Movie break: The house that Spielberg built, and vice versa: Jaws (1975)

First in an occasional series, “Patchouli and B.O.” (a recollection of the ’70s)

Landmark horror film was a first in several ways, and still holds attention today

When I think of Jaws, I think of both courage and stupidity.

—Steven Spielberg (paraphrased), in a 1995 making-of doc commenting on how he made the film as a young man, including with the unforeseen many problems the production had

[Edits 1/17/14. Further comments on interesting facts on this film may be included in the "Jersey Combo Plate" package. Edit 2/8/14. Edit 3/24/14.] 

I’d been toying with reviewing this film for some time. When, in 2012 or 2013, I heard a girl of about nine say, in a public library to a friend, something to the effect that this film was definitely creepy, in a sort of approving way (i.e., it was an effective horror film), I knew that this merely wasn’t an artifact of the 1970s—that it’s as timeless in its way as are horror films like Frankenstein (1931), Psycho (1960), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and others.

Jaws was only Steven Spielberg’s second feature film, and he was about 26 when he made it. He had made the TV film Duel (1971-72), which was added to for European theatrical release the year after it appeared on U.S. TV. He had made The Sugarland Express (1974), which was built on a real story that intrigued Spielberg and featured, as an apparent condition of its being made, a star in Goldie Hawn, who had achieved fame via TV’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Jaws was based on a pulp story, a first novel by Peter Benchley, and it was seen by film producers David Brown and Richard  D. Zanuck as having potential as a gripping film. Spielberg was tapped to direct, after another director had shown interest (thinking hopefully it was about a whale) and then bowed out.

The production was hurried into starting in about spring 1974, in order to get photography going before a film-related strike that, for whatever reason, would prevent any films’ being started after a June date, or such (though whatever was started could be finished during the strike period, apparently). Spielberg and his production team set up shop in Martha’s Vineyard, though the film was set on a fictional Long Island, specifically a town called Amity. According to Spielberg on a 2005 DVD extra, Martha’s Vineyard was chosen because, 12 miles out—enough to remove views of land on the horizon in all directions—the ocean was still about 30 feet deep, enough to accommodate special effects that would be launched from the seabed.

Thus began a protracted production that went well beyond the time limit anyone imagined; it lasted about seven months, to about November 1974 (for 159 shooting days, per producer Brown; Spielberg said one day a week was always off). The main reason was that, for the on-the-sea shots, there was so much interference—from wind, waves moving the boats around, and distant vessels entering shots so that the shots had to be redone—that production slowed to getting a very few shots on a given date, or none at all. In this regard, the stretched-out principal-photography phase was something like that of Apocalypse Now (which, for reasons not just including environmental conditions, ran from March 1976 to May 1977).

The result was two things: with the famously malfunctioning mechanical sharks (there were several, for different views), which were state-of-the-art in their way for Universal production professionals but still ushered in a bounty of technical problems, a lot of shots for the film—as a substitute for ones including the shark—were subtle, with only glimpses of the shark, or some shots without the shark visible at all but presumed to be present.

Also, with the tediously long shoot on the water, it would seem that partly due to chance, enough really-good shots were accumulated that, with the professional editing of Verna Fields, a solidly made film was compiled, with attention to detail and ability to render suspense through a host of vignettes, plot diversions, and visual situations.

Jaws’ accomplishment

At two hours, Jaws may seem a little long—today, a film like this would probably be no longer than 90 minutes—but it seems to have few boring or hokey parts. The deliberateness with which it unfolds its story seems excused by the well-roundedness of the main characters and the sense of place and of the classic middle-class diversion that some people can’t get enough of—seashore living. And while there are some bloody scenes—and the situation where one of the principals (I won’t spoil it by saying who) is swallowed by the “enemy” Great White shark is awful—in all, you have a detail-oriented, concretely fleshed-out horror film that often uses subtlety in a way that today seems old-fashioned. And it taps into an instinctual fear—of a “monster” animal, this one plaguing that American “Mecca” of the shore vacation—in such an effective way that you wonder why it took about 60 years of film history before this kind of story was delivered.

And it certainly appealed at the time. Jaws became the highest-grossing film up until that point, outselling even longtime champs like Gone With the Wind (1939) and the more recent The Godfather (1972), surprising even its producers. In fact, it inaugurated the “tradition” of the summer blockbuster, or at least big-budget summer fare that is aimed mainly at young audiences, which I believe has gone on every year since. And some of its facets even entered the spray of cultural “received wisdom,” rather as happens with great art: the idea of a shark approaching, only its dorsal fin shown slicing through water, with the rhythmic dark notes from the famous score by John Williams, has long been a cliché, or at least widely understood. And such lines as “We’re going to need a bigger boat!” have become about as famous as quotables from the likes of Apocalypse Now.

