How Jaws swam out of a perfect storm

Steven Spielberg's groundbreaking film was released 30 years ago this summer. Marc Lee talks to producer Richard Zanuck about its genesis.

"It became a milestone movie," says producer Richard Zanuck. "But we had no idea when we were on location, most of the time with sad looks on our faces and heads bowed."

It was the summer of 1974. Zanuck, a Hollywood "player" with a reputation for knowing as much about the business as anyone alive, had bought the rights to a novel called Jaws and chosen an eager young filmmaker by the name of Steven Spielberg to direct the movie version.

At this point, the book by first-time novelist Peter Benchley hadn't even been published and Spielberg's only feature film to date, The Sugarland Express, had yet to be released. Furthermore, there would be no star names in the cast. So this was a project that came with no guarantees and, to add to the anxiety, the practicalities of the shoot were to prove extraordinarily demanding.

Zanuck was present throughout on the small Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard (and on the waters surrounding it), keeping an eye on how his sophomore director was handling his investment. Certainly, he says, it didn't feel as if cinema history was in the making.

Day after day, Spielberg and his crew set sail from the harbour and headed out into metaphorically uncharted waters. The special effects involved in creating the ravenous, rampaging villain of the piece would have been challenging enough on dry land; on the choppy, nausea-inducing waves of Nantucket Sound they often proved impossible.

"We were lucky to get one or two shots a day," says Zanuck. "The shark was a mechanical monster that very rarely worked. Actually, we had four of them, and they were all hydraulically operated - very crude by today's standards.

"They had all these rubber-hose attachments, and there were 16 different parts that had to work - the eye, the jaws, the tail, the fins and so on. We had a barge bouncing up and down in the sea, with people at all these levers, each of them controlling a particular part. It was like an orchestra with these 16 guys on the barge, and they had to play it perfectly each time.

"But the mechanics just kept breaking down. For example, the shark would come out of the water with its eye closed, and we'd have to abandon the shot. It was so agonising. You'd have actors hanging around for days, waiting for just one shot."

Despite its troublesome gestation (or possibly because of it), when Jaws was released in the summer of 1975, its success exceeded even the hopes of its makers. It became the original Hollywood blockbuster - the first film to gross more than $100 million - and effectively reshaped the movie industry.

Every big-budget filmmaker since has had plenty to thank Spielberg for. And, as director of the sci-fi epic War of the Worlds - one of the best of this year's box-office behemoths - you could say that Spielberg owes himself a measure of gratitude.

Comparing the two films demonstrates just how much movie-making has changed. War of the Worlds (cost: $128 million) is packed with computer-generated imagery; Jaws (cost: $3.5 million) has none. Yet the latter is as great an achievement - and just as frightening.

"Steven and I have talked on several occasions," Zanuck tells me, "about whether we could have made a better picture if we'd had computer ability. And the answer is no, because there was something about the fact that we had to solve the problems concerning the star of the picture, the shark. It made Steven and all of us more inventive."

The opening sequence of the film illustrates Zanuck's point perfectly. In it, a couple of teenagers slip away from a night-time beach party to go skinny-dipping. The girl strips off and swims out into the calm, moonlit sea; the boy collapses drunkenly on the sand. As the girl splashes about gaily, we get the sense of a menacing presence somewhere in the water. Then something drags her under… It's an utterly terrifying moment.

"In the script," says Zanuck, "we had the shark in that scene, but the mechanics weren't working. Steven made it so much more horrifying by having shots from underneath of the girl's legs dangling there, then the girl being ripped apart." All without the audience getting even a glimpse of her attacker.

"I think if we'd had a computerised shark, we would have overdone it, and a lot of that suspense and build-up, which was not really intended, would have been lost.

"Through the years, Steven has been praised for holding back on the shark and waiting, but it was never planned that way. We just didn't have it working."

