After the Zanuck/Brown production credit and before the movie's title card, the three main actors share equal billing, their names forming a triangle in white Souvenir Bold font in the centre of the screen. One year before the release of Jaws Hollywood had witnessed another trio of male actors (Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and William Holden) all fighting for the top billing in The Towering Inferno. Holden, whose star power was on the wane, had little chance of claiming pole position, but Newman and McQueen were an equal match. Only a staggered shared credit was able to satisfy all parties. McQueen's name appeared on the left and - as the eye reads from left to right - was therefore technically first. Newman's name followed, but was raised above McQueen's and so benefited from greater prominence. William Holden - as nominal co-star - came third, but tellingly his name was a fraction of an inch lower still. Trailing the three men, and slightly lower than them all, was Faye Dunaway, the only actress on the movie to be given top billing. The other actors were given below the title credits in egalitarian alphabetical order (starting with Fred Astaire and ending with Robert Wagner).
The triptych credit designed to mollify the superstar egos was adapted for Jaws a year later. Of the three actors involved Robert Shaw had the strongest argument for top billing. He had won an Academy Award for A Man For All Seasons (although in the Seventies this honour had not become part of the branding of an actor that it is today). He was also coming off The Sting, a crowd-pleasing critical hit in 1973, albeit in a supporting role.
Although Roy Scheider's face might have recognition value with movie audiences of the day (he had been in Klute and The French Connection, two key Seventies thrillers), his name was not exactly a box-office draw. However, he did have the argument of screen time in his favour: as the police chief, he is in practically every scene of the movie, whereas Shaw - with the exception of the Town Hall scene and a brief appearance by the dock - does not figure in the story until more than an hour has passed.
Although he didn't know it, Richard Dreyfuss was on the cusp of greatness in 1975. Coming off the Canadian film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which he wrongly thought was a career mistake, the actor was suffering a crisis of confidence. He might have cringed at his performances, but audiences responded to his boyish enthusiasm. He would follow Jaws with the double-whammy of Close Encounters and The Goodbye Girl in 1977, and win an Oscar for the showier of the two roles. For a few brief years in the mid Seventies he was an unlikely movie star before he went into a cocaine free fall from which his career never fully recovered.
It seems more likely that the pyramid credit granted the three main actors was designed to reflect the dynamics of their characters' relationships rather than any fragile egos. Robert Shaw's name occupies the superior position - just as his character assumes command at sea ("You're on board my vessel [...] and I'm captain.") and looks down God-like from the Orca's mast. Roy Scheider's name comes in the 'Steve McQueen' position, identifying him as the first main character deserving of the audience's sympathies. Richard Dreyfuss's name completes the final corner of the triangle, on a level with Scheider's just as the character of Matt Hooper quickly establishes himself as an equal, an unofficial deputy to the town's sheriff. If you read left to right the actors' names appear in the same sequence in which their characters first appear in the movie.
All this is, of course, just fanciful supposition on my part. As is the notion that the triangular figure of the names is a visual echo of a shark's fin or the tooth of a Great White.
