Jaws is a disaster movie only if it doesn’t make money. Then it’s a disaster.
Steven Spielberg in the New York Post, 28 June 1975
IN TIME, Spielberg would apologise for Jaws. He confessed to a London audience in 1978 that it now seemed to him ‘violent, nasty, crude. There was nothing in the picture that was personal to me. It was a calculated movie. I made each cut with glee, knowing the effect that it would have on the audience. I don’t ever want to be involved in another picture like that.’
Yet he was driven to make it. With flower-power films discredited, the industry was re-endorsing mass entertainment: popcorn movies. The Godfather and Cabaret would sweep the 1972 Oscar nominations: films with strong stories, high production values, hummable tunes. Jaws was the picture for the time, and for Spielberg’s career as well, and such was his sensitivity to the market, and to the combined opinions of his colleagues and friends, that he could no more avoid making it than the shark in Benchley’s story could ignore the pale legs of summertime tourists dangling so tantalisingly from the ceiling of his world.
Spielberg’s instincts did not fail him. He finished Sugarland Express as simply another young director riding – late – the wave of enthusiasm for young directors. Jaws transformed him into an unignorable force, admired by some in the industry, suspected and resented by others. Hollywood embraces a wunderkind but never quite trusts him, and the greatest enthusiasts are the first to plot his downfall. Jaws won audiences, grossing $260 million from the US domestic box office alone, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, through which his peers voted each year’s Academy Awards, would withhold an Oscar from Spielberg personally for twenty years.
Even as he struggled during the first months of 1974 to find a film in the manuscript of Jaws, Spielberg refined ‘Watch the Skies’, now called, after Hynek’s phrase, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In October 1973, Universal had announced that he would direct for them another Barwood and Robbins script, ‘Clearwater’, but after Jaws there could be no film but Close Encounters. And since he’d decided that the film would be an anthology of his enthusiasms, an affirmation of the popular culture that had got him through adolescence, he would write the script himself.
Jaws’s publication in February 1974 came almost as an anti-climax. A few thousand sales would push a book onto California’s best-seller list, so Spielberg, Zanuck, Brown and friends bought a hundred copies of the novel each. Most of these were sent, with a personal note, to opinion-makers and members of the chattering class. Restaurateurs were prime targets, the team printed up a special poster for restaurants. By 7 p.m. on the first day, Jaws was the state’s most successful book, though it needed no help nationwide. Within weeks, paperback rights went to Bantam for $575,000 and Jaws was climbing towards an eventual 9.5 million sales in the US alone.
The book’s enormous success surprised the publishing world, as bestsellers usually do. Though the son of one novelist, Nathaniel Benchley, and the grandson of New Yorker humorist and occasional character actor Robert Benchley, Peter Benchley himself, who’d worked desultorily as a journalist, possessed the family talent in diluted form at best. Doubleday had optioned his four-page outline for $1000, part of a total advance of $7500, but his first drafts made them wonder if they’d wasted their money.
Benchley himself, unconvinced a shark hunt alone could carry the novel, piled on sub-plots. Spielberg complained that the book had a little Peyton Place, a little Godfather, a little Enemy of the People, and plenty of Moby-Dick. Amity’s postmistress warns that the shark is a divine force, like Melville’s white whale, and undestroyable, a view Benchley endorses when, after killing both Hooper and Quint and sinking their boat, the fish ignores Brody and retreats into the depths, ‘an apparition evanescing into darkness’. Quint’s corpse, like Ahab’s, goes with it, arms wide, head back, ‘mouth open in mute protest’. Later Spielberg would say, ‘[eventual scriptwriter] Carl Gottlieb and I have spent a lot of time taking out the similarities between Melville and Gottlieb, Melville and Benchley.”
Over the next few months, Benchley delivered three screenplays, none of which the producers or Spielberg liked, and, following his meeting with the trio at Cannes, left for Bermuda to write his new novel. The Deep. Spielberg fretted, confessing later that he tried to get off the film three times. Zanuck and Brown were equally restive. Not only did they lack both director and script, but, as the culmination of a long-running dispute with producers over TV income, the Screen Actors’ Guild was threatening to strike from 28 June 1974. No studio was funding anything that ended after that date.
Even without a script, the production rolled on, a juggernaut that had acquired a life of its own. Sugarland Express grossed only $3 million on its first run, so Zanuck and Brown budgeted Jaws at $2.5 million – a spectacular miscalculation. The same year, Fox spent $2.8 million on Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, shot almost entirely on sets, without stars and in black and white. A more realistic comparison would have been The Poseidon Adventure ($5 million) or Earthquake ($7 million), but at first everyone envisaged a small film without more than basic mechanical or optical effects.
Spielberg hoped to keep as many as possible of his Sugarland family for Jaws. Designer Joe Alves, production manager Bill Gilmore and casting director Shari Rhodes all came on board the leaky ship. Zsigmond wasn’t available, so Spielberg hired cameraman Bill Butler, from Something Evil and Savage. He also wanted the same editor, Verna Fields. Not only was she now Hollywood’s hottest cutter; as an inner member of Ned Tanen’s kaffe klatsch, she would be a useful buffer against his interference. She’d been set to edit Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, a grandiose attempt to revive the thirties musical. Rather than having his stars mime their songs to playback, Bogdanovich planned to record them live and on location, an interesting challenge for an editor. He still didn’t have a cast, however, and, with the strike looming, Fields chose Jaws, bringing her son Ric with her as Spielberg’s gofer and trainee. Bogdanovich was so furious that he burst into tears, but she chose wisely; At Long Last Love bombed comprehensively.
