Just how much credit Fields (who died in 1982) deserves for the success of Jaws has been the subject of heated debate since the film’s release. Hollywood gossip claimed that she “saved” the picture. As recently as 1995, when the issue was raised in The New York Times, Carl Gottlieb replied, “Speaking from firsthand knowledge and without denigrating Verna Fields’s enormous contribution to Jaws, that film didn’t need saving.” Shortly before the film’s release, however, the studio tacitly acknowledged Fields’s crucial role in its completion by naming her an executive consultant on all Universal films, and the following year she became feature-production vice president. “A skillful film editor can make all the difference between a movie that doesn’t work and a movie that does,” Mary Murphy pointedly observed in a 1975 Los Angeles Times profile of Fields. Others, including Spielberg, have felt that Fields was given, or took, too much credit at his expense—a feeling that intensified after she won an Academy Award for Jaws and he didn’t. Fields diplomatically stated that Spielberg “delivered so much good footage that it became an editor’s dream,” but she did not discourage the speculation with her Delphic utterance, “I got a lot of credit for Jaws, rightly or wrongly.”
On Spielberg’s next film, Close Encounters, Fields was to be both editor and either a producer or associate producer, but, reported Julia Phillips, “Steven started to resent all the credit she was giving herself for [the] success [of Jaws] and asked me to kill her off.” Paul Schrader—who had his own falling-out with Spielberg over his uncredited draft of Close Encounters—said that after various people connnected with Jaws gave interviews about their contributions to the film, Spielberg “felt they had all conspired to take away his credit…. He seemed to resent the fact that anyone has ever helped him, whether they be Verna Fields, Zanuck and Brown, Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb, Mike and Julia Phillips. That’s Steve’s problem.”
Fields “didn’t rescue the film—it’s Steven,” Zanuck comments. “But Verna Fields did a hell of a lot. She was really brilliant. She actually came in and reconstructed some scenes that Steven had constructed for comedy and made them terrifying, and some scenes he shot to be terrifying and made them comedy scenes. I’m not saying that Steven didn’t partake in it, but it was her idea to reconstruct it.” Although “Verna’s contribution was fantastic,” Gilmore points out, “she was not out there on the boat. She wasn’t in the heat of battle. Steven has a very good editing sense. In the end, we had the film. If we didn’t have the film, it wouldn’t matter how good Steven was or Verna was.”
In working with Spielberg on Jaws, Fields explained, she tried to “get inside his head and know what he was aiming for. Steve is a good sport, a mature young man who is open, does not mind contributions, but has a clear picture of what he wants…. There was a lot of talk on the set that if Jaws ever got put together it would be a miracle, and the picture would never get to the screen unless Verna was a genius. It isn’t true. But no one really knew what pieces were going to be put in where; it was so mixed up because they were so dependent on weather and special effects and whether the shots worked that day…. There were enormous problems with matching the look of water, sky, things like that. But we suddenly realized that the picture really worked. There were some cuts I would have liked to make that we didn’t, because the continuity just looked too bad, but if we managed to distract the eye for a moment with action we could make it work.”
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AFTER Sid Sheinberg saw a rough cut of Jaws in a Universal screening room, the lights came on and the MCA president displayed no reaction. “Well, Sid,” asked an anxious David Brown, “what do you think?” “It’s OK,” Sheinberg said. Hearing that remark “was like being given one-half a star,” Brown remembered. “‘OK’ for a hundred and fifty-nine days? Well, of course it was only OK. It didn’t have Johnny Williams’s music. It didn’t have some major underwater stuff that we filmed in the tank at MGM Studios…. So the reaction was, ‘Go get the rest of the movie.’”
Even people who had worked on the film had serious doubts about how it would play with audiences. As Joe Alves recalls, “When I saw pieces of it—cut, assembled footage—the color wasn’t corrected, it didn’t have music, the shark just made funny sounds splashing through the water. You’d hear pneumatic rams, hoses whipping through the water. The color would jump radically. I was just afraid that people were going to laugh at the shark.” As the film neared the date of its first public preview, Alves worried that if the public thought the shark was phony and ridiculous, “We’re dead.”
