John Milius said that after the success of Jaws and the considerable money he made from it, Spielberg bought a beach house in Malibu and used to express concern that the sharks were out there waiting for him to get into the water because they knew he had done a great injustice to them by making the movie.

According to Spielberg, his original idea for introducing Quint was to show him sitting in a movie theater laughing at the special effects of the whale in Moby Dick (1956). The film's star, Gregory Peck, who also owned the movie's rights, refused to let Spielberg use any footage from it, allegedly because he hated his performance in the picture and didn't want it seen again.

Spielberg and Richard Dreyfuss became friends on this production. The director said he expected they would have a similar relationship to the one between director Francois Truffaut and his muse, Jean-Pierre Leaud, but Dreyfuss has actually been in only two other Spielberg movies as of this writing: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Always (1989).

Lorraine Gary (Ellen Brody) has been married to entertainment industry executive Sidney Sheinberg since 1956. She retired for eight years after making Spielberg's 1941 (1979) but returned to the screen to make Jaws: The Revenge (1987). That performance, her last as of this writing, earned her both a Razzie (aka Golden Raspberry) Award nomination as Worst Actress and a Saturn Award nomination from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films as Best Actress.

According to writer Carl Gottlieb, the line "You're gonna need a bigger boat" was not scripted but improvised by Roy Scheider.

Howard Sackler, who had done uncredited work on the script, later got screen credit for Jaws 2 (1978). Carl Gottlieb, the credited writer (along with Benchley) on the original, also got credit for the sequel.

The track-in zoom-out shot of Brody when he realizes the boy has been eaten by a shark is similar to the zoom-in track-out shot first used in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).

After the release of the movie, the average summer tourist population of Martha's Vineyard tripled.

The crew began to refer to the movie as "Flaws" because of all the technical problems.

The mechanical sharks were named "Bruce" after Spielberg's lawyer Bruce Ramer.

Scriptwriter Carl Gottlieb plays local newspaper editor Meadows. Novelist Peter Benchley has a bit as a reporter.

Peter Benchley (1940-2006) was the son of author Nathaniel Benchley and grandson of Algonquin Round Table wit Robert Benchley.

Ron and Valerie Taylor, the Australian photographers who provided underwater footage of a real Great White Shark, worked on the documentary that is a precursor to Jaws in terms of creating a terror of sharks, Blue Water, White Death (1971), which contains the first 35 mm footage of a Great White ever captured. Ron Taylor was also the co-director of an Australian documentary, Shark Hunters (1962).

Special effects wizard Robert Mattey created the giant squid in the Disney movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954).

Memorable Quotes from JAWS

VAUGHN (Murray Hamilton): Fellows, let's be reasonable, huh? This is not the time or the place to perform some kind of a half-assed autopsy on a fish. And I'm not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock.

VAUGHN: I'm only trying to say that Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars. Now, if the people can't swim here, they'll be glad to swim at the beaches of Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Long Island...
BRODY (Roy Scheider): That doesn't mean we have to serve them up as smorgasbord!

HOOPER (Richard Dreyfuss): This was no boat accident!

QUINT (Robert Shaw): I'll catch this bird for you, but it ain't gonna be easy. Bad fish. Not like going down the pond chasin' bluegills and tommycods. This shark, swallow you whole. Little shakin', little tenderizin', an' down you go.

QUINT: Front, bow. Back, stern. If ya don't get it right, squirt, I throw your ass out the little round window on the side.

QUINT: So, eleven hundred men went in the water; 316 men come out and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

HOOPER: That's a twenty-footer.
QUINT: Twenty-five. Three tons of him.

BRODY: You're gonna need a bigger boat.

BRODY: Smile, you son of a bitch!

Compiled by Rob Nixon