The Myth of the "Jaws" Shooting Star

The GIFs below were part of a Tweetstorm where I attempted to debunk the whole "the Jaws shooting stars were real and actually happened on camera" mythology. These read better as tweets than as a blog post, so see the thread here, if you want.

All these "Jaws" tweets reminds me to dig up my half-finished project files debunking the whole "those shooting stars were real" myth.

A'ight , I'm just going to post these in their current state, w/no context. I planned to talk day-for-night, fast lenses, film stock, exposure of stars, depth of field, motion blur, tracking, hand-drawn animation composited into live-action... but nobody's got time for that.

In summary, contrary to what the mythology might be, there is no way those two shooting stars you see in "Jaws" were real-life shooting stars photographed in-camera during filming. Those shots contain animated effects work to simulate shooting stars.

/fin 🦈

For more reactions, visit the original Twitter thread.

Update, 10/24/2021, from Paul Hirsh's fantastic book "A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away: My Fifty Years Editing Hollywood Hits":

As I watched [Jaws], I noticed something odd in one of the later reels. In a low-angle close-up of Roy Scheider showing the early evening sky behind him, I saw what looked like a brief fiery streak in the sky. Later the evening at a party at Steven's hotel to celebrate the opening, I asked him about it. "Hey," he called out, "Paul Hirsch saw it! He saw the UFO!" As I had suspected, that streak was deliberate; it was a little foretaste of Steven's next picture, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.