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Blog · 30 Aug 2026

How Steven Spielberg Changed Cinema Forever | Jaws, E.T. & Jurassic Park

First episode of Straight Off The Shelf: three Spielberg classics off Dan’s shelf. The video title names Jaws, E.T. and Jurassic Park — watch for his memories and which moments hit hardest. Fact sheets (with goofs) below.

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Three Spielberg fact sheets

Geeky fact sheet

Jaws (1975)

Year
1975
Director
Steven Spielberg
Principal cast
Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton
Budget (reported)
About $9 million (producer-confirmed figure cited on Wikipedia; not the lower early estimates)
Box office (reported)
About $495 million worldwide (Box Office Mojo figure cited on Wikipedia)

Geeky trivia

  • Mechanical shark “Bruce” malfunctioned so often that Spielberg leaned on suggestion and John Williams’s two-note motif.
  • Often credited with helping invent the wide-release summer blockbuster template.
  • Verna Fields won the editing Oscar; the chaotic Martha’s Vineyard shoot is film-school legend.

Mistakes & goofs

  • Continuity: Quint’s machete jumps around the boat between shots in the finale (widely logged on MovieMistakes).
  • Barrel/harpoon counts on the Orca don’t always add up across the chase — a known editing-era quirk.
  • Hooper’s distinctive ring appears to change style in some underwater cage shots.

Budget/box office: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaws_(film) ; goofs summarised from https://www.moviemistakes.com/film670

Geeky fact sheet

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Year
1982
Director
Steven Spielberg
Principal cast
Henry Thomas, Dee Wallace, Peter Coyote, Robert MacNaughton, Drew Barrymore
Budget (reported)
About $10.5 million (reported)
Box office (reported)
About $797.3 million worldwide (reported)

Geeky trivia

  • Shot partly from a child’s-eye camera height so adults feel looming and strange.
  • Carlo Rambaldi’s animatronic E.T. became as iconic as any 80s movie creature.
  • John Williams’s flying-bike theme is permanent cinema DNA.

Mistakes & goofs

  • Home-video and theatrical versions differ (notably the later CGI gun/walkie-talkie swaps Spielberg later walked back) — version-shopping is part of the geek sport.

Figures from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial

Geeky fact sheet

Jurassic Park (1993)

Year
1993
Director
Steven Spielberg
Principal cast
Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, Samuel L. Jackson, BD Wong
Budget (reported)
About $56–63 million (range reported)
Box office (reported)
About $1.058 billion worldwide (reported)

Geeky trivia

  • ILM’s CGI dinosaurs + Stan Winston’s practical beasts rewired blockbuster VFX overnight.
  • Based on Michael Crichton’s novel; David Koepp co-wrote the screenplay.
  • First film to clear $1B worldwide in some tallies of its long theatrical life / re-releases depending on counting method — Wikipedia lists ≈ $1.058B.

Mistakes & goofs

  • Plenty of continuity niggles in the kitchen raptor scene and jeep chase across goof databases; none stop it being a perfect “Straight Off The Shelf” pick.

Budget range and gross from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_(film)

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