Steven Spielberg (43 page)

Before the galley proofs reached Universal and several other movie studios in 1973,
Jaws
had been turned down by ABC as a TV movie, because the network figured it would cost too much to produce. That decision was made before the book stirred a feeding frenzy in the publishing industry with its paperback auction: Bantam Books bought the paperback rights for a staggering $575,000. “There was a lot of heat around town on this book,” recalls Peter Saphier, who was Jennings Lang's right-hand man at Universal. “It was given to me on a Wednesday [April 11, 1973] by Benchley's agent
[John Ptak of International Famous Artists], and I read it over the weekend. I thought, This is going to be a smash movie—send it to Lew Wasserman. We had to move quickly. Jennings was a consummate packager, and when I gave him the report on Monday, he said, ‘I'll call Lew. I'll call Leonard Hirshan [a William Morris agent] and send it to him for Paul Newman.' I wrote a note to Lew and—thinking of the old man and the sea—I suggested Alfred Hitchcock to direct.”

On April 17, the Universal story department, which generated a reader's report on every property offered to the studio, rendered its opinion. To Saphier's astonishment, “They didn't like it! If the story department liked a property, they would stamp on the first page ‘Recommend,' or they would stamp ‘Possibility.' If they didn't like it they wouldn't stamp it at all. They didn't stamp it at all. I thought, Oh, God, they're killing me.” But by the following day, Zanuck and Brown had read the synopsis by studio reader Dennis McCarthy, and they called Wasserman to express their strong interest in the project.

They soon found themselves in what Zanuck remembers as “a fierce bidding contest.” Columbia expressed interest on behalf of veteran producer-director Stanley Kramer, but the final bidding came down to Warner Bros.  and Universal. “We did everything,” Zanuck said. “We got down on bended knee. We made a lot of promises that, happily, we lived up to…. The other people had as much money as we did. It got down to who was going to make the better picture. We convinced [Benchley] that we would.” In a deal concluded on May 1 between Ptak and Universal, Zanuck/Brown agreed to pay the author $150,000 and 10 percent of the net profits for the book and $25,000 for his screenplay adaptation.
†
“Jennings, frankly, erupted when that happened,” Saphier says. “He felt it should have been our picture, under our wing.”

A few days later, when Saphier was having lunch in the studio commissary, Zanuck and Brown thanked him for finding
Jaws.
“We figure on making it as a low-budget picture for about $750,000,” they said. Saphier expressed skepticism that a film made on the water—traditionally regarded as a nightmarish environment for filmmakers—could be shot so cheaply. The producers thought for a moment and replied, “Maybe a million.” Brown later admitted that after acquiring the book, he and Zanuck “experienced a panic of unpreparedness. If we had read
Jaws
twice, we might never have made the movie. Careful analysis could have convinced us that it was too difficult to make.”

Z
ANUCK
and Brown initially thought the best way to ensure themselves against the production problems posed by
Jaws
was to hire an experienced
action director. The first director with whom they discussed the picture was John Sturges, whose films included not only the classics
Bad
Day
at
Black
Rock
and
The
Great
Escape
but also
The
Old
Man
and
the
Sea
,
a travesty of the Hemingway novel filmed mostly in a studio tank, with Spencer Tracy sitting in front of a process screen. That was exactly the kind of film the producers came to realize they did
not
want to make of
Jaws.
They decided to offer the job instead to Dick Richards, who was in his late thirties and had made his feature debut at Fox in 1972 with a Western about a teenaged cowboy,
The
Culpepper
Cattle
Company.

“Part of the deal, if we were to buy this book, was that it would be much appreciated if we took an IFA director,” Zanuck recalls. “We had a gentleman's agreement with Mike Medavoy [Spielberg's former agent, then head of the motion picture department of IFA]. They came up with several names. We went back [to New York] to meet with Benchley, and we brought this director [Richards] with us to lunch at ‘21.' The director kept referring to this thing as ‘the whale.' After he'd done it three times, I said, ‘For God's sake, this is a fucking shark!' As we walked back to the office after this disastrous lunch, I said to Mr. Brown, ‘We gotta renege. No way this guy who thinks a shark's a whale is going to direct this picture.' I called Mike. It was a tough call. Mike said, ‘This is a big renege. I'm going to lose the client.' I said, ‘Your client should know the difference between a whale and a shark. I can't go out to sea with this man.'”

