Steven Spielberg (44 page)

What happened next was related by Spielberg: “Immediately, our stuntman turned around and quite calmly walked to the hold of the ship and locked himself in the head [the toilet]! And they tried to get him out of there with a butter knife and he was holding the door closed and he would not move!”

The next day, Gilmore received a phone call from Ron Taylor on the coast of Australia. “He was so excited on the phone he was interrupting himself,” Gilmore says. “He went on to tell us he had just shot the most spectacular shark footage he had ever seen in his professional life. I said, ‘Ron, that's great. Was the little guy in the cage?' He said no. My heart sank. I said, ‘It's unusable.' They sent the film; it was the most spectacular footage. [Film editor] Verna Fields and Steven and I were all so bummed by the fact that it was unusable until we decided it was so good we had to have it in the movie. In the book, the Dreyfuss character goes down in the cage, the shark comes over and takes his cage on—it's the end of
Dreyfuss, the shark eats him. We had Dreyfuss drop his gun, the shark would go on, and Dreyfuss would get out of the cage, swim down, and hide in the rocks. Can you imagine
Jaws
without Dreyfuss's character? He was the most likable character. The shark down in Australia rewrote the script and saved Dreyfuss's character.”

W
HEN
Spielberg approached Dreyfuss to play the outspoken ichthyologist Matt Hooper,
‡
the actor said, “I would go to see this movie in a minute. I don't want to do it.”

“Why?” asked Spielberg.

“Because, as an actor, it doesn't do a thing for me.”

After completing the movie, Dreyfuss explained, “The character, as it existed, was just there to give out shark information…. Boring, boring, boring. But then I had no money, everybody said there was going to be an actors' strike, everyone I trust as an advisor said, ‘Do it.' So we constructed a character over three days and finally I said OK, I gave in, I surrendered, I was a prostitute.”

Dreyfuss was not cast until shortly before the start of principal photography. Spielberg's first choice for Hooper, Jon Voight, had turned down the part; the director also considered Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Joel Grey. In casting the young actor he came to view as “my alter ego,” Spielberg was reshaping the character and the film to reflect his own sensibilities. Besides being short and full of what Spielberg called “kinetic energy,” Dreyfuss has other traits in common with the director. As the actor's longtime friend Carl Gottlieb observed, “When his speech exceeds rationality, it is only because his fast-moving mouth has not caught up with his even faster-racing brain.” Dreyfuss is “not an intellectual man. His college education is incomplete, and he can be surprisingly naive on certain issues…. [But he] can easily grasp a complex problem, reduce its conflicts and ambiguities to a few broad generalities, and then set a course of action that enables him to deal specifically with those large assumptions.”

To Spielberg, Dreyfuss also “represents the underdog in all of us.” Using him as a mouthpiece, Spielberg and Gottlieb were able to elevate
Jaws
from a formulaic monster melodrama to a film with a modestly stated, yet clearly defined social perspective. As “an American Jew with clearly defined ethnic roots,” Dreyfuss exemplifies what Gottlieb defined as “a tradition of intellectual inquiry, respect for learning, and intense involvement with morality and law.” Those qualities are abundantly present in the film's Matt Hooper, the voice of scientific reason and civic responsibility against a town whose leaders initially are more concerned with tourist dollars than with protecting their citizens against harm. In taking a principled stand against official hypocrisy, Hooper helps awaken the conscience of Roy Scheider's police chief Martin Brody. After an initial display of cowardice, Brody risks his career to defy the venal mayor (Murray Hamilton), the toadying newspaper editor (Gottlieb), and the town's short-sighted merchants.

Despite his disdain for the movie, which lasted throughout the shooting process, Dreyfuss responded enthusiastically to his collaboration with Spielberg: “Steve's not what you'd call an actor's director in the classical sense. But he's relaxed and open in the way he communicates what he wants, and he helps you to get there. In his philosophy, the actors serve the story. But this doesn't eliminate improvisation—not at all.”

Spielberg's shrewd, offbeat casting sense also was evident in his rejection of Universal stalwart Charlton Heston, who made it known that he wanted to play Chief Brody. No doubt recalling his unfavorable impression of Heston from their meeting when Spielberg was serving his apprenticeship at the studio, the director realized that Heston's stentorian, larger-than-life persona
would make it hard for the audience to see him as a small-town police chief, particularly one with such unheroic, all-too-human failings. After trying to persuade Zanuck and Sheinberg to let him cast the little-known Joseph Bologna, Spielberg offered the part to Robert Duvall, but Duvall wanted to play Captain Quint, and Spielberg had trouble envisaging him in such a flamboyant role (a decision the director later regretted). According to Brown, Spielberg was “slow to come around” on the decision to cast Roy Scheider as Brody. The actor was best known at the time as the hard-boiled New York cop in
The
French
Connection
,
and Spielberg did not want Brody to be played as a tough guy. But Scheider proved highly credible in a low-key performance as Spielberg's “Mr. Everyday Regular Fella.”

Lee Marvin turned down the role of Quint, and Sterling Hayden was unable to appear in the film because of his ongoing tax problems. Spielberg turned to Robert Shaw, the colorful British actor, playwright, and novelist who had worked for Zanuck and Brown in
The
Sting.
Although worrying that Shaw's film performances were always “over the top,” Spielberg rationalized that Quint should be played larger than life. Shaw came to admire Spielberg once they started working together, but the actor initially approached the project with cynicism. He told
Time
magazine,
“Jaws
was not a novel. It was a story written by a committee, a piece of shit.”

“
P
ETER
Benchley's view of his book was not my view of the movie I wanted to make from his book,” Spielberg told
Newsweek
reporter Henry McGee in an unguarded moment on location in Martha's Vineyard. “Peter didn't like any of his characters, so none of them were very likable. He put them in a situation where you were rooting for the shark to eat the people—in alphabetical order.”

Although an efficient page-turner, Benchley's first novel is peopled with cardboard characters and bogged down by a pulpish subplot Spielberg aptly described as “too much like
Peyton
Place”
—the shark action is repeatedly and distractingly interrupted by the couplings of the police chief's wife with  the visiting ichthyologist. spielberg insisted on doing away with the book's  sexual and mafia subplots and minimizing its
moby-dick
  parallels. sid  sheinberg concurred, suggesting, “why don't we simply make
duel
  with a  shark?”

Benchley wrote two screenplay drafts, one in consultation with Spielberg. Although the structure of the film follows Benchley's second draft fairly closely, most of his dialogue was rewritten and the action scenes became far more exciting as Spielberg reimagined them, often improvising to deal with problems posed by the sea and the mechanical sharks. “I was not a competent screenwriter,” concedes Benchley, who says he failed to grasp how much a book has to be changed in the transition from script to screen. “The only argument Steven and I had was over the ending,” the novelist adds. “He said, ‘The ending of the book is a downer,' and he told me what he
wanted to do.” In the book, Hooper and Quint are killed by the shark, and the shark escapes. But in the film, Hooper survives and Chief Brody kills the shark by ramming a tank of compressed air into its mouth and firing a bullet into the tank. Benchley told Spielberg, ‘‘That is incredible. The audience will never believe it.” Spielberg replied, “If I have them for two hours, they'll believe it. I want them to go out of the theater screaming.” Benchley concedes that the director “absolutely pulled it off.”

Looking for new writers, Spielberg first turned to Richard Levinson and William Link, as he previously had done on
The
Sugarland
Express
,
but received the same answer they had given him before. “We were not interested at all,” Link says of
Jaws.
“We hated the whole idea. We were doing important television like
The
Execution
of
Private
Slovik
and
That
Certain
Summer
—we were the social-issue boys. We, idiots that we were, tried to talk him out of it. We said, ‘Why do you want to do a dumb horror film? It's like a Hammer film. You're so talented, what do you want to do a dumb thing about a shark for?' He wasn't too all fired up about it, and he hated the first half of the book. He said, ‘I'm going to make it on Cape Cod. You can come there with your wives. You'll have a good time.' We said, ‘No, no, Steve. Why would you approve meretricious material like this?' As we all know,
Jaws
turned out to be a brilliant thriller. He invited us to see it about two months before it came out. We said, ‘Gotta buy MCA.' We bought thousands of shares, and it was very lucrative for us. The woman who became my wife saw the film and said, ‘Never turn that kid down again!'”

