Before Jaws became a cinematic classic, and the very first American “summer blockbuster”, director Steven Spielberg thought the 1975 film would be the last one he would be allowed to make.
Spielberg, who was just 26, had decided to shoot his second film, a thriller about a killer shark, on location on the east coast island of Martha’s Vineyard.
“My hubris was that we could take a Hollywood crew, go out 12 miles into the Atlantic Ocean, and shoot an entire movie with a mechanical shark. I thought that was going to go swimmingly,” Spielberg told an audience of journalists at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles this week, where an exhibit marking the 50th anniversary of Jaws is opening on Sunday.
“I thought my career was virtually over halfway through production on Jaws, because everybody was saying to me, ‘You are never going to get hired again,” Spielberg recalled.
Jaws, the Academy Museum’s first exhibit focused on a single film since the museum opened in 2021, traces the film’s colorful struggles, including the many mechanical failures of the titular prop shark, along with the artistic collaborations that led to its ultimate success. Film editor Verna Fields won an Oscar for her work shaping the film’s legendary scenes of suspense. So did composer John Williams, whose ominous “dun-dun” theme song has become one of the most recognizable movie soundtracks. The $260.7m success of the film with domestic audiences also launched Spielberg’s career as one of the most influential American directors.
But in 1974, as the production was filming on Martha’s Vineyard, it was far from clear that the movie would secure a place in Hollywood history – or even that the film would actually be finished at all. Spielberg’s attempt to shoot on the actual ocean soon put the production massively over budget and behind schedule, he said, due to constant problems with “the shark, the weather, the currents, the regattas”.
“I’ve never seen so much vomit in my life,” Spielberg said of people’s queasiness at sea, to laughter. “I haven’t! In the six months out to sea, I have never seen so many people getting sick.”
Spielberg himself “never got seasick”, he said – “and I think that is only because I had the weight of this production on my shoulders and I didn’t have time to get sick.”
Filming on the ocean caused non-stop challenges, many of which are highlighted in the new exhibit, which focuses on the value of artistic problem-solving. At one point, a speedboat pulling the Orca, the small boat the main characters use to hunt the great white shark, went too fast and pulled out the boat’s planking, sending John Carter, the film’s Academy Award-winning sound director, into the water, his recorder still in his hands.
While the Amity Island Regatta is a key plot point in the films, the actual boat races around Martha’s Vineyard caused endless headaches for Spielberg’s wide-lens ocean shots.
“I cannot tell you how nerve-racking it is to get the cameras in position. The tides are slack. We don’t have currents dragging our anchors. The picture boat moves away from the Orca, moves away from the electrical barge, and we’re finally ready to shoot. Everybody’s ready. And all of a sudden, the first white sail appears on the horizon, followed by another one, followed by 25 white sails, little regattas going through the frame,” Spielberg said.
Because it was 1974, there were no simple tools to erase the sails from the film post-production. “So, most of the time, we just waited,” Spielberg said. “People played cards. A lot of people vomited.”
Then there were all the technical problems with the three animatronic sharks, which Spielberg nicknamed Bruce, after his lawyer, Bruce Ramer.
The sharks, which were powered by pneumatic and hydraulic systems, had to be assembled on a very rapid timeline after the film studio moved up Jaws’s production schedule to better capitalize on the bestselling success of the novel on which it was based, exhibit curator Jenny He told the Guardian. Many special effects experts refused the assignment, saying the sharks would take years to create.
“The special effects team who designed and constructed the shark never had a chance to test it in salt water,” He said. “The first time they put it in the ocean was in Martha’s Vineyard.”
As she noted, wryly, “mechanics and salt water really didn’t mix”. The pressurized air systems designed to manipulate the sharks used long underwater tubes, which sometimes got unplugged, or filled with oil, or simply malfunctioned because of the distances they had to snake through the sea.
As the filming dragged on, “I was offered, actually, several times, a chance to gracefully bow out of the film, not to be replaced by another director, but for the film to be shut down,” Spielberg said. He refused.
The rest of his production team, crucially, stood by him, even as the long delay put a strain on the whole crew: “Every week, I’d have five or six people come over to me to say: ‘I haven’t seen my family. I’ve been here for five months. Just give me an incentive to keep working on your movie. Give me a date, a guarantee of when you’re going to wrap.’ And I didn’t know when we were going to wrap.”
What got the cast and crew through it all, Spielberg said, “was being in the company of each other … the camaraderie that happens when you’re just trying to survive something.”
While it would likely have been easier to film the prop sharks in a controlled tank environment, the curator said, Spielberg’s choice to shoot on location in Martha’s Vineyard was crucial to the film’s artistic power: “He made you feel that you could encounter Bruce in the ocean,” she said. “Even though there were challenges, without those challenges, I don’t think Jaws would have been as successful.”
Spielberg, who has since been nominated for nearly two dozen Academy Awards, praised the new exhibit and said he was amazed to see the more than 200 objects the museum curators “have so ingeniously assembled” from a film that finished production more than a half century ago.
“Why would anybody, when we shot the opening scene of Chrissie Watkins being taken by the shark, and we had a buoy floating in the water – how did anybody know to take the buoy and take it home and sit on it for 50 years and then loan it to the Academy?”
“How did they know? I didn’t know!” Spielberg said.