Jaws Video Showcase

Jaws is a 1975 American horror/thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Peter Benchley's novel of the same name. The police chief of Amity Island, a fictional summer resort town, tries to protect beachgoers from a giant great white shark by closing the beach, only to be overruled by the town council, which wants the beach to remain open to draw a profit from tourists during the summer season. After several attacks, the police chief enlists the help of a marine biologist and a professional shark hunter. Roy Scheider stars as police chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as marine biologist Matt Hooper, Robert Shaw as shark hunter Quint, Murray Hamilton as the Mayor of Amity Island, and Lorraine Gary as Brody's wife, Ellen.

Jaws is regarded as a watershed film in motion picture history, the father of the summer blockbuster movie and one of the first "high concept" films. Due to the film's success in advance screenings, studio executives decided to distribute it in a much wider release than ever before. The Omen followed suit in the summer of 1976 and then Category: Star Wars Episode IV - : A New Hope|Star Wars one year later in 1977, cementing the notion for movie studios to distribute their big-release action and adventure pictures (commonly referred to as tentpole pictures) during the summer. Jaws is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. Jaws was number 48 on American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movies, a list of the greatest American films of all time, dropping down to number 56 on the 10 Year Anniversary list. It was ranked second on a similar list for thrillers, 100 Years... 100 Thrills. The film was followed by three sequels, none with the participation of Spielberg or Benchley: Jaws 2 (1978), Jaws 3-D (1983) and Category: Jaws: The Revenge - (1987). A video game titled Jaws Unleashed'' was produced in 2006.

The Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916 were a series of shark attacks along the coast of New Jersey between July 1 and July 12, 1916, in which four people were killed and one injured. Since 1916, scholars have debated which shark species was responsible and the number of animals involved, with the great white shark and the bull shark most frequently being blamed. The attacks occurred during a deadly summer heat wave and polio epidemic in the northeastern United States that drove thousands of people to the seaside resorts of the Jersey Shore. Shark attacks on the Atlantic Coast of the United States outside the semitropical states of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas were rare, but scholars believe that the increased presence of sharks and humans in the water led to the attacks in 1916.

Local and national reaction to the attacks involved a wave of panic that led to shark hunts aimed at eradicating the population of "man-eating" sharks and protecting the economies of New Jersey's seaside communities. Resort towns enclosed their public beaches with steel nets to protect swimmers. Scientific knowledge about sharks before 1916 was based on conjecture and speculation. The attacks forced ichthyologists to reassess common beliefs about the abilities of sharks and the nature of shark attacks.

The Jersey Shore attacks immediately entered into American popular culture, where sharks became caricatures in editorial cartoons representing danger. The attacks inspired Peter Benchley's novel Jaws (1974), an account of a great white shark that torments the fictional coastal community of Amity. Jaws was made into an influential film in 1975 by Steven Spielberg. The attacks became the subject of documentaries for the History Channel, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic Channel.

The great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), also known as great white, white pointer, white shark, or white death, is a large lamniform shark found in coastal surface waters in all major oceans. Reaching lengths of more than and weighing up to , reaching sexual maturity at around 15 years of age and having a lifespan of 30 to over 100 years. The great white shark is arguably the world's largest known predatory fish, eating dolphins, porpoises, whale carcasses and pinnipeds such as seals, fur seals and sea lions. It is the only surviving species of its genus, Carcharodon.

The best selling novel Jaws and the subsequent film by Steven Spielberg provided the great white shark with the image of a "man eater" in the public mind even though humans are not appropriate prey for white sharks.

C.I.T.E.S. has listed the great white shark as an endangered species.