Steven Spielberg (47 page)

Ironically, a large part of Spielberg's success in creating terror stemmed from the problems he was having with the mechanical shark. A portfolio of storyboarded scenes Universal distributed to the press when the film began shooting shows the shark acrobatically performing a number of stunts that aren't contained in the finished film. But because the director had to shoot around the recalcitrant shark, he had to suggest its presence more than showing it: “I thought that what could really be scary was
not
seeing the shark.” As a result,
Jaws
“went from a Japanese Saturday-matinee horror flick to more of a Hitchcock, the less-you-see-the-more-you-get thriller.” Roy Scheider felt that from the actors' point of view, while the malfunctioning shark “drove everybody crazy, it was also a key element in making the movie much better. There was so much time for the actors to get to know each other, to improvise and evolve as a team…. So it's ironic that the very problem that stalled the production was the one that cemented the movie.”

What Spielberg referred to as his “documentary style” on
Jaws
also was dictated by necessity. “This film required a straightforward photographic style,” David Brown said in 1975. “… We did not want what was done brilliantly and appropriately by Vilmos Zsigmond in
The
Sugarland
Express.
This was a different kind of story.” Zsigmond, however, says he turned down an offer from Spielberg to photograph
Jaws
because he considered it “just a suspense story. I didn't think I could contribute anything.”

Bill Butler, who took the assignment, recalled that Spielberg initially “insisted that we would not handhold it, that we would have everything on a tripod. I told Steve Spielberg, ‘You've never shot on water before, have you? You have no idea how seasick the audience would become if you did that.' And he had to be convinced. We had to shoot some footage and show him what we meant. He soon came to love the idea.” “One of the unsung heroes of the movie,” Gilmore says, was Michael Chapman, a distinguished cinematographer in his own right who did the graceful and unobtrusive camera operating. “Every shot at sea, every shot in the last thirty minutes, was handheld. Chapman had to compensate with his legs for the pitch and roll. I don't know how many times I saw him in incredibly difficult conditions, and you'd see the dailies and the horizon was rock-solid.” To
American
Cinematographer
magazine, Spielberg described
Jaws
as “the most expensive handheld movie ever made.”

Spielberg's frustrations were epitomized by what happened during the
filming of what Gilmore says was intended to be “the majestic shot of the picture,” when the shark jumps out of the water onto the boat before sinking it and eating Robert Shaw. “We shot it and we were so disappointed,” Gilmore remembers. “The shark was supposed to come out of the water with tremendous energy. Take one was no good. The shark came out of the water kind of like a dolphin walking along the water and fell on the boat. We assumed it was a rehearsal and that the second take was going to be better. It wasn't. The shark sort of came up like a limp dick, skidded along the water, and fell onto the boat.

“I went to Bob Mattey and I said, ‘Bob, the shark looks like shit.' He mumbled something about ‘We don't have enough power.' I got into it, and it turned out that a year earlier when he was putting this whole million-dollar package together, the motor that we needed—the motor that drove the thing out of the water—cost $27,000. And without talking to me or anybody, he bought one for $9,000. I said, ‘Are you telling me for the $18,000 we saved that we can't make this shot? It's the
movie!'
Bob said, ‘Sorry.' I told Spielberg, ‘We'll have to print what we've got and move on.' He went bananas. I told him, ‘Steven, it will never be any better.' I knew a lot better than he did. He could be there till
today
and it would never be any better. It's done in cuts, we change the angle; Steven didn't want to break it up. My mother will never know the difference, but all of us film people wanted it to be in one shot. I think Steven will agree it was the only compromised shot in the picture.”

