Promoted through a massive advertising campaign and given unprecedentedly widespread distribution by Universal studios,
Jaws lived up to the expectation it generated. With its rousing adventure and horror elements and its crowd-pleasing finale, it became a worldwide phenomenon, and for at least one summer made millions of people very nervous about swimming in the ocean.
If the success of the film was nothing short of remarkable, the novel upon which it was based had proved a commercial phenomenon in its own right. In January 1973, author Peter Benchley submitted to the New York publishing house of Doubleday the final draft of a novel inspired by his memory of a monstrous great white shark caught off the coast of Montauk in 1964. In a documentary accompanying the laser-disc release of the film, Benchley recalls how several titles (such as "Stillness in the Water" for example) were considered and rejected for the novel before the simple, visceral Jaws was chosen. Very quickly, Bantam paid for paperback rights to the novel, and Hollywood producers David Brown and Richard Zanuck bought not only the film rights, but also the services of author Benchley for a first-draft screenplay.
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