Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  When a studio executive urged Wasserman to have the production brought back to the studio for completion there, Wasserman asked, “Do we know how to make it better than they do?”

  “No,” admitted the executive.

  “Then,” said Wasserman, “let them keep going.”

  Sheinberg’s wife, TV actress Lorraine Gary, was making her first feature-film appearance as Ellen Brody, the wife of Roy Scheider’s Chief Brody. Her casting in Jaws and two of its three sequels inevitably led to charges of nepotism against her husband, but those charges were unfounded, because the decision to cast her in Jaws was Spielberg’s. When Zanuck suggested casting his own wife, actress Linda Harrison, not realizing Spielberg already had offered the part to Gary, Spielberg exclaimed, “Oy vey!” Casting Gary was “a very shrewd political move” on Spielberg’s part, William Link observes. “Zanuck and Brown would say, ‘The kid is waiting for the sky, watching for the boats to leave the horizon,’ and Sid would talk to Lorraine, who’d say to him, ‘He’s a brilliant director.’ Steve wasn’t using Lorraine as a favor to Sheinberg, she was very good for the part, but it was a little dividend. Steve knew at that early age that filmmaking is not just filmmaking—it’s a people game. And he played it well.”

  When Sheinberg visited Martha’s Vineyard, he had dinner with Spielberg at the house the director shared with Gottlieb. At the end of dinner, Sheinberg recalled, Spielberg and Gottlieb “excused themselves and went into a corner and started typing, started preparing the next day’s work. It was an absolutely terrifying experience. ‘My God! This is the way this is being done?’ The thought went through my mind that we may have footage that would never be assembled into a movie.”

  After watching attempts to shoot at sea the following day, Sheinberg asked the director whether it would be possible to make the movie in a studio tank. Spielberg replied, “Well, I wanted to shoot this in the ocean for reality.”

  “Reality is costing us a lot of money,” Sheinberg said.

  “I understand that, but I really believe in this movie.”

  “Well, I believe in you. If you want to quit now, we will find a way to make our money back. If you want to stay and finish the movie, you can do that.”

  “I want to stay and finish the movie,” Spielberg said.

  “Fine,” said Sheinberg.

  As Universal feature production chief Ned Tanen recalled, “[W]hen it got ugly and tough—and it got ugly and tough—Sheinberg wouldn’t turn his back on Steven. That is really where this relationship comes from. Sheinberg was the president of Universal, but had not been so for very long, so it was a very dicey moment for him.”

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  FROM childhood, Spielberg has used moviemaking as a way of exorcising his fears. ‘‘Fear is a very real thing for me,” he once said while talking about Jaws. “One of the best ways to cope with it is to turn it around and put it out to others. I mean, if you are afraid of the dark, you put the audience in a dark theater. I had a great fear of the ocean.”

  When he read Benchley’s book, Spielberg instantly recognized a subject that would grip his audience on a deep, visceral level: “I wanted to do Jaws for hostile reasons. I read it and felt that I had been attacked. It terrified me, and I wanted to strike back…. I knew I would be happy making a film like that, because it somehow appealed to my baser instincts…. I didn’t have any fun making it. But I had a great time planning it, going tee-hee-hee! … In fact, I thought Jaws was a comedy.”

  Watching swimmers being menaced by the shark—from camera angles on shore, bobbing on the surface of the water, or from below—puts the viewer into a position of extreme childlike vulnerability. That strategy is implicit in Spielberg’s description of Jaws as “a primal scream movie.” The reason it “hit a nerve” with audiences, he felt, was “maybe because it’s basically Freudian. We have been taught to suppress our fears, [with] the macho cover. But Jaws makes it safe to express fear in public. Then there’s the theory of its relationship to our prenatal hours, because people are little sharks at one point; they know how to survive in water for a while.” At the same time, Spielberg’s frequent employment of the shark’s menacing point of view, seen from the safely vicarious perspective of the theater seat, perversely encourages the viewer to revel in hostility toward its human prey. “You will root for the shark as you rooted for King Kong,” Spielberg promised. The director’s indulgence in his “baser instincts” accounted for some of the film’s extraordinary commercial success with mid-1970s audiences seeking new levels of violent stimulus, but it troubled the director in retrospect. “Jaws is almost like I’m directing the audience with an electric cattle prod,” he admitted in a 1977 interview with the British film magazine Sight and Sound. “I have very mixed feelings about my work on that picture, and two or three pictures from now I’m going to be able to look back on it and see what I’ve done. I saw it again and realized it was the simplest movie I had ever seen in my life. It was just the essential moving, working parts of suspense and terror…. I could have made that a very subtle movie if I wanted to.”

