The 1970s began with a bang. Or maybe a bottle being smashed in some dingy Manhattan dive bar by a furious auteur screaming about final cut. Either way, it was the era of the director as God: Altman, Coppola, Scorsese, Ashby, Friedkin. Films were messy, political, experimental, personal—shot through with cigarette smoke, New York grime, and the scent of celluloid freedom.

Then came the fin.

Jaws didn’t mean to kill anything. That’s the great irony. Spielberg was a film brat just like the others, trying to make his mark, trying to keep the camera dry and the production afloat. But when Jaws exploded at the box office—wide release, national marketing, TV spots, merchandising—the studios smelled blood in the water. And they didn’t just dip a toe in. They cannonballed.

Suddenly, the auteur was out, and the high-concept was in. You didn’t need a soul, just a hook. Something you could pitch in two words and poster in one: “The Shark.” “The Alien.” “The Ark.” The seismic success of Jaws set the table for Star Wars, Close Encounters, and the age of Event Cinema. The summer blockbuster was born, swaddled in popcorn grease and lit by the flicker of a thousand multiplex screens.

What died? Ambiguity. Risk. The kind of film where a character might sit in silence, drink whiskey, and tell you a story about the USS Indianapolis—without cutting away, without cutting corners, without caring if you were bored. That kind of patient tension would soon be carved up, streamlined, test-screened to death.

And it’s not Spielberg’s fault. He made a damn masterpiece. But he also gave the studios a blueprint: thrill them, brand it, repeat. What was once a wild landscape of rogue visionaries turned into a theme park, complete with merchandising stands and licensing deals. From the moment Jaws hit, the clock was ticking on the Director’s Decade. Within five years, the studios would have their claws back in the tiller, and the artists would be back to hustling for their next passion project on the sidelines.

But the irony’s saltier than the Atlantic: Jaws is a product of the very freedom it helped destroy. You feel it in the sweat on Roy Scheider’s brow, the simmering class tension between Brody, Hooper, and Quint, the silence that builds between John Williams’ stabs of dread. It’s not just spectacle—it’s cinema. Dangerous, uncertain, and tinged with fear. And maybe that’s why it resonates still: because it wasn’t meant to be a product. It just became one.

So yes, Jaws gave us the summer movie. But it also gave us the final act of New Hollywood, played out not in a boardroom, but on the high seas—with one man trying to keep control of a beast too big, too unruly, too monstrous to contain.

Sound familiar?

• Saul Muerte