Steven Spielberg. John Baxter
waves undermining the foundations, and dreamed of piling up sandbags to protect it. He felt personally attacked by the shark, and wanted to strike back. This was reflex thinking, punch/counterpunch, the sort that video games sharpened. On Monday he walked into Zanuck and Brown’s office and said, ‘Let me direct this film.’
‘We’ve got a director,’ Brown told him.
He was Dick Richards, a competent technician but, more importantly, a client of Mike Medavoy, who also represented Benchley and had attached Richards to the project at its inception.
‘Well, if anything falls out,’ Spielberg told Brown, ‘I love this project.’
He didn’t have long to wait. Two days later, Zanuck and Brown lunched with Richards, Benchley and Medavoy. To Benchley’s mounting irritation, Richards kept referring to ‘the whale’. Finally Benchley blew his top; nobody who was unable to tell a shark from a whale was going to film his book. Richards said he’d rather make Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely anyway, and the fragile coalition collapsed.
Four days after Spielberg expressed interest, Zanuck and Brown offered him the film – and found, to their dismay, that he’d changed his mind.
‘I don’t know,’ he told Zanuck. ‘After all, it’s only a shark story.’ Wouldn’t it be perceived as another Duel: Everyman v. The Beast? At other times he compared it to just an inflated episode of Sea Hunt, the popular 1950s TV scuba series with Lloyd Bridges.
He was also finding the UFO project ‘Watch the Skies’ both more interesting and more challenging.
When pressed, Spielberg always professed scepticism about UFOs. He never mentioned his teenage UFO feature Firelight, nor the phenomenon seen by other members of his Scout troop in the Arizona desert. Later he would claim to have been converted by the US government’s objections to him making ‘Watch the Skies’. ‘I really found my faith,’ he said, ‘when I heard that the government was opposed to the film. If NASA took the time to write me a twenty-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening.’
What he really believed is unimportant. Not for the first time, he was adopting the beliefs of his audience, sensing what polls later made clear: that many Americans, without having particularly strong convictions, felt there ‘might be something to’ flying saucers. For a consensus film-maker, that was enough. Five years before John Naisbitt’s Megatrends became the fashionable read, Spielberg and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as ‘Watch the Skies’ was renamed, exemplified its propositions: that the best way to beguile America’s slow-reacting public is not to be original but to spot a trend and exploit it; that such trends seldom emerge in Washington or New York but are more apparent in a few heartland states, and in California; and that Americans had lost interest in travelling to outer space. What they now wanted was for outer space to come to them.
It was for the ability to chart the Zeitgeist, to articulate the mood of the crowd before they knew it themselves, and then to exploit it, that Spielberg most admired Orson Welles, whose radio version of War of the Worlds in 1938 convinced thousands that Martians had landed at Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Welles, he said, ‘was not so much writing a radio program about Martians invading New Jersey as about America’s fear of invasion from Europe. War was just a few months away, but Welles’s invasion was not the Stuka, it was the Martian; it preyed on the vulnerability of the time.’ Spielberg, both in this film and in Jaws, would do the same For the record he repudiated Welles’s broadcast, but later he bought the original script for the programme and displayed it under glass at his home.
In Schrader’s script for what would become Close Encounters, VanOwen bargains with the Air Force. He’ll keep quiet, providing they give him the money to keep investigating. They agree, and he spends his life searching, a counterpart of the protagonists in films which Schrader later directed or wrote: Yukio Mishima, Hank Williams, Patty Hearst, John Latour of Light Sleeper and, archetypally, Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, visionaries drawn to self-destruction as their only means of redemption. At the end of his life VanOwen finds the aliens and, as Schrader put it, is ‘taken off the planet, like Elijah. He had fought the good fight and he was transcended.’
But Spielberg wasn’t happy with this approach.
‘Steve took violent objection,’ Schrader says. ‘He wanted the lead character of this drama to be an ordinary guy, a Joe Blow.’
‘I refuse,’ Schrader said, ‘to send off to another world, as the first example of earth’s intelligence, a man who wants to go and set up a McDonald’s franchise.’
Spielberg said, ‘That’s exactly the guy I want to send.’
After a series of increasingly recriminatory meetings, Schrader abandoned the project.
Throughout his discussions with Schrader, Spielberg had kept his options open on Jaws. He even came into the Zanuck/Brown office and handed out T-shirts printed with Doubleday’s inspired cover design of a phallic shark rising from an inky ocean towards a swimming girl. But in the long nights, he fretted that the narrative expired after the first hundred pages, and didn’t revive until the last hundred. Where was the drive for which he’d been praised in the reviews of Duel?
‘I don’t want to make a film,’ he explained to his eventual star Richard Dreyfuss. ‘I want to make a movie.’
Increasingly he visualised Jaws in far simpler terms than Benchley, as ‘an experiment in terror… the behemoth against Everyman… There is nothing subtle about Jaws. There are underpinnings that are subtle, but what it’s about is pretty slam-bang.’ He told journalist Monte Stettin, ‘Jaws isn’t a big movie. It’s a very small picture. It deals with one social issue [i.e.] There is no place in the world to stay unprotected. Which is what this film is all about.’
Benchley’s story had a journalistic simplicity. The town of Amity, an East Coast summer resort based on Martha’s Vineyard, is terrorised by a rogue Great White Shark which snaps up unwary bathers. The police chief, Brody, a newcomer from New York, bows to pressure from local businessmen to hush up the deaths, but when the shark begins taking children from the shallows and wrecking the boats sent out to hunt it, he finds his courage again and hunts down the fish. He’s helped by Hooper, a wealthy shark expert, and Quint, a local eccentric who shows them the brutal techniques necessary to kill the giant. In their final confrontation, Quint and Hooper are killed, but the shark spares Brody, sinking back into the depths with the body of Quint in its jaws.
Writing in the shadow of Watergate, Benchley drew the people of Amity as products of Nixonian moral blight. Quint is a ruthless environmental despoiler. (In case we miss this, he baits a hook with the body of an unborn baby dolphin.) The town’s Chief Selectman has sold out to the Mafia in a land deal. Brody frets about losing his job, while his wife Ellen itches for sex and attention, which Hooper, the conceited Ivy League ichthyologist, provides. Spielberg disliked them all. ‘The only likeable character was the shark,’ he said, ‘who was a garbage-eating machine and ate all the trashy characters.’ In particular, the Spielberg of the broken home, the one man in the house of women, found Hooