Breaking for lunch, actors Richard Dreyfuss (from left), Robert Shaw, and Roy Scheider are shuttled from the Orca to the tugboat used as the staging area for the film shoot. Poster courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Everett Collection

50 Years After Jaws’ Release, an Alum’s Exclusive Photos Capture the Stars on Set

Peter Vandermark was a local photojournalist in 1974 when he shot a day of filming off Martha’s Vineyard, watching a little-known director named Steven Spielberg make movie magic

In the summer of 1974,

Cape Cod News photographer Peter Vandermark, then 26, and a reporter boarded a boat on Martha’s Vineyard and zipped into Nantucket Sound to cover a Hollywood movie filming off Cape Poge that day. The two spent the day on a tugboat that served as a staging area for the film crew, photographing the action and talking with the young director, Steven Spielberg—who was making just his second movie and at the time was known mostly for his television work—and the three stars, Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw.

The film, about the hunt for a killer great white shark, was Jaws.

“I remember watching Spielberg and thinking, ‘How did a guy my age come to be in charge of all this?’” says Vandermark (COM’71). “It was a massive undertaking involving hundreds of people and, right then, they were only halfway through what would eventually become five months of filming on the island.”

The next day, Vandermark developed his photos, all of them black-and-white, and the story ran on the cover of the July 24 edition of the (now defunct) weekly newspaper.

Over the next five decades, he didn’t give those pictures much thought. He went on to work for a stock photography agency and do freelance work. In 1979, he became an adjunct faculty at the Boston University College of Communication, teaching there for about 20 years before retiring as an associate professor of photojournalism.

Jaws, meanwhile, premiered on June 20, 1975, and became a smash hit, eventually grossing more than $470 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo, and helping to launch the summer Hollywood blockbuster phenomenon (while striking fear into the hearts of swimmers worldwide). Spielberg (Hon.’09) is now one of the most influential and acclaimed filmmakers of all time.

The negatives from Vandermark’s 1974 shoot remained buried in his files until last year, when Matt Taylor, author of the 2012 book Jaws: Memories from Martha’s Vineyard, contacted him about including some of the images in his revised edition. He dug out the negatives and had them scanned. “When I got them back, it was like a discovery,” he says. “I’d never seen some of those frames enlarged before and I was knocked over by the quality of the digital scans.”

Vandermark, who has published thousands of photos during his career—in books, annual reports, newspapers, and magazines, including the (Boston) Globe Magazine, Yankee, Horticulture, and Bostonia—never again had an opportunity to shoot on a film location.

“I did photograph a few famous folks here and there,” he says. “John Updike for one of his book jackets. Julia Child (Hon.’76) cooked me an omelette in her kitchen once for Yankee magazine. But I’ll have to say, having lunch with Steven Spielberg in the middle of Nantucket Sound stands way out.”