  A particularly disturbing aspect of Jaws is its mingling of sexuality and violence in the opening sequence, in which the naked limbs of a voluptuous young female swimmer (Susan Backlinie) dangle alluringly in the water before she is torn to pieces (the same sexually charged image was used to advertise the book and the movie). Like the slasher movies that became popular later in the 1970s, the sequence seems to punish the woman for being sexually aggressive; she enters the water to entice a drunken young man into skinnydipping with her, but he sprawls impotently in the sand, unable to respond as she is attacked. In a 1978 essay, “Jaws as Patriarchal Myth,” Jane E. Caputi argued that the scene is “a carefully constructed form of subliminal cinematic rape,” with the shark as a rampaging phallic symbol. Caputi’s analogy is somewhat muddied, however, by the fact that the rest of the shark’s victims are males, and by her argument that the shark also represents “the mythological motif of the vagina dentata (the toothed, i.e., castrating vagina).” Still, there is no doubt that Jaws is swimming in some treacherous psychological waters. That streak of misogyny is an attitude Jaws shared with other American films made during the period when the women’s liberation movement was threatening traditional male prerogatives. Film editor Verna Fields admitted she “came very close to not doing Jaws” because of her concerns over whether it would exploit sex and violence: “Steve told me about Jaws, and it just sounded awful. The only thing he could promise me was that the picture was going to be in good taste.”

  An even more pervasive sexual overtone is the theme of male impotence, as seen in Chief Brody’s initial failure to protect his community, and his own son, from the shark. Brody’s weakness is typical of Spielberg’s thematic preoccupation with flawed father figures. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Spielberg visually conveys Brody’s helpless anguish by using the “Vertigo effect” (the combination of forward tracking shot and reverse zoom) as Brody sits on the beach watching a small boy being torn apart by the shark. Brody’s reassertion of his fragile manhood in hunting and killing the shark, with the help of Hooper and Quint, is the dominant theme of the last third of the film. For Caputi, this is simply Spielberg’s “ritual retelling of an essential patriarchal myth.” But her reading of Jaws fails to take into account Spielberg’s explicit critique throughout the film of patriarchal and macho behavior traits.

  Dreyfuss’s Hooper, a bearded, bespectacled, deceptively nerdy-looking intellectual, uses brains (and technology) more than brawn to hunt the shark, but summons up the courage to descend in an underwater cage with a poison-dart gun when there seems no other alternative. The offbeat, sarcastic Hooper serves as a Spielbergian foil for the traditional hero figure, Shaw’s swaggeringly macho, Ahab-like Quint. Pauline Kael observed, “When the three protagonists are in their tiny boat, you feel that Robert Shaw, the malevolent old shark hunter, is so manly that he wants to get them all killed; he’s so manly he’s homicidal…. When Sh
aw squeezes an empty beer can flat, Dreyfuss satirizes him by crumpling a Styrofoam cup. The director, identifying with the Dreyfuss character, sets up bare-chested heroism as a joke and scores off it all through the movie.” (The joke with the Styrofoam cup came out of a bull session Spielberg and Gottlieb had over coffee with Dreyfuss in a Boston hotel room, when they were trying to coax the reluctant actor into agreeing to do the picture.)

  Equally crucial to the film’s nuanced portrayal of contemporary masculinity is Spielberg’s depiction of the vulnerabilities of Chief Brody, who, like the director himself, is deathly afraid of water. Spielberg was determined to “take the edge off Roy Scheider as the hotshot masculine leading man … and let him have all the problems, all the faults of a human being. And let him have fears and phobias, and bring all these fears and phobias out in the picture, and then not resolve all of them. Because you can’t. That’s why a person spends all his life learning about himself.”