Spielberg's unwillingness to compromise not only estranged him from Gilmore but also made him unpopular with many other men in the crew. “I'm glad I got out of Martha's Vineyard alive,” Spielberg recalled. “The morale was my responsibility, and it was important to keep people from losing their minds…. 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.” According to Spielberg, there was a rumor on the set that when the film finished shooting on Martha's Vineyard, the crew was planning to drown him: “They were going to hold me underwater as long as they could and still avoid a homicide rap.” Carl Gottlieb put a more benign construction on the rumor: “Steven had heard that they were going to throw him over the side to celebrate.” Whatever the case, Spielberg took the precaution of preplanning the final shot with Butler the night before, and secretly arranging to have a speedboat waiting to spirit him away from the location as soon as the shot was ready for filming. Speeding off for the island, where a car was waiting for him, Spielberg shouted, “I shall
not
return!”

“On the road to Boston,” reported Gottlieb, “Steven started blinking and twitching, reacting to a whole new set of visual stimuli. Billboards. Traffic. Highways. Lots of cars and people. The closer the car got to Boston, the crazier he felt. It was like coming down off a five-and-a-half-month psychedelic experience, and he wasn't used to it. That night, sitting in the bar of the
hotel, he and a hyperkinetic Rick Dreyfuss made a spectacle of themselves, mostly by screaming ‘Motherfucker, it's over! It's over! Motherfucker!' (That's Rick's influence. Steven is not so outspoken.)

“That night, staying in Boston to catch the morning flight to Los Angeles, Steven couldn't sleep, jolting upright in bed with a sensation of being shocked with electricity. A full anxiety attack overwhelmed him, complete with sweaty palms, tachycardia, difficulty breathing, and vomiting. When he did sleep, he dreamed he was still filming. Repetitive dreams of Martha's Vineyard kept assaulting his unconscious, and it persisted for three months after he left the island.”

“
W
HEN
we came back [to Universal], no one loved us,” Joe Alves remembers. “We were really looked down upon as ‘those guys out there making this dumb shark movie.'”

Undaunted, Spielberg pushed ahead with three weeks of additional shooting at Universal, in the MGM tank, and off Catalina Island. Verna Fields had been editing the film throughout the shooting on Martha's Vineyard, commuting to location sites on a bicycle and consulting with Spielberg at sea by walkie-talkie, as well as participating in the nightly script discussions. Along with Alves, she even did some second-unit filming. Affectionately known as “Mother Cutter” to the young directors with whom she preferred to work, Fields also served as a “terrific diplomat” when friction would arise on the island, Bill Gilmore said. “She would get people to kiss and make up. She was very maternal. Steven loved Verna. She was like another mother to him.” By the time they left the island, Fields had a rough cut of the first two-thirds of the picture, up to the shark hunt. During months of arduous postproduction, she remained intimately involved in Spielberg's creative decisions as he fine-tuned and restructured the film in the editing room at her Van Nuys home.

Just how much credit Fields (who died in 1982) deserves for the success of
Jaws
has been the subject of heated debate since the film's release. Hollywood gossip claimed that she “saved” the picture. As recently as 1995, when the issue was raised in
The
New
York
Times,
Carl Gottlieb replied, “Speaking from firsthand knowledge and without denigrating Verna Fields's enormous contribution to
Jaws
,
that film didn't need saving.” Shortly before the film's release, however, the studio tacitly acknowledged Fields's crucial role in its completion by naming her an executive consultant on all Universal films, and the following year she became feature-production vice president. “A skillful film editor can make all the difference between a movie that doesn't work and a movie that does,” Mary Murphy pointedly observed in a 1975
Los
Angeles
Times
profile of Fields. Others, including Spielberg, have felt that Fields was given, or took, too much credit at his expense—a feeling that intensified after she won an Academy Award for
Jaws
and he didn't. Fields
diplomatically stated that Spielberg “delivered so much good footage
that it became an editor's dream,” but she did not discourage the speculation with her Delphic utterance, “I got a lot of credit for
Jaws
, rightly or wrongly.”

On Spielberg's next film,
Close
Encounters
,
Fields was to be both editor and either a producer or associate producer, but, reported Julia Phillips, “Steven started to resent all the credit she was giving herself for [the] success [of
Jaws
]
and asked me to kill her off.” Paul Schrader—who had his own falling-out with Spielberg over his uncredited draft of
Close
Encounters
—said that after various people connnected with
Jaws
gave interviews about their contributions to the film, Spielberg “felt they had all conspired to take away his credit…. He seemed to resent the fact that
anyone
has ever helped him, whether they be Verna Fields, Zanuck and Brown, Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb, Mike and Julia Phillips. That's Steve's problem.”

