It’s been said that we might need a bigger Island, and in August few can argue with that. Now you can add Jawsfest: The Tribute to your August planning calendar, a special four-day series of events that will explore just about every aspect of the making of the movie Jaws. And as they did in 2005 for the first Jawsfest on the Vineyard, Jaws afficionados from around the world are expected to travel to this festival.

Up Close With Jaws

Jaws: Memories from Martha’s Vineyard is making its debut trip to the wider world on Tuesday, June 21 at the West Tisbury Public Library. The project, a massive undertaking featuring an exhaustive and engaging collection of pictures and stories from the making of the movie Jaws, was created by Matt Taylor and Jim Beller. It is magnificent.

Much has been said and written about the filming of Jaws and its impact in the spring and summer of 1974 on a still relatively obscure fishing and agricultural tourist redoubt seven miles off the southeast coast of Massachusetts. After Jaws: Memories from Martha’s Vineyard there is simply nothing left to be said.

The U.S. Coast Guard issued an unprecedented warning to swimmers and boaters a week ago: beware of the great white shark.

Thomas Bena, founder of the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival, stood in front of a mostly full house at the Chilmark community center last Wednesday night, and shared an anecdote.

“I can remember one night a few years ago when a man approached me on his way out the door. He told me that he appreciated what we were doing here, but that the film we had just shown was repetitive and just generally not very good. I thanked him for his thoughts and was watching him leave when someone else came up to me and said ‘Do you know who that guy was?’”

It was 35 years ago that Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws, about a great white shark that terrorizes a resort town, was first published, starting a run of 44 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and inspiring the Steven Spielberg film of the same name, filmed off the shores of Martha’s Vineyard.

This week the novelist’s widow, Wendy Benchley, made a visit to the Oak Bluffs selectmen to take aim at what has become, in recent years, a focal point in the battle over shark conservation: the annual Oak Bluffs Monster Shark Tournament.

The ominous, quickening strains that can mean only one thing -
the shark is near and getting nearer - are slated to fill Ocean
Park in Oak Bluffs at an August 5 open-air screening of Jaws.

Netflix, a company that operates a DVD mail rental service, has
applied to the Oak Bluffs Park Commission to show the movie at the park
off Seaview avenue. Admission would be free. The commission was
scheduled to vote on the application last night.

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."

When Paul Garcia looks back at that hectic summer 31 years ago, he mostly remembers a lot of standing around, talking baseball with the lead actor and waiting to be called to the set. For Lynn Murphy, that summer meant time in the Valerie N. towing boats, barges and shark cages across Island waters. And for Hershel West it was the summer his dog Chipper won him a speaking role in one of the biggest films of all time.

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.