But Jaws’s most pressing need remained a script. One of Zanuck’s unfulfilled projects at Fox had been Howard Sackler’s play The Great White Hope, about black boxer Jack Johnson. Sackler, he remembered, was a keen scuba diver, and happened to be in town, kicking his heels while Peter Bogdanovich made up his mind about a screenplay he’d commissioned. Sackler agreed to spend four weeks in the Bel Air Hotel rewriting Jaws. Spielberg, who looked over his shoulder and made suggestions, credits the playwright, who worked on the understanding that he would remain anonymous, with most of the episodes that differ from the book.
Joe Alves, after cruising the east coast for locations, chose Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard. Not only was the island community unspoiled compared to Cape Cod and Hyannisport; with only a three-foot tide, but plenty of deep water just offshore, the unit could shoot at all times of day. From the start, Spielberg was adamant that nothing would be shot in the studio tank. This mustn’t look like Irwin Allen’s 1960s TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, all crystal water and pretty ripple patterns. But how to corral the shark, if not in a tank? Though everyone agreed that the Great White wasn’t tameable, and none had lived in captivity more than a few hours, they hypothesised that a specimen might conceivably be trapped and brought into American waters…
‘Sure, yeah,’ Spielberg laughed as he recalled this proposal. ‘They’d train a Great White, put it in front of the camera, with me in a cage.’
Australian documentary film-maker Ron Taylor and his wife and partner Valerie, who knew Carcharodon Carcharias intimately, became celebrities after their close encounters with these monsters were featured in Peter Gimbel’s 1971 documentary about the Great White, Blue Water, White Death. Gilmore hired them to shoot shark footage off the Great Barrier Reef. But they were adamant about not promising a twenty-five-foot specimen. Despite anecdotal evidence of Whites almost twice that long, none had ever been filmed.
Reluctantly, Zanuck and Spielberg accepted the idea of a mechanical shark. But what about the moment when Hooper is attacked while dangling below the boat in a steel cage? Surely that demanded the real thing.
Zanuck came up with the solution. ‘Why don’t we make a miniature cage and put a midget in it?’
Spielberg was impressed. ‘From a producer, that’s a wonderful idea.’
Two small cages were made, one for the stunt man and the other for the camera. The narrower gauge of the bars, however, meant that full-strength steel couldn’t be used.
‘I had a casting session for short people,’ says Spielberg. ‘I saw about ten, but they were mostly dwarves calling themselves midgets. I’d just about decided to forget the idea when there was a knock on my door, and in walks a short person covered in blood. He’s bleeding from his ear. A cut on his forehead. His nose is bleeding. His shirt is all stained and he’s dripping on the carpet.
‘And he says, “I had a wreck just outside the gate. The police are towing my car away right now, but I didn’t want to miss our appointment.”’
The man was Carl Rizzo. At four foot nine he was the perfect size and, he swore, an expert scuba diver who ‘had spent his life in the water with sharks’. Spielberg was impressed. ‘Anyone who would come into my office in that condition, wanting the job that badly, he could go into the water with the Great White Shark. The man was fearless!’
Rizzo and second-unit director Rodney Fox arrived on the Great Barrier Reef to work with the Taylors. They carried storyboards and sketches – and, just in case, a dummy of Richard Dreyfuss in a wetsuit.
The Taylors, towing a skiff with the steel cages, sailed out to Dangerous Reef, dangled some well-rotted horse shanks overboard and began cruising, with Fox filming on 16mm and Rizzo in his wetsuit sitting on the transom with a cup of coffee, awaiting his big moment.
It came, unexpectedly, when a Great White surfaced near the skiff, grabbed one of the cages in its jaws and dragged it into the water. Rizzo immediately got up, went into the cabin of the boat and locked himself in the lavatory. When Fox tried to trip the door catch with a butter knife, Rizzo held it shut. Valerie Taylor finally persuaded him to come out with promises that the camera cage would stay close enough for them to fend off the shark if it came too near, but as Rizzo climbed into the cage he confessed to Fox, ‘I lied to Mr Spielberg. I’ve never worn scuba gear in my life.’
Shooting was scrubbed for that day, and for the rest of the week the few sharks that approached refused to attack the cage. One did show signs of returning each day for a free meal, but local abalone fishermen decided the Taylors’ lavish ‘chumming’ was making the area too dangerous, and the shark turned up dead one morning, tied to their boat. Fox shot some scenes with the dummy standing in for Dreyfuss (and Rizzo), and came home.
Joe Alves completed his sketches for an artificial shark and started looking for someone to build it. At Spielberg’s suggestion he hired Bob Mattey, who engineered the giant squid that attacked the Nautilus in Disney’s 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Mattey came out of retirement to meet this unique personal challenge. Jaws’s budget inched up to $3.1 million. Spielberg tried to reassure Zanuck. The film, he said, would make ten times that.
‘Steve,’ Zanuck told him morosely, ‘if that happens, it will be a real disappointment. The expectation is so high, people have been waiting for this movie since the book. They’re anticipating it to be even better than they expected. If it’s no better than they expected and the film only makes $31 million, there’s going to be a cry of disappointment from the financial people.’