Fields “didn't rescue the film—it's Steven,” Zanuck comments. “But Verna Fields did a hell of a lot. She was really brilliant. She actually came in and reconstructed some scenes that Steven had constructed for comedy and made them terrifying, and some scenes he shot to be terrifying and made them comedy scenes. I'm not saying that Steven didn't partake in it, but it was her idea to reconstruct it.” Although “Verna's contribution was fantastic,” Gilmore points out, “she was not out there on the boat. She wasn't in the heat of battle. Steven has a very good editing sense. In the end, we had the film. If we didn't have the film, it wouldn't matter how good Steven was or Verna was.”

In working with Spielberg on
Jaws,
Fields explained, she tried to “get inside his head and know what he was aiming for. Steve is a good sport, a mature young man who is open, does not mind contributions, but has a clear picture of what he wants…. There was a lot of talk on the set that if
Jaws
ever got put together it would be a miracle, and the picture would never get to the screen unless Verna was a genius. It isn't true. But no one really knew what pieces were going to be put in where; it was so mixed up because they were so dependent on weather and special effects and whether the shots worked that day…. There were enormous problems with matching the look of water, sky, things like that. But we suddenly realized that the picture really worked. There were some cuts I would have liked to make that we didn't, because the continuity just looked too bad, but if we managed to distract the eye for a moment with action we could make it work.”

A
FTER
Sid Sheinberg saw a rough cut of
Jaws
in a Universal screening room, the lights came on and the MCA president displayed no reaction. “Well, Sid,” asked an anxious David Brown, “what do you think?” “It's OK,” Sheinberg said. Hearing that remark “was like being given one-half a star,” Brown remembered.
“
‘
OK'
for a hundred and fifty-nine days? Well,
of
course
it was only OK. It didn't have Johnny Williams's music. It didn't have some
major underwater stuff that we filmed in the tank at MGM Studios…. So the reaction was, ‘Go get the rest of the movie.'”

Even people who had worked on the film had serious doubts about how it would play with audiences. As Joe Alves recalls, “When I saw pieces of it—cut, assembled footage—the color wasn't corrected, it didn't have music, the shark just made funny sounds splashing through the water. You'd hear pneumatic rams, hoses whipping through the water. The color would jump radically. I was just afraid that people were going to laugh at the shark.” As the film neared the date of its first public preview, Alves worried that if the public thought the shark was phony and ridiculous, “We're dead.”

John Williams's celebrated musical score—his pulsating, heart-stopping, four-note motif, primitive in its force and simplicity—signals the unseen presence of the shark and viscerally establishes a mood of abject terror. The first time Williams played the theme for Spielberg, the director began to laugh. “Oh, no, this is serious,” insisted Williams. “I mean it. This is
Jaws.”
“At first I thought it was too primitive,” Spielberg admitted. “I wanted something a little more melodic for the shark, and then Johnny said, ‘What you
don't
have
here is
The
L-Sh
aped
Room
… you have made yourself a popcorn movie.' And he was absolutely right.”

With the addition of the music, it no longer mattered that the mechanical shark had such a limited repertoire or that when it emerges from the sea to gobble up Robert Shaw in the climactic scene it looks like a performer on the Universal Studios tour.
Jaws
“was a good picture before it was scored,” said Fields, “but [the] score did tremendous things for it.”
**

T
HE
first sneak preview of
Jaws
at Dallas's Medallion Theater on March 26, 1975, was advertised without the title but with a drawing of a shark menacing a swimmer, lifted from the cover of the paperback edition. Zanuck and Brown drove from their hotel at three in the afternoon to check out the theater. “There was a huge line,” recalls Zanuck. “We asked each other, ‘What's playing here?' Then it dawned on us.”