-the-scenes Islanders. “We really want this exhibit to be seen through the lens of the island,” says M.V. Museum’s Curator of Exhibitions Anna Barber. “This is where it happened. This is Ground Zero, and I hope that all the people who come leave with a better understanding of how the magic of that movie could not have occurred without the Island and its people.” The museum’s exhibit will feature rare photographs, oral histories, original art, and movie props, showcasing how Martha’s Vineyard became the fictional Amity Island. We have a write-up of the Museum’s significant exhibition in these pages.
The film’s casting crew set up shop in the Kelley House in March 1974 and offered Ozzie Fischer, a Chilmark farmer, a role he turned down, saying, “I was running the Keith farm” in Chilmark. But local photojournalist Jini Poole, wife of Menemsha fish retailer Everett Poole, was hired to assist Shari Rhodes, the “Jaws” casting director.
Jini cast much of the movie, with local Peggy Scott as Polly, Chief Brody’s office manager. The real-life Dr. Robert Nevin, cast as the medical examiner, Hershel West, longtime fisherman and hand at Larsen’s in Menemsha, played Quint’s deckhand. Robert Carroll was the Amity town selectman. Poole also cast her father in law, Captain Donald L. Poole, and John Alley, of Alley’s General Store fame, as well as her own children, Katharine and Donald, for the movie, according to the Vineyard Gazette at the time. For more about local characters, see the “In Memoriam” story.
The first week of May 1974, “Jaws” was set for filming, and the Island caught glimpses. It was cold, and Spielberg and his team were shooting scenes for late June on hot summer days. For one scene, Chrissie Watkins’ arm and hand stuck up out of the sand, with seaweed and crabs crawling over it. And, out of sight, the owner of the arm lay on the sand, cold, in a sleeping bag.
Gerald Kelly wrote, “The prop man … poured warm coffee on the crabs … They wriggled … People joked … Can a severed arm have goose bumps?”
Those Technicolor summer scenes had locals shivering off set, and a bit steamed about the process. John Alley, playing an extra who walked ahead of Chief Brody on a dock, one day had had enough and quit.
The opening shark attack scene starts with a classic Vineyard tradition of a nighttime fire on the beach, with long-haired teens, guitar playing, and Falstaff beer. Then it cuts into glances, flirtation, and Chrissie running easily across a dune, Tom Cassidy (played by seasonal resident Jonathan Filley) stumbling behind. Then to surprising nudity, Chrissie diving in and swimming, the water glistening in moonlight. And then it begins: the menacing music that would live forever in the minds of all of us who have seen “Jaws.” Then screams, Chrissie being dragged back and forth across the screen — and silent disappearance. The whole scene takes less than four minutes. Just four minutes to shock a nation and be seared in our memories.
The shock recedes fast when you see how the filming is done, when you know the story behind the story. There is a free premier of National Geographic’s “Jaws @ 50” on June 20 at the Performing Arts Center in Oak Bluffs, and watch out for listings on how to see the film through the summer.
Thanks in part to the ocean conservation and marine policy advocate work of Peter Benchley, the author of “Jaws,” and his wife Wendy Benchley, sharks, and great whites in particular, are now respected, even revered, instead of just feared. The documentary will feature footage and photography from the Benchley and Spielberg archives, as well as interviews from the worlds of film, literature, and popular culture. The event will wrap with an after-party at the Harbor View Hotel.
Then there’s poor Alex Kitner. He only asked his mom if he could go in the water one last time. He’s the second human to die in “Jaws,” just after the black Lab Pippin disappears. Turns out, Alex Kitner is alive, sort of. In real life he was played by Jeffery Vorhees. Vorhees is the long-serving and recently retired manager of the Wharf in Edgartown. Be sure to read our interview with Vorhees by the acclaimed Island writer Nicole Galland, who was here with her family that summer as the film was being made.
From June 20 through 22, the Wharf presents its “‘Jaws’ 50th Anniversary Celebration,” where you might have a “Kitner-sighting.” As part of this three-day event, a full-scale model of the Orca will be docked at Nancy’s in Oak Bluffs, with its lifesize model of a great white shark mounted outside.
And again there is that music which lurks in the recesses of fear: Daah dum. Daah dum. Daah dum, dum, dum, dum … In Katama on June 21, “Jaws”’ musical score, by John Williams, will be played live under the stars by the Cape Symphony, accompanying an outdoor “Jaws” screening. It’s the kind of immersive cultural experience that might rekindle youthful beach fires of decades past, remind you of nighttime swims, and could knit new memories, very near to where Chrissie’s arm was found.
These words, the big celebration of a significant, and in some ways transformative, moment in Vineyard history, wouldn’t have happened without locals, without beaches, without the ocean around us, without sharks. It would all have been a passing summer, on a tranquil and beautiful Island off the coast of Massachusetts. But, it did happen because this Island was this Island, seven miles from the mainland dock in Woods Hole.
Imagine: It’s fifty years ago. There was no phone in your pocket, no internet. You’re at the bow of the Naushon, and the ferry is just pulling away from the dock. It’s June 30, 1975. July Fourth is coming on Friday, and you’ve left the world behind. Ahead is your imagination. Standing at the bow of the Naushon, you have no idea you’re about to be filmed by an unknown director for an unknown movie, and there at the Vineyard Haven dock will be shark paraphernalia for you to buy (including small jaws).
