This week’s headline nods to the fact that the movie Jaws is now 50 years old; but it also admits that a single Webb article can’t possibly cover all the fascinating facts about this film: the actors; the music; the box-office bonanza; Peter Benchley’s original book; and of course, the infamous rigors of actual production, which doubled the budget — and nearly tripled the initial shooting schedule.
That’s why you should come to my free talk this Thursday — 5:30 p.m. at Brown Library (registration at jvbrown.edu.). We’ll discuss not only Spielberg’s enduring blockbuster, but also other movie milestones from 1975.
In the meantime, here are several Jaws tidbits — to bait the hook, I guess you could say.
Young director Steven Spielberg had previously made only two full-length films; one of these — the thrilling made-for-TV Duel — had a similar vibe of “everyman against a faceless killer” (in that case, it was Dennis Weaver vs. a maniacal trucker); in acknowledgement of this, Spielberg had the sound of the truck’s destruction revamped for use as the shark’s death roar.
Novelist Benchley was initially hired to pen the Jaws script, but Spielberg wanted more humor; so he hired Carl Gottlieb, who had worked on TV’s Odd Couple. Gottlieb — who, like Benchley, has a small role in Jaws — wound up adding more than two dozen scenes that were not in the book. He also went on to pen The Jaws Log, which has been called the best single account ever written about making a movie.
Spielberg hit a gold-mine in the now-famous acting trio of Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss — but many others were considered for those roles: Charlton Heston (Sheriff Brody); Robert Duvall, Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden (Quint); and Jon Voight, Joel Grey and Jeff Bridges (Hooper).
Most fans know about the mechanical shark, eventually nicknamed Bruce — though there were actually three of these; more on that shortly. What you may not know is that there were also two Orca’s (Quint’s famous boat — appropriately named for a shark’s only natural predator); the second Orca was a fiberglass mock-up, designed to sink and be re-floated numerous times while filming the climax.
As for Bruce & co.: After scrapping a brief but lunatic idea to train real sharks, the effects crew built three 25-foot mechanical beasts — one whole, and one each with an open right and left flank (to be filmed the from opposite sides of course). Having decided to shoot in Martha’s Vineyard partly for its somewhat shallow waters, the crew built a greased ocean-floor track for these machines to “ride,” while also attached to a pivoting arm; using this and a separate sled-like device that could be directed through the water, the prosthetic fish were able to move up to 70 feet without visible support.
One lesser-known detail involves the infamous jump-scare when Ben Gardner’s damaged head suddenly appears at a hole in his boat. Long after filming ended and test-screenings had begun, Spielberg remained unhappy with the sequence; he reshot it in a California swimming pool — belonging to Jaws’s Oscar-winning editor, Verna Fields.
In order to simulate night for this shoot, they covered Fields’s pool with a tarp — also pouring powdered milk into the water so it would look like the particle-laden Atlantic. That reshoot cost $3,000 (about $20K nowadays) — and Spielberg paid for it himself.
Despite this sort of overage, Jaws was such a box-office smash that it totally reshaped modern movie marketing; not only was it the first-ever “summer blockbuster,” but also, it ushered in the now-standard practice of opening in hundreds of theaters (well, it’s actually thousands today) — rather than a staggered release allowing word of mouth to build.
Jaws became the biggest money-maker up to that time (soon to be displaced by Star Wars, however); it inspired three sequels, two theme-park rides, video games, a Lego set, a musical, a documentary, a play by Shaw’s son (2019’s The Shark Is Broken) — and of course, a host of shark-movie imitators, most of them lame to say the least. (Though Piranha, Deep Blue Sea and The Shallows all manage pretty well.)
Yet despite this financial windfall and legacy, Spielberg was not even nominated for a Best Director Oscar.
Since then, he has certainly had the last laugh: Eventually tapped for nine Academy Awards, he’s won three and is now “the highest-grossing film director of all time.”
That quote is from Wikipedia — as is most of the info above. What Gottlieb has to say would fill three articles or more; so come to my talk — and we’ll also discuss who did win Best Director in that sterling cinematic year.
