Steven Spielberg (46 page)

“He would jump on an idea with great enthusiasm and take it a little step further until it became unreal.
Nobody
has energy and enthusiasm like he has; it's a wonderful trait. But if you said, ‘I think the family should have a dog,' next day you'd see
three
dogs there. We would reel him back in, because he does have a bit of a propensity to go over the top. His idea for the final shot of
Jaws
—I don't know how serious he was about it—was to have a lot of [shark] fins on the horizon, coming to the island. He thought it would be a great irony that when they had killed the shark, more sharks arrive. We said that was not a good idea. We talked him out of it.”

Spielberg has said that, during the desperate period that summer when the shark would not work, Universal was thinking of canceling the picture—in Hollywood parlance, “pulling the plug”—or firing him. Sheinberg, however, insisted, “No one ever contemplated doing anything of that sort,” and Zanuck and Gilmore also contend that pulling the plug was not an option. But Zanuck admits
Jaws
“was in intensive care. The studio at one point was talking about shutting down and coming back and trying to figure out the mystery of the shark here [in Hollywood], without two hundred and fifty people standing around.” The idea of delaying the picture a year and coming back to Martha's Vineyard the following summer to finish shooting also was considered, but that “would have ruined all the momentum the film had going,” Zanuck felt.

“We listened and agonized,” Brown recalled, “but finally concluded it was wiser to keep on going, however slow the process…. Our budget for the film was about four and a half million dollars, which we exceeded by one hundred percent [including studio overhead, the total production cost was about $10 million]. How could we anticipate costs? We were budgeting a production unlike any previous production. Nobody had ever budgeted a shark.”

Sheinberg and Marshall Green, Universal's executive production manager, visited the location to decide what needed to be done. Gilmore recalls that Green, “who was such an old pro, took one look at what we were doing and said, ‘Keep up the good work.'” “To Wasserman's credit, and Sheinberg's, they didn't put any pressure on us,” Zanuck adds. “They were concerned, because they were putting up the money, but they never considered taking the cameras away. They were very supportive.”

When a studio executive urged Wasserman to have the production brought back to the studio for completion there, Wasserman asked, “Do we know how to make it better than they do?”

“No,” admitted the executive.

“Then,” said Wasserman, “let them keep going.”

Sheinberg's wife, TV actress Lorraine Gary, was making her first feature-film appearance as Ellen Brody, the wife of Roy Scheider's Chief Brody. Her casting in
Jaws
and two of its three sequels inevitably led to charges of nepotism against her husband, but those charges were unfounded, because the decision to cast her in
Jaws
was Spielberg's. When Zanuck suggested casting his own wife, actress Linda Harrison, not realizing Spielberg already had offered the part to Gary, Spielberg exclaimed,
“Oy
vey!”
Casting Gary was “a very shrewd political move” on Spielberg's part, William Link observes. “Zanuck and Brown would say, ‘The kid is waiting for the sky, watching for the boats to leave the horizon,' and Sid would talk to Lorraine, who'd say to him, ‘He's a brilliant director.' Steve wasn't using Lorraine as a favor to Sheinberg, she was very good for the part, but it was a little dividend. Steve knew at that early age that filmmaking is not just filmmaking—it's a people game. And he played it well.”

When Sheinberg visited Martha's Vineyard, he had dinner with Spielberg at the house the director shared with Gottlieb. At the end of dinner, Sheinberg recalled, Spielberg and Gottlieb “excused themselves and went into a corner and started typing, started preparing the next day's work. It was an absolutely terrifying experience. ‘My God! This is the way this is being done?' The thought went through my mind that we may have footage that would never be assembled into a movie.”

After watching attempts to shoot at sea the following day, Sheinberg asked the director whether it would be possible to make the movie in a studio tank. Spielberg replied, “Well, I wanted to shoot this in the ocean for reality.”

“Reality is costing us a lot of money,” Sheinberg said.

“I understand that, but I really believe in this movie.”

“Well, I believe in you. If you want to quit now, we will find a way to make our money back. If you want to stay and finish the movie, you can do that.”

“I want to stay and finish the movie,” Spielberg said.

“Fine,” said Sheinberg.

As Universal feature production chief Ned Tanen recalled, “[W]hen it got ugly and tough—and it got ugly and tough—Sheinberg wouldn't turn his back on Steven. That is really where this relationship comes from. Sheinberg was the president of Universal, but had not been so for very long, so it was a very dicey moment for him.”

F
ROM
childhood, Spielberg has used moviemaking as a way of exorcising his fears. ‘‘Fear is a very real thing for me,” he once said while talking about
Jaws.
“One of the best ways to cope with it is to turn it around and put it out to others. I mean, if you are afraid of the dark, you put the audience in a dark theater. I had a great fear of the ocean.”

When he read Benchley's book, Spielberg instantly recognized a subject that would grip his audience on a deep, visceral level: “I wanted to do
Jaws
for hostile reasons. I read it and felt that I had been attacked. It terrified me, and I wanted to strike back…. I knew I would be happy making a film like that, because it somehow appealed to my baser instincts…. I didn't have any fun making it. But I had a
great
time planning it, going tee-hee-hee! … In fact, I thought
Jaws
was a comedy.”

Watching swimmers being menaced by the shark—from camera angles on shore, bobbing on the surface of the water, or from below—puts the viewer into a position of extreme childlike vulnerability. That strategy is implicit in Spielberg's description of
Jaws
as “a primal scream movie.” The reason it “hit a nerve” with audiences, he felt, was “maybe because it's basically Freudian. We have been taught to suppress our fears, [with] the macho cover. But
Jaws
makes it safe to express fear in public. Then there's the theory of its relationship to our prenatal hours, because people are little sharks at one point; they know how to survive in water for a while.” At the same time, Spielberg's frequent employment of the shark's menacing point of view, seen from the safely vicarious perspective of the theater seat, perversely encourages the viewer to revel in hostility toward its human prey. “You will root for the shark as you rooted for King Kong,” Spielberg promised. The director's indulgence in his “baser instincts” accounted for some of the film's extraordinary commercial success with mid-1970s audiences seeking new levels of violent stimulus, but it troubled the director in retrospect.
“Jaws
is almost like I'm directing the audience with an electric cattle prod,” he admitted in a 1977 interview with the British film magazine
Sight
and
Sound.
“I have very mixed feelings about my work on that picture, and two or three pictures from now I'm going to be able to look back on it and see
what I've done. I saw it again and realized it was the simplest movie I had ever seen in my life. It was just the essential moving, working parts of suspense and terror…. I could have made that a very subtle movie if I wanted to.”

A particularly disturbing aspect of
Jaws
is its mingling of sexuality and violence in the opening sequence, in which the naked limbs of a voluptuous young female swimmer (Susan Backlinie) dangle alluringly in the water before she is torn to pieces (the same sexually charged image was used to advertise the book and the movie). Like the slasher movies that became popular later in the 1970s, the sequence seems to punish the woman for being sexually aggressive; she enters the water to entice a drunken young man into skinnydipping with her, but he sprawls impotently in the sand, unable to respond as she is attacked. In a 1978 essay, “
Jaws
as Patriarchal Myth,” Jane E. Caputi argued that the scene is “a carefully constructed form of subliminal cinematic rape,” with the shark as a rampaging phallic symbol. Caputi's analogy is somewhat muddied, however, by the fact that the rest of the shark's victims are males, and by her argument that the shark also represents “the mythological motif of the
vagina
dentata
(the toothed, i.e., castrating vagina).” Still, there is no doubt that
Jaws
is swimming in some treacherous psychological waters. That streak of misogyny is an attitude
Jaws
shared with other American films made during the period when the women's liberation movement was threatening traditional male prerogatives. Film editor Verna Fields admitted she “came very close to not doing
Jaws”
because of her concerns over whether it would exploit sex and violence: “Steve told me about
Jaws,
and it just sounded awful. The only thing he could promise me was that the picture was going to be in good taste.”