Howard Sackler, the playwright and screenwriter who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his play
The
Great
White
Hope
,
was brought in to tackle the great white shark. An experienced scuba diver, Sackler spent five weeks rewriting the script of
Jaws
but requested no credit. One of his most significant contributions was the story of the 1945 sinking of the USS
Indianapolis
in shark-infested waters. As a monologue for Quint, the haunting tale gives the grizzled shark-hunter a reason for his obsessive hatred of sharks. Spielberg thought Sackler's speech needed to be expanded, so he enlisted the help of John Milius, a World War II buff who “really wanted me to cast him as Quint all along and wrote the speech as only John Milius would say it.” The final version was revised by Shaw, who “was a brilliant writer and ad-libbed,” Zanuck says. “He was half drunk at the time.”

Spielberg felt Sackler helped refocus the script on “the four or five elements that made the book so enthralling—especially the last hundred pages,” but the director was far from satisfied with Sackler's draft and his own subsequent attempt to rewrite it. “I knew what I needed to do was cast the movie and do something that is very frightening to me—which I understand Bob Altman does quite a lot—you subjugate absolute control to meaningful collaboration; everybody gets into a room to determine jointly what kind of movie we are going to make here. Is it going to be a picture about the shark—or about the heroes who kill the shark? I hired a man named Carl Gottlieb, who was an old friend of mine, and he came with me to Martha's
Vineyard essentially to polish the script as the actors sat with me every night—often only twenty-four hours before the shot—and
improvise
…. I dealt with the actors in
Jaws
as intensely as I dealt with the special effects.”

To facilitate their work on the script, Gottlieb and Spielberg shared a house on location, with Gottlieb continuing to work on the revisions after Spielberg went to sleep. Each morning, Gottlieb would give new pages to the company typist, and by 8:30
A.M.
they would be approved and ready for filming. “It made for incredible tension on the location, because of changes in props,” Gottlieb said in a 1975 interview. “Some days the production manager, William Gilmore, and Spielberg wouldn't even talk.”

F
URTHER
tension arose when Benchley visited the location. Spielberg asked him to play a TV reporter broadcasting a report from the beach about shark attacks. As it happened, the day Benchley arrived on Martha's Vineyard was the day the
Newsweek
article hit the stands with Spielberg's bad-mouthing of the novel. When Benchley stepped off the plane at the local airport, he was met by unit publicist Al Ebner and
Los
Angeles
Times
reporter Gregg Kilday, who was there to do a feature on the filming. As Benchley recalls, Kilday announced: “Spielberg says your book is a piece of shit.”

“You must understand,” Benchley shot back to the reporter, “there has never been a question of controversy. I understood what they had to take out. When I finished my version of the screenplay, Brown said it was wonderful. Zanuck said it was OK. Spielberg didn't say anything. After Howard Sackler did his rewrite, I sent an angry letter to David Brown. I accused one of the characters, the oceanographer [Hooper], of being an insufferable, pedantic little schmuck. I think Spielberg took it to mean him. [
Benchley
laughed.
] But that is
not
what the letter said.

“Spielberg needs to work on character. He knows, flatly, zero. Consider: He is a twenty-six-year-old [actually twenty-seven] who grew up with movies. He has no knowledge of reality but the movies. He is B-movie literate. When he must make decisions about the small ways people behave, he reaches for movie clichés of the forties and fifties.”

With what Kilday described as “a certain sardonic pleasure,” Benchley concluded: “Wait and see. Spielberg will one day be known as the greatest second-unit director in America.”

Recalling that outburst twenty years later, Benchley said, “In the great catalogue of stupid things one says in life, that ranks high on the list. It was an extremely unfortunate bit of anger. We had both been manipulated by the press. We were both extremely naive. I regretted my petulant response immediately and I tried to take it back [Kilday reported both versions in his July 7 article]. Universal was getting upset we were pissing all over each other in public. They said, ‘Please stop this.' After that, the two of us got together and told each other we were really sorry. In a way, my remark was a cleansing.”