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  “JAWSMANIA” was the word the press used to describe the public reaction to the movie, an “epidemic of shark fever” that gave swimmers everywhere a serious case of the jitters and severely depressed beach attendance. In fact, the danger of being attacked by any kind of shark, let alone a great white shark, is extremely remote. But the rarity of shark attacks has done little to dampen the fear that sharks have always provoked in the public imagination, a fear greatly heightened by Jaws and its sequels.

  Spielberg’s great white shark is as relentless and implacable as the truck in Duel.|| But unlike that truck, whose malevolence was due to the irrationality of its unseen driver, the shark in Jaws is inherently destructive, and therefore even more frightening. It attacks people because that is part of its raison d’être, not because it is “a sea beast slightly influenced by the occult,” as Spielberg fancifully put it. Despite its seemingly supernatural destructiveness, the great white is depicted in the film with scientific understanding and even a degree of admiration. As Dreyfuss’s Matt Hooper tells the mayor, “What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine—an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks.” Hooper’s respect for the great white has been echoed in the recent work of real-life scientists, who have increasingly come to regard sharks as an endangered species. The worldwide impact of “Jawsmania” exacerbated the vulnerability of what Richard Ellis and John E. McCosker, in their 1991 book Great White Shark, call “this unreasonably maligned and misunderstood creature … a powerful, magnificently adapted creature of ancient lineage that has resisted our understanding and control, mindless of our attempts to eradicate it.” Benchley acknowledges he couldn’t write Jaws the same way today, “because all the information on sharks has changed so radically since then. I couldn’t show him as being the bad guy, as I did then.”

  Ironically, a large part of Spielberg’s success in creating terror stemmed from the problems he was having with the mechanical shark. A portfolio of storyboarded scenes Universal distributed to the press when the film began shooting shows the shark acrobatically performing a number of stunts that aren’t contained in the finished film. But because the director had to shoot around the recalcitrant shark, he had to suggest its presence more than showing it: “I thought that what could really be scary was not seeing the shark.” As a result, Jaws “went from a Japanese Saturday-matinee horror flick to more of a Hitchcock, the less-you-see-the-more-you-get thriller.” Roy Scheider felt that from the actors’ point of view, while the malfunctioning shark “drove everybody crazy, it was also a key element in making the movie much better. There was so much time for the actors to get to know each other, to improvise and evolve as a team…. So it’s ironic that the very problem that stalled the production was the one that cemented the movie.”

  What Spielberg referred to as his “documentary style” on Jaws also was dictated by necessity. “This film required a straightforward photographic style,” David Brown said in 1975. “… We did not want what was done brilliantly and appropriately by Vilmos Zsigmond in The Sugarland Express. This was a different kind of story.” Zsigmond, however, says he turned down an offer from Spielberg to photograph Jaws because he considered it “just a suspense story. I didn’t think I could contribute anything.”

  Bill Butler, who took the assignment, recalled that Spielberg initially “insisted that we would not handhold it, that we would have everything on a tripod. I told Steve Spielberg, ‘You’ve never shot on water before, have you? You have no idea how seasick the audience would become if you did that.’ And he had to be convinced. We had to shoot some footage and show him what we meant. He soon came to love the idea.” “One of the unsung heroes of the movie,” Gilmore says, was Michael Chapman, a distinguished cinematographer in his own right who did the graceful and unobtrusive camera operating. “Every shot at sea, every shot in the last thirty minutes, was handheld. Chapman had to compensate with his legs for the pitch and roll. I don’t know how many times I saw him in incredibly difficult conditions, and you’d see the dailies and the horizon was rock-solid.” To American Cinematographer magazine, Spielberg described Jaws as “the most expensive handheld movie ever made.”

  Spielberg’s frustrations were epitomized by what happened during the filming of what Gilmore says was intended to be “the majestic shot of the picture,” when the shark jumps out of the water onto the boat before sinking it and eating Robert Shaw. “We shot it and we were so disappointed,” Gilmore remembers. “The shark was supposed to come out of the water with tremendous energy. Take one was no good. The shark came out of the water kind of like a dolphin walking along the water and fell on the boat. We assumed it was a rehearsal and that the second take was going to be better. It wasn’t. The shark sort of came up like a limp dick, skidded along the water, and fell onto the boat.