What, I wondered, was the difference between working with a green, relatively inexperienced filmmaker, as Spielberg then was, and someone like Tim Burton, who directed Zanuck's latest film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

"Well, Steven was never green," says Zanuck, recalling Spielberg's earlier work on The Sugarland Express (another Zanuck production). "Right there and then I knew we were dealing with a guy far advanced in his knowledge about the mechanics of making a film. There's a part of his brain that's unlike anybody else's that I've worked with. He knows precisely how film works - how much do you move the camera? Do you move the camera, or do you move the actors, or both?

"I'd worked with all the great directors at that time, and he knew much more about the lenses and things like that than the cameramen or the director of photography. So he wasn't green.

"Tim, on the other hand, has a flamboyant vision. He does a lot of homework: it doesn't just happen. Behind what you see is weeks and weeks of him studying, sketching little ideas. It's not as instinctual. I don't think I've worked with anybody as instinctual mechanically as Steven."

Richard D Zanuck is the son of the legendary movie mogul Darryl F Zanuck, founder of the studio that became 20th Century Fox and producer of hundreds of films. Richard says he was "born and brought up at 20th Century Fox"; he attended his first Academy Awards ceremony at the age of seven.

His own list of production credits was already impressive at the time he made Jaws. The company he formed with David Brown had been responsible for The Sound of Music, The French Connection and The Sting, which won the 1974 Oscar for best film.

Nevertheless, Zanuck's faith in the 26-year-old Spielberg was not shared by everyone at Universal, the studio that would release Jaws. Zanuck recalls ringing studio boss Lew Wasserman before shooting started.

"Lew said, 'I know the kid is great and all, but, you know, Dick, you'll get out there on the sea, and you'll really need an experienced hand.'

"And I remember saying, 'That's exactly what I don't want - an experienced hand. I want a guy who hasn't done this before, because that way we'll turn this thing into something different and fresh. I don't just want this to be an adventure picture about a shark; I want this to have the terror and all of that. And I really think that this young guy has the expertise to give us something that goes way beyond just, you know, a Moby-Dick.'"

Spielberg's involvement in the film was part of what Zanuck describes as "a perfect storm", the combination of elements that turned Jaws into a worldwide phenomenon.

Another factor was the instant success of Benchley's novel, which became a huge bestseller while Jaws was being shot, helpfully creating a mood of anticipation for the movie. (The paperback edition was timed to coincide with the film's release.) It also helped that John Williams contributed the perfect score, for which he won an Oscar.

Jaws even had a newsworthiness that was a producer's dream. "Everything worked so harmoniously," says Zanuck, "that when we were ready to release it in the summer of 1975, by some strange coincidence, there happened to be more shark attacks than ever before recorded, in places they had never been seen before."

Early previews of the film were encouraging, to say the least. Zanuck, Spielberg, Wasserman and a number of other studio executives attended the second one at a movie theatre in Long Beach, California. The audience went wild.

"They tore the seats apart," says Zanuck. "People were screaming, and old ladies were fainting. It really was pandemonium. I'd never been to anything like it."

Afterwards, Wasserman gathered his men in the manager's office. The mood was buoyant, congratulatory. The head of distribution announced that, after the first screening (in Dallas, Texas), he'd been fighting off exhibitors desperate to show the movie, and was refusing to take any more calls.

Addressing Wasserman, he said: "I'm happy to tell you, Lew, we're setting a record - we have 600 and some theatres, and it's an all-time record." Wasserman paused for a moment, then said: "Cut half of them. Tell half of them they don't have the picture."

Zanuck remembers thinking this was a big mistake when clearly everyone wanted to see the picture. "But Lew was so smart. He said, 'I want to see lines. I want people to have to drive a hundred miles to see this picture.' And, actually, people were flying to see it. I know people who flew from Europe to New York just to see Jaws.

"Obviously, we were number one on the opening weekend, but what Lew did was he prolonged it so that we were number one throughout the whole summer, which had never been done before. He realised the thing to do was not to give the public what they wanted immediately. Tease them. Make it impossible to get in. And it worked."

Certainly it worked. It was the final, crucial element in the Jaws "perfect storm", a storm that's as potent and as chilling now as it was when it first started brewing off the shores of Martha's Vineyard 31 years ago.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk