Steven Spielberg (48 page)

The landlocked Texans greeted the movie with a gratifying cacophony of screams, cheers, and applause. Not only that, they laughed in all the right places and didn't laugh at the shark. There was so much demand to see
Jaws
that a second screening had to be added that night. The producers celebrated with champagne in a penthouse of the Registry Hotel until four in the morning with Spielberg, Sheinberg, Gilmore, Fields, and Williams.

“When we heard that first scream, David and I nudged each other—we were in,” Zanuck says. “A lot of doomsayers had pronounced the picture terrible and in trouble. We ourselves had some concerns. We were so accustomed
to the shark being a failure that until we had heard that first scream in the theater, we didn't know whether it was going to be a scream or a failure or a [Bronx cheer]. The word got out immediately to Wall Street.” The morning after the preview, while preparing to leave Dallas, Brown received a call from his stockbroker in New York, who “told
me
that we had had two previews, the exact card count at both, and gave me the comments of leading exhibitors who were in the audience. The stock of MCA/Universal went up several points.”

The reaction was confirmed at another preview at the Lakewood Theater in Long Beach, California, on March 28. The audience in the seaside city where Spielberg had attended college gave
Jaws
a standing ovation. One member of the public wrote on a preview card, “This is a great film. Now don't fuck it up by trying to make it better.” But they
did
make it better. “There were certain things we did not know were going to be big laughs,” Fields said. “Nobody knew that Roy Scheider saying, after the shark jumps, ‘[You'll] need a bigger boat' was going to be an enormous laugh. As a matter of fact, we went back and looped it to try to raise the volume. Nobody ever hears that line thoroughly because they're still mumbling from the scream. I have tapes of the preview that are incredible because that audience not only went out of their seats, they carried on and talked for a full minute.”

A more substantial change was made in the underwater scene of Dreyfuss exploring the wreckage of a boat and coming upon the body of a man killed by a shark. “I have a four-scream movie,” Spielberg said. “I think I can get it up to a five-scream.” Spielberg had a dummy head constructed and, using camera equipment surreptitiously borrowed from the studio, shot new footage in Verna Fields's backyard swimming pool, punching up the moment when Dreyfuss discovers the head popping out of a hole in the boat. The footage was inserted in time for the final preview at Hollywood's Cinerama Dome on April 24, and it became one of the movie's two biggest screams, along with the scene of the shark jumping out of the water at Roy Scheider.

O
N
its fourteenth day of release following its opening on June 20, 1975,
Jaws
turned a profit. Sixty-four days later, on September 5, it surpassed Francis Ford Coppola's
The
Godfather
to become the most successful film in motion picture history to that date.

Jaws
held that distinction until November 1977, when it was dethroned by George Lucas's
Star
Wars.
Spielberg took out an ad in the Hollywood trade press showing the little robot from
Star
Wars,
R2D2, catching Bruce the shark in his jaws with a fishing hook. Congratulating Lucas for capturing the box-office title, Spielberg wrote, “Wear it well. Your pal, Steven.” Inflated ticket prices would help push several other movies—including Spielberg's own blockbusters
E.T.
and
Jurassic
Park
—ahead of
Jaws
on the list of the top box-office hits. But with its $458 million in world box-office gross,
Jaws
remains one of Hollywood's most phenomenal successes, all the more remarkable in light of its calamitous production history.
††

