It was the movie Jaws which brought downtown Edgartown, State Beach and the Vineyard’s breathtaking South Shore to audiences nationwide for the first time.

But Island newcomers be warned -- Amity Island isn’t any more realistic than the great white shark that terrorized it.

Production designer Joe Alves had planned to scout Nantucket for the movie Jaws when his ferry was turned around. He ended up on Martha's Vineyard instead, forever changing the Island.

In 1974, Universal Studios sent a new young director to the Island to make a movie about a big shark terrorizing a little town. The plan was to spend five weeks and 3.5 million dollars. The reality was a film shoot that stretched to over five months and a cost overrun to more than 8 million dollars.

The director was Steven Spielberg, the movie was Jaws, and the bottom line was history. Three Academy Awards. The first movie to earn $100 million from American audiences. The first to be released on more than 450 screens at once.

Forty years after its release, Jaws remains a treasured part of Island history. A look back on the summer Hollywood filmmakers descended on the Island and struggled against all odds to make a realistic-looking movie about a giant shark with a taste for human flesh.

As the small island of Amity - er, Martha's Vineyard
- found out this weekend, when it comes to the movie Jaws, there
are fanatics, and then there are fin-atics.

"There is no other movie I would fly hundreds of miles to go
celebrate," a giddy Yvette Pryor of Augusta, Ga., said on Sunday.
"It's the ultimate movie."