Jaws fans, movie buffs and Islanders all will find a lot to like in Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story, the new documentary that premieres on the Vineyard with a series of sold-out screenings this weekend.

In a tightly-edited 88 minutes of interviews, film clips, outtakes and archival footage, director Laurent Bouzereau takes a multifaceted look at the 50-year-old summer blockbuster.

“This was a chance to tell the human story of Jaws,” Mr. Bouzereau told the Gazette, during a telephone interview earlier this month.

The documentary screens Friday, June 20, at the Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center in Oak Bluffs, in collaboration with Circuit Arts, before moving to the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center in Vineyard Haven for screenings Sunday evening and Wednesday evening. All shows are sold out.

From 1976 television clips, showing huge crowds lining up at theatres to see the new movie, to recent interviews with James Cameron, JJ Abrams, Jordan Peele and other top Hollywood directors, Jaws @ 50 deftly outlines the film’s instant and enduring influence in popular culture.

“I’ve seen Jaws in the theatre 31 times,” says director Steven Soderbergh, who first watched it at age 12 and, like Steven Spielberg, was directing feature films by his mid-20s.

Director Guillermo del Toro also first saw Jaws on the big screen, experiencing the scares along with everyone else in the audience.

Steven Spielberg was worried the film would be a flop. Boy was he wrong. — Courtesy Universal Studios Licensing LLC

“The whole theatre reacted like a musical instrument,” Mr. del Toro recalls, with visible delight.

Mr. Bouzereau himself credits Jaws with inspiring him to leave his native France after high school for the United States and a career in film.

“I saw it as a teenager in France [and] after that movie, I convinced my parents that I had been born in the wrong country and I had to move to America,” he told the Gazette.

Arriving in the 1980s, Mr. Bouzereau found a niche creating videodisc documentaries that traced the “making of” popular films, including Mr. Spielberg.

“He embraced this new way of re-inventing his films, re-introducing himself and his films through the home entertainment market,” recalled Mr. Bouzereau, who later directed the documentaries Steven Spielberg & John Williams: The Adventure Continues (2017) and Music by John Willliams (2024).

Mr. Spielberg, whose company Amblin Entertainment has co-produced Jaws @ 50 with National Geographic and Mr. Bouzereau, speaks candidly in the new documentary about his struggles with the famously troubled, months-long shoot on Martha’s Vineyard in the spring and summer of 1974.

“The film wound up 100 days over schedule, the shark was not working and I was terrified that I was going to be fired,” he says.

After returning to Los Angeles, Mr. Spielberg suffered from what hadn’t yet been identified as post-traumatic stress disorder and would occasionally have to seclude himself and weep.

The following summer, however, he ventured to the Jaws opening at New York City’s Rivoli Theatre and saw ticketholders lined up around the block.

“The movie that I thought would really end my career is the one that began it,” Mr. Spielberg says.

“Not only did it change his life, it changed the film industry worldwide,” Mr. Bouzereau told the Gazette. “It’s an incredible lesson in perserverence.”

Jaws @ 50 also spends time with Island cast members Jeffrey Kramer (Deputy Hendricks) and Jeffrey Voorhees (Alex Kintner) as well as

Wendy Benchley, widow of Jaws author Peter Benchley, and marine biologists studying shark conservation.

After the Vineyards shows, Jaws @ 50 screens at next week’s Nantucket Film Festival, ahead of its official release in July on the National Geographic channel and the Disney+ and Hulu streaming platforms.

As for the original film — which is playing frequently this summer — Mr. Bouzereau said, “It’s like good wine: Good art ages well, and Jaws is an example of that.”