“
I
T
'
S
A MOVIE, TOO
!” Universal reminded readers of
The
Wall
Street
Journal
in a July 10 advertisement. By then, the iconography of the shark and his naked female prey had become ubiquitous. The ad reprinted several editorial cartoons, including one showing the shark with its teeth shaped like a hammer and sickle, attacking Uncle Sam, and another showing the shark as the CIA, attacking the Statue of Liberty. The public frenzy landed Bruce on the cover of
Time
and prompted the opening of a “Jaws” discotheque in the Hamptons. Ice-cream stands began selling such flavors as “sharklate,” “finilla,” and “jawberry,” and a Maryland entrepreneur with a macabre sense of humor began marketing strap-on Styrofoam shark fins. Although Universal was not prepared for the full extent of the demand, it hurriedly licensed a wide variety of product tie-ins, including T-shirts, beach towels, inflatable sharks, and shark's tooth jewelry; animal-rights activists managed to stop the studio tour's souvenir shop from selling bottles of formaldehyde containing actual shark fetuses. (Months before
Jaws
opened, Spielberg proposed that the studio sell little chocolate sharks which, when bitten, would squirt cherry juice. “We'll clean up,” he said, but Universal vetoed the idea.)

Universal spent $1.8 million, an extraordinary amount at that time, for pre-opening advertising on the film, including $700,000 for TV commercials. But no amount of ballyhoo could account for the way that
Jaws,
as
Newsweek
put it, appealed to “primal fears buried deep in the collective unconscious of all mankind.” The magazine also suggested an underlying political reason for the film's runaway success, quoting psychiatrist Alfred Messer, who “viewed the film as a metaphor for the ‘helplessness and powerlessness' ordinary folk in the United States feel in their everyday lives—just this once with a happy ending.” Fidel Castro offered a Marxist interpretation of
Jaws,
seeing it as an indictment of greedy capitalists willing to sacrifice people's lives to protect their investments. “Wonderful!” exclaimed Spielberg when he heard Castro's remark. “That's the whole
Enemy
of
the
People
question.”

Critical opinion on the film was widely divergent, showing that the battle lines were beginning to be drawn on Spielberg.

“Jaws
is an artistic and commercial smash,” wrote
Daily
Variety
reviewer Art Murphy, calling it “a film of consummate suspense, tension, and terror.”
Time'
s
anonymous cover story described
Jaws
as “technically intricate and wonderfully crafted, a movie whose every shock is a devastating surprise.” Frank Rich proclaimed in
New
Times
that “Spielberg is blessed with a talent that is absurdly absent from most American filmmakers these days: this man actually knows how to tell a story on screen…. It speaks well of this director's gifts that some of the most frightening sequences in
Jaws
are those where we don't even see the shark.”

But William S. Pechter confessed in
Commentary
that he could not “warm very much to filmmaking of this essentially manipulative sort, whose sole aim is systematically to reduce one to a quivering mass of ectoplasm.
Jaws
is the very essence of what Brecht characterized as the ‘culinary' element in modern art, high and low—a mind-numbing repast for sense-sated gluttons.” While grudgingly admitting that
Jaws
was “a scare machine that works with computer-like precision,” Molly Haskell told the readers of
The
Village
Voice
that she did not feel “compelled to give it a rave review because I jumped out of my seat…. You feel like a rat, being given shock treatment.”

When
Jaws
broke the box-office record, Universal took out an eight-page ad in
Variety
quoting dozens of positive snippets from reviews and claiming hyperbolically, “The most popular movie of all time is also the most acclaimed film of our time.” Sid Sheinberg told the
Los
Angeles
Times
that July, “I want to be the first to predict that Steve will win the best-director Oscar this year.” But as Spielberg noted, “For the first twelve weeks of
Jaws,
people were thrilled by it. Six months later they were saying that no film that made that amount of money could be that good.”

