‘JAWS’: The Story Behind John Williams’ Classic Movie Soundtrack
This is how one of the most important movie soundtracks ever created came together.
The cinematic event of 1975 was JAWS, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Peter Benchley’s novel about a killer shark. Despite a challenging production, JAWS became the highest-grossing movie for two years and inspired modern blockbusters that keep audiences in movie theaters (and out of the water) every summer. John Williams’ acclaimed score to JAWS helped give the film its bite. But even that fish story didn’t go as planned.
The Great White Joke
Spielberg and Williams were friends ever since the composer scored the director’s feature film debut The Sugarland Express (1974). Williams suggested JAWS should be scored like “a pirate movie” and invited Spielberg to his office to preview the theme on piano.
“I expected to hear something kind of weird and melodic…tonal but eerie,” Spielberg recalled in 1995. “What he played for me instead, with two fingers on the lower keys, was ‘dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun…’…I thought he was putting me on.” But Williams was serious, building a simple, driving theme on low strings with a foreboding countermelody on solo tuba. With the film’s faulty mechanical shark largely unseen, this theme represented the terror audiences thought they were seeing.
A Silent Killer
Williams’ cleverness in JAWS’ music even goes beyond those two notes to none at all.
“There were opportunities when we don’t have music, and the audience has the sense of an absence,” Williams explained in 1995, referring to the scene when a shark sighting on the Fourth of July turns out to be kids swimming with a fake fin. “They sense the absence of the shark because they don’t hear the thump-thump; we’ve conditioned them to do that.” Later, Williams flips the script again, offering no score in scenes when viewers know the shark is lurking, advertising its sudden presence with musical stings.
A Record with Bite
Audiences and critics raved about JAWS’ music. A specially-recorded soundtrack album earned Williams his first of 26 Grammy Awards, and the score won him his second of five Academy Awards. Both the album and a new mix of the original film score will be released on vinyl to mark the film’s 50th anniversary.
John Williams has scored 29 films for Steven Spielberg, but few have had the impact of JAWS – something the director freely admits. “I think the score was clearly responsible for half the success of that movie,” he said.
Learn more about the 50th anniversary of the Jaws soundtrack.
