All of Spielberg’s instincts from childhood had driven him to seek acceptance and approval from the majority. Being a marginal artist rather than a popular filmmaker was psychologically unacceptable to him. And after the succès d’estime of The Sugarland Express, it was vital for him to prove to Hollywood that he was more than an art-house auteur. So he swallowed his doubts and agreed to make “the big commercial movie.”
“We went to Wasserman and Sheinberg,” Zanuck recalls, “and it’s hard to imagine now, but at the time you’re talking about a guy’s second picture. He hadn’t proved himself. Even though Wasserman was very impressed by the kid—in those days we referred to him many times as ‘the kid’—Wasserman thought he was a strange choice.”
“Jesus, Dick, the kid’s great and everything,” Wasserman said, “but remember you’re going to be out there, it’s going to be a big production, and it can get out of control. Wouldn’t you be better off with one of the sure-handed guys who’s done this kind of picture before?”
Zanuck replied, “That’s exactly what we don’t want. We don’t want to do Moby-Dick again. The kid can bring visual excitement to it. We’ll give him the support he needs.”
*
TWENTY years after the making of Jaws, Zanuck/Brown production executive Bill Gilmore described it as “the most difficult film ever made, to this day.” Soon after principal photography began on May 2, 1974, on Martha’s Vineyard, it became apparent that the star of the film, the mechanical shark, was refusing to cooperate. “Around August 1, when the movie was in terrible jeopardy, with the shark not working,” Gilmore relates, “I came back to the hotel and I was agonized. My wife said to me, ‘Who was the guy that told ’em the movie could be done in the first place?’ I took a big Scotch. We were all heroes in retrospect, but we all thought we had failed because we’d gone double the budget and double the schedule.” In fact, Jaws went almost triple the schedule, with its planned 55 days of shooting ballooning to 159.
At the beginning, when Zanuck gave Gilmore the galleys of the book, wanting his ideas about how to make the movie and how much it would cost, Gilmore “read it as being sort of a Hollywood shark, a supershark that could do everything but fly. Benchley wrote, ‘Towering overhead, it blocked out the light.’ Dick Zanuck said, ‘Can we do it?’ I said, ‘Yes, we can do it.’ I was speaking out of all the arrogance of somebody who had grown up in the business and felt Hollywood could do anything—Gene Kelly could dance with a mouse, we could put people into orbit. We accepted and believed that we could build a mechanical shark and we could shoot over the head of the victim toward the shark and over the head of the shark toward the victim. It had never been done before.
“And we took on the Atlantic Ocean. Nobody had ever done a movie at sea with a small boat. Every movie that was shot at sea, they always wound up shooting in a tank with a process screen, and it looked like it. From the beginning, Steven and [production designer] Joe Alves and myself and Zanuck agreed we would shoot on a real sea. I can’t tell you how many times that came back and bit us in the ass. But despite all the problems it caused us, ultimately it’s why the picture was so incredibly successful, because everybody was there. It was a real sea and a real boat.”
Gilmore’s belief that a mechanical “supershark” could be built by Hollywood special-effects wizards began to focus the producers on the realities involved. Gottlieb reported that Zanuck and Brown “had innocently assumed that they could get a shark trainer somewhere, who, with enough money, could get a great white shark to perform a few simple stunts on cue in long shots with a dummy in the water, after which they could cut to miniatures or something for the close-up stuff.” Spielberg laughed when he remembered those discussions: “Sure, yeah, they’d train a great white, put it in front of the camera, with me in a cage. They tried to convince me that this was the way to go. I was yelling: ‘Disney!’ The minute I read the script, I was yelling, ‘Disney! We’ve gotta get the guy who did the squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea!’ … I didn’t know who he was at the time. It turned out to be Bob Mattey and we hired him to build us a shark. But they still wanted me to experiment with live sharks.”
