Steven Spielberg (45 page)

Spielberg claimed
Newsweek
had misrepresented his comments. He explained to Benchley that what he
really
felt was, “The book is
not a good book as a film.” Benchley took that convoluted statement to mean: “You couldn't just shoot the book.” Nevertheless, Benchley laments, “Steven had an unfortunate tendency to denigrate the book in public.” Three months before
Jaws
was released, the film magazine
Millimeter
published an interview Spielberg had given on Martha's Vineyard. This time the director was quoted as saying, “If we don't succeed in making this picture better than the book, we're in real trouble.”

Spielberg sent Benchley a letter of apology, to which the beleaguered author responded: “Thanks for your letter, I don't see
Millimeter
(in fact, your mention of it was the first I'd ever heard), so whatever vicious, putrid, scabrous, scurrilous, subversive slime you ladled on me would probably have escaped my view. Nevertheless, forewarned is … etc. You were thoughtful to write.

“In fairness, though, you should know that I have employed mercenaries to prepare a broadside about you, revealing, at last, the sordid truth about your personal life. It'll all be there—whips, leather sneakers, shorty-nighties and crunchy peanut butter. I'm aiming for the June issue of
Jack
& Jill….”

“
L
OOK
,
Jaws
could have turned out to be the laugh riot of '75,” Spielberg said later. “I made it to entertain myself, then I tried to get off it three times.”

In the months before shooting began, Spielberg gave serious consideration to quitting
Jaws
to direct
Lucky
Lady
for Twentieth Century–Fox. An original screenplay by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz,
Lucky
Lady
was a romantic comedy/action melodrama about 1930s rum-runners involved in a
ménage
à
trois.
Paul Newman wanted Spielberg to direct him in it. “I was offered a film that I very much wanted to direct at Fox,” Spielberg said at his November 1973 AFI seminar, “and Universal had a preemption right in [my contract], so they exercised their preemption right against the Fox project for a film [
Jaws
]
that I had committed to do but wasn't going into production for at least eight months. Universal is a corporation, and they don't treat you like an individual…. [Y]ou reach a certain high point in your career and you really want out bad. They make you pay the piper again and again.” After shooting
Jaws
,
which he considered “the worst experience of my life,” he told studio publicist Orin Borsten, “I will never do another picture for Universal.”

When Jennings Lang heard that Spielberg wanted out of
Jaws
,
he yelled at Spielberg over the telephone (in a conversation overheard by Lang's teenaged son Rocky): “You're going to stay with this movie. You're going to do a great job. It's going to be great. What do you want to go to Fox and do
Lucky
Lady
for? It's going to be a disaster.” The savvy Jennings Lang was right on both counts. With Stanley Donen directing Burt Reynolds, Gene Hackman,
and Liza Minnelli,
Lucky
Lady
became, as Gloria Katz put it, “an appalling movie.”

Sid Sheinberg also had words with Spielberg over
Jaws.
“It was one of the few disagreements that Steven and I had,” the MCA president said in a 1988 interview. “I literally forced him to do it…. I think he was upset for a while. He turned to me and said, ‘Why are you making me do this B movie?'”

“I was tipped off that Steven was going to come in my office and resign,” Zanuck recalls. “This was about three months before the picture started. He was scared, and I think he felt overwhelmed. He wasn't sure he was the right guy for it, and he was being tempted by offers to do other things. When I made the deal with him at Fox [for the script of
Ace
Eli
and
Rodger
of
the
Skies
],
we included two cheap directorial options at $50,000 each. They had
Lucky
Lady
,
and I didn't think much of it. I told him, ‘You're well off not getting involved.' I would have said that about
Gone
With
the
Wind
,
because I wanted him to stay on this project. We were under deadline to get started and finished before an actors' strike.
§
Wasserman had told us we would have to start before a certain date or we couldn't start. We had a lot of people involved in building the shark. It was a nightmare.

