Spielberg Read online

  Jaws was having a “negative effect” on its director even before production began. The problems began with the novel. Not surprisingly, Spielberg loved its action plot but hated the romantic subplot, which involved an adulterous love triangle among the town’s police chief, his wife, and the marine biologist called in to help snare the shark.

  Although he had virtually no clout after the box-office failure of The Sugarland Express, Spielberg retained enough self-confidence to make some pretty imperious demands of his two bosses.

  “I told Zanuck and Brown that I’d like to do the film, but only on condition that the love story be dropped, that the shark not be revealed until a good sixty-five minutes into the film, and that in the end I could attempt to exorcise as many of the Moby Dick parallels as possible. In the book, [the shark hunter] Quint is snarled in a rope and dragged to his drowning death by the shark [a la Captain Ahab]. I wanted the ending to be much more personal and decided Quint should be masticated and emulsified,” he recalled with grisly determination.

  Spielberg felt the shark caused more than enough heavy breathing and didn’t need any of the human variety to enliven the main action.

  Not mincing words, he told the book’s author flat out that the subplot was “soap opera. I told Peter and he balked for ten hours. After that, he was 100 percent cooperative.”

  Or maybe just distracted since Spielberg added, “Peter wanted to move on and write another book.”

  Benchley’s recollection of their prickly collaboration was less rosy. After Benchley toiled over three rewrites of his screen adaptation, he said, “I give up.”

  Howard Sackler, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for The Great White Hope, tried a draft and found the shark harder to knock out than Jack Johnson, the hero of his play.

  Finally Spielberg collaborated with a buddy from his college days, Carl Gottlieb, on a fifth and sixth draft.

  An examination of how the screenplay evolved is revealing. The first three drafts by Benchley were merely literal reworkings of the novel. Benchley obviously cared more for the private lives of his characters than he did for his toothy villain because his drafts incorporated every heavy breath from the book’s adulterous love triangle.

  Perhaps respecting the original author’s intentions, Howard Sackler, in his draft, kept the romantic subplot, but his version showed none of the talent that had won him a Pulitzer. Spielberg collaborated with Sackler on his version, but their partnership was a bust. “When Howard Sackler came on to the job I sat with him for four weeks at the Bel Air Hotel,” but still no dice, the director recalled.

  Spielberg found his perfect alter ego in Carl Gottlieb.

  In their editions, all the hokey soap opera elements were surgically excised. In fact, at the time of the film’s release, one critic pointed out that Jaws was the first action film in history that did not have a romantic subplot.

  But Spielberg’s analytical genius went far beyond deep-sixing amorous characters. In his drafts, the shark became a terrifying cipher, rarely seen but always felt. The shark was both the most important and the least seen character in the script. And it was indeed a character.

  “My feeling about sharks is that they’ve had 80 million years to get their act together,” he said in an interview shortly after the film came out. “Parts of the book terrorized me. I tried to translate my fear into visual language. It became a picture book of fears, phobias, and anxieties.”

  He must have felt personally vindicated when the film critic for the London Observer essentially agreed with his aesthetic choices regarding the script: “When the story is hurtling the audience along, who cares that Spielberg’s successes are peopled with papier mache characterizations? In Jaws, the three principals are carefully individualized, but their personalities are quickly submerged in the elemental hunt for a shark. Indeed, the film succeeds as entertainment in large measure because it completely excises the banal, interpersonal angst Peter Benchley layered over his characters in the novel.”

  Spielberg felt he had struck just the right balance between light character and heavy action. Years later, after one too many critics complained that he sacrificed character for special effects and cheap thrills in his movies, Spielberg would angrily say, “Jaws and Close Encounters and Raiders would not have involved the audience as entertainment were it not for the characters. Otherwise, people would have rooted for the shark.”

  The problems with the script development were a honeymoon compared to the nightmare that actual shooting became.

  The least of his problems was his youthful appearance. “I looked younger than twenty-six,” he recalled years later. “I looked seventeen, and I still had acne, and that doesn’t help instill confidence in seasoned crews.”