The crew desperately needed a list of sequences to start planning shooting, but Sackler’s script remained only halfway satisfactory. In March, Spielberg also sent the script to Carl Gottlieb, whom he wanted to play Meadows, editor of the Amity Leader. The chubby writer, then script editor of ABC-TV’s The Odd Couple, accepted. Figuring he had nothing to lose, since he’d been hired to act, not write, Gottlieb, with six screenplays – unproduced – under his belt, returned the script with three pages of comments.
Spielberg still hated casting, but his choices on Jaws were shrewd. The producers wanted Charlton Heston as Brody, but couldn’t afford him. In any event, Chuck was just finishing Earthquake and getting ready to play Macbeth on stage in Los Angeles opposite Vanessa Redgrave. Even if he had been free, Spielberg would have resisted. He had scant respect for stars; their inflated salaries offended his prudent nature. Actors in general, Spielberg feels, enjoy an exaggerated importance. ‘I like people who bring very little baggage,’ he said of his casting philosophy in the seventies. ‘It’s very hard when you have an icon playing an ordinary person. My main drive since I began was not to use people who were on the cover of Rolling Stone.’ While he lavished millions on Douglas Trumbull’s special effects for Close Encounters, he resisted giving more than union scale to performers. For the next twenty years, actors would complain that Spielberg paid as little as the law and the unions permitted. ‘No one crafts better deals for himself than Spielberg,’ the Los Angeles Times quoted a prominent agent as saying, ‘often at the expense of the talent he hires.’
The first role cast was Brody. Spielberg initially favoured Robert Duvall for the police chief, but decided on Roy Scheider. He’d attracted attention with his mask-like face and trademark broken nose as a tough cop in The French Connection and The Seven Ups, but even after that, offers had been so thin he’d made two films in France. Spielberg played against his tough-guy image, which Scheider, who prided himself on his ‘legit’ New York credentials in Shakespeare for Joseph Papp, was pleased to abandon. They refined his transplanted New York cop into the most Fordian of the film’s characters, a man who keeps quiet and hides his anger until it serves some purpose to unleash it.
Hooper was harder to cast. Timothy Bottoms or Jeff Bridges, both hot after Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, were pencilled in. Diminutive Cabaret singer/dancer Joel Grey put in his bid too. But after briefly favouring Jon Voight, Spielberg urged Zanuck and Brown to troll the shoals of hungry wannabees, has-beens and never-was’s whose agents were burning up the phones.
Of these, Richard Dreyfuss was typical. Notoriously hard to handle, he’d ducked the draft in 1972, pleading grounds of conscience, and instead worked as an orderly in the LA County Hospital, which he left with a ferocious amphetamine habit. Since American Graffiti, his career hadn’t ignited, though he’d just made The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in Canada, playing a young man on the make, and had hopes that this would be his breakthrough.
Spielberg offered him Hooper. Dreyfuss said he was too busy; in fact he found the role ‘meaningless’. Spielberg insisted. What had he to lose? Jaws would take only two months to shoot.
‘More like six,’ snapped Dreyfuss. ‘The shark won’t work, and you’ll have nothing but grief.’
Dreyfuss left for the Montreal opening of Duddy Kravitz – and was horrified by his performance. ‘I thought I was awful and that I would never work again.’ When Spielberg offered him Jaws once more, Dreyfuss asked for some character changes. ‘Sure,’ Spielberg said. So Dreyfuss signed, ‘out of desperation’, he said, and for much less than the $200,000 that would have been paid even a minor Hollywood name. His casting was announced on 30 April. Ironically, Duddy Kravitz opened shortly after and was an instant success, which did nothing to improve Dreyfuss’s temper as he faced weeks of work in the icy waters off Cape Cod.
Dreyfuss would be pivotal to the success of Jaws. For all his tearaway private life, he embodied the integrity Spielberg admired in Hollywood’s old-time stars, in particular Spencer Tracy. Perhaps because Tracy too had been an addictive personality. Spielberg found that Dreyfuss fitted those clothes. ‘He’s as close an actor to Tracy as exists today,’ he says. ‘Most of us are like Richard Dreyfuss… My central protagonist has always been – and probably always will be – Mr Everyday Regular Fella.’
Increasingly he was visualising Jaws as a Spencer Tracy film for our time His nearest parallel was Captains Courageous. Spielberg also confided to Dreyfuss his ambition to remake Tracy’s 1943 fantasy, also directed by Victor Fleming, A Guy Named Joe. Dreyfuss told him, ‘If you cast anyone else in the part of Pete, I’ll kill you.’ Spielberg relieved him of the necessity for homicide by giving him the role when he made Always in 1989. Benchley had written Hooper as self-assured, seductive, professional, the hired gun who ambles into town and takes on the menace, only to be destroyed himself. Dreyfuss makes him an extension of the intellectual Curt in American Graffiti, untidy, clumsy, shorter than almost everyone else, but a winner just the same; another clone of Spielberg’s idealised high-school self.
Also unlike Benchley’s Hooper, Dreyfuss is Jewish, and ‘immensely proud of being [so]’, says the actor. ‘I was raised in Bayside, which is 90 per cent Jewish. I went every week to Temple Emanuel from the time I was nine until I was sixteen… In a sense, everything I do has to do with my being Jewish.’ Spielberg didn’t overtly play the ethnic card in Jaws or in Close Encounters, but in both films it was his ace in the hole, a covert suggestion that the characters don’t belong, but a promise too that they may, like Spielberg, prove canny and resourceful when the chips are down.
As usual, smaller roles became playthings of the producers. Having used Richard Zanuck and Linda Harrison’s son Harrison as the child in Sugarland Express, Spielberg wasn’t surprised when Zanuck requested the role of Ellen Brody for Linda.
