The movie's single word title appears in white block capitals in the centre of the screen a second or so after the establishing first shot of the sea bed. The first two letters of the word are joined at the base and the second two letters welded at the top. The middle two letters are flush together without touching and the gap between them forms a backslash - like a mirror image of the punctuation mark in the production credit. One could almost imagine an animation of the title -as in the opening credits of Psycho - in which the letters clamp together like the jaws of the shark, or - as in the geometric design of North By Northwest - slide together at an angle on the plane shared by the A and the W. Later in his career Spielberg would play with titles to highlight the artifice of the medium or to establish his post-modernist credentials, but for this - his first blockbuster - he went for simplicity.
A similar but not identical font was used for the poster but was in an eye-catching red, a colour that Spielberg decided in pre-production that he wanted to avoid as much as possible. The white of the movie title was stark enough to stand out against the underwater night shots, but would have been less effective on the side of a bus. Both the top and bottom of the letters are aligned on the poster, whereas the J of the movie title dangles below the line, like one of Quint's hooks. The bridge of the A does not connect with its left hand strut, creating a gap-toothed effect. The geometry of the W itself suggests teeth, the twin upper wedges like a vampire's bite. The S curls like a tail at the end of the word and provides a pleasing rounded symmetry to the curled hook of the J.
The movie's title has passed into legend although it was one of the last elements of the original novel to fall into place. The word appears multiple times in the book, particularly in the descriptions of the shark attacks, and, although it is never spoken in the film, there are several key visual references to it. It was never intended to refer to the shark itself, but within a few years of the movie's release this had become common usage. Poducer Dino De Laurentiis was probably responsible for starting it all when he was promoting his version of King Kong in 1976. "No one cry when Jaws die," he told Time magazine. "But when the monkey die, people gonna cry. Intellectuals gonna love Kong; even film buffs who love the first Kong gonna love ours. Why? Because I no give them crap. I no spend two, three million to do quick business. I spend 24 million on my Kong. I give them quality. I got here a great love story, a great adventure. And she rated P.G. For everybody."
English clearly not being the producer's first (or even second) language, Dino could be forgiven for his mistake. The error was compounded, however, in the following year by The Spy Who Loved Me. By the mid Seventies the Bond franchise was running out of steam and was no longer setting trends but following them. Naming the villain's key henchman after Spielberg's shark movie was just one more example of the series' creative bankruptcy. Even Valerie Taylor - who should know better - refers to the shark as 'Jaws' in the Inside Jaws documentary. It's an issue that has engaged some of the finest minds on the Internet and, sadly, it's probably never going to be resolved.