While Mattey, who had been lured out of retirement, started to work on three twenty-five-foot mechanical sharks to perform various functions in the film, Zanuck and Brown hired the husband-and-wife team of Ron and Valerie Taylor to shoot live shark footage off Dangerous Reef on the coast of South Australia. The producers felt that whatever wonders Mattey might be able to perform, it was important to see an actual shark in the film and to be able to publicize that fact. The Taylors were renowned for their intrepid underwater photography on Blue Water, White Death. When Gilmore met them in Australia, he “was nervous, because I felt here are the greatest shark experts in the world. I said, ‘How did you like the book?’ Ron Taylor said, ‘I don’t know who Mr. Benchley is, but whoever he is, he knows the great white. Because everything he writes about could happen.’ The hair went up on the back of my neck. Being a cynical Hollywood type, I was stunned that a great white shark really could do all this. From that moment on, I knew we had a chance.”
Spielberg made a wish list of sixteen shots he wanted from the Taylors, including footage of a shark circling a man in an underwater cage. Later, close shots of Richard Dreyfuss in a wet suit would be filmed in a studio tank to match their footage. To make the real shark look even larger, a midget Stuntman, an ex-jockey named Carl Rizzo, was sent down as Dreyfuss’s underwater double. “When we were shooting the live shark footage,” Valerie Taylor recalled, “none of us had any idea that the film would be such a tremendous success. To Ron and me it was just another filming job, our eighth at that time, involving great white sharks. It was the first time that Ron had to work to a script.” But the shark did not follow the script.
The Taylors put out to sea with shark expert Rodney Fox on February 16, 1974. After ten days, they managed to get footage of a shark circling a cage. Then they readied Rizzo for a dive in his cage, which was five-eighths scale. He was about to be lowered from a nineteen-foot fiberglass auxiliary boat, the Skippy, when the shark suddenly attacked the boat. “The Skippy rolled onto her side, dragged down by a half a ton of fighting fish,” Valerie Taylor wrote in her diary of the filming. “A huge head rose above the spray twisting and turning, black maw gaping in a frenzy of rage and pain. Triangular teeth splintered as they tore the restricting metal. The brute dove, his cycle tail whipping the air six feet above the surface.
“Carl stood frozen with shock. As Rodney pulled him back, the tail brushed Carl’s face. Had Rodney been two seconds slower, the little stuntman would have been killed, his head crushed into pulp…. The great white shark’s body crashed into the hull. The noise was incredible, splitting wood, thrashing water, cage against boat, shark against boat…. A last mighty splash, then shark, cage, winch, and deck vanished in a boiling, foaming swirl. Had Carl been in the cage, he too would have vanished with no possible chance of survival.”
What happened next was related by Spielberg: “Immediately, our stuntman turned around and quite calmly walked to the hold of the ship and locked himself in the head [the toilet]! And they tried to get him out of there with a butter knife and he was holding the door closed and he would not move!”
The next day, Gilmore received a phone call from Ron Taylor on the coast of Australia. “He was so excited on the phone he was interrupting himself,” Gilmore says. “He went on to tell us he had just shot the most spectacular shark footage he had ever seen in his professional life. I said, ‘Ron, that’s great. Was the little guy in the cage?’ He said no. My heart sank. I said, ‘It’s unusable.’ They sent the film; it was the most spectacular footage. [Film editor] Verna Fields and Steven and I were all so bummed by the fact that it was unusable until we decided it was so good we had to have it in the movie. In the book, the Dreyfuss character goes down in the cage, the shark comes over and takes his cage on—it’s the end of Dreyfuss, the shark eats him. We had Dreyfuss drop his gun, t
he shark would go on, and Dreyfuss would get out of the cage, swim down, and hide in the rocks. Can you imagine Jaws without Dreyfuss’s character? He was the most likable character. The shark down in Australia rewrote the script and saved Dreyfuss’s character.”
*
WHEN Spielberg approached Dreyfuss to play the outspoken ichthyologist Matt Hooper,‡ the actor said, “I would go to see this movie in a minute. I don’t want to do it.”
“Why?” asked Spielberg.
“Because, as an actor, it doesn’t do a thing for me.”
After completing the movie, Dreyfuss explained, “The character, as it existed, was just there to give out shark information…. Boring, boring, boring. But then I had no money, everybody said there was going to be an actors’ strike, everyone I trust as an advisor said, ‘Do it.’ So we constructed a character over three days and finally I said OK, I gave in, I surrendered, I was a prostitute.”