“Steven had made up some
Jaws
T-shirts, and when I was told he was coming in to resign, I hurriedly took off my shirt and put on the
Jaws
shirt and sat behind my desk. It threw him, because he had made a big deal of giving out these shirts. He had a real hard time getting words out of his mouth, but all the difficulties and concerns poured out. This picture was important to him, vitally important. There were such huge professional stakes, and he said, ‘Jesus Christ, we're going off half-cocked.'

“I laid a giant guilt trip on him. I laid it right on the line that this was a great opportunity, and we were going to make a successful picture; he couldn't even
think
not to be part of it. I told him we were backing him all the way. It was one of those things where I myself was shitting in my pants, because I didn't know how the hell we were going to start the picture. Nothing was ready. It was, at that stage, completely out of control, as it was during most of the shooting.”

J
AWS
ran into so many production problems that exasperated crew members began referring to the movie as
Flaws.
“[F]our days out of seven we were making it,” Spielberg later admitted, “I thought it would be a turkey.”

The changing weather was a constant headache, and filming at sea caused enormous logistical difficulties. But the biggest culprits were Bob Mattey's three mechanical sharks—collectively named “Bruce,” after Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce Ramer. Bruce had not been tested in ocean water before being trucked from Universal to Martha's Vineyard, and no one had anticipated the
corrosive effects of saltwater electrolysis on his complex substructure. For most scenes, the shark was to ride on an underwater crane, moving along a track on a submersible platform, controlled by pneumatic hoses operated by men at a floating console. The entire apparatus, which had to be towed out to sea each day, weighed twelve tons.
¶
For weeks after shooting started, Bruce simply refused to work. After Spielberg watched the first rushes of the shark, the atmosphere was “like a wake,” recalled director Brian De Palma, who was visiting the location. “Bruce's eyes crossed, and his jaws wouldn't close right.” That night, Dreyfuss declared, “If any of us had any sense, we'd all bail out now.”

At a makeshift workshop dubbed “Shark City,” Mattey, production designer Joe Alves, and their staff kept tinkering frantically with the machinery while Spielberg anxiously shot around the star of the movie. Picking up on a device in Howard Sackler's screenplay draft, Spielberg, out of desperation, began shooting barrels instead of the shark; in the movie, the barrels are affixed to the shark by harpoon and they cruise the ocean surface as a stand-in for the submerged creature. It was not until late summer that the shark itself was ready for action, and then only intermittently.

“The shark was a disaster,” Zanuck says. “It let us down tremendously. We were starting to lose confidence in Mattey. We were very scared. Quite frankly, I didn't know whether any of us could do it. We thought, Jesus Christ, we're making a picture called
Jaws
,
and we don't have the fucking shark. Today, with computer stuff, you could put the shark in, like Steven did with dinosaurs in
Jurassic
Park.
In those days, it was a strictly mechanical thing. We had a platform with thirteen guys sitting at a console—one guy would control the dorsal fin, one guy would control the eyes … it was like an orchestra. It was the goddamnedest thing to watch. The tail would be going right, but the head would be cockeyed. It was really painful. It took all of Steven's skill as a filmmaker to make it look like it worked. When it did work, by a miracle, it worked so
great.
”

“We shot when the shark was working,” Spielberg recalled. “It didn't matter what the light was doing, whether the actor had the right shirt on—if the shark worked, roll! You know the shark on the Universal tour? Well, that thing works ten times better than the one we had on the movie!”

The pressure on the twenty-seven-year-old director was enormous. “I thought my career as a filmmaker was over,” Spielberg admitted in a 1995 interview. “I heard rumors from back in
Hollywood that I would never work again because no one had ever taken a film a hundred days over schedule—let alone a director whose first picture had failed at the box office…. There were moments of solitude, sitting on the boat waiting for a shot, thinking, This can't be done. It was stupid to begin it, we'll never finish it.
No one is ever going to see this picture, and I'm never going to work in this town again.”

