25 Deep-Dive Facts About 'Jaws,' the Wildest, Most Waterlogged Movie Shoot of All Time
Jaws isn’t just one of the most beloved movies of all time; it’s also one of the most thoroughly documented. From the moment Steven Spielberg’s wonderfully terrifying, darkly comic shark tale — based on Peter Benchley’s monstrously successful 1974 novel — began filming, Jaws was the subject of countless behind-the-scenes articles and news reports, many of which focused on its perpetually troubled production. Jaws was so obsessed-about, so chewed-over, it made the cover of Time magazine before it had even opened — a rarity in back in the mid '70s, when newsmagazines often shuttled pop-culture coverage to their back pages.
In the 40 years since the release of Jaws — it first hit theaters June 20th, 1975 — moviegoers’ infatuation with all things Jaws has only increased, and the film has gone on to inspire countless documentaries, books, oral histories, and even a semi-regular festival. As a result, even the most casual Jaws fans are familiar with its best-known lore. They know, for example, that Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, was the stand-in for Amity, the island town in which three men — Brody (Roy Scheider), Quint (Robert Shaw), and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) — attempt to take down a killer fish. They know that the mechanical shark used for filming was named Bruce (after Spielberg’s lawyer), and that it malfunctioned throughout the shoot, forcing the young director to keep the creature off the screen. And they know that, if given the chance, the ever-feuding Shaw and Dreyfuss would likely have tossed each other overboard.
So, in celebration of the film’s 40th anniversary, we tried to come up with some of the more deeply submerged Jaws facts — tidbits that even some of the most well-studied Jaws junkies might not have heard about. If you knew all of these already, congratulations! You’re either the biggest Jaws-head of all time, or you’re Robert Shaw’s ghost (and if it’s the latter, please drop us a line — we have a lot of questions about The Sting we’ve been meaning to ask).
1. Benchley considered dozens of titles for his novel — including Leviathan Rising, Dreadful Silence, Dark White, and The Edge of Gloom — before settling on Jaws at the last minute. “No one knows what [Jaws] means,” the author later joked, “but at least it’s short.”
2. Producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown spent $150,000 for the film rights to Jaws, and agreed to allow Benchley to take a few stabs at the screenplay. His versions were never used, but he remained involved with the production: In a letter to Zanuck in 1974, he described an early script of Jaws — which depicted the shark as a rogue, “world-girdling maniac” out for blood — as an “insane farce.”
3. Jaws had sold 5.5 million copies by the time the movie debuted, but there was at least one non-fan among the cast. “Jaws was not a novel,” Robert Shaw once told a reporter. “It was a story written by a committee, a piece of s—.”
4. Numerous storylines from Benchley’s novel were jettisoned from the script, including a romance between Elaine Brody and Hooper; Mayor Larry Vaughn’s financial problems and dealings with the Mafia; and Hooper’s death during the final Orca expedition.
Spielberg on the set (Everett Collection)
5. At one point during preproduction, Spielberg wrote his own draft of Jaws; his version introduces Quint at a movie theater in Amity, where he’s watching the 1956 film adaptation of Moby-Dick, and guffawing throughout: “People get up and start leaving the theater until he’s all alone in the theater,” Spielberg later explained, “and [Quint’s] laughter can be heard right down the street.”
6. When Spielberg approached Gregory Peck — the star of Moby-Dick, and also a producer — for permission to use footage from the film, the actor declined. “He just claimed that he wasn’t proud of Moby-Dick … he didn’t want us to make fun of it, or include it at all.” After the success of Jaws, Peck’s film was rereleased in 1976 with a new tagline: “Before the Shark there was the Whale.”
Watch a countdown of the 40 biggest summer movies of the last 40 years below:
7. Another Spielberg-scripted scene that didn’t make the cut depicted a harbormaster sitting in a shack at night, ignoring the nearby sailboats and instead watches his TV (which just happens to be playing the 1957 WWII adventure Don’t Go Near the Water). As he stares at the screen, the masts of the ships begin moving in the background — evidence that the shark is nearby — and the oblivious harbormaster is eventually attacked in the shack. Spielberg couldn’t afford the scene, so it was replaced in the film by the sequence in which two fishermen are almost gobbled up on a pier.
8. Spielberg originally wanted two characters from his 1974 comedy The Sugarland Express — an older couple whose car was stolen — to make an appearance among the Amity beachgoers. But by that point in the film’s preproduction, he said, the logistics were already too daunting: “[I thought], ‘I’ve got to stop making it harder on myself,’” he later remembered.
Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, Steven Spielberg, and Richard Dreyfuss on the set of ‘Jaws’ (Everett Collection)
9. Jon Voight was approached to play Hooper, but turned Spielberg down; the director also talked to Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges (“I was a big fan of the entire cast from The Last Picture Show,“ the director later explained). When he finally approached Dreyfuss — who’d been highly recommended by American Graffiti director George Lucas — the actor declined, saying, “I’d rather watch this movie than shoot it, because it’s gonna be a bitch to shoot.” Months later, Dreyfuss panicked after seeing his performance in the 1974 comedy The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; fearing he’d never get work again, he called Spielberg and asked if the part was still available. “I came crawling to Martha’s Vineyard for the part,” Dreyfuss later said.
10. Spielberg hoped Lee Marvin would play Quint, but the actor wasn’t interested: “What I heard was, he wanted to go fishing for real … that [making a movie] wasn’t his idea of a vacation.” His next choice was The Killing star Sterling Hayden, who’d played a harpooner in 1958’s Terror in a Texas Town, but he was unavailable. His producers suggested Shaw, who’d just starred in The Sting.