And this film established Spielberg as a great director—while maybe he often aims at the middle of middle-class audiences, more than some discriminating film connoisseurs might like—and it establishes him as a director of good story-recognizing instinct and well-rounded ability to deliver the full set of organs of a story on film. If you thought Spielberg’s grand career only really started with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), or E.T. (1982), take another look at Jaws.

Just about all the Spielberg trademark features are here: a good grip on suspense (whether in specific vignettes or in how to vary the texture of the larger story to make this work); adept handling of the camera (with influence by Hitchcock and others), such as to move from one still, evocative face (showing a grim reaction) to other characters in one sweep of a pan or dolly, getting to another point in the story in an economical manner; and as is maybe grating to some critics, his rooting his main characters in the middle class in a way that can’t help but allow average audiences to identify with them, especially using young children as frames of reference (not just as passing objects of “cute” shots), as sorts of “conscience” brought to the ongoing activity in the film. (This latter feature would be crucial to CE3K and E.T., among others.)

By way of a closer look

If you want to take a scholarly approach to Jaws, you should view Duel first, if you can find it. Duel is a more barren, narrowly short-story-like tale, but it exemplifies how much can be cinematically done with such a story, with maintaining suspense over a long period, through simple means. As Spielberg says in the two-hour (!) making-of DVD extra for Jaws (from 1995, and most of which is gripping enough), and as another producing person (Sid Sheinberg, former head of MCA, parent of Universal Studios at the time) says, the idea of Jaws was originally as a sort of repeat of the formula of Duel: a dark, linear chase story.

For his part, Spielberg notes that both stories involve a menacing “leviathan,” as he calls both the truck/trucker of Duel and the shark of Jaws. (Spielberg, ever a user of little allusions within his films, even has edited in a hokey B-movie dinosaur sound near the end of Jaws, which sounds like a sort of grace note as the dead shark cascades, in a cloud of blood, down in the water; this same sound, more distinct, is heard in Duel as the truck meets its end.)

If Spielberg had never made another film after Jaws, people would still remember it as a solidly made, gripping horror film, and film buffs could group it with Spielberg’s two prior movies and ask, “Whatever happened to that Spielberg guy? He made two good, creepy ’70s thrillers (along with an accomplished crime/semi-comedy road film), and achieved a huge hit with his third film….”

Spielberg’s career wasn’t just cemented with the dollar signs that were raised by Jaws; his longtime partnership with composer John Williams started here, and he didn’t have to wait long for his longtime editor: that is Michael Kahn, coming on board with Spielberg’s next film, CE3K. (Joe Alves, an important production designer for Jaws, also was key to CE3K; and he would actually direct one of the Jaws sequels.)

By the way, Spielberg in the making-of doc says John Williams’ score is responsible for half of the success of Jaws—a roughly similar situation to the contribution the score of Psycho has been said to make to that film.

A look at details

Jaws is so familiar, and is so fairly simply structured, that the real fun remains in looking at certain details, from different angles. The story is in two big acts: the first hour or so is mostly on land, and amounts to a sort of “making the case” for catching and killing the Great White; and the second half is almost entirely on the water, with Chief Martin Brody, played by Roy Scheider (died 2008) , ichthyologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and local arch-fisherman Quint (Robert Shaw [died 1978]) all forming a task force on the fishing vessel Orca, set on locating and catching/killing the shark—in waters with no land on the horizon and no other ships in the area. Men alone against a wild evil: easy to get.

The source novel had an adultery subplot—actress Lorraine Gary (as Brody’s wife) speaks in the making-of doc as if she regretted that subplot’s not being in the film script and hence her not being able to take part in that subplot. Actually, the story as presented on film, I think, doesn’t need it.

Autobio blip: I also recall having read the novel in about spring 1975; I was in seventh grade, and it had been a best-seller; apparently we students could choose ourselves what books we read for an English class (the teacher was an Alice Carr); and as part of the work I drew pictures that related to the books I read. (I still have them somewhere, including for Jaws. [Update: I found the Jaws pic, but I can't include it (for grins) as a Google Drive "exhibit" because it is on colored paper and has colored features, making it in black-and-white too large an electronic file for my purposes.]) The Jaws story, it’s not hard to understand, seemed especially attractive to a young mind (not that I read a lot of horror or pulp in those days), where the simple marketing gimmick of a huge shark torpedoing up from the depths toward an unwitting female swimmer—on the book cover and on movie posters—was all it took to hook you into opening the book or buying a movie ticket. (Not that the swimmer's being female was key here in any perverse sort of way, not for me, anyway.)