Coping with the recalcitrant shark was hard enough, but Spielberg also had to deal with unrelenting pressure from Gilmore and the producers to keep shooting …
something.
Because of the shark and the weather, there were days when Spielberg could manage to complete only a few seconds of footage, or none at all. But with the film looming as a potential disaster, Spielberg did not want to start compromising on quality on the rare occasions when he was able to shoot. ‘‘There were times early in the picture when we felt we had made a mistake [in hiring him] because Steven was maddeningly perfectionistic,” Brown wrote. “Yeah, he was a perfectionist,” agrees Zanuck. “And I have to hand it to him for sticking to his guns. The situation was very agitating. By the same token, when he knew there were no solutions, he would find solutions. He had to prove himself to a lot of the crew members. Steven can be rough on a crew. He's very demanding. He does some very unorthodox things. Everybody was older than Steven, and a lot of them were very skeptical of him. They weren't seeing the dailies.”

“The entire company had developed a foxhole mentality, behaving like troops in the line, experiencing battle fatigue, nervous exhaustion, and incipient alcoholism,” screenwriter Gottlieb recalled. “… [T]he cast was going quietly insane, along with their director, who could not reveal the fact. Steven would keep his cool, wait patiently for setups, work with his actors, and listen as they babbled hysterically of other projects, pictures they were missing, home and family, and Robert Shaw's income taxes.” At one point, Gottlieb reported, Roy Scheider became fed up with the catered food they were served on the boat. The actor “threw the tray on the deck, and screamed at the AD [assistant director], and shouted at Steven, and then unburdened himself of all the frustrations and observations that had been bubbling inside him for the preceding months. It was probably a Primal release, and it took hours for Steven to calm him down and walk it off, which isn't easy on a small boat.”

Joan Darling spent a day with Spielberg on location and witnessed his frustration when technical problems made filming impossible in the morning and excruciatingly slow in the afternoon. “It was hard for him to sit around,” she realized. “He has incredible courage and endurance as a director. Beat by beat, shot by shot, he was going to get that movie, not in an unpleasant way, but with an inner quiet. Even though inside he may have been going through agony, that never pulls him away from his target.”

A major source of delay and conflict was Spielberg's insistence that the horizon be kept clear in scenes involving the shark-hunting boat, the
Orca.
If the audience was to believe that the
Orca
was out on the ocean alone, far from any possible help and with a broken radio to boot, it was crucial that they not see a pleasure boat drifting by in the distance. But as the summer months wore on, the waters around Martha's Vineyard became crowded with
sailboats. If a boat appeared in the background of a shot, the company would dispatch a crew member in a motorboat to ask the boater to stay away while they were filming. “Some people were nice about it,” Zanuck recalls, “but other people wanted to see the filming and said, ‘Fuck you. You can't tell me to get off the ocean.'” In such instances, it could take as long as an hour for the horizon to clear. Sometimes Bill Gilmore had to resort to paying a boater a couple of hundred dollars to move away.

“I was amazed at how unrattled Steven would get, at that young age,” comments production designer Joe Alves. “Steven's idea was to have
nothing
on the horizon. He wanted to get this vulnerability of three men out there on their boat—and the shark. The studio kept saying, ‘Couldn't you shoot if there was just
one
boat?' But he was relentless about it. There was a
lot
of pressure from the studio. Any lesser director might have given in, but he stuck to his guns about that.”

“Steven will never know the severe beating we would take every night when we would report the day's activities [to Universal],” Zanuck has said, “and that's where the buffer comes in.” The studio was “anxious for us to get out of there. There's always a very tough and fine line that has to be danced around between the production manager and the director, because the production manager's looking at his watch all the time. Sure, he wants to get it right, but he also wants to move on. He's the guy who's talking to the studio every night, and there was a lot of tension there. We backed [Spielberg] up whenever we could. Some things he wanted to do we thought were unreasonable—some suggestions to do further shooting—and we couldn't.