Spielberg by then had made his interest known, and the producers, delighted by his work on
The
Sugarland
Express
,
were beginning to think it might be better
not
to work with a more experienced Hollywood hand. “The studio visualized having one of those guys out there,” Zanuck says. “It probably would have made more sense from an economic standpoint, and we would sleep better at night, but we wanted to make something that would knock everybody's socks off.” “We were looking for a film as well as a movie,” said Brown, “and that's why we selected Steven Spielberg.”

His signing was announced on June 21, 1973. But not before Spielberg, too, began having second thoughts. “Steven got very excited about it, and then got very scared,” Zanuck says. “It became a question of ‘How do you
make
the son of a bitch?' It's one thing to read the book and another to build the shark.”
Jaws
co-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb reported that Spielberg also was “afraid of being typed as an action director who specialized in contests between brave men and insensate killers. ‘Who wants to be known as a shark-and-truck director?' was his complaint.” Spielberg “was reluctant to take on
Jaws
because he recognized it would be primarily a commercial movie and not necessarily a distinguished film, and he is a serious filmmaker,” Brown said shortly before
Jaws
was released in 1975. “Dick and I convinced him, and I think he now realizes he did make a film as well as a movie—not that he doesn't respect the big commercial movie and regard it as a necessary part of his career.”

All of Spielberg's instincts from childhood had driven him to seek acceptance
and approval from the majority. Being a marginal artist rather than a popular filmmaker was psychologically unacceptable to him. And after the
succès
d'
estime
of
The
Sugarland
Express,
it was vital for him to prove to Hollywood that he was more than an art-house
auteur.
So he swallowed his doubts and agreed to make “the big commercial movie.”

“We went to Wasserman and Sheinberg,” Zanuck recalls, “and it's hard to imagine now, but at the time you're talking about a guy's second picture. He hadn't proved himself. Even though Wasserman was very impressed by the kid—in those days we referred to him many times as ‘the kid'—Wasserman thought he was a strange choice.”

“Jesus, Dick, the kid's great and everything,” Wasserman said, “but remember you're going to be out there, it's going to be a big production, and it can get out of control. Wouldn't you be better off with one of the sure-handed guys who's done this kind of picture before?”

Zanuck replied, “That's exactly what we
don't
want. We don't want to do
Moby-Dick
again. The kid can bring visual excitement to it. We'll give him the support he needs.”

T
WENTY
years after the making of
Jaws
,
Zanuck/Brown production executive Bill Gilmore described it as “the most difficult film ever made, to this day.” Soon after principal photography began on May 2, 1974, on Martha's Vineyard, it became apparent that the star of the film, the mechanical shark, was refusing to cooperate. “Around August 1, when the movie was in terrible jeopardy, with the shark not working,” Gilmore relates, “I came back to the hotel and I was agonized. My wife said to me, ‘Who was the guy that told 'em the movie could be done in the first place?' I took a big Scotch. We were all heroes in retrospect, but we all thought we had failed because we'd gone double the budget and double the schedule.” In fact,
Jaws
went almost
triple
the schedule, with its planned 55 days of shooting ballooning to 159.

At the beginning, when Zanuck gave Gilmore the galleys of the book, wanting his ideas about how to make the movie and how much it would cost, Gilmore “read it as being sort of a Hollywood shark, a supershark that could do everything but fly. Benchley wrote, ‘Towering overhead, it blocked out the light.' Dick Zanuck said, ‘Can we do it?' I said, ‘Yes, we can do it.' I was speaking out of all the arrogance of somebody who had grown up in the business and felt Hollywood could do anything—Gene Kelly could dance with a mouse, we could put people into orbit. We accepted and believed that we could build a mechanical shark and we could shoot over the head of the victim toward the shark and over the head of the shark toward the victim. It had never been done before.

