We like to imagine masterpieces born from controlled brilliance, but the real history of cinema is chaotic. This deep dive draws on production diaries, academic analyses of 1970s film and box office data to explore the near-disastrous making of the 1975 aquatic thriller its own crew nicknamed Flaws, a movie that ran more than 100 days over schedule, ballooned from 3.5 to 9 million dollars, and accidentally changed the motion picture industry forever.

From producers buying an unpublished manuscript and a first director who kept calling the shark a whale, to a 26-year-old Steven Spielberg trying to quit, we follow a script rewritten nightly by Carl Gottlieb, the casting of Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw, the decision to shoot on the open ocean off Martha's Vineyard, and the saltwater destruction of the mechanical sharks nicknamed Bruce. The ...