John Williams’s celebrated musical score—his pulsating, heart-stopping, four-note motif, primitive in its force and simplicity—signals the unseen presence of the shark and viscerally establishes a mood of abject terror. The first time Williams played the theme for Spielberg, the director began to laugh. “Oh, no, this is serious,” insisted Williams. “I mean it. This is Jaws.” “At first I thought it was too primitive,” Spielberg admitted. “I wanted something a little more melodic for the shark, and then Johnny said, ‘What you don’t have here is The L-Shaped Room … you have made yourself a popcorn movie.’ And he was absolutely right.”
With the addition of the music, it no longer mattered that the mechanical shark had such a limited repertoire or that when it emerges from the sea to gobble up Robert Shaw in the climactic scene it looks like a performer on the Universal Studios tour. Jaws “was a good picture before it was scored,” said Fields, “but [the] score did tremendous things for it.”**
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THE first sneak preview of Jaws at Dallas’s Medallion Theater on March 26, 1975, was advertised without the title but with a drawing of a shark menacing a swimmer, lifted from the cover of the paperback edition. Zanuck and Brown drove from their hotel at three in the afternoon to check out the theater. “There was a huge line,” recalls Zanuck. “We asked each other, ‘What’s playing here?’ Then it dawned on us.”
The landlocked Texans greeted the movie with a gratifying cacophony of screams, cheers, and applause. Not only that, they laughed in all the right places and didn’t laugh at the shark. There was so much demand to see Jaws that a second screening had to be added that night. The producers celebrated with champagne in a penthouse of the Registry Hotel until four in the morning with Spielberg, Sheinberg, Gilmore, Fields, and Williams.
“When we heard that first scream, David and I nudged each other—we were in,” Zanuck says. “A lot of doomsayers had pronounced the picture terrible and in trouble. We ourselves had some concerns. We were so accustomed to the shark being a failure that until we had heard that first scream in the theater, we didn’t know whether it was going to be a scream or a failure or a [Bronx cheer]. The word got out immediately to Wall Street.” The morning after the preview, while preparing to leave Dallas, Brown received a call from his stockbroker in New York, who “told me that we had had two previews, the exact card count at both, and gave me the comments of leading exhibitors who were in the audience. The stock of MCA/Universal went up several points.”
The reaction was confirmed at another preview at the Lakewood Theater in Long Beach, California, on March 28. The audience in the seaside city where Spielberg had attended college gave Jaws a standing ovation. One member of the public wrote on a preview card, “This is a great film. Now don’t fuck it up by trying to make it better.” But they did make it better. “There were certain things we did not know were going to be big laughs,” Fields said. “Nobody knew that Roy Scheider saying, after the shark jumps, ‘[You’ll] need a bigger boat’ was going to be an enormous laugh. As a matter of fact, we went back and looped it to try to raise the volume. Nobody ever hears that line thoroughly because they’re still mumbling from the scream. I have tapes of the preview that are incredible because that audience not only went out of their seats, they carried on and talked for a full minute.”
A more substantial change was made in the underwater scene of Dreyfuss exploring the wreckage of a boat and coming upon the body of a man killed by a sha
rk. “I have a four-scream movie,” Spielberg said. “I think I can get it up to a five-scream.” Spielberg had a dummy head constructed and, using camera equipment surreptitiously borrowed from the studio, shot new footage in Verna Fields’s backyard swimming pool, punching up the moment when Dreyfuss discovers the head popping out of a hole in the boat. The footage was inserted in time for the final preview at Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome on April 24, and it became one of the movie’s two biggest screams, along with the scene of the shark jumping out of the water at Roy Scheider.
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ON its fourteenth day of release following its opening on June 20, 1975, Jaws turned a profit. Sixty-four days later, on September 5, it surpassed Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather to become the most successful film in motion picture history to that date.
