By Jim Bloch
2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the novel JAWS by Peter Benchley; in 2025, the movie, directed by Steven Spielberg, also turns 50.
A trip to the Martha’s Vineyard, the beautiful, pricey island south of Cape Cod, is a perfect place to read the novel and immerse yourself in the geographic backdrops and picturesque towns featured in the film, which became the original summer blockbuster and established the distribution model Hollywood has followed ever since.
You can buy the book in either of the island’s three-star bookstores.
You can buy JAWS t-shirts, hoodies, coffee cups, beach towels, socks, coffee cups, shot glasses, insulated tumblers and snow globes in gift shops around the island.
Most charmingly, you can visit a number of settings used in the movie.
Aquinnah cliffs in northwestern Martha’s Vineyard.
As the movie opens, long-haired kids are drinking and smoking in front of a bonfire on a beautiful night-time beach, which turns out to be South Beach at the western edge of the barrier peninsula known as Katama Beach. Chrissie invites a drunk boy to go swimming. He’s too drunk to swim.
And she’s too tasty for the great white shark to release — an attack filmed at Cow Beach, a few miles north, beyond Edgartown, where the water is super shallow.
The Vineyard Haven house of Chief Brody, played by Roy Scheider, still partially stands at 265 East Chop Drive, but its second story was removed in the early 2000s and the renovated house doesn’t resemble the one in the movie.
A tourist looking out the mouth of a fake hammerhead shark in a gift shop in Oak Bluffs.
As Brody types up the police report indicating “shark attack” and then walks to the hardware store to buy supplies to make “Beach Closed” signs, downtown Edgartown looks just as it does today in all of its 150-year old Greek Revival splendor. The interior of the hardware store was filmed in what now is the Port Hunter restaurant. City hall, the setting for a tense town council meeting about closing the beach, still stands, its exterior basically unchanged.
One scene features Chief Brody being scolded by the mayor for his failure to realize the importance of beaches to the town’s bottom-line. The pair ride back and forth on the three-car ferry from Edgartown to Chappaquiddick, a five minute ride. Neither Brody nor the mayor disembarks on Chappaquiddick.
“Amity is a summer town,” the mayor insists. “We need summer dollars!”
The docks at Vineyard Haven are shown choked with tourists pouring off ferries just in time to get eaten alive on July 4. A sign for Woods Hole sneaks into the film, announcing the main port on Cape Cod for ferry rides to Martha’s Vineyard, which in the film is called Amity. Woods Hole is home to the Oceanographic Institution, the professional base of shark specialist Matt Hooper, played by Richard Dreyfuss, who turns up to help Brody get the great white shark.
Brody and the mayor argue again with colorful Aquinnah cliffs and Gay Head lighthouse on the northwest corner of the island in the background.
The Gay Head Lighthouse.
The town reluctantly hires a grizzled fisherman named Quint, played by Robert Shaw, to catch the shark. Quint’s nautically funky boathouse was constructed especially for the movie — the only set built for the picture and long since torn down — in the working fishing village of Menemsha and its harbor, as picturesque today as it was in 1975. Enjoy a lobster roll at Larsen’s Fish Market.
The great white shark swims from Nantucket Sound under the American Legion Memorial Bridge into the Sengakontacket Pond to attack young Alex Kintner. The bridge, part of the lovely drive from Oak Bluffs to Edgartown, is now known colloquially as the JAWS bridge and is a popular jumping spot for summer swimmers. The bridge is framed by Cow Beach.
Shark protection
Benchley, who became a champion of sharks in the years after the movie and an ardent environmentalist, came to regret his portrait of animal as a single-minded human-hunter.
“I could never write JAWS today,” said Benchley in his introduction to the 30th anniversary edition of the book. “I could never demonize an animal, especially not an animal that is much older and much more successful in its habitat than man is, has been, or ever will be, an animal that is vitally necessary for the balance of nature in the seas and that we may — if we don’t change our destructive behaviors — extinguish from the face of the earth.”
According to a 2021 story in Science magazine, shark populations have fallen by more than 70 percent since 1970. The main culprit besides habitat loss and warming oceans? Overfishing.
Benchley died in 2006 at age 65.
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