“And we took on the Atlantic Ocean. Nobody had ever done a movie at sea with a small boat. Every movie that was shot at sea, they always wound up shooting in a tank with a process screen, and it looked like it. From the beginning, Steven and [production designer] Joe Alves and myself and
Zanuck agreed we would shoot on a real sea. I can't tell you how many times that came back and bit us in the ass. But despite all the problems it caused us, ultimately it's why the picture was so incredibly successful, because everybody was
there.
It was a real sea and a real boat.”

Gilmore's belief that a mechanical “supershark” could be built by Hollywood special-effects wizards began to focus the producers on the realities involved. Gottlieb reported that Zanuck and Brown “had innocently assumed that they could get a shark trainer somewhere, who, with enough money, could get a great white shark to perform a few simple stunts on cue in long shots with a dummy in the water, after which they could cut to miniatures or something for the close-up stuff.” Spielberg laughed when he remembered those discussions: “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. I was yelling: ‘Disney!' The minute I read the script, I was yelling, ‘Disney! We've gotta get the guy who did the squid in
20,000
Leagues
Under
the
Sea!'
… I didn't know who he was at the time. It turned out to be Bob Mattey and we hired him to build us a shark. But they still wanted me to experiment with live sharks.”

While Mattey, who had been lured out of retirement, started to work on three twenty-five-foot mechanical sharks to perform various functions in the film, Zanuck and Brown hired the husband-and-wife team of Ron and Valerie Taylor to shoot live shark footage off Dangerous Reef on the coast of South Australia. The producers felt that whatever wonders Mattey might be able to perform, it was important to see an actual shark in the film and to be able to publicize that fact. The Taylors were renowned for their intrepid underwater photography on
Blue
Water
,
White
Death.
When Gilmore met them in Australia, he “was nervous, because I felt here are the greatest shark experts in the world. I said, ‘How did you like the book?' Ron Taylor said, ‘I don't know who Mr. Benchley is, but whoever he is, he knows the great white. Because everything he writes about could happen.' The hair went up on the back of my neck. Being a cynical Hollywood type, I was stunned that a great white shark really
could
do all this. From that moment on, I knew we had a chance.”

Spielberg made a wish list of sixteen shots he wanted from the Taylors, including footage of a shark circling a man in an underwater cage. Later, close shots of Richard Dreyfuss in a wet suit would be filmed in a studio tank to match their footage. To make the real shark look even larger, a midget Stuntman, an ex-jockey named Carl Rizzo, was sent down as Dreyfuss's underwater double. “When we were shooting the live shark footage,” Valerie Taylor recalled, “none of us had any idea that the film would be such a tremendous success. To Ron and me it was just another filming job, our eighth at that time, involving great white sharks. It was the first time that Ron had to work to a script.” But the shark did not follow the script.

The Taylors put out to sea with shark expert Rodney Fox on February 16, 1974. After ten days, they managed to get footage of a shark circling a cage.
Then they readied Rizzo for a dive in his cage, which was five-eighths scale. He was about to be lowered from a nineteen-foot fiberglass auxiliary boat, the
Skippy
,
when the shark suddenly attacked the boat. “The
Skippy
rolled onto her side, dragged down by a half a ton of fighting fish,” Valerie Taylor wrote in her diary of the filming. “A huge head rose above the spray twisting and turning, black maw gaping in a frenzy of rage and pain. Triangular teeth splintered as they tore the restricting metal. The brute dove, his cycle tail whipping the air six feet above the surface.

“Carl stood frozen with shock. As Rodney pulled him back, the tail brushed Carl's face. Had Rodney been two seconds slower, the little stuntman would have been killed, his head crushed into pulp…. The great white shark's body crashed into the hull. The noise was incredible, splitting wood, thrashing water, cage against boat, shark against boat…. A last mighty splash, then shark, cage, winch, and deck vanished in a boiling, foaming swirl. Had Carl been in the cage, he too would have vanished with no possible chance of survival.”