To facilitate their work on the script, Gottlieb and Spielberg shared a house on location, with Gottlieb continuing to work on the revisions after Spielberg went to sleep. Each morning, Gottlieb would give new pages to the company typist, and by 8:30 A.M. they would be approved and ready for filming. “It made for incredible tension on the location, because of changes in props,” Gottlieb said in a 1975 interview. “Some days the production manager, William Gilmore, and Spielberg wouldn’t even talk.”
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FURTHER tension arose when Benchley visited the location. Spielberg asked him to play a TV reporter broadcasting a report from the beach about shark attacks. As it happened, the day Benchley arrived on Martha’s Vineyard was the day the Newsweek article hit the stands with Spielberg’s bad-mouthing of the novel. When Benchley stepped off the plane at the local airport, he was met by unit publicist Al Ebner and Los Angeles Times reporter Gregg Kilday, who was there to do a feature on the filming. As Benchley recalls, Kilday announced: “Spielberg says your book is a piece of shit.”
“You must understand,” Benchley shot back to the reporter, “there has never been a question of controversy. I understood what they had to take out. When I finished my version of the screenplay, Brown said it was wonderful. Zanuck said it was OK. Spielberg didn’t say anything. After Howard Sackler did his rewrite, I sent an angry letter to David Brown. I accused one of the characters, the oceanographer [Hooper], of being an insufferable, pedantic little schmuck. I think Spielberg took it to mean him. [Benchley laughed.] But that is not what the letter said.
“Spielberg needs to work on character. He knows, flatly, zero. Consider: He is a twenty-six-year-old [actually twenty-seven] 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.”
With what Kilday described as “a certain sardonic pleasure,” Benchley concluded: “Wait and see. Spielberg will one day be known as the greatest second-unit director in America.”
Recalling that outburst twenty years later, Benchley said, “In the great catalogue of stupid things one says in life, that ranks high on the list. It was an extremely unfortunate bit of anger. We had both been manipulated by the press. We were both extremely naive. I regretted my petulant response immediately and I tried to take it back [Kilday reported both versions in his July 7 article]. Universal was getting upset we were pissing all over each other in public. They said, ‘Please stop this.’ After that, the two of us got together and told each other we were really sorry. In a way, my remark was a cleansing.”
Spielberg claimed Newsweek had misrepresented his comments. He explained to Benchley that what he really felt was, “The book is not a good book as a film.” Benchley took that convoluted statement to mean: “You couldn’t just shoot the book.” Nevertheless, Benchley laments, “Steven had an unfortunate tendency to denigrate the book in public.” Three months before Jaws was released, the film magazine Millimeter published an interview Spielberg had given on Martha’s Vineyard. This time the director was quoted as saying, “If we don’t succeed in making this picture better than the book, we’re in real trouble.”
Spielberg sent Benchley a letter of apology, to which the beleaguered author responded: “Thanks for your letter, I don’t see Millimeter (in fact, your mention of it was the first I’d ever heard), so whatever vicious, putrid, scabrous, scurrilous, subversive slime you ladled on me would probably have escaped my view. Nevertheless, forewarned is … etc. You were thoughtful to write.
“In fairness, though, you should know that I have employed mercenaries to prepare a broadside about you, revealing, at last, the sordid truth about your personal life. It’ll all be there—whips, leather sneakers, shorty-nighties and crunchy peanut butter. I’m aiming for the June issue of Jack & Jill….”
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“LOOK, Jaws could have turned out to be the laugh riot of ’75,” Spielberg said later. “I made it to entertain myself, then I tried to get off it three times.”