Jaws held that distinction until November 1977, when it was dethroned by George Lucas’s Star Wars. Spielberg took out an ad in the Hollywood trade press showing the little robot from Star Wars, R2D2, catching Bruce the shark in his jaws with a fishing hook. Congratulating Lucas for capturing the box-office title, Spielberg wrote, “Wear it well. Your pal, Steven.” Inflated ticket prices would help push several other movies—including Spielberg’s own blockbusters E.T. and Jurassic Park—ahead of Jaws on the list of the top box-office hits. But with its $458 million in world box-office gross, Jaws remains one of Hollywood’s most phenomenal successes, all the more remarkable in light of its calamitous production history.††
“IT’S A MOVIE, TOO!” Universal reminded readers of The Wall Street Journal in a July 10 advertisement. By then, the iconography of the shark and his naked female prey had become ubiquitous. The ad reprinted several editorial cartoons, including one showing the shark with its teeth shaped like a hammer and sickle, attacking Uncle Sam, and another showing the shark as the CIA, attacking the Statue of Liberty. The public frenzy landed Bruce on the cover of Time and prompted the opening of a “Jaws” discotheque in the Hamptons. Ice-cream stands began selling such flavors as “sharklate,” “finilla,” and “jawberry,” and a Maryland entrepreneur with a macabre sense of humor began marketing strap-on Styrofoam shark fins. Although Universal was not prepared for the full extent of the demand, it hurriedly licensed a wide variety of product tie-ins, including T-shirts, beach towels, inflatable sharks, and shark’s tooth jewelry; animal-rights activists managed to stop the studio tour’s souvenir shop from selling bottles of formaldehyde containing actual shark fetuses. (Months before Jaws opened, Spielberg proposed that the studio sell little chocolate sharks which, when bitten, would squirt cherry juice. “We’ll clean up,” he said, but Universal vetoed the idea.)
Universal spent $1.8 million, an extraordinary amount at that time, for pre-opening advertising on the film, including $700,000 for TV commercials. But no amount of ballyhoo could account for the way that Jaws, as Newsweek put it, appealed to “primal fears buried deep in the collective unconscious of all mankind.” The magazine also suggested an underlying political reason for the film’s runaway success, quoting psychiatrist Alfred Messer, who “viewed the film as a metaphor for the ‘helplessness and powerlessness’ ordinary folk in the United States feel in their everyday lives—just this once with a happy ending.” Fidel Castro offered a Marxist interpretation of Jaws, seeing it as an indictment of greedy capitalists willing to sacrifice people’s lives to protect their investments. “Wonderful!” exclaimed Spielberg when he heard Castro’s remark. “That’s the whole Enemy of the People question.”
Critical opinion on the film was widely divergent, showing that the battle lines were beginning to be drawn on Spielberg.
“Jaws is an artistic and commercial smash,” wrote Daily Variety reviewer Art Murphy, calling it “a film of consummate suspense, tension, and terror.” Time’s anonymous cover story described Jaws as “technically intricate and wonderfully crafted, a movie whose every shock is a devastating surprise.” Frank Rich proclaimed in New Times that “Spielberg is blessed with a talent that is absurdly absent from most American filmmakers these days: this man actually knows how to tell a story on screen…. It speaks well of this director’s gifts that some of the most frightening sequences in Jaws are those where we don’t even see the shark.”
But William S. Pechter confessed in Commentary that he could not “warm very much to filmmaking of this essentially manipulative sort, whose sole aim is systematically to reduce one to a quivering mass of ectoplasm. Jaws is the very essence of what Brecht characterized as the ‘culinary’ element in modern art, high and low—a mind-numbing repast for sense-sated gluttons.” While grudgingly admitting that Jaws was “a scare machine that works with computer-like precision,” Molly Haskell told the readers of The Village Voice that she did not feel “compelled to give it a rave review because I jumped out of my seat…. You feel like a rat, being given shock treatment.”
When Jaws broke the box-office record, Universal took out an eight-page ad in Variety quoting dozens of positive snippets from reviews and claiming hyperbolically, “The most popular movie of all time is also the most acclaimed film of our time.” Sid Sheinberg told the Los Angeles Times that July, “I want to be the first to predict that Steve will win the best-director Oscar this year.” But as Spielberg noted, “For the first twelve weeks of Jaws, people were thrilled by it. Six months later they were saying that no film that made that amount of money could be that good.”
In February 1976, Spielberg blithely ushered a camera crew from a Los Angeles TV station into his office to record his reactions as he watched the Oscar nominations being announced on television. “Jaws is about to be nominated in eleven categories,” he declared. “You’re about to see a sweep of the nominations. We’re very confident.” But as the last name was read from the list of directing nominations, the TV crew captured Spielberg’s astonishment: “Oh, I didn’t get it!” he moaned, clenching his fists against his cheeks. “I didn’t get it! I wasn’t nominated! I got beaten out by Fellini.”‡‡ That slap in the face was given an added sting when Jaws received a Best Picture nomination. Told that his film also had been nominated for music, editing, and sound, Spielberg said, “That’s it? Best screenplay, we didn’t—? Not even special effects?” Regaining his composure somewhat, he picked up his own video camera and taped himself saying in a jocular tone of voice, “For my record, I am outraged that I wasn’t nominated for best director for Jaws.” He added, “This is called ‘commercial backlash.’ … [W]hen a film makes a lot of money, people resent it. Everybody loves a winner. But nobody loves a WINNER.” Although Jaws went on to win the three craft Oscars at the March 29 ceremony, it lost in the top category to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, whose director, Milos Forman, also received an Oscar.
Richard Zanuck later commented that Spielberg “made a terrible mistake having a television crew with him when they read the names.” The humiliating experience evidently taught Spielberg not to wear his heart so publicly on his sleeve about the Oscars and other sensitive subjects. His youthful candor to interviewers gradually gave way to far more circumspect public utterances, such as his remark a few years later, “I think my films are too, umm, popular for the Academy.”
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NEVERTHELESS, Jaws had a profound and lasting influence on Hollywood and the way it does business. The most obvious impact was the most superficial: the plethora of cheesy Jaws sequels and rip-offs that followed in its wake, such as Orca, Grizzly, Alligator, Day of the Animals, Eaten Alive, Tentacles, Great White, The Jaws of Death, Jaws of Satan, and Piranha. Spielberg considered the low-budget, tongue-in-cheek Piranha “the best of the Jaws ripoffs.” The film’s director, Joe Dante, learned later that Universal was “less than thrilled Piranha was coming out at the same time [in 1978] as Jaws 2. They wanted to take out an injunction. Steven saw it and said, ‘This picture’s OK. Leave them alone.’”
Spielberg initially did not want anything to do with Universal’s inevitable attempt to capitalize further on the success of Jaws. While being honored with a somewhat p
remature retrospective at the San Francisco Film Festival in October 1975, he told the audience that “making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick.” Universal, he said, “offered me the opportunity to direct the sequel, but I didn’t even answer them. I didn’t call or write or anything.” Despite those harsh words, his attitude changed in June 1977, when Jaws 2 director John Hancock was fired in the early days of shooting. Universal then offered the job to its feature-production vice president, Verna Fields. Because Spielberg felt Fields had received too much credit for the success of Jaws, it may have been the prospect of her directing the sequel that briefly caused him to reconsider his opposition.
David Brown recalled that while he and Zanuck were negotiating with Fields, Spielberg (then in postproduction on Close Encounters) “called Dick and me in Martha’s Vineyard and said he would like to be of any help he could. He felt allegiance to the project. We said, ‘Do you think you could do it?’ And he said, ‘Let me think about it.’ At this point I said to Verna, ‘How would you feel if we could get Steve? We feel we should take him, don’t you?’ And she said, ‘I would insist upon it.’ Steve also called Sid Sheinberg…. We finally had another telephone call from Steve, who said he would definitely like to do it. And negotiations were undertaken. However, because of his contract with Close Encounters, he couldn’t undertake the contract for a year. Furthermore, he wanted to make radical revisions on the script.”
Spielberg offered a somewhat different account: “I said I’d spend the July Fourth weekend trying to find the solution to a sequel and that if I could write it and Zanuck and Brown would push the production to the spring of ’78, I’d do it. I spent three days at the typewriter and wrote seven or eight schematic breakdowns. I kept the Dreyfuss and Scheider characters in it. Then I finally said to myself, ‘I can’t, I can’t.’ For me, a sequel becomes a real fish story. I called Sid back and said I couldn’t do it…. I decided a sequel would not be an exercise in expanding my own horizons. It would be corporate business.”
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