In February 1976, Spielberg blithely ushered a camera crew from a Los Angeles TV station into his office to record his reactions as he watched the Oscar nominations being announced on television.
“Jaws
is about to be nominated in eleven categories,” he declared. “You're about to see a sweep of the nominations. We're very confident.” But as the last name was read from the list of directing nominations, the TV crew captured Spielberg's astonishment: “Oh, I didn't get it!” he moaned, clenching his fists against his cheeks. “I didn't get it! I wasn't
nominated!
I got beaten out by Fellini.”
‡‡
  That slap in the face was given an added sting when
Jaws
received a Best Picture nomination. Told that his film also had been nominated for music, editing, and sound, Spielberg said, “That's
it?
Best screenplay, we didn't—? Not even
special
effects?”
Regaining his composure somewhat, he picked up his own video camera and taped himself saying in a jocular tone of voice, “For
my
record, I am outraged that I wasn't nominated for best director for
Jaws.
”
He added, “This is called ‘commercial backlash.' … [W]hen a film makes a lot of money, people resent it. Everybody loves a winner. But nobody loves a
WINNER.
”
Although
Jaws
went on to win the three craft
Oscars at the March 29 ceremony, it lost in the top category to
One
Flew
Over
the
Cuckoo's
Nest,
whose director, Milos Forman, also received an Oscar.

Richard Zanuck later commented that Spielberg “made a terrible mistake having a television crew with him when they read the names.” The humiliating experience evidently taught Spielberg not to wear his heart so publicly on his sleeve about the Oscars and other sensitive subjects. His youthful candor to interviewers gradually gave way to far more circumspect public utterances, such as his remark a few years later, “I think my films are too, umm, popular for the Academy.”

N
EVERTHELESS
,
Jaws
had a profound and lasting influence on Hollywood and the way it does business. The most obvious impact was the most superficial: the plethora of cheesy
Jaws
sequels and rip-offs that followed in its wake, such as
Orca,
Grizzly,
Alligator,
Day
of
the
Animals,
Eaten
Alive,
Tentacles,
Great
White,
The
Jaws
of
Death,
Jaws
of
Satan,
and
Piranha.
Spielberg considered the low-budget, tongue-in-cheek
Piranha
“the best of the
Jaws
ripoffs.” The film's director, Joe Dante, learned later that Universal was “less than thrilled
Piranha
was coming out at the same time [in 1978] as
Jaws
2.
They wanted to take out an injunction. Steven saw it and said, ‘This picture's OK. Leave them alone.'”

Spielberg initially did not want anything to do with Universal's inevitable attempt to capitalize further on the success of
Jaws.
While being honored with a somewhat premature retrospective at the San Francisco Film Festival in October 1975, he told the audience that “making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick.” Universal, he said, “offered me the opportunity to direct the sequel, but I didn't even answer them. I didn't call or write or anything.” Despite those harsh words, his attitude changed in June 1977, when
Jaws
2
director John Hancock was fired in the early days of shooting. Universal then offered the job to its feature-production vice president, Verna Fields. Because Spielberg felt Fields had received too much credit for the success of
Jaws,
it may have been the prospect of her directing the sequel that briefly caused him to reconsider his opposition.

David Brown recalled that while he and Zanuck were negotiating with Fields, Spielberg (then in postproduction on
Close
Encounters
)
“called Dick and me in Martha's Vineyard and said he would like to be of any help he could. He felt allegiance to the project. We said, ‘Do you think you could do it?' And he said, ‘Let me think about it.' At this point I said to Verna, ‘How would you feel if we could get Steve? We feel we should take him, don't you?' And she said, ‘I would insist upon it.' Steve also called Sid Sheinberg…. We finally had another telephone call from Steve, who said he would definitely like to do it. And negotiations were undertaken. However, because of his contract with
Close
Encounters,
he couldn't undertake the contract for a year. Furthermore, he wanted to make radical revisions on the script.”

Spielberg offered a somewhat different account: “I said I'd spend the July Fourth weekend trying to find the solution to a sequel and that if I could write it and Zanuck and Brown would push the production to the spring of '78, I'd do it. I spent three days at the typewriter and wrote seven or eight schematic breakdowns. I kept the Dreyfuss and Scheider characters in it. Then I finally said to myself, ‘I can't, I can't.' For me, a sequel becomes a real fish story. I called Sid back and said I couldn't do it…. I decided a sequel would not be an exercise in expanding my own horizons. It would be corporate business.”