In the months before shooting began, Spielberg gave serious consideration to quitting Jaws to direct Lucky Lady for Twentieth Century–Fox. An original screenplay by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, Lucky Lady was a romantic comedy/action melodrama about 1930s rum-runners involved in a ménage à trois. Paul Newman wanted Spielberg to direct him in it. “I was offered a film that I very much wanted to direct at Fox,” Spielberg said at his November 1973 AFI seminar, “and Universal had a preemption right in [my contract], so they exercised their preemption right against the Fox project for a film [Jaws] that I had committed to do but wasn’t going into production for at least eight months. Universal is a corporation, and they don’t treat you like an individual…. [Y]ou reach a certain high point in your career and you really want out bad. They make you pay the piper again and again.” After shooting Jaws, which he considered “the worst experience of my life,” he told studio publicist Orin Borsten, “I will never do another picture for Universal.”
When Jennings Lang heard that Spielberg wanted out of Jaws, he yelled at Spielberg over the telephone (in a conversation overheard by Lang’s teenaged son Rocky): “You’re going to stay with this movie. You’re going to do a great job. It’s going to be great. What do you want to go to Fox and do Lucky Lady for? It’s going to be a disaster.” The savvy Jennings Lang was right on both counts. With Stanley Donen directing Burt Reynolds, Gene Hackman, and Liza Minnelli, Lucky Lady became, as Gloria Katz put it, “an appalling movie.”
Sid Sheinberg also had words with Spielberg over Jaws. “It was one of the few disagreements that Steven and I had,” the MCA president said in a 1988 interview. “I literally forced him to do it…. I think he was upset for a while. He turned to me and said, ‘Why are you making me do this B movie?’”
“I was tipped off that Steven was going to come in my office and resign,” Zanuck recalls. “This was about three months before the picture started. He was scared, and I think he felt overwhelmed. He wasn’t sure he was the right guy for it, and he was being tempted by offers to do other things. When I made the deal with him at Fox [for the script of Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies], we included two cheap directorial options at $50,000 each. They had Lucky Lady, and I didn’t think much of it. I told him, ‘You’re well off not getting involved.’ I would have said that about Gone With the Wind, because I wanted him to stay on this project. We were under deadline to get started and finished before an actors’ strike.§ Wasserman had told us we would have to start before a certain date or we couldn’t start. We had a lot of people involved in building the shark. It was a nightmare.
“Steven had made up some Jaws T-shirts, and when I was told he was coming in to resign, I hurriedly took off my shirt and put on the Jaws shirt and sat behind my desk. It threw him, because he had made a big deal of giving out these shirts. He had a real hard time getting words out of his mouth, but all the difficulties and concerns poured out. This picture was important to him, vitally important. There were such huge professional stakes, and he said, ‘Jesus Christ, we’re going off half-cocked.’
“I laid a giant guilt trip on him. I laid it right on the line that this was a great opportunity, and we were going to make a successful picture; he couldn’t even think not to be part of it. I told him we were backing him all the way. It was one of those things where I myself was shitting in my pants, because I didn’t know how the hell we were going to start the picture. Nothing was ready. It was, at that stage, completely out of control, as it was during most of the shooting.”
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JAWS ran into so many production problems that exasperated crew members began referring to the movie as Flaws. “[F]our days out of seven we were making it,” Spielberg later admitted, “I thought it would be a turkey.”
The changing weather was a constant headache, and filming at sea caused enormous logistical difficulties. But the biggest culprits were Bob Mattey’s three mechanical sharks—co
llectively named “Bruce,” after Spielberg’s lawyer, Bruce Ramer. Bruce had not been tested in ocean water before being trucked from Universal to Martha’s Vineyard, and no one had anticipated the corrosive effects of saltwater electrolysis on his complex substructure. For most scenes, the shark was to ride on an underwater crane, moving along a track on a submersible platform, controlled by pneumatic hoses operated by men at a floating console. The entire apparatus, which had to be towed out to sea each day, weighed twelve tons.¶ For weeks after shooting started, Bruce simply refused to work. After Spielberg watched the first rushes of the shark, the atmosphere was “like a wake,” recalled director Brian De Palma, who was visiting the location. “Bruce’s eyes crossed, and his jaws wouldn’t close right.” That night, Dreyfuss declared, “If any of us had any sense, we’d all bail out now.”
