The Summer blockbuster was initiated with the release of Jaws in 1975. Adapted from the Peter Benchley novel which director Steven Spielberg saw when it was still in galley proofs, it limned Ibsen’s The Enemy of the People but viewers might also recall aspects of his father Nathaniel Benchley’s novel The Off-Islanders which became the film The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.
Benchley co-wrote the screenplay for Jaws with Carl Gottlieb. He plays a TV reporter in the 4th of July beach scene.
There were three versions of the fake Great White (Carcharodon carcharias) and they were all called Bruce after Spielberg’s lawyer.
Stuntwoman and actress Susan Backlinie who played Chrissie Watkins the shark’s first victim died 11th May 2024 at the age of 77.
Spielberg said of the principal cast: I did go for a big star initially because my first choice for Quint was Lee Marvin, but he wasn’t interested. What I heard was that he wanted to go fishing for real! He took his fishing very seriously and didn’t want to do it from a ‘movie’ boat. My second choice was Sterling Hayden, whom I thought would make an amazing Quint. He had an Ahab quality about him – he had done a film entitled Terror in a Texas Town in 1958, where he played an imposing whaler who walked around with a harpoon. I was a big fan of his, especially from the two films he had done with Stanley Kubrick, The Killing [1956] and Dr. Strangelove [1964]. I don’t remember why, but he wasn’t able to do the role.
There were other actors who wanted to play Quint, and then Dick Zanuck and David Brown suggested Robert Shaw – they had just worked with him in The Sting [1973], which they produced, and loved him. I’d just screened two films with Shaw to refresh my memory, including A Man for All Seasons [1966], in which he was spectacular. Based on that, and of course on From Russia with Love [1963] – with that great fight on a train where he played the nemesis to 007 – I said, “Wow . . . I wish I had thought of him! It’s a great idea!” He fortunately said yes.
Richard Dreyfuss was not my first choice either. I went to Jon Voight first, and he said no. I think we interviewed Timothy Bottoms as well as several other actors, including Jeff Bridges. I was a big fan of The Last Picture Show [1971] – I was going after everyone in the cast from that film, including Bottoms and Bridges. We got turned down or they weren’t available. These things happen all the time. Richard Dreyfuss got the part because I loved [George Lucas’s] American Graffiti [1973]. George was the one who told me, “Why don’t you cast Ricky Dreyfuss?” I sought a meeting with Richard, who said he was interested in seeing Jaws, but he wasn’t interested in being in it. I was persistent, and [Jaws co-screenwriter] Carl Gottlieb, who knew Richard well, kept saying to him, “Come on, it will be fun.” So, Richard accepted another meeting with me, and I talked him into it.
How I cast Roy Scheider is an interesting story. I was going to a whole series of actors, most of them unknown. There was an actor I liked from Serpico [1973] – it was not Al Pacino – as well as another one I had seen in an off-Broadway play. But the studio, Zanuck, and Brown were pressuring me to get a name for this part. I was having trouble finding someone I liked. Then, I remember going to a party one night, and Roy Scheider, whom I loved from The French Connection, came and sat down next to me and said, “You look awfully depressed.” I told him, “Oh no, I’m not depressed. I’m just having trouble casting my movie.” He asked what the film was – I explained it was based on a novel called Jaws and told him the entire plot. At the end of it, Roy said, “Wow, that’s a great story! What about me?” I looked at him and said, “Yeah, what about you? You’d make a great Chief Brody!”
And the famous speech?
The Indianapolis speech about the delivery of the atomic bomb is my favorite part in Jaws. It was conceived by [uncredited Jaws screenwriter] Howard Sackler – who only wrote a one-page monologue as Quint starts to talk about one of the reasons he hates sharks. It was a wonderful scene and I kept trying to get Howard Sackler to expand it, but he felt that shorter was better and never would extend it. One day, I was talking to John Milius, and I said, “Could you make this a speech?” And John said, “Sure, it’s a great idea. I’ll try.”
So, John sat down and wrote page after page, in long hand I believe, a very, very long speech for Quint. It was essentially too much but pared down I knew it was going to be great. When Robert Shaw, who was himself an accomplished writer, read it, he said, “It’s too hard for me to play. There’s too much John Huston in some of this monologue. Huston could say this, but I can’t do it as well as he would. Let me have a chance at rewriting it.” So, Shaw rewrote Milius, who had rewritten Sackler – the final speech in the movie is basically Shaw’s version of Milius’s version of Sackler’s version!
And the most famous line? We’re gonna need a bigger boat. This was improvised by Roy Scheider.
Spielberg said of the experience making his second theatrical-only film: Being on Jaws became a living nightmare, and not because I didn’t know what I was doing or because I was struggling to find the movie in my head. I knew the film I wanted to make. I just couldn’t get the movie I had in mind on film as quickly as I wanted. When we got out to the ocean, a lot of the crew got seasick, and once that passed, a kind of lethargy set in because we weren’t seemingly getting anything done. The end never seemed to be in sight, and yet I was the only person who could reassure the crew that there would be an end to this some day.
I never left the island because I knew that, if I did, I would never come back. Yet I never wanted to quit. Ever. I had terrible, despairing days where I could see nobody hiring me again, and I could imagine Jaws being my last studio movie. I thought I would probably go on to make independent films if I could get doctors and dentists to put up enough money to finance a little movie with four people playing cards in a room. Basically, I didn’t have much hope for any longevity for my career, but I wanted to finish Jaws because I had never stopped believing in the movie.
I thought that if we could pull the shark off – if we could get the audience to believe in this big, mechanical monstrosity, if it really worked, if it even floated – people would be frightened. But I had no idea, nor did anybody on the production, how difficult it was going to be to float that monstrosity and get it to work in the ocean. And none of us anticipated how long Jaws would take.
None of us understood the water.
It was made under the worst of conditions. People versus the eternal sea. The sea won the battle.
Spielberg describes the reaction at the first preview: We previewed the film at the Medallion Theatre in Dallas, Texas. It was the first time the public ever saw Jaws. I’d had only one experience prior to this with The Sugarland Express, where the preview audience just kept quiet the entire time. But with Jaws, it was very, very loud and people went crazy. This preview was the most extraordinary response I could ever have imagined.
At one point, I remember I was standing at the door, and after the death of the Kintner boy, a man got up and started walking out—I thought, Oh my God. Our first walkout. Then he began running and I went, Oh, no, he’s not walking out—he’s running out. I could tell he was headed for the bathrooms, but he didn’t make it and vomited all over the floor. And I just went, Oh my God, what have I done? What kind of a movie have I made? A man has just barfed because of my film. But the great news was, about five minutes later, he went right back to his seat.
The film’s success gave Spielberg carte blanche: The success of Jaws gave me final cut on every movie I’ve made since then. It gave me a chance to make Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I had written the story. I was writing the screenplay. No one wanted to touch it until Jaws became a phenomenon, and suddenly Columbia said, “Go make your movie.”
So, ultimately, Jaws was the gift that kept on giving.
All quotes from Laurent Bouzereau’s Spielberg: The First Ten Years (Insight Edition, 2023)
mondomovies 