‘Sorry, Dick,’ Spielberg said, ‘you’re a little late. I already had to give the part to Lorraine Gary.’
Casting Gary, Sid Sheinberg’s wife, cemented that useful corporate relationship. But, blonde and rangy, with long experience in TV movies, Gary was also a better choice than the glamorous Harrison would have been. She would project Spielberg’s preferred image of Ellen as loyal and quietly supportive. In fact, he wanted everyone in the film to be likeable, even Quint.
In the case of the eccentric, ill-tempered shark-hunter who shows Brody and Hooper how to kill the monster and is himself killed by it, this was a tall order. Howard Sackler had, however, made an important contribution towards it. In Florida, he’d heard stories about the torpedoing of the USS Indianapolis as it returned from delivering to the USAF on the island of Tinian the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima. The ship sank in twelve minutes, and 1100 men went into the water, but, because of secrecy, nobody reached the survivors for days, by which time sharks had devoured many of them.
The incident fired Spielberg’s imagination. He went over to John Milius’s house and told him about it. Immersed in Dillinger, his first film as director, Milius had been too busy to script Jaws, but the Indianapolis story was the sort of giant myth he thrived on. Milius skimmed the research material and, in fifteen minutes, wrote a nine-minute monologue in which Quint recalls the sinking and the sharks.
Milius, Spielberg sensed, really wanted to play Quint himself. Instead they offered the role to Sterling Hayden. Sailing round the world had weathered the star of Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and Kubrick’s The Killing, while years of exile because of tax problems and his decision to inform on old friends to the House un-American Activities Committee had ground in the necessary cynicism. Hayden lived in Paris on a barge, writing and occasionally acting. Zanuck and Brown negotiated with him for months, but tax liens against him ensured the IRS would seize anything he earned in the US.
In April, The Sting won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Robert Shaw’s performance as the gangster Lonigan had done much to make the film a hit. David Brown suggested offering him Quint, and a copy of the novel was sent to him at the Volnay in New York where he was living while he played in Strindberg’s The Dance of Death.
Even for Quint, the hard-drinking, argumentative Irishman was coarse-grained. As Dirk Bogarde sneered, Shaw ‘only does two things really well… shout above rain and wind and stand with his legs apart’. Spielberg agreed, until he saw him in William Friedkin’s film of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. Under control, that intensity made a powerful impression.
Shaw, a novelist himself, decided that Jaws was ‘a story written by a committee… a piece of shit’. Still, his wife Mary Ure urged him to take the part, so he told Zanuck and Brown he’d read the script when it was finished, then left for Ireland. He’d been offered Trevor Howard’s role in the remake of Brief Encounter opposite Sophia Loren – a romantic lead, after playing scores of henchmen and heavies. But producer Lew Grade offered only $50,000. They were still haggling in early May when the Jaws script arrived with an offer of $100,000 for four weeks’ work.
By now, the story had been radically restructured. Gone were the Mafia and the Hooper/Ellen affair. Instead of a cuckold seething with resentment, Brody was a man of principle who, after bowing to political pressure and playing down the first shark death, digs in his heels and is vindicated. Hooper became a beady-eyed obsessive, too interested in sharks to bother with sex. If there was an affair, it was between him and Brody, who found friendship as they spent Act Two chasing red herrings and zeroing in on the shark. Even Quint became a gruff good guy, his vendetta against sharks justified in a soliloquy about surviving the sinking of the Indianapolis. With Spielberg’s approval, Shaw would condense Milius’s nine pages into a moving confession of hatred and guilt. The three men bond into a team by getting drunk and harmonising in a song – potent emblems of union in John Ford’s films. And in the final, most audacious alteration, Brody kills the shark, exploding an air tank in its jaws.
A veteran of all-star casts, Shaw assessed the competition and decided he could steal the film from Dreyfuss and Scheider. He accepted, provided he could be done before Brief Encounter’s 8 July start. He still had fifty-five working days in the US before exceeding the crucial 183 days, after which his worldwide income for the year would be subject to US tax. Zanuck and Brown assured him they’d begin on 28 May and finish no later than 25 June, with a Christmas 1974 release. Fortunately for those who admired the Noël Coward/David Lean original, he never played in Brief Encounter. Richard Burton got that thankless job, while Shaw worked on Jaws for 16 1/2 weeks.
Shaw’s window of opportunity wasn’t the only pressure on Zanuck and Brown. Jaws cried out to be shot in August, at the height of the holiday season. Instead, because of the threatened Screen Actors’ strike, it would have to be finished while the water was still cold and the weather variable.
While Edgartown rubbed its hands at the thought of a film unit in residence, Spielberg sequestered himself in a house overlooking the ocean, which he papered with thousands of storyboard drawings; four hundred for the final sequence alone. For company he had Ric Fields, his spaniels Elmer and Zalman, a local cook/housekeeper, and Carl Gottlieb, who metamorphosed into Jaws’s third and final screenwriter.
Arriving to play Meadows, Gottlieb was astonished to be asked by Spielberg to rewrite the script. A week’s dialogue polish stretched into seven weeks’ work. Strategically, using Gottlieb was shrewd. Benchley, Sackler or any other writer would be looking out for themselves or for Zanuck and Brown. Gottlieb, however, Spielberg could trust and influence: he was a patriot for him.