But when I read the adultery stuff (which was fairly graphic, as I recall), I was 13 and wasn’t that wise in the ways of sex and I found alienating or embarrassing the goings-on (in bed, with the narration paralleling the activity to a boat’s movement, if I recall). Maybe it was just my own young person’s tastes and idiosyncratic squeamishness about sex at the time, but I think I thought this marred the book. In any event, the film is fine without it.

Details:

Robert Shaw (1927-78) delivers a character that is both a cliché and a treat. Somehow Quint rises above cliché, with Shaw’s rough-hewn help. With Shaw’s face as broad and proud as the front of a truck, his largely Scottish accent, and his he-man bearing (including that eternal measure of manhood, swilling down the last of beer in a can and crushing the can with one hand), he adds blue-collar spice that you have no choice but to be able to enjoy in order to get through the film’s second half. (Dreyfuss in the making-of doc says Shaw was “extraordinarily competitive—unnecessarily so,” but he speaks of him appreciatively, too.)

Shaw’s speaking delivery (probably angled to convey Quint) is something: with his often-short sentences and his almost musical patterning of cadences that seem a relatively stupid person’s on the surface but are literarily canny on a closer look, he gives the most potent character in a film that one critic has said is Spielberg’s only film with truly interesting characters [this was a writer not long ago in The New York Review of Books; update 2/8/14: I thought it was in NYRB, but now I'm not sure; I checked "How Close to Lincoln?," by David Bromwich (Jan. 10, 2013, pp. 8, 10), on Spielberg's nice 2012 film on that president, but it appears not to be there]. “It ain’t like goin’ down to the pond and catching blue gills or tommycots [sp?]. Bad fish. This shark—swallow ye whole.” [some of this maybe minorly mistranscribed] “I value my life more than 3,000 bucks. I’ll find ’im for three. But I’ll catch ’im—and kill ’im—for 10.”

Even when you can’t understand what Shaw is saying, you get Quint’s point. And even if you might want to parody him (eyepatch and peg leg optional), he’s still fun to take in. Spielberg also notes that the long war story Quint delivers during a break late in the film—about the torpedoing of the U.S. Indianapolis and the swarm of sharks’ eating some of the military men—was originally written by one of the screenwriters, Howard Sackler; rewritten by director and screenwriter John Milius (otherwise not involved in this film); and rewritten again by Shaw, whom Dreyfuss says was a writer as well as an actor. If you listen to the war story closely, even with Shaw’s slightly puzzling enunciation at times, it sounds like a darned good piece of anecdote that is like the best pulp literature.

(By the way, one of the screenwriters for Jaws was Carl Gottlieb, who also plays the Amity news reporter/PR guy, rather unobtrusive—and occasionally with garish 1970s sport jacket—in several scenes.)

From revelers, the shark’s first kill. The film starts with an almost entirely-offhand sequence that includes what became a horror-movie staple: young partiers doing their off-the-grid thing without a care in the world, one of whom is about to become short work for a local monster. The group is fireside on the beach, with guitar, wailing harmonica, beer, and (for those partaking) some “wacky tobacky” (someone reminded me not long ago of an All in the Family gag where Edith observes to Archie, “Those people next-door must be poor. They’re sharing the same cigarette”). Groups of kids partying outdoors were not an uncommon phenomenon in the ’70s, though this group seems pretty cleaned-up and stagy.

And wouldn’t you know? Our young, long-haired male hero (for the intro sequence) has eyes for a girl sitting apart—she’s kind of looking fierce, not too pretty (guess that beer he’s quaffing is affecting his judgment, prettying her up a bit, huh?)—but no surprise, because when she runs off to go swimming, she’s played by Susan Backlinie, by her own admission not an actress but a stunt performer, who appears collegially on the 1995 making-of doc.

The famous scene with her in the water, jerked around mercilessly by the unseen shark, is an iconic horror moment, though if you listen to her water-gurgling screams on a second or more viewing (making-of info tells how this was effected in the “looping” stage), it sounds a little over-the-top, darkly comical.