At a makeshift workshop dubbed “Shark City,” Mattey, production designer Joe Alves, and their staff kept tinkering frantically with the machinery while Spielberg anxiously shot around the star of the movie. Picking up on a device in Howard Sackler’s screenplay draft, Spielberg, out of desperation, began shooting barrels instead of the shark; in the movie, the barrels are affixed to the shark by harpoon and they cruise the ocean surface as a stand-in for the submerged creature. It was not until late summer that the shark itself was ready for action, and then only intermittently.
“The shark was a disaster,” Zanuck says. “It let us down tremendously. We were starting to lose confidence in Mattey. We were very scared. Quite frankly, I didn’t know whether any of us could do it. We thought, Jesus Christ, we’re making a picture called Jaws, and we don’t have the fucking shark. Today, with computer stuff, you could put the shark in, like Steven did with dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. In those days, it was a strictly mechanical thing. We had a platform with thirteen guys sitting at a console—one guy would control the dorsal fin, one guy would control the eyes … it was like an orchestra. It was the goddamnedest thing to watch. The tail would be going right, but the head would be cockeyed. It was really painful. It took all of Steven’s skill as a filmmaker to make it look like it worked. When it did work, by a miracle, it worked so great.”
“We shot when the shark was working,” Spielberg recalled. “It didn’t matter what the light was doing, whether the actor had the right shirt on—if the shark worked, roll! You know the shark on the Universal tour? Well, that thing works ten times better than the one we had on the movie!”
The pressure on the twenty-seven-year-old director was enormous. “I thought my career as a filmmaker was over,” Spielberg admitted in a 1995 interview. “I heard rumors from back in Hollywood that I would never work again because no one had ever taken a film a hundred days over schedule—let alone a director whose first picture had failed at the box office…. There were moments of solitude, sitting on the boat waiting for a shot, thinking, This can’t be done. It was stupid to begin it, we’ll never finish it. No one is ever going to see this picture, and I’m never going to work in this town again.”
Coping with the recalcitrant shark was hard enough, but Spielberg also had to deal with unrelenting pressure from Gilmore and the producers to keep shooting … something. Because of the shark and the weather, there were days when Spielberg could manage to complete only a few seconds of footage, or none at all. But with the film looming as a potential disaster, Spielberg did not want to start compromising on quality on the rare occasions when he was able to shoot. ‘‘There were times early in the picture when we felt we had made a mistake [in hiring him] because Steven was maddeningly perfectionistic,” Brown wrote. “Yeah, he was a perfectionist,” agrees Zanuck. “And I have to hand it to him for sticking to his guns. The situation was very agitating. By the same token, when he knew there were no solutions, he would find solutions. He had to prove himself to a lot of the crew members. Steven can be rough on a crew. He’s very demanding. He does some very unorthodox things. Everybody was older than Steven, and a lot of them were very skeptical of him. They weren’t seeing the dailies.”
“The entire company had developed a foxhole mentality, behaving like troops in the line, experiencing battle fatigue, nervous exhaustion, and incipient alcoholism,” screenwriter Gottlieb recalled. “… [T]he cast was going quietly insane, along with their director, who could not reveal the fact. Steven would keep his cool, wait patiently for setups, work with his actors, and listen as they babbled hysterically of other projects, pictures they were missing, home and family, and Robert Shaw’s income taxes.” At one point, Gottlieb reported, Roy Scheider became fed up with the catered food they were served on the boat. The actor “threw the tray on the deck, and screamed at the AD [assistant director], and shouted at Steven, and then unburdened himself of all the frustrations and observations that had been bubbling inside him for the preceding months. It was probably a Primal release, and it took hours for Steven to calm him down and walk it off, which isn’t easy on a small boat.”
Joan Darling spent a day with Spielberg on location and witnessed his frustration when technical problems made filming impossible in the morning and excruciatingly slow in the afternoon. “It was hard for him to sit around,” she realized. “He has incredible courage and endurance as a director. Beat by beat, shot by shot, he was going to get that movie, not in an unpleasant way, but with an inner quiet. Even though inside he may have been going through agony, that never pulls him away from his target.”
A major source of delay and conflict was Spielberg’s insistence that the horizon be kept clear in scenes involving the shark-hunting boat, the Orca. If the audience was to believe that the Orca was out on the ocean alone, far from any possible help and with a broken radio to boot, it was crucial that they not see a pleasure boat drifting by in the distance. But as the summer months wore on, the waters around Martha’s Vineyard became crowded with sailboats. If a boat appeared in the background of a shot, the company would dispatch a crew member in a motorboat to ask the boater to stay away while they were filming. “Some people were nice about it,” Zanuck recalls, “but other people wanted to see the filming and said, ‘Fuck you. You can’t tell me to get off the ocean.’” In such instances, it could take as long as an hour for the horizon to clear. Sometimes Bill Gilmore had to resort to paying a boater a couple of hundred dollars to move away.
“I was amazed at how unrattled Steven would get, at that young age,” comments production designer Joe Alves. “Steven’s idea was to have nothing on the horizon. He wanted to get this vulnerability of three men out there on their boat—and the shark. The studio kept saying, ‘Couldn’t you shoot if there was just one boat?’ But he was relentless about it. There was a lot of pressure from the studio. Any lesser director might have given in, but he stuck to his guns about that.”
“Steven will never know the severe beating we would take every night when we would report the day’s activities [to Universal],” Zanuck has said, “and that’s where the buffer comes in.” The studio was “anxious for us to get out of there. There’s always a very tough and fine line that has to be danced around between the production manager and the director, because the production manager’s looking at his watch all the time. Sure, he wants to get it right, but he also wants to move on. He’s the guy who’s talking to the studio every night, and there was a lot of tension there. We backed [Spielberg] up whenever we could. Some things he wanted to do we thought were unreasonable—some suggestions to do further shooting—and we couldn’t.
“He would jump on an idea with great enthusiasm and take it a little step further until it became unreal. Nobody has energy and enthusiasm like he has; it’s a wonderful trait. But if you said, ‘I think the family should have a dog,’ next day you’d see three dogs there. We would reel him back in, because he does have a bit of a propensity to go over the top. His idea for the final shot of Jaws—I don’t know how serious he was about it—was to have a lot of [shark] fins on the horizon, coming to the island. He thought it would be a great irony that when they had killed the shark, more s
harks arrive. We said that was not a good idea. We talked him out of it.”
Spielberg has said that, during the desperate period that summer when the shark would not work, Universal was thinking of canceling the picture—in Hollywood parlance, “pulling the plug”—or firing him. Sheinberg, however, insisted, “No one ever contemplated doing anything of that sort,” and Zanuck and Gilmore also contend that pulling the plug was not an option. But Zanuck admits Jaws “was in intensive care. The studio at one point was talking about shutting down and coming back and trying to figure out the mystery of the shark here [in Hollywood], without two hundred and fifty people standing around.” The idea of delaying the picture a year and coming back to Martha’s Vineyard the following summer to finish shooting also was considered, but that “would have ruined all the momentum the film had going,” Zanuck felt.
“We listened and agonized,” Brown recalled, “but finally concluded it was wiser to keep on going, however slow the process…. Our budget for the film was about four and a half million dollars, which we exceeded by one hundred percent [including studio overhead, the total production cost was about $10 million]. How could we anticipate costs? We were budgeting a production unlike any previous production. Nobody had ever budgeted a shark.”
Sheinberg and Marshall Green, Universal’s executive production manager, visited the location to decide what needed to be done. Gilmore recalls that Green, “who was such an old pro, took one look at what we were doing and said, ‘Keep up the good work.’” “To Wasserman’s credit, and Sheinberg’s, they didn’t put any pressure on us,” Zanuck adds. “They were concerned, because they were putting up the money, but they never considered taking the cameras away. They were very supportive.”
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