Jaws is widely considered one of the best thrillers ever made, but it almost never happened
at all.
From budget problems to cast feuds and Oscar snubs, we're diving deep into the waters of
a movie that started with notorious production problems but finished with rave reviews, three
Academy Awards, and a whole bunch of cash.
Here's the untold truth of Jaws.
Unfinished script
One of the early signs that production on Jaws wouldn't run as smoothly as planned came
from the script, which passed through the hands of three writers — Jaws novelist Peter
Benchley, playwright Howard Sackler, and comedy writer Carl Gottlieb.
Gottlieb told the Los Angeles Times in 2015: "[Benchley was a] journalist who didn't understand
screenplays.
Sackler did a workman-like job of translating the novel faithfully.
A faithful rendition of the novel was not what was needed.
Something else was needed, and I came on board."
Gottlieb wound up removing a number of subplots from Benchley's novel and adding a dose of
humor to the script, ultimately creating the story that made it on-screen.
Broken shark
Choosing to film out in the ocean and not in a Hollywood studio tank created a number
of headaches for the cast and crew.
However, few things were more frustrating — and costly — than the film's mechanical
shark.
According to Mental Floss, the shark sank to the bottom of the Nantucket Sound on its
first day of shooting.
"And you could hear, basically and every day you could hear this 'the shark is not working.'
The fishy villain, nicknamed Bruce on-set, continued to malfunction, forcing Steven Spielberg
and his team to figure out how to film most of the movie without the shark.
And as it turned out, the shark-free approach worked, and Spielberg later admitted that
"had the shark been working, perhaps the film would have made half the money and been half
as scary."
Production woes
Between mechanical sharks sinking to the bottom of the ocean and boats flooding mid-scene,
Jaws' seemingly endless production woes ate into the film's production schedule and budget,
to the point where some members of the cast, crew and executive team thought the movie
would ruin their careers.
"The studio was running out of patience there's no question about it.
Things were, you know, the atmosphere was getting a little tense."
According to BuzzFeed, Jaws started with budget of $3.5 million and a 55 day production schedule,
but ultimately cost about $9 million and took over 159 days to complete.
To this day, the production haunts Spielberg, who said: "100 days over schedule, all the
water, it was insane.
I almost got fired probably 19 times.
It was almost my epilogue, you know?
'He made Jaws.'"
Of course, Jaws became the highest grossing movie of 1975, and remains one of the most
financially successful movies of all time.
But nobody knew that then.
Actor feud
Much like the characters they played, actors Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss did not get
along during much of the shooting of Jaws.
What caused the feud?
According to co-star Roy Scheider, Shaw initially took issue with Dreyfuss' pompous attitude
about filming a movie.
Scheider recalled in the Biography Channel documentary, Jaws: The Inside Story.
"[Shaw] really thought Dreyfuss needed a slapping down, [that he was a] young punk with no stage
experience."
Things only got worse from there.
Eventually, their feud reached a boiling point when Dreyfuss threw a glass of bourbon that
Shaw had been drinking out the window.
Spielberg remembers that moment well.
"That was the shot heard around the world.
The duo eventually made amends during the filming of Quint's famous USS Indianapolis
speech — again, much like their characters.
And speaking of that scene …
Drunk on set
One of the key turning points in Jaws comes when Shaw's character Quint delivers a harrowing
monologue about the time he battled tiger sharks in the water after the USS Indianapolis
was torpedoed by the Japanese Navy.
"I don't know how many sharks maybe a thousand.
I don't know how many men, they averaged six an hour."
But actually filming the iconic moment wasn't exactly easy — because Shaw was too drunk
to say his lines.
Spielberg told Ain't It Cool News:
"I guess he had more than a few drinks because two crew members actually had to carry him
onto the Orca and help him into his chair.
I had two cameras on the scene and we never got through the scene, he was just too far
gone."
Iconic ad-lib
Although Quint's speech remains one of the great movie monologues of all times, it inevitably
pales in comparison to Jaws' most iconic line:
"You're gonna need a bigger boat."
According to screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, the line was a running joke on set because everybody
thought the barge carrying the production's lighting, camera equipment and craft services
was too small.
"[Richard] Zanuck and [David] Brown were very stingy producers, so everyone kept telling
them, 'You're gonna need a bigger boat.'
It became a catchphrase for anytime anything went wrong—if lunch was late or the swells
were rocking the camera, someone would say, 'You're gonna need a bigger boat.'"
Gottlieb added that Scheider liked to ad-lib the line at various points during production
— including the now-famous scene.
No sequel for Spielberg
After Jaws went on to make a boatload of money, the inevitable sequel talk came into play.
By that point, however, Spielberg was done with the franchise.
He told Ain't It Cool News: "I was done, I was done with the ocean.
I would have done the sequel if I hadn't had such a horrible time at sea on the first film."
Still, that doesn't mean he hasn't revisited the story on occasion.
He added:
"I have a very, very good scene which I thought would have been good for a sequel someday
… every time I think of this scene, I think, 'Hmmm, could this be another Jaws movie?'
And I have to immediately pull myself back down to earth."
Oscar snub
When awards season rolled around after Jaws' release, Spielberg was so convinced that he
was going to be nominated for an Oscar that he hired a camera crew to film him watching
the nominations on television.
"And Jaws is about to be nominated in 11 categories you're about to see a sweep in the nominations."
Turns out Spielberg was a little too optimistic.
The film wound up receiving only four nominations, and although it went on to win three, Spielberg
was upset that he wasn't nominated for Best Director for Jaws, calling the decision "commercial
backlash."
"When a film makes a lot of money people resent it.
Everybody… everybody loves a winner."
That may be true — but nobody loves a sore loser, either.
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