  After the watery headache of making Jaws, he made and kept a promise to himself that he would never, ever again shoot anything on water.

  “If they talk about a sequel, I hope they don’t talk to me. I’ve had it,” he said, summing up the experience. In fact, three more sequels were made, the third a weird concoction in 3-D. Spielberg’s name appeared nowhere in the credits of any of these knockoffs, not even as the honorific “executive consultant.”

  The whims of the ocean make even the most temperamental movie star seem positively gracious in comparison. Most days, because of the unpredictable tides and storms, the crew couldn’t start shooting until 4 P.M. That meant more than just a late start to a long day. The light would start to fade at 6 P.M., so the production had only two hours of shooting time available each day.

  Life on the water was full of perils. The multiphobic director had his worst fears about the water confirmed when he almost drowned. And he would have if he hadn’t been wearing a life preserver. On another occasion, he was almost crushed to death when two vessels collided.

  It could have been worse. The producers, Zanuck and Brown, originally wanted Spielberg to use real sharks. The director laughed: “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.”

  Instead, Spielberg found a safer alternative. He hired Bob Mattey, who had built the giant squid for Disney’s 1954 film, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, to create a mechanical shark.

  Zanuck and Brown, however, continued to push for the real thing. Spielberg didn’t have the clout to say drop dead to these far more powerful producers, so he did an end run around them. Spielberg contacted Ron and Valerie Taylor, Australian documentarians who had made the 1971 film Blue Water, White Death.

  Spielberg recalls, “They’re the foremost authorities on the behavior of great whites, where to find them, how to photograph them. I told them what [Zanuck and Brown had demanded], and they said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ For one thing a shark will not live in captivity, especially a great white. It would die in a boat. It has to keep moving. We’d have to shoot an awful lot of sea water through their gills and keep them alive on the journey to the States.

  “I also knew they wouldn’t allow us to have a great white shark in the waters off Martha’s Vineyard! After a few weeks of discussing the practicality of this wonderful concept, Zanuck and Brown agreed with me that we had to build the shark.” Spielberg did relent and agree to send a second-unit team to Australia to shoot some long shots of the real thing. These live shots were intercut with close-ups of the mechanical shark.

  The mechanical shark, nicknamed Bruce, turned out to be a true enfant terrible. There were actually five rubber sharks, costing a total of $1 million, and every single one of them was more uncooperative than the most egotistical human star. Half the time the sharks’ electronics didn’t work. It may have been all that salt water messing with the diodes and transistors.

  “Jaws was physically exhausting because the ocean pummelled us every single day for over eight months. But physical exhaustion and your anger at nature for putting you through so much torment just build up your will to survive. With Jaws, I was fighting nature, and I grew stronger,�
�� he later said in a calmer, Nietzschean moment. With no exaggeration, he added, “I’m glad I got out of Martha’s Vineyard alive. The morale was my responsibility, and it was important to keep people from losing their minds. I watched quiet men on the crew go bonkers in very vocal ways. I saw the vocal type become totally withdrawn to the point where they tore tiny bits of styrofoam off coffee cups and threw them into the tide. It’s like giving birth to a baby shark and hoping it has legs.”

  Perhaps the hardest part to cast was the shark that was caught by the townspeople early in the film and presumed erroneously to be the killer of the beach goers. Local fishermen in Martha’s Vineyard promised to catch sharks that could be used in Spielberg’s cattle call. But after several days of empty nets, the producers put out an emergency call to Florida; a thirteen-foot tiger shark (dead) was soon flown in, packed in ice. The shark was hung on a hook for five days while it waited for its call to the set. During that time it began to stink in the hot sun. Local people retaliated by dumping dead sharks on the producers’ rented digs. (The producers must have wondered, “Where were these people, and their dead fish, when we were casting the role of the dead shark?”)

  Technical problems and the temperamental sea took their toll on the budget and the shooting schedule. After only three days of shooting, the shark sank, and the production saw its original fifty-five-day shooting schedule balloon disastrously to 155 days! The budget doubled—from $4 million to $8 million. Universal executives threatened to shut down the runaway production and put Bruce on exhibit as part of the Universal Studios Tour.

  Mixing metaphors, Spielberg grimly remembered, “It was Mutiny on the Bounty, with me tied to Moby Dick.”

  “There were so many obstacles in the path on the production of Jaws. The experience was so physically exhausting that the only special feeling any of us shared was watching Bruce the shark stay afloat long enough for a shot to be completed,” he said.

  The dailies saved the production and the director’s butt. Even without its terrifying score by John Williams and most of the special effects, the raw daily footage kept the studio from pulling the plug on the project.

  Meanwhile, tragedy almost befell Carl Gottlieb, the screenwriter whom Spielberg wisely cast in a small role so the writer would always be available on the set for rewrites. While shooting on the ocean, Gottlieb fell overboard and was almost chewed up by the boat’s propeller.

  Roy Scheider, on the other hand, wasn’t taking any chances. For his scene in which he almost drowns as his cabin fills with water, he brought along his own axes and hammers to free himself if the safety crew failed.

  Some days, when the sea was too rough, Spielberg would adhere to the studio’s demand that he film every day by shooting close-ups of objects that, unlike the sea, didn’t move, such as rope, oxygen tanks, and shark cages.

  After five months on location, the crew had become extremely restless—and in Spielberg’s opinion, mutinous. Is he joking when he says that he truly believed the tech people were going to drown him? “That’s the rumor that went around the set. They were going to hold me underwater as long as they could and still avoid a homicide rap. And 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 [until filming was completed],” Spielberg says.

  In fact, after discussing the final shot with cinematographer Bill Butler the night before, Spielberg left without saying goodbye to the cast or crew, taking a ferry from the island to the mainland. From the boat, Spielberg allegedly screamed “I shall not return!”—an obvious twist to General MacArthur’s famous farewell to the Philippines on the eve of the Japanese surrender.

  There was one palliative on the set, and it was a lifesaver. As much as Spielberg hated the mechanical shark, the uncooperative tides, and the nervous studio brass, he loved his star, Richard Dreyfuss.

  Ironically, Dreyfuss wasn’t the director’s first choice for the role of the marine biologist. Spielberg originally went after Jon Voight, who turned him down. Robert Shaw, who played the great white shark hunter, Quint, also was not the director’s first choice. He had offered the role to Lee Marvin, who rebuffed him, saying, “I’m going to do some real fishing,” before embarking on a fishing trip. It was a big mistake for both Voight and Marvin. Shaw, up to then a character actor, became a major star after appearing in the biggest hit of all time. Another actor, Roy Scheider, who played the police chief, also found himself transformed from supporting actor to handsome leading man after Jaws came out.

  But it was Dreyfuss who bonded most closely with the director during filming. Jaws, in the words of Casablanca’s finale, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, one that would last professionally and personally for two decades.

  After the exhausting regimen of sea and studio, Dreyfuss was the director’s personal shot of adrenaline. “Richard is a major energy outlet,” Spielberg said. “Everyone plugs into Dreyfuss to wake up in the morning. We stretch out umbilicals over to him and join navels. He’s like a hydroelectric plant. Ricky and I would get into jam sessions on both Jaws and Close Encounters. And a lot of good things came out of them.”

  Dreyfuss didn’t share his director’s enthusiasm. In fact, he initially turned down the role of the marine biologist called in to offer scientific know-how on how to nail the shark.

  Dreyfuss was a serious actor. He had just starred in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, a low-budget, intensely character-driven study of a Jewish heel in Montreal. Ironically, his fears about Duddy Kravitz finally got him to change his mind about taking on Bruce the shark. Before Kravitz was released to glowing reviews and predictions that Dreyfuss would become a major star, the actor was sure he had turned in a terrible performance. (He hadn’t.) To revive what he thought was a faltering career, he reluctantly agreed to appear in a potential blockbuster like Jaws.

  As Spielberg wryly described the artsy actor’s attitude: “Richard told me he would rather see the film than be in it, and I told him I was interested in making a movie, not a film. Rick said all along he thought the movie would be a turkey.”

  Once Dreyfuss overcame his artistic qualms, he threw himself into the project with such devotion Spielberg felt himself perpetually charmed during the traumatic shoot.

  “I don’t have a working philosophy. What I need depends on the story I’m telling and the actor I’m working with. Take Richard Dreyfuss. Working with him is pure joy because we’re so close. He’s as crazy as I am, and if we aren’t fighting like wild men over some electronic computer game or other, we both adore playing board games. Then there are absolutely no problems at all.”

  Dreyfuss wasn’t quite so effusive on his collaborator. “He’s a perfectionist,” Dreyfuss said of Spielberg. “He shoots scenes again and again until he gets exactly what he wants. But he’s good to work with because unlike some directors, he actually knows exactly what he wants.”

  That character trait—knowing exactly what he wants—was best demonstrated after the film was in the can, edited, and ready to hit the theaters.

  Sneak preview audiences were turning in 99 percent approval-rating index cards. Universal executives were ecstatic. They didn’t want the director to touch or tinker with this gold mine waiting to be excavated.

  But the perfectionist director discovered what he perceived to be flaws in the final cut during a sneak preview at a Dallas theater.

  The scariest moment in Jaws, which has people literally jumping up in their seats, has to be the scene where the corpse pokes its head out of a hole in the hull of a submerged boat. As originally shot, the camera first focused on the faces of the actors and the look of horror they expressed before revealing the object of their horror, the corpse’s head.

  During the Dallas sneak, Spielberg realized the actors’ reaction was giving away the surprise.

  Spielberg called up the cinematographer and took him over to the pool in the film editor’s backyard. There, he
re-created the murky waters off Martha’s Vineyard by throwing Carnation’s powdered milk into the unlucky editor’s pool. Then he reshot the corpse scene without showing the actor’s reaction first.

  The tinkering was a big improvement. People leapt from their seats. The only problem was that Spielberg had violated union rules by not using a union crew. He confessed his crime to the union and voluntarily paid a fine into its retirement fund.

  As the film’s editor, the late Verna Fields, recalled at the time, “Steven essentially threw himself on the mercy of the union, and they forgave him.”

  The director, based on the sneak preview reaction, also reedited the climactic scene when the shark leaps out of the water and on to the boat.

  As one studio source says, “Steven is the ultimate tinkerer. On Judgment Day, he’ll ask God if he can shoot the Apocalypse from a different angle.”

  When Jaws was released in June 1975, it enjoyed twofold success: it broke box-office records and the critics loved it.

  There were instant comparisons to Hitchcock and the master’s use of relaxation and tension, alternating moments of terror with humor.

  “I always thought of Jaws as a comedy,” Spielberg said.

  Gary Arnold of the Washington Post took the film much more seriously and compared Jaws’ montage of swimmers fleeing the water during the shark attack to the classic Odessa Steps sequence of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, one of the greatest films of all time.

  “Spielberg’s dynamic sense of movement creates a compelling sense of flight, confusion and anxiety. There has never been an adventure-thriller quite as terrifying yet enjoyable as Jaws, and it should set the standard in its field for many years to come,” Arnold said in his review.

  The studio didn’t care about esoteric comparisons to fifty-year-old silent film classics. Sid Sheinberg fell all over himself making outrageous predictions in the ecstasy of the moment. “I want to be the first to predict that Steve will win best director Oscar this year,” he proclaimed. Sheinberg had an additional reason to be pleased by Spielberg. The director had found work for Sheinberg’s wannabe actress wife. With virtually no acting credits to her name, Lorraine Gary, Mrs. Sid Sheinberg, landed the plum role of Scheider’s wife. She would find gainful employment in several Jaws’ sequels.