J. Michael Roddy was only six years old in the summer of 1975, but like the rest of the country, he developed shark fever after seeing Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. “There are two things that are really cool to a six year old boy, and that’s dinosaurs and sharks,” says Roddy. “I begged my parents to let me see Jaws, and it was the first time I remember being completely lost in a film. It changed my life.”
Roddy isn’t alone. Jaws changed a lot of people’s lives, beginning with the then 28-year-old Spielberg himself. But in The Shark is Still Working, the splendid Jaws documentary that Roddy produced that’s a bonus on the remastered Blu-ray version of the film available next week, a generation of filmmakers who shared Roddy’s fascination — including Kevin Smith, M. Night Shyamalan, and Bryan Singer — delight in the nerdy details and lasting legacy of Hollywood’s first summer blockbuster. “The intensity of the passion is what surprised me,” says Roddy. “Because it made us feel like, ‘Okay we’re not crazy. Everyone loves that film.’”