Six days a week, Spielberg was up at 6 a.m. with a cup of tea, memorising the day’s pages – he never, on this or any later film, took a script onto the set, though he was seldom far from his storyboards – before setting out in the shivering dawn to chivvy four hundred extras into pretending it was July. Days were spent bobbing on the SS Scup Bucket or the SS Garage Sale, ungainly floats which acted as camera platforms and support vessels for the Orca, Quint’s forty-two-foot boat, and its fibreglass replica, Orca II, which the shark would sink at the climax. To the unpaid technical advisers who lounged around Edgartown dock, Orca, built on the hull of a scallop boat, looked top-heavy. There was too much glass. It would never survive a storm. Crews gritted their teeth at their remarks and worked on.
After dinner each night, Spielberg, Gottlieb, Verna Fields and the stars rewrote the script over the dirty plates, improvising dialogue into a tape recorder. The actors left early, and by 10 p.m. Spielberg too was nodding. Gottlieb typed up the next day’s lines until midnight, to be printed and distributed by morning. Locals got used to a harassed writer sticking a tousled head out the door and yelling at a passer-by, ‘What sort of fish would kids catch around here?’ Throughout the day, as Fields edited the film in her improvised cutting room, she stayed in touch with Spielberg via walkie-talkie, pedalling down to the dock on her bike if he had specific queries.
Spielberg’s later remark that Jaws was made up as they went along overstates the case, but it is true that hurried fixes characterised the writing. Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins made uncredited improvements. Briefly worried that the film lacked humour, Spielberg cast around for someone to write a few comedy scenes. John Landis, who’d won brief fame by directing and starring in Schlock, a $60,000 send-up of horror films, was surprised and delighted to be summoned to Martha’s Vineyard. He flew in, only to leave a few hours later. Though he and Spielberg shared obsessions, Landis’s ambition was too naked, his personal style too hectic. Judith Belushi said he reminded her of a cartoon character who never spoke without an exclamation mark at the end of every sentence. Spielberg decided that making Jaws was hard enough without such a loose cannon on the team.
Roy Scheider’s role expanded as Spielberg, not for the last time on his films, enlarged the character most resembling his father. For the second shark attack of the film, in which a dog and a boy on a rubber float are taken, he underlined the sheriff’s shock by imitating a famous shot from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, tracking back quickly from Scheider’s face but zooming in at the same time, from 250mm to 30mm, so that the framing doesn’t change but the face stretches and flattens in an almost physical assault. He also wrote in a new scene where Brody, agonising at the dinner table, smiles wearily as he sees his young son imitating every worried gesture.
In this process, Lorraine Gary’s character shrank, to her irritation. She all but disappeared from the completed film. Even Gottlieb’s role was pared. ‘I had the schizophrenic sensation,’ he said, ‘of having to write myself out of a scene.’
Benchley too was less in evidence as the film progressed. While he and Gottlieb shared script credit, they never physically worked together. Convinced his book had been traduced by the replacement of its sex and corruption sub-plots with, as he saw it, formula situations and action, Benchley complained to the Los Angeles Times:
Spielberg needs to work on character. He knows, flatly, zero. Consider. He is a twenty-six-year-old who grew up with movies. He has no knowledge of reality but the movies. He is B-movie literate. When he must make decisions about the small ways people behave, he reaches for movie clichés of the forties and fifties… One day, Spielberg will be known as the greatest second-unit director in America.
Benchley did, however, agree to play a cameo as a TV reporter stepping gingerly over sunbathers as he covers Amity’s ill-fated 4 July. For his part, Spielberg put an arrogant ‘Major Benchley’ into Close Encounters as the Air Force’s mouthpiece who tries to bluff UFO believers into recanting.
The budget hit $3.5 million and kept climbing. Zanuck and Brown fumed at the cost, much of which was avoidable. On Sugarland Express, they had been able to negotiate with the Chicago office of various unions to waive their strict staff requirements, but the New York and Boston locals of the technicians’ union, IATSE, were less helpful. There were seldom less than a hundred crew-members on the beach locations, only half of them needed. Paul F. Connors, IATSE’s Boston business agent (who happened to be seeking re-election), raided the location and found twenty-three non-union locals working on the production. He demanded union replacements.
The union also dictated a sit-down hot lunch for everyone, while the Teamsters insisted every performer and crew-member check in at Transportation and be bussed to work, even when they lived five minutes from the location. ‘If I see you getting into someone’s car,’ one driver growled at an actor, ‘I’ll close down this production.’ Spielberg still had his bullet-riddled Texas Highway Patrol black-and-white, but for 5 1/2 months he, like the rest of the cast and crew, walked, biked or was driven.
Union feather-bedding wasn’t the only added expense. Film was flown to California for processing, so Spielberg didn’t see his rushes for forty-eight hours. Nor were the locals grateful for the influx of money. Hotel rooms soared from $14 a night to $45. It was $60 cheaper to fly wetsuits from Los Angeles than to buy them locally. The production spent $30,000 a day on the island, but still the authorities demanded $100,000 bonds to restore sites, with a $1000 penalty for every day a new building like Quint’s barn-like boathouse remained standing. Such greed would rebound later in the decade when a swelling number of big productions, including most of Spielberg’s, based themselves in London.
Shooting should have finished by 1 July, leaving clear the 4 July weekend, traditionally the moment when the Gulf Stream changes course, bringing warm water to Cape Cod and with it the rich annual tourist harvest. By 6 June, however, work was at a crawl and the schedule fourteen days behind. The crew were uniformly hostile, but forced to stay by Universal’s seniority system, under which they risked heavy penalties if they walked off a project. ‘If they could have quit,’ said Spielberg, ‘I’d have lost forty of them the first week.’
