NEED TO KNOW
A new book has new, behind-the-scenes details from Jaws, just in time for its 50th anniversary
It’s the 50th anniversary of Jaws!
Slated to release in February of next year, The Last Kings of Hollywood compiles hundreds of original interviews and extensive research to chronicle the rollercoaster ride of a production behind Jaws, the first film to gross over $100 million at the box office.
Author Paul Fischer shares that after Steven Spielberg quickly rejected the proposition of using a real shark in the movie, his production team shifted to construct a mechanical great white. With an $8.5 million budget, they built a 25-foot steel predator lined with rubber skin and filled with electronic guts. Bruce was ready to hit the ocean, except for one thing.
“What worked in the shop did not work in the sea,” says Fischer, whose writing appears in The New York Times and Amazon’s Best of the Year Nonfiction Selection. “Salt ate at Bruce’s rubber skins. Water gushed out of his eyeballs. His plastic parts soaked up water and his rubber teeth folded back like putty. His circuits were liable to fry when immersed.”
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As the filming of the movie began in Martha’s Vineyard, members of the public began crowding the beach to watch Spielberg meticulously craft Jaws. He’d spend hours shooting multiple takes of one shot, before being satisfied and moving to the next, according to Fischer.
However, when someone observed the three-ton steel shark being pulled out into the sea by a small speedboat, they shouted, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.”
What began as a joke soon became customary for the crew to blurt out on set when something went wrong, which happened frequently. From the shark malfunctioning and capsizing, to lunch arriving late and walkie-talkies falling overboard, the production of Jaws faced many obstacles.
“Every night, Steven sat on the phone at the log cabin, begging Universal executive William Gilmore to let him keep going, and every morning, he went back out onto the ocean, hoping for better,” Fischer writes. Eight hours of work, and he’d get one shot, maybe two, sometimes neither of them great.”
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Actor Roy Scheider found it amusing to repeatedly let out the phrase while on set, much to Spielberg’s chagrin. When the shark finally made its on-screen appearance and Scheider improvised the line, Spielberg chose to keep it in the final cut.
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The Last Kings of Hollywood also follows filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas during their rise to fame in the 1980s. Lucas, who Spielberg invited onto the set of Jaws, was curious about the mechanisms of the shark’s mouth and poked his head into the great white.
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Consequently, Spielberg decided to pull a practical joke and pull the lever that closed the mouth of the shark. Unfortunately, the maker of Star Wars found himself stuck inside the shark.
“Steven, Marty, and Milius yanked and pulled, forced the jaws apart, and after several minutes of sweaty, panicked struggle, managed to free George,” Fischer writes. “The four of them hurried off the lot, convinced they’d broken Mattey’s expensive work-in-progress.”
Details adapted from The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema by Paul Fischer. Copyright (c) 2026 by the author and reprinted with permission of Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC
The Last Kings of Hollywood by Paul Fischer comes out Feb. 10, 2026, and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
