The movie Jaws first lunged off the screen and into viewers’ shark-shocked imaginations 45 summers ago. On Martha’s Vineyard, where much of the film was made over several months the previous year, Jaws remains a cultural touchstone, with frequent summer screenings and the occasional festival.
A unique 45th-anniversary event this week pays tribute to the movie’s lasting impact: an art show at the Old Sculpin Gallery in Edgartown that pairs recent paintings and photography inspired by Jaws with images and artifacts from the film’s local production.
Closing Friday, the Jaws exhibit is an homage to production designer Joe Alves, who created some of the movie’s most indelible images—including Quint’s shack, a replica of the Old Sculpin building, which stood on the Menemsha waterfront for less than a week in the spring of 1974.
Mr. Alves’s drawings and a photographed clay model of the historic building, which he chose as his original for the shark-hunter’s lair after extensive site scoping on the East Coast, present visitors to the gallery with the rare sensation of being both inside and outside a structure at once and yet at different points in time. It’s a little like the moment when the movie’s first Edgartown audiences, in the old theatre atop town hall, realized a key scene they were watching had been filmed in the selectmen’s meeting room just downstairs.
Other rarities on display through Friday include Mr. Alves’s full-scale drawing of the shark weathervane for the top of Quint’s shack, (marked DUE DATE APRIL 22!!) Nearby, and dated April 27, is the late Island metalworker Travis Tuck’s $150 pay stub from Universal Studios for creating the weathervane—the first of many in Mr. Tuck’s career.
The loaned artifacts, production stills and wall texts with memorable lines from Jaws accompany recent paintings and photographs by members of the Martha’s Vineyard Art Association, which has called the Old Sculpin home since 1954.
Beach-bright acrylics by Brian Kirkpatrick and the petite, whimsical oil Baby Shark Cupcake by Rosalie Ripaldi Shane are among the contemporary works that summon the 1970s summer-fun feel of the film, minus the sinister undertones of impending, toothed disaster.
Both photographers and painters contributed beachscapes, portraits of buildings seen in the film and images of fishing and sailing boats.
Familiar scenes from the film appear as well. June Schoppe’s Amity Bound, an oil of the Chappy Ferry headed for the Edgartown side, hangs by a Jaws clapper shot of the ferry with a Cadillac and no fewer than 16 cast and crew members aboard. Alison Convery’s painting of veterans marching on July 4 is paired with a black and white shot of the Amity parade, filmed in 1974 Edgartown.
The local artists’ work is for sale, with numerous paintings and photos already spoken for earlier this week. For Jaws fans with limited art budgets, the gallery is also selling the exhibition poster, a collectable designed by Old Sculpin intern and lifelong seasonal Chappaquiddick resident Harry DeLana. An Island map, with a key to locations used in the film, is free.
The Old Sculpin Gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily through Friday, when the show comes down. Admission is free.
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