While Spielberg was preparing Jaws, veteran director Henry Hathaway had told him, ‘I’ll give you some advice, kid. Make sure the crew and the cast believe in what you’re doing, even if you don’t know what you’re doing.’ It became harder and harder to keep up an appearance of Olympian confidence. One local glimpsed Spielberg scampering by in the dawn, muttering hysterically, ‘The director doesn’t know what he’s do-ing!’ The problem was not the actors but the shark. Jaws was Spielberg’s introduction to a problem faced by all directors of special-effects movies. Shooting Gremlins in 1984, Joe Dante contrasted it with his 1980 film The Howling, which took twenty-eight days to shoot: Gremlins took twenty-six weeks.
We shot the material with the actors, then had a little break, then tooled up to do the Gremlin effects. Weeks and weeks of Gremlin effects. Some of it was torture. You have to fool around with camera speeds; fool around with angles. You shoot reams of footage. And after you’ve watched the eightieth take of this Gremlin smiling and moving his eyes, you can’t tell any more. This is better? This is worse?
Increasingly, producers would separate live action from effects, sending the actors home after the former. On Jaws, however, it had been assumed – wrongly – that everything could be done at once.
While the crew bobbed offshore, wrestling with the shark, Shaw ducked into Canada or Bermuda to cut down his time in the US, offering everyone a welcome relief from his ill-temper and interference. Murray Hamilton, who played the Chief Selectman, fretted about the roles he was losing, and Lorraine Gary sulked over her vanishing lines. Roy Scheider threw tantrums.
Nobody had taken into consideration that Martha’s Vineyard is the home of every big yacht and sailboat on the eastern seaboard. So on the horizon line, the regattas were going constantly. In the climactic scene… we’re supposed to be in a boat at sea miles offshore and totally alone. And there are all these damn boats all over the place. First, we tried to shoot in between the sailboats. That didn’t work. Then we tried getting up at 5 a.m. to get out there before the yachts did. That didn’t work either. Finally, we decided we’d simply have to reshoot when the regatta season was over.
Richard Dreyfuss, convinced his one chance at major stardom was leaking away as he wasted time on a guaranteed loser, consoled himself with serial partying. From time to time, he paused to criticise Spielberg and the production in the media. ‘What comes out of Steven unconsciously,’ said the actor, ‘is that he’s a big kid who at twelve years old decided to make movies, and he’s still twelve years old – he’s focused every one of his powers and capabilities on making movies and blocked everything else in the world out of his personality.’
Spielberg put the best face on it, remarking, ‘We all complained on location… I took it out on everyone involved with the filming, while Dreyfuss had access to the media.’ Ironically his star’s speed-freak vitality proved crucial to the morale of the unit. Using a metaphor he once applied to his mother, Spielberg called him ‘a major energy input. Everyone plugs into Dreyfuss to wake up in the morning. We stretch our umbilicals over to him and join navels. I guess you would call the phenomenon Rickymania… he’s like a hydroelectric plant.’
Spielberg felt able to confide in Dreyfuss to an extent he couldn’t with other people in the crew. One night towards the end of shooting he kept the actor up until dawn outlining, scene by scene, other ways in which he might have shot Jaws. He could have done it as a Hitchcock pastiche, like Brian De Palma, or as a dynastic saga, like Coppola, or as a Bergmanesque morality tale where the shark represented God. Dreyfuss was stunned. Invention on this protean level seemed less a gift than a burden.
Mattey’s polyurethane shark, nicknamed ‘Bruce’, was built on a steel armature, which perched on a twelve-foot steel tower that rested in turn on an underwater sled. Three copies were made. Each weighed 1.5 tonnes and cost $150,000 to build, and at least an equal sum to operate. A crew of thirteen was needed to control it. When the sled was towed, the shark moved realistically along the surface. Or should have. In practice, the eyes crossed and the jaws, which gushed blood as they bit, wouldn’t close. Meticulously, Mattey refined the mechanism, but he wasn’t a man to be hurried. ‘Ask him what time it is,’ Spielberg sighed, ‘and he’ll tell you how to build a watch.’
Tides and currents tore the creature apart if you fought them. Because of dents, scrapes, barnacles and the corrosive effects of salt water, ‘Bruce’ had to be scrubbed down, repaired, dried with hair dryers and repainted each night. Tanks sprang leaks, motors burned out, tools and equipment were stolen. After a storm stopped shooting for days, Gilmore contemplated moving to a cheaper and safer location – the Caribbean perhaps; even Indonesia.
By 17 July, only ninety-six shots had been filmed. The old budget and schedule were memories. Jaws now looked like taking four times as long as planned and costing three times as much. Gilmore and Spielberg often weren’t speaking. The culminating disaster came on 30 July, with scenes of the Orca sinking. The boat had been built with large eye-bolts at each comer, allowing it to be anchored in any position or dragged by underwater cables to simulate the power of the shark. However, while Spielberg was filming a shot of Scheider inside the cabin, a chunk of planking as big as a table-top ripped loose. Two Arriflex cameras went over the side, a minor loss compared with that of the film, which was salvaged. Ric Fields caught the next New York shuttle, hand-carrying the precious thousand-foot magazines of exposed film in a bucket of fresh water. Eastman’s labs saved everything.
Celebrity tourists, the kind who couldn’t simply be turned away, were a constant irritant. TV newsman Walter Cronkite, a keen yachtsman, cast an eye over the production. So did actress Ruth Gordon, as well as novelist Thornton Wilder and veteran New York Times reporter Scotty Reston, both of whom had houses on the island. John Milius dropped by. Spielberg left him playing with ‘Bruce’s’ biting mechanism while he got on with shooting. Michael and Julia Phillips made three or four visits, each time pressing Spielberg on Close Encounters. He told them he still wasn’t happy with the script. He also worried about the obvious and growing rift between the couple. If they split, which one would inherit the project?
Zanuck and Brown were likewise in a state of nerves, exacerbated by the open secret that Jaws was in trouble. ‘Everywhere we went,’ said Brown, ‘people treated us with sympathy, like we had some kind of illness.’ They flinched from gibes that their shark looked more and more like a turkey.
Late in July, Sid Sheinberg called Zanuck, Brown and Spielberg to Hollywood for a disaster meeting. According to legend, he kept them waiting two hours before demanding, ‘Why shouldn’t I close down the picture?’ The trio convinced him a corner had been turned. For one thing, the Actors’ Guild strike was off. Thereafter, however, Zanuck and Brown spent far more time in Martha’s Vineyard. Would they have fired Spielberg? Brown insists it never crossed their minds. ‘We believed we had a hit. [He] was working hard and diligently, and it was our judgement – not an easy one to arrive at, mind you, but we had worked with Steven before – that we would not change course.’ But nobody forgot that Zanuck had thrown Akira Kurosawa off Tora! Tora! Tora! A few years later, he would also replace John Hancock with Jeannot Szwarc as director of Jaws 2.
Whether from accumulated tension or its removal, the cast took the opportunity of one Zanuck/Brown visit to stage a food fight in the staid Harbor View Hotel. Scheider was the catalyst. ‘I realised we were all going bananas with weather and technical delays,’ he said, ‘so I dumped the fruit salad on Spielberg’s head.’ Spielberg poured red wine over Scheider. ‘Richard Dreyfuss looked like a mountain of ravioli,’ said Scheider. ‘I can’t believe it but Zanuck just sat there calmly and never got so much as a spot of gravy on him.’
As they left (after picking up the tab), Zanuck and Brown reiterated the importance of keeping ‘Bruce’ under wraps. Throughout the production, they had gone on the national chat-show circuit with Benchley, the writer burying his enmity in deference to a deal with Bantam to promote book and film at the same time. Everywhere, they found enormous interest in how the shark would be reproduced on screen. It was essential to maintain that mystery and sense of menace. ‘If anybody in the audience laughs at the shark,’ Verna Fields had said, ‘we’re sunk.’
Each night, the fish and its shed were shrouded with tarpaulins. A couple of locals tried to get pictures, and failed. The Directors’ Guild magazine Action printed a tongue-in-cheek report that they were using a real shark, raised in captivity, given a transplanted chimpanzee’s brain and trained to deliver lines by the voice teacher from Mike Nichols’s film Day of the Dolphin. From Scotty Reston, news of the film’s troubles reached the New York Times. The writer L.M. Kit Carson, then a critic for the French magazine Oui, spent a day nosing around in search of a story, and on returning to his hotel room found the door locked and his luggage in the hall. On the drive to the airport, however, a garrulous Teamster confided that the shark didn’t work. Carson published this revelation, along with the driver’s opinion that ‘all the people who make movies are crazier’n a sackfulla assholes.’ Finally a Christian Science Monitor reporter sneaked some shots of the shark.
This guerrilla war with the press embarrassed and angered the Jaws unit, used to thoroughly tamed Hollywood reporters who knew better than to bite the hand that fed them. ‘It’s amazing how many people came up to Martha’s Vineyard and gave us a line about being really interested in the production,’ grated Roy Scheider, ‘when they really just wanted to expose the fact that we were having difficulties with the mechanical shark. And what really hurt was that these people were taken in and made comfortable and taken into our confidence, and then we were terribly betrayed.’ After Jaws, Spielberg would become fanatical about security. His next film became the best-guarded of all time.
Location shooting finally lurched to a halt on 15 September. It had lasted 155 days. For weeks, ‘Bruce’ had looked less and less like a force of nature and more and more like a piece of plastic. Spielberg said his whole attitude at that point was ‘Aw, fuck it!’ Hearing that the crew proposed to toss him overboard once the last shot was finished, Spielberg, who now hated water even more than before Jaws, escaped in a small boat with Dreyfuss, leaving the first assistant to finish the film. As he sailed away, he stood up in the boat and, in a parody of General Mac-Arthur, announced, ‘I shall not return!’ He and Dreyfuss drove to Boston, booked into a hotel and, sitting in the bar, exulted that it was all over at last. Still the fact hadn’t sunk in. For months afterwards, Spielberg woke, nerves arcing as if he’d just had an electric shock, from nightmares of SS Scup Bucket. Years later, he could still imitate with eerie accuracy the suck-sob sound of compressed air operating the internal mechanism of ‘Bruce’, a noise with which he’d lived daily for months. To friends, he swore he would never do another film on location.
While Spielberg took three weeks’ holiday, ‘Bruce’ was shipped across country and installed in the very MGM ‘Esther Williams’ tank which Spielberg had struggled to avoid using for the main shooting. Happy now, however, to be working with controllable light, he shot the discovery of the half-sunken boat. With this and other tricky moments in the can, he and Verna Fields started fine editing.
John Williams began the music. Spielberg at first thought of cooling his violent scenes with an emollient soundtrack – maybe even a delicate piano theme for the shark, something like Williams’s score for Altman’s Images. ‘No,’ the composer said after he saw the rough cut. ‘What you’ve got here is a pirate movie with a touch of Fantasia. His Jaws music, by turns eerie in the style of Bernard Herrmann, then crudely manipulative, especially in its chugging Shark Theme, which owed almost everything to the use by Disney in Fantasia of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for the dinosaur sequences, was one of the most striking of all film scores.
Meanwhile Zanuck and Brown were toughing out the last weeks in limbo between the end of shooting and the first previews. This was when nerve cracked and desperate deals were made. Robert Shaw, smelling a hit, offered to swap his salary, which had ballooned to $322,000, for 1 per cent of the profits. Zanuck and Brown were tempted, but turned him down – shrewdly, since within ten days of its opening, Jaws would gross $22 million.
They finally knew that all their effort and anxiety had paid off when they showed the first fine cut to Sid Sheinberg. At the end of the screening, the executive turned to them and, with the unabashed enthusiasm of the most devoted punter, said plaintively, ‘Isn’t there any more?’
Everyone was sucked into the publicity machine. Even Verna Fields, whom some insiders had credited with ‘saving’ the film with her editing, went on the promotion trail. In March, Jaws had two sneak previews. One in Dallas simply reproduced the cover logo of the book on its marquee, but the graphic was so familiar that three thousand people queued for three hours in a hailstorm to get in, and were happy to sit through the night’s regular film. The Towering Inferno, for a first look at Jaws. So many were turned away that Universal hurriedly scheduled a second screening at 11 p.m. Afterwards, Spielberg decided the film needed a big shock in the second act. He rewrote the discovery of the half-sunk fishing boat so that, as Dreyfuss swims up to a hole in its hull, the head of the dead owner pokes out. Diplomatically, Shaw had agreed to a mere $5000 for another day’s shooting of cutaways, so Spielberg found the producers inflexible when he went to them for $100,000 to film these additional shots.
‘If you want them,’ said Zanuck, ‘you pay for them.’
Spielberg did so, though, since Dreyfuss refused to go anywhere near a boat, they filmed in Verna Fields’s chilly swimming pool. The actor got pneumonia.
The next preview, at the Lakewood Shopping Center in Long Beach, was attended by Sheinberg and Wasserman. Henry ‘Hi’ Martin, Universal’s chief of distribution, taped the audience reaction. At two shock points, the appearance of the dead man’s head and Scheider’s first glimpse of the shark’s giant maw, excited murmuring continued for a minute. The final applause was thunderous, the comment cards a distributor’s dream. Delighted executives piled into the men’s room to replan their release strategy. Obviously this film was going to make everyone a great deal of money. The first impulse was to forget the traditional graduated release starting in 125 to 150 key theatres, and instead to flood the country, opening at eight hundred cinemas simultaneously. After seeing it again, however, wiser heads prevailed. With exhibitors clamouring, they could afford to give Jaws to only the hottest houses, and still make them pay for the privilege. Trade screenings across the country fanned the already fevered word-of-mouth. Exhibitors howled, however, at Universal’s terms. Almost all the seat price went to the studio – which, even though most cinemas made the bulk of their income on popcorn and Coca-Cola, was unprecedented. So was the studio’s requirement that cinemas advertise the film on local TV at their own expense. Disgruntled exhibitors appealed to the Department of Justice, which ruled Universal must offer the film more widely, though the other restrictions remained.
To exploit Jaws to the limit, the film needed a lenient censorship rating. Spielberg himself admitted it deserved an ‘R’ rating, which would have barred anyone under eighteen, denying it to its largest audience, the teenagers. Scenes were cut, including the horrific climax of the first daytime beach attack, when the shark was shown colliding with a screaming child with a man’s head in its mouth. He consoled himself for the loss of three days’ shooting with the knowledge that, by delaying the first full shot of the shark until Act Three, he was maximising the effect of the moment which had already electrified preview audiences. The result was a ‘PG’ certificate, astonishingly mild, given that the science fictional Rollerball was rated ‘R’ for some bloody sports scenes that hardly compared with Jaws. To mollify the censors, Universal added notes to its advertising, warning that the film might be ‘too intense’ for pre-teens. In the week before release it also, in supposed deference to public interest, published full-page ‘educational’ ads listing grim statistics about sharks.
Jaws opened on 20 June 1975 in 407 US cinemas and fifty-five in Canada. For three days before. Universal swamped the media, neutralising the more patronising reviews, like that in the New York Times which dismissed it as ‘nothing more than a creaky, old-fashioned monster picture reminiscent of The Creature from the Black Lagoon’. Diane Jacobs, like many, would see the film as commercial surrender after the relative purity of Duel and The Sugarland Express – ‘as if after painting Guernica Picasso got it into his head to make an Excedrin commercial’. But Pauline Kael wrote that ‘parts of Jaws suggest what Eisenstein might have done if he hadn’t intellectualised himself out of reach’. As for what the public thought, one only had to look at the queues winding round the block at every cinema showing the movie. No reaction, however, pleased Spielberg more than the gibe from Cuban president Fidel Castro, that Jaws showed how far American capitalists would go to protect an investment. Here was convincing proof that Jaws was more than a hit. It was news.