Rooting the story, shot-wise, in solid “American-ness.” The first shot of Brody in his home with his wife shows some of the texture of this film, which is good for a generally tasteful kind of horror and which Spielberg has mastered as well as anyone: alternating scenes of violence or horror with quieter, “average American day” stuff. And certainly Spielberg shows one of his trademarks—placing our main hero in such a “relatable” home that we connect with Brody from the first time—after he gives chary advice to his kid who was injured on the swings—as he unwittingly answers the phone about an ugly development.

The shark girl—in the long July 4^th beach scene—who first alerts others to the fact the shark is going into “the pond”: first, she’s dressed rather warmly for July 4^th, with a bandanna on her head, worn jeans, and other non-bathing-suit clothes (she looks like a ’70s Special, no?); maybe indicating this shot was done in the cold spring. But also—the real point—doesn’t she sound like she first says, “Syark!” She doesn’t seem like an actress—maybe she was an island resident (as are, evidently, others in the film) enlisted to be an extra.

Adept use of camera movements shows influences and Spielberg’s own arriving cinematic style. Spielberg’s having learned from technicians like Hitchcock shows fairly early, when the post-first-violence scene in the police office has the camera first placed before the somber young man (after some of the girl’s remains have been found), and shifts with the passing through of the dowdy secretary who’s just coming in (first greeting the dorky assistant policeman), going into Chief Brody’s office: in one camera sweep, a number of characters with different personalities and attitudes are caught just enough to see what kind of community (and emergent situation) we have.

You could call this a use of a “master shot,” but the most impressive use of such a thing (at least for the bases it tries to touch on) is in the scene almost midway through the film, where Brody and Hooper have a more spirited attempt than usual to convey the unambiguous menace posed by the shark to Amity’s mayor, played with restrained ambiguity by Murray Hamilton (died 1986; remember him as Mr. Robinson from The Graduate [1967]; and his manner crafted for Jaws suits a politician looking out for his resort-community constituents’ business interests—not so “evil” today). Brody and Hooper want to make perfectly clear that a Great White shark is endangering the community, and so the July 4^th festivities can’t be held as usual. But to no avail.

Here, it may seem puzzling that the whole sequence, which goes on for some minutes, has Brody and Hooper pressing their case with the mayor in some remote location, and then the visual attention turns to a billboard that has been defaced humorously by vandals, about which the mayor makes an argument to Brody. In this latter phase, the camera has moved to be low, to accommodate (from almost a ground-level view) the billboard as well as the actors—and seems to present the actors Orson Welles style, as if looking up onto a stage.

Also, Dreyfuss’s Hooper seems to devolve into rather broad comedy in this scene, and you wonder about the scene’s length and the variation in tone. But from the making-of doc you can understand why this was shot this way, and thus appreciate it as effective enough. As maybe Spielberg pointed out, Martha’s Vineyard’s community reps were so particular about how the movie crew did their work on the island that they required the fake billboard to only be up one day at a time (or one day in total—I forget which). Therefore, any scene or scenes with it had to be shot within a day. It is apparently because of this that what seems like several pages of script were shot with this scene with the three men and the billboard.

Other Hitchcock-like visual touches include the “trombone shot” when Brody appreciates that someone is getting attacked by a shark in the first extended populated-beach scene; a “trombone shot” is when the camera zooms in one direction and dollies in the opposite direction, seeming to make the picture warp (Hitch pioneered this in Vertigo [1958]). Another technique—admittedly minor—is when Hooper is in the coroner’s lab and is examining the dead girl’s remains—and in one shot a lamp is conspicuously within the frame. Hitch did this in a few of his movies, and it gives a sense of there being “middle space” when a character is fairly close, but it also seems to give a little claustrophobic effect.

An implausible plot part is when Hooper suddenly wants to go out on the water, with Brody with him (and Brody drunk, no less), in order to check on evidence bearing on the shark during the night, when the shark exercises his habit as a “night feeder.” In Hooper’s specially fitted-out boat, they come upon an abandoned fishing vessel, and Hooper compulsively has to go into the water in wet suit and check out the abandoned vessel’s hull. (I also understand that at least part of this sequence was shot in a pool after principal photography was done.) Of course, he finds a shark tooth that will be key to his trying to make the case to the mayor about the incipient danger. And—especially valuable to the film—the appearance of the dead man’s waterlogged face in the hole in the hull is one of the guaranteed-scare parts of the film.

But think a minute: if the Great White is such a beast that it’s all the three men can do to not get snagged by its jaws in the second, hunt half of the film, how smart is it for Hooper to go into the water, at night, near the shark-attacked boat when, for all he knows, Mr. Dorsal Fin may still be in the area?