The Myth of the "Jaws" Shooting Star

Update: If you've been here before, you absolutely need to scroll down to Gigantic Update, 1/20/2025 for some new information.

The GIFs below were part of a Twitter thread 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. I'm just going to post these in their current state, without 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. For more reactions, visit the original Twitter thread.

Update, 10/24/2021, from Paul Hirsch'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.

the shot, brightened for clarity

Gigantic Update, 1/20/2025

Here we are again.

I find it astonishing that folks are still repeating the myth that the shooting stars in "Jaws" were captured in-camera. To recap, here's a quick summary of the forensic evidence that the two shooting stars are animated and were not photographed in-camera during first unit production.

1. The sequence was shot day-for-night and exposure values where they are for this sequence could not possibly expose for a real shooting star.
2. In both shots, there is zero motion blur on the hottest part of the shooting star, while the head of a real shooting star, if captured, would be smeary.
3. The shooting star, in both shots, has a single point of intensity and a variably flickering pink tail. This is not what shooting stars look like.
4. The Roy Scheider shot is photographed with the camera panning and tilting a bit, however the animation is locked in screen space indicating the animator didn't "match move" the camera.
5. Anything in the background of the Roy Scheider shot would be out of focus. Just look at Richard Dreyfuss, who is soft. The shooting star is crisp and sharp, indicating a non-defocused animated effect.
6. They looks animated as HELL, with extremely similar characteristics to hand drawn animation of shooting stars from animated films like "Pinnochio" and "Sleeping Beauty". In fact, they look similar in spirit to the hand-painted animated effects that brighten the barrels' lights in the water in the exact same scene. The second shooting star in "Jaws" is even animated on two's, meaning the animation is exactly the same in the shot for two frames in a row. The film runs at 24 frames per second but the animation is only running at 12 fps (to reduce the animation workload) and is double printed for every frame of animation. (Thanks, Randy Cook!)

One reason it's bubbling up again on blogs and social media is due to "The Shark is Broken" which debuted on Broadway in August 2023. Co-written by Robert Shaw's son Ian Shaw, the play dramatizes the often-difficult production of "Jaws", and the shooting star makes a cameo in the play, with the authors of the play implying that it actually happened during filming - a beautiful example of serendipity and happy accidents amidst a troubled film production.

From Deadline: "Fans of the film – who isn’t? – will be delighted with the attention to detail on this Broadway stage, right down to that famous shooting star accidentally captured by the late, great cinematographer Bill Butler."

Here's the problem - those shooting stars featured in "Jaws" were NOT captured in-camera. They are optical effects added in post-production by an animator. Film fans need to stop repeating the false claim that they were happy accidents captured in-camera during the filming of the movie.

If the forensic analysis of the footage indicating that the two shooting stars were added in post-production doesn't convince you, then maybe the fact that director Steven Spielberg's well-documented love of "When You Wish Upon a Star" from "Pinocchio" can convince you. Or Spielberg's vivid childhood memory of a meteor shower that captured his imagination (see Joseph McBride’s ‘Steven Spielberg: A Biography’). Or that he later adding hand-drawn animated shooting stars into "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom". Or the Paul Hirsch quote printed above. 

If all of this isn't enough, perhaps this reporting will help slam the door on this myth.

I reached out to film historian Jamie Benning about this issue. He said, "let me ask Joe Alves."

Alves was the "Jaws" production designer and also worked with Spielberg on "The Sugarland Express" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", and has spoken extensively about his experience on "Jaws". Paraphrasing, this is the response he got from Alves in August 2023: yes, the shooting stars in the movie were animated. Yes, they were added in post-production.

Let's put this myth to bed, once and for all.

As an aside, let's discuss why this myth gets perpetuated. Firstly, with the well-documented production troubles that "Jaws" had to overcome, the shooting stars being real, in-camera events invites a pleasant bit of magical serendipity, which captures one's imagination. Even when all hell was breaking loose, months behind schedule and millions over budget, this movie was destined to be a masterpiece, and nothing exemplifies that than the wonderful serendipity of two shooting stars that happened to get captured on film for the movie! It's a terrific bedtime story, but one that is pure mythology.

But another piece of the puzzle is that there might have been an actual meteor shower that occurred during the filming of the movie. Someone sent me this bizarre quote from cinematographer Bill Butler apparently given to American Cinematographer 1975 that birthed the myth:

"During the scene where Brody and Hooper are waiting for the shark and comparing scars, we had a meteor shower in the sky behind them. We didn't plan it, but when we saw it happening, we quickly set up and filmed it. This kind of natural phenomenon does a lot for a film. It wasn't an optical effect." 

(Complicating the issue - I can't find this quote in the AC archives. I went into a deep dive in the American Cinematographer archives (here's the "Jaws" issue from March 1975),  and reviewed every single 1975 issue, and couldn't not locate this quote. As an aside, the AC Archives are absolutely amazing.)

A version of this story is often repeated, sometimes attributed as being mentioned in a “making of Jaws” documentary, but I’ve scoured the several documentaries about the making of the film and I have not come across this story. 

Here's what I think happened: Yes, there was a meteor shower during filming. Yes, Butler and crew did what they could to photograph the event, devoid of the boat or actors, just to attempt to capture something on film. And he erroneously says in the "it wasn't an optical effect", meaning that what they filmed was what they filmed. However, and this is a gigantic "however", the footage of the real meteor shower they filmed is not in the final movie. It's not. The "meteor shower being filmed by the crew" story was told by Robert Shaw to his son Ian, which became part of his father's "Jaws" lore, but mistakenly morphed into "the shooting stars in the movie were REAL".

The shooting stars in "Jaws" are animated optical effects executed in post-production.

•  •  •  •

Oh... there's just one more thing.

Another source has access to Steven Spielberg. So this person asked Steven Spielberg in September 2023:

Paraphrasing from Spielberg: Yep, it's animated shooting star, animated by Albert Whitlock.

This was a bombshell for me. No, not that Spielberg confirmed that it was animated, but that it was supervised by none other than Al Whitlock who passed away in 1999, the veteran visual effects artist who contributed to some of the most amazing visual effects of all time. Not to mention that really terrific illusion in "The Blues Brothers" (1980) that I documented on Twitter.