‘Jaws’ Extras Were Paid an Absurdly Low Rates For Scenes

Leave it Hollywood’s fat cats to rip off crew members working on the biggest shark movie ever.

Leave it Hollywood’s fat cats to rip off crew members working on the biggest shark movie ever.

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Shame also lies directly at the feet of the ice-cold makers of Jaws, one of the biggest blockbusters of all time, for spreading what we Americans in 2022 could call a piggish big a bite out of the crew’s paychecks. The crew shot on Martha’s Vineyard — one of the richest and most beautiful areas in America.

But the filmmakers reportedly didn’t even toss a shrimp, or better yet a bucket of shrimp, to the extras.

The incident reminds us, once again, that chumps will do anything for the fleeting chance to get on TV, even if it means turning themselves into chum. And that slimy execs will conniving struggling unemployed people from Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Los Angeles.

The History of Jaws

The dramatic thriller falls squarely in the “man vs. nature” bracket of storytelling. In stories such as those, humans often find that manmade weaponry isn’t enough to defeat a lurking enemy.

Regardless, the moviegoing pubic was all for it, shelling out about $476 millions to watch the two-hours flick.

But there was a flip side to that coin, of course. Many kids and adults alike were now reluctant to swim in the Atlantic Ocean, for fear of killer sharks, particularly, great whites.

Spielberg co-wrote the screenplay with Peter Benchley, whose novel of the sam The thriller made boffo bucks at the box office.

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws single-handedly and irresponsibly led to a craze that terrified children from going into the ocean for many decades to come. 

Two years ago, Scientific American scribe Christine Russell gave the skinny, so to speak, on shark attacks.

“The human threat to sharks is far greater than the shark threat to humans,” Russell argued in an article named Classic Film, Crummy Science. “Each year, fishermen kill, directly or indirectly, an estimated 100 million sharks of all kinds worldwide, the majority for shark fin soup or meat. Many deaths also occur after white sharks are snagged in commercial fishing gear.”

More tellingly, Benchley became an ocean activist after saying the movie was reckless and propagated unfounded claims toward the huge fish, according to The Vintage News.

Of course, there are still plenty of shark sightings, and humans do encounter them. But visually never to the extremes portrayed in Jaws.

Jaws is still considered one of the scariest horror films ever, having shown gory details of a shark attack over and over in the summer blockbuster — even though the predator was actually just a mechanical shark.

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