We like to imagine masterpieces born from controlled brilliance, but the real history of cinema is chaotic. This deep dive draws on production diaries, academic analyses of 1970s film and box office data to explore the near-disastrous making of the 1975 aquatic thriller its own crew nicknamed Flaws, a movie that ran more than 100 days over schedule, ballooned from 3.5 to 9 million dollars, and accidentally changed the motion picture industry forever.

From producers buying an unpublished manuscript and a first director who kept calling the shark a whale, to a 26-year-old Steven Spielberg trying to quit, we follow a script rewritten nightly by Carl Gottlieb, the casting of Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw, the decision to shoot on the open ocean off Martha’s Vineyard, and the saltwater destruction of the mechanical sharks nicknamed Bruce. Then we show how that failure forced point-of-view shots, yellow barrels, John Williams’s two-note score, and a wide release with television ads that created the summer blockbuster.

• Why the affair subplot from the novel was cut to keep three men alone on a boat
• The Australian footage of a real great white that rewrote Hooper’s fate
• A tuba played in a high register and the weaponized silence before the shark breaches
• Why a 450-screen opening was once a tactic reserved for trashy exploitation films
• Gallup polls, cinematic neurosis, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and post-Watergate cynicism