New England

Jaws Behind the Scenes: Exclusive Photos

Photojournalist Peter Vandermark shares rare images from the 1974 filming of “Jaws” off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.

By Yankee Magazine|May 20 2025|

A group of people with film equipment stand on a pier by the ocean under a partly cloudy sky, some looking out to sea and others using cameras.

Steven Spielberg, far left, and the Jaws crew aboard the tugboat Whitefoot, which served as the staging area for filming off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. As the director later told Vanity Fair, “The audience would not have connected with the movie unless it looked real, and that’s why I insisted on shooting the picture on open sea in the Atlantic Ocean.”

Photo Credit: Peter Vandermark

Editors’ note: With the Jaws 50th anniversary arriving on June 20, Yankee is unveiling this early online version of a feature that will appear in the magazine’s July/August issue. Enjoy a peek at Jaws behind the scenes!

Fantastic Voyage

Back in March, Yankee received an intriguing email from Peter Vandermark, a photojournalist and retired Boston University journalism professor. He had shot hundreds of assignments over his long career, but he wanted to share the story of one in particular.

On July 19, 1974, Vandermark was 26 and working for the weekly Cape Cod News when he was sent to Martha’s Vineyard for the day to photograph the filming of a movie there. He had unfettered access to the set, to the cast, and to the young director, a Hollywood upstart named Steven Spielberg. Vandermark’s photos appeared in the next week’s paper.

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Since then, he hasn’t published a single frame from that shoot—until now. With movie lovers around the world celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jaws this summer, we present a selection of Vandermark’s remarkable photos, along with his account of how it all unfolded.

* * * * *

Peter Vandermark: A friend of the editor flew us to the island, where his sports car waited to whisk us to the dock in Edgartown. The day’s shooting location was offshore, and our next ride soon arrived. The skipper turned out to be musician James Taylor’s older brother, Alex, who, like a few other islanders, had been hired by Universal Studios to ferry people and equipment from place to place. As we sped into Nantucket Sound, we could see on the horizon a small cluster of boats where we were to spend the rest of the day.

The staging area was a 65-foot tugboat named Whitefoot, and orbiting it were a number of smaller boats, including the Orca, the fishing boat central to the film. The tug was crammed to the gunwales with movie equipment and crew, and when we stepped aboard that morning, the shoot was already underway. What we were yet to realize was that they were filming what would become one of Jaws’s most iconic sequences.

In it, the Orca is pursuing the harpooned but still fleeing shark, with Quint [Robert Shaw] standing at the end of the bow pulpit with harpoon in hand, Hooper [Richard Dreyfuss] at the helm, and Brody [Roy Scheider] on the afterdeck, holding on for the ride. The only evidence of the shark’s location is a yellow barrel racing through the water.

Coordinating these scenes on a rolling sea made for a complicated and sometimes frustrating shoot. If one element didn’t line up, it meant starting all over. Spielberg and I were around the same age, but I remember watching him and thinking, Who is this guy? How is he running the whole show? He just seemed like he was from a different world.

When lunch was called, actors and crew were motored back to the Whitefoot just as the caterers’ boat arrived with beef stroganoff and strawberry shortcake. It felt like movie magic, floating out there in the middle of nowhere on a crowded tugboat. We ate with Spielberg, Dreyfuss, and Scheider in the tug’s galley. My most persistent memory of that time has always been Spielberg and Dreyfuss performing skits and songs from a 1960s Stan Freberg comedy album. They were a hilarious team.

Shooting continued with the same rhythm of takes and retakes until around 6 p.m., after which we flew back to the Cape. The next morning I developed my film, made prints for the story, and filed the negatives away—where they remained undisturbed until last year, when I had them scanned for a book project.

Seeing the digitally scanned images for the first time, with their surprising sharpness and tonal quality, was a thrill. I’d been assigned to shoot the making of a movie, and yet the pictures that stand out for me now are the ones of cast and crew hanging out, reading, chatting, and joking around. Those are the kinds of photos that really tell a story.