An even more pervasive sexual overtone is the theme of male impotence, as seen in Chief Brody's initial failure to protect his community, and his own son, from the shark. Brody's weakness is typical of Spielberg's thematic preoccupation with flawed father figures. In one of the film's most memorable scenes, Spielberg visually conveys Brody's helpless anguish by using the
“Vertigo
effect” (the combination of forward tracking shot and reverse zoom) as Brody sits on the beach watching a small boy being torn apart by the shark. Brody's reassertion of his fragile manhood in hunting and killing the shark, with the help of Hooper and Quint, is the dominant theme of the last third of the film. For Caputi, this is simply Spielberg's “ritual retelling of an essential patriarchal myth.” But her reading of
Jaws
fails to take into account Spielberg's explicit critique throughout the film of patriarchal and macho behavior traits.

Dreyfuss's Hooper, a bearded, bespectacled, deceptively nerdy-looking intellectual, uses brains (and technology) more than brawn to hunt the shark, but summons up the courage to descend in an underwater cage with a poison-dart gun when there seems no other alternative. The offbeat, sarcastic Hooper serves as a Spielbergian foil for the traditional hero figure, Shaw's
swaggeringly macho, Ahab-like Quint. Pauline Kael observed, “When the three protagonists are in their tiny boat, you feel that Robert Shaw, the malevolent old shark hunter, is so manly that he wants to get them all killed; he's so manly he's homicidal…. When Shaw squeezes an empty beer can flat, Dreyfuss satirizes him by crumpling a Styrofoam cup. The director, identifying with the Dreyfuss character, sets up bare-chested heroism as a joke and scores off it all through the movie.” (The joke with the Styrofoam cup came out of a bull session Spielberg and Gottlieb had over coffee with Dreyfuss in a Boston hotel room, when they were trying to coax the reluctant actor into agreeing to do the picture.)

Equally crucial to the film's nuanced portrayal of contemporary masculinity is Spielberg's depiction of the vulnerabilities of Chief Brody, who, like the director himself, is deathly afraid of water. Spielberg was determined to “take the edge off Roy Scheider as the hotshot masculine leading man … and let him have all the problems, all the faults of a human being. And let him have fears and phobias, and bring all these fears and phobias out in the picture, and then not resolve all of them. Because you can't. That's why a person spends all his life learning about himself.”

“
J
AWS
MANIA”
was the word the press used to describe the public reaction to the movie, an “epidemic of shark fever” that gave swimmers everywhere a serious case of the jitters and severely depressed beach attendance. In fact, the danger of being attacked by any kind of shark, let alone a great white shark, is extremely remote. But the rarity of shark attacks has done little to dampen the fear that sharks have always provoked in the public imagination, a fear greatly heightened by
Jaws
and its sequels.

Spielberg's great white shark is as relentless and implacable as the truck in
Duel.
||
But unlike that truck, whose malevolence was due to the irrationality of its unseen driver, the shark in
Jaws
is inherently destructive, and therefore even more frightening. It attacks people because that is part of its
raison
d'être,
not because it is “a sea beast slightly influenced by the occult,” as Spielberg fancifully put it. Despite its seemingly supernatural destructiveness, the great white is depicted in the film with scientific understanding and even a degree of admiration. As Dreyfuss's Matt Hooper tells the mayor, “What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine—an eating machine. It's really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks.” Hooper's respect for the great white has been echoed in the recent work of real-life scientists, who have increasingly come to regard sharks as an endangered species. The worldwide impact of “
Jaws
mania” exacerbated the vulnerability of what Richard Ellis and John E. McCosker, in their 1991
book
Great
White
Shark,
call “this unreasonably maligned and misunderstood creature … a powerful, magnificently adapted creature of ancient lineage that has resisted our understanding and control, mindless of our attempts to eradicate it.” Benchley acknowledges he couldn't write
Jaws
the same way today, “because all the information on sharks has changed so radically since then. I couldn't show him as being the bad guy, as I did then.”