Dreyfuss was not cast until shortly before the start of principal photography. Spielberg’s first choice for Hooper, Jon Voight, had turned down the part; the director also considered Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Joel Grey. In casting the young actor he came to view as “my alter ego,” Spielberg was reshaping the character and the film to reflect his own sensibilities. Besides being short and full of what Spielberg called “kinetic energy,” Dreyfuss has other traits in common with the director. As the actor’s longtime friend Carl Gottlieb observed, “When his speech exceeds rationality, it is only because his fast-moving mouth has not caught up with his even faster-racing brain.” Dreyfuss is “not an intellectual man. His college education is incomplete, and he can be surprisingly naive on certain issues…. [But he] can easily grasp a complex problem, reduce its conflicts and ambiguities to a few broad generalities, and then set a course of action that enables him to deal specifically with those large assumptions.”
To Spielberg, Dreyfuss also “represents the underdog in all of us.” Using him as a mouthpiece, Spielberg and Gottlieb were able to elevate Jaws from a formulaic monster melodrama to a film with a modestly stated, yet clearly defined social perspective. As “an American Jew with clearly defined ethnic roots,” Dreyfuss exemplifies what Gottlieb defined as “a tradition of intellectual inquiry, respect for learning, and intense involvement with morality and law.” Those qualities are abundantly present in the film’s Matt Hooper, the voice of scientific reason and civic responsibility against a town whose leaders initially are more concerned with tourist dollars than with protecting their citizens against harm. In taking a principled stand against official hypocrisy, Hooper helps awaken the conscience of Roy Scheider’s police chief Martin Brody. After an initial display of cowardice, Brody risks his career to defy the venal mayor (Murray Hamilton), the toadying newspaper editor (Gottlieb), and the town’s short-sighted merchants.
Despite his disdain for the movie, which lasted throughout the shooting process, Dreyfuss responded enthusiastically to his collaboration with Spielberg: “Steve’s not what you’d call an actor’s director in the classical sense. But he’s relaxed and open in the way he communicates what he wants, and he helps you to get there. In his philosophy, the actors serve the story. But this doesn’t eliminate improvisation—not at all.”
Spielberg’s shrewd, offbeat casting sense also was evident in his rejection of Universal stalwart Charlton Heston, who made it known that he wanted to play Chief Brody. No doubt recalling his unfavorable impression of Heston from their meeting when Spielberg was serving his apprenticeship at the studio, the director realized that Heston’s stentorian, larger-than-life persona would make it hard for the audience to see him as a small-town police chief, particularly one with such unheroic, all-too-human failings. After trying to persuade Zanuck and Sheinberg to let him cast the little-known Joseph Bologna, Spielberg offered the part to Robert Duvall, but Duvall wanted to play Captain Quint, and Spielberg had trouble envisaging him in such a flamboyant role (a decision the director later regretted). According to Brown, Spielberg was “slow to come around” on the decision to cast Roy Scheider as Brody. The actor was best known at the time as the hard-boiled New York cop in The French Connection, and Spielberg did not want Brody to be played as a tough guy. But Scheider proved highly credible in a low-key performance as Spielberg’s “Mr. Everyday Regular Fella.”
Lee Marvin turned down the role of Quint, and Sterling Hayden was unable to appear in the film because of his ongoing tax problems. Spielberg turned to Robert Shaw, the colorful British actor, playwright, and novelist who had worked for Zanuck and Brown in The Sting. Although worrying that Shaw’s film performances were always “over the top,” Spielberg rationalized that Quint should be played larger than life. Shaw came to admire Spielberg once they started working together, but the actor initially approached the project with cynicism. He told Time magazine, “Jaws was not a novel. It was a story written by a committee, a piece of shit.”
*
“PETER Benchley’s view of his book was not my view of the movie I wanted to make from his book,” Spielberg told Newsweek reporter Henry McGee in an unguarded moment on location in Martha’s Vineyard. “Peter didn’t like any of his characters, so none of them were very likable. He put them in a situation where you were rooting for the shark to eat the people—in alphabetical order.”
Although an efficient page-turner, Benchley’s first novel is peopled with cardboard characters and bogged down by a pulpish subplot Spielberg aptly described as “too much like Peyton Place”—the shark action is repeatedly and distractingly interrupted by the couplings of the police chief’s wife with the visiting ichthyologist. spielberg insisted on doing away with the book’s sexual and mafia subplots and minimizing its moby-dick parallels. sid sheinberg concurred, suggesting, “why don’t we simply make duel with a shark?”
Benchley wrote two screenplay drafts, one in consultation with Spielberg. Although the structure of the film follows Benchley’s second draft fairly closely, most of his dialogue was rewritten and the action scenes became far more exciting as Spielberg reimagined them, often improvising to deal with problems posed by the sea and the mechanical sharks. “I was not a competent screenwriter,” concedes Benchley, who says he failed to grasp how much a book has to be changed in the transition from script to screen. “The only argument Steven and I had was over the ending,” the novelist adds. “He said, ‘The ending of the book is a downer,’ and he told me what he wanted to do.” In the book, Hooper and Quint are killed by the shark, and the shark escapes. But in the film, Hooper survives and Chief Brody kills the shark by ramming a tank of compressed air into its mouth and firing a bullet into the tank. Benchley told Spielberg, ‘‘That is incredible. The audience will never believe it.” Spielberg replied, “If I have them for two hours, they’ll believe it. I want them to go out of the theater screaming.” Benchley concedes that the director “absolutely pulled it off.”
Looking for new writers, Spielberg first turned to Richard Levinson and William Link, as he previously had done on The Sugarland Express, but received the same answer they had given him before. “We were not interested at all,” Link says of Jaws. “We hated the whole idea. We were doing important television like The Execution of Private Slovik and That Certain Summer—we were the social-issue boys. We, idiots that we were, tried to talk him out of it. We said, ‘Why do you want to do a dumb horror film? It’s like a Hammer film. You’re so talented, what do you want to do a dumb thing about a shark for?’ He wasn’t too all fired up about it, and he hated the first half of the book. He said, ‘I’m going to make it on Cape Cod. You can come there with your wives. You’ll have a good time.’ We said, ‘No, no, Steve. Why would you approve meretricious material like this?’ As we all know, Jaws turned out to be a brilliant thriller. He invited us to see it about two months before it came out. We said, ‘Gotta buy MCA.’ We bought thousands of shares, and it was very lucrative for us. The woman who became my wife saw the film and said, ‘Never turn that kid down again!’”
Howa
rd Sackler, the playwright and screenwriter who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Great White Hope, was brought in to tackle the great white shark. An experienced scuba diver, Sackler spent five weeks rewriting the script of Jaws but requested no credit. One of his most significant contributions was the story of the 1945 sinking of the USS Indianapolis in shark-infested waters. As a monologue for Quint, the haunting tale gives the grizzled shark-hunter a reason for his obsessive hatred of sharks. Spielberg thought Sackler’s speech needed to be expanded, so he enlisted the help of John Milius, a World War II buff who “really wanted me to cast him as Quint all along and wrote the speech as only John Milius would say it.” The final version was revised by Shaw, who “was a brilliant writer and ad-libbed,” Zanuck says. “He was half drunk at the time.”
Spielberg felt Sackler helped refocus the script on “the four or five elements that made the book so enthralling—especially the last hundred pages,” but the director was far from satisfied with Sackler’s draft and his own subsequent attempt to rewrite it. “I knew what I needed to do was cast the movie and do something that is very frightening to me—which I understand Bob Altman does quite a lot—you subjugate absolute control to meaningful collaboration; everybody gets into a room to determine jointly what kind of movie we are going to make here. Is it going to be a picture about the shark—or about the heroes who kill the shark? I hired a man named Carl Gottlieb, who was an old friend of mine, and he came with me to Martha’s Vineyard essentially to polish the script as the actors sat with me every night—often only twenty-four hours before the shot—and improvise…. I dealt with the actors in Jaws as intensely as I dealt with the special effects.”
Steven Spielberg Page 35