11. Actress Susan Backlinie, who plays doomed swimmer Chrissie Watkins in the film’s opening attack sequence, was supposed to recite “The Lord’s Prayer” as her character is being pulled against the buoy. But neither Backlinie nor any of the other Catholics on-set could remember the words.
12. To record Backlinie’s screaming sounds in post-production, Spielberg stood above the actress with a baby bassinet full of water and poured it over her mouth as she yelled.
13. The well-reviewed The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz opened during filming, making Dreyfuss a star; his ego restored, he’d use one of the assistant director’s megaphones to try to pick up women during filming. "You know why I get so many dates?” he reportedly told Spielberg. “Because I have a 40-foot face.”
Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and the ever-smelly tiger shark (Photo: Everett Collection)
14. The 13-foot tiger shark that’s reeled in by the locals in Jaws was a real fish, one that had been caught in Florida, packed in ice, and shipped to Martha’s Vineyard, where it sat on a dock for four days, making an awful stench. In revenge, irked Vineyard residents left shark carcasses at the doorsteps of Zanuck and Brown’s island dwellings.
15. To make the blood in the film as visually vibrant and distinctive as possible, Spielberg instructed production designer Joe Alves to make sure no other bright-red objects found their way into the frame.
16. Three mechanical sharks — each weighing a ton and a half, and costing about $150,000 apiece — were used for filming. At times, the sharks simply sank; at other points, their hydraulics exploded. They also became discolored after too much water. Filmmaker (and Spielberg friend) Brian De Palma happened to be visiting the set on the day Spielberg looked at the first footage of the shark in action. "It was like a wake,” De Palma later told a reporter. “Bruce’s eyes crossed, and his jaws wouldn’t close right.”
17. The naughty limerick Quint coos before the Orca takes off to hunt the shark — “Here lies the body of Mary Lee/died at the age of 103/For 15 years, she kept her virginity/not a bad record for this vicinity” — was lifted from a tombstone Shaw had once seen in Ireland.
18. To pass time on the set, Spielberg and Dreyfuss sang songs by comedian-musician Stan Freberg; the director also set up a DIY projection room on one of the boats. “Universal had only two films they could send us from their Boston office,” Spielberg told a reporter. “We watched Ma and Pa Kettle on the Farm a lot."
19. For the Orca, Alves secured an old boat named The Warlock. But Spielberg felt the ship lacked character, and replaced the entire wheelhouse. Most crucially, though, he added big windows on all sides, so that viewers would see the ocean everywhere they looked — a move that highlighted just how isolated the three men were at sea.
20. The famous U.S.S. Indianapolis speech was filmed twice: For the first effort, shot at night, Shaw insisted on verisimilitude: ‘Robert came over to me and said, ‘You know, Steven, all three of these characters have been drinking and I think I could do a much better job in this speech if you let me actually have a few drinks before I do the speech,’” the director told Ain’t it Cool News in 2011. “And I unwisely gave him permission.” Shaw went into a bathroom for a while, and returned so loaded that crew members had to carry him to his seat; he eventually ran out of energy, and filming was suspended. The next morning, an apologetic Shaw — who had to be reminded what had happened the night before — nailed the scene in about four takes.
21. For the scene in which Hooper goes into the underwater cage, Spielberg needed footage of a real-life great white, so he secured documentarians Ron and Valerie Taylor to film the animals in the waters of Australia. But because the sharks there were only 14 feet long — about 10 feet smaller than the killer fish in Jaws — Spielberg came up with the idea of placing a dwarf in a miniature cage, giving the illusion that the shark was much bigger. He eventually hired Carl Rizzo, a 4-foot-9 stuntman who doubled for Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, but who had no diving experience. “We had to … dangle him into the Southern Ocean, and have big, huge, monstrous sharks swimming around him,” Valerie Taylor later said. “He was very much afraid, and we had a lot of difficulty getting him into the cage.” A dummy was also used for the underwater sequence.
22. Dreyfuss wasn’t available to shoot the close-up of Hooper’s face when he spots the shark swimming toward the cage. Luckily, stunt-double Frank Sparks had a Dreyfuss-sized beard, and was able to complete filming the sequence.
23. For the scene in which the shark plunges to the bottom of the ocean, Spielberg blended in the sound of a roaring dinosaur from an old B-movie — the exact same sound he’d used to score the cliff-tumbling truck from the end of 1972′s Duel.
24. On the last day of shooting, Spielberg — who’d heard rumors that the crew was going to throw him into the water once the five-and-half-month shoot finally wrapped — wore leather and suede to the set, hoping it would convince the team not to attack. He then snuck away to a ferry and headed toward a waiting car, which would quickly whisk him to the airport. As his boat pulled away, the director could be heard yelling “I shall not return!” He suffered a panic attack almost immediately afterward.
25. In order to secure the film’s PG rating — as opposed to an R, which would kill its chances for widespread success — Spielberg had to cut a few frames from the scene in which the boater’s leg is bitten off; the ratings board didn’t want audiences to see it linger as it hit the bottom of the sea. Brown further sealed the deal by pointing out to the MPAA, unlike other scary movies, no one should be worried about Jaws-inspired copycat crimes. After all, he noted, “nobody impersonates a shark.”
(Sources: Carl Gottleib’s The Jaws Log; supplementary material from the recent edition of Peter Benchley’s Jaws; the 1995 documentary The Making of Jaws; the 1975 Time magazine cover story; this 2011 interview conducted with Spielberg on Ain’t it Cool News)
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