  “I went to Bob Mattey and I said, ‘Bob, the shark looks like shit.’ He mumbled something about ‘We don’t have enough power.’ I got into it, and it turned out that a year earlier when he was putting this whole million-dollar package together, the motor that we needed—the motor that drove the thing out of the water—cost $27,000. And without talking to me or anybody, he bought one for $9,000. I said, ‘Are you telling me for the $18,000 we saved that we can’t make this shot? It’s the movie!’ Bob said, ‘Sorry.’ I told Spielberg, ‘We’ll have to print what we’ve got and move on.’ He went bananas. I told him, ‘Steven, it will never be any better.’ I knew a lot better than he did. He could be there till today and it would never be any better. It’s done in cuts, we change the angle; Steven didn’t want to break it up. My mother will never know the difference, but all of us film people wanted it to be in one shot. I think Steven will agree it was the only compromised shot in the picture.”

  Spielberg’s unwillingness to compromise not only estranged him from Gilmore but also made him unpopular with many other men in the crew. “I’m glad I got out of Martha’s Vineyard alive,” Spielberg recalled. “The morale was my responsibility, and it was important to keep people from losing their minds…. I was really afraid of half the guys in the crew. They regarded me as a nice kind of Captain Bligh. They didn’t have scurvy or anything, but I wouldn’t let them go home.” According to Spielberg, there was a rumor on the set that when the film finished shooting on Martha’s Vineyard, the crew was planning to drown him: “They were going to hold me underwater as long as they could and still avoid a homicide rap.” Carl Gottlieb put a more benign construction on the rumor: “Steven had heard that they were going to throw him over the side to celebrate.” Whatever the case, Spielberg took the precaution of preplanning the final shot with Butler the night before, and secretly arranging to have a speedboat waiting to spirit him away from the location as soon as the shot was ready for filming. Speeding off for the island, where a car was waiting for him, Spielberg shouted, “I shall not return!”

  “On the road to Boston,” reported Gottlieb, “Steven started blinking and twitching, reacting to a whole new set
of visual stimuli. Billboards. Traffic. Highways. Lots of cars and people. The closer the car got to Boston, the crazier he felt. It was like coming down off a five-and-a-half-month psychedelic experience, and he wasn’t used to it. That night, sitting in the bar of the hotel, he and a hyperkinetic Rick Dreyfuss made a spectacle of themselves, mostly by screaming ‘Motherfucker, it’s over! It’s over! Motherfucker!’ (That’s Rick’s influence. Steven is not so outspoken.)

  “That night, staying in Boston to catch the morning flight to Los Angeles, Steven couldn’t sleep, jolting upright in bed with a sensation of being shocked with electricity. A full anxiety attack overwhelmed him, complete with sweaty palms, tachycardia, difficulty breathing, and vomiting. When he did sleep, he dreamed he was still filming. Repetitive dreams of Martha’s Vineyard kept assaulting his unconscious, and it persisted for three months after he left the island.”

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  “WHEN we came back [to Universal], no one loved us,” Joe Alves remembers. “We were really looked down upon as ‘those guys out there making this dumb shark movie.’”

  Undaunted, Spielberg pushed ahead with three weeks of additional shooting at Universal, in the MGM tank, and off Catalina Island. Verna Fields had been editing the film throughout the shooting on Martha’s Vineyard, commuting to location sites on a bicycle and consulting with Spielberg at sea by walkie-talkie, as well as participating in the nightly script discussions. Along with Alves, she even did some second-unit filming. Affectionately known as “Mother Cutter” to the young directors with whom she preferred to work, Fields also served as a “terrific diplomat” when friction would arise on the island, Bill Gilmore said. “She would get people to kiss and make up. She was very maternal. Steven loved Verna. She was like another mother to him.” By the time they left the island, Fields had a rough cut of the first two-thirds of the picture, up to the shark hunt. During months of arduous postproduction, she remained intimately involved in Spielberg’s creative decisions as he fine-tuned and restructured the film in the editing room at her Van Nuys home.