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Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws”<\/a> forever altered the commercial filmmaking landscape 50 years ago when it became the highest grossing movie in Hollywood history. His film held the box office crown for a whole two years until George Lucas’ “Star Wars” exploded into theaters and affirmed that the motion picture industry was now a blockbuster-driven realm.<\/p>\n This is still true a half-century later, but there have been aesthetic shifts along the way. For instance, back then we lived with a different constellation of movie stars. Sure, there were still impossibly handsome leading men (e.g. Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and Burt Reynolds), but audiences would often line up to see movies featuring regular-looking guys portraying underdogs who were battling a stacked-deck system. They looked like the local fire chief, your little league baseball coach, or maybe even your dad. They might be bulb-nosed misanthropes scrambling to hold it together (like Walter Matthau in “The Bad News Bears”<\/a>), or simply men who wearily did their job, grabbed a sixer on the way home from work, and daddied it up until the kids were ready for bed.<\/p>\n That was the 1970s vibe. We loved our flawed, weathered, up-against-it heroes, and I don’t think anyone embodied this type more palpably than Roy Scheider. He made a major impression as the reasonable, by-the-book partner of Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle in William Friedkin’s classic “The French Connection.” So when he encountered Steven Spielberg at a Hollywood party one night in the mid-1970s at the exact moment the up-and-coming director couldn’t find the right actor for the everyman lead in “Jaws,” Scheider seized the moment and got himself cast as Police Chief Martin Brody.<\/p>\n