Richard Dreyfuss wears an Alsta Nautoscaph

Steven Spielberg directed Jaws. Richard Dreyfuss plays Matt Hooper, the young oceanographer from the Woods Hole Institute who arrives on Amity Island to help Chief Brody deal with a great white shark. Hooper is the expert in the film, the one who knows exactly how dangerous the situation is while Mayor Vaughn keeps the beaches open. Roy Scheider is Brody. Robert Shaw is Quint, the shark hunter. Spielberg was twenty-seven when he made it, and the mechanical shark barely worked, so he shot around it. The result is one of the most effective thrillers ever made.

Hooper wears an Alsta Nautoscaph Superautomatic, a deep-cut dive watch that watch enthusiasts debated online for years before anyone could definitively identify it. The Nautoscaph pairs a bicolor black-and-silver 60-minute dive bezel with a cushion case and a big-hole "Rallye" steel bracelet. It is the kind of watch a marine biologist in 1975 might actually have owned, practical and slightly obscure. Hooper strikes as a man who would deliberately avoid wearing a Rolex Submariner because he would consider it too obvious. The Alsta brand folded in the late 1970s and was revived in 2014, eventually producing a faithful recreation of the Jaws watch; one edition was limited to 1,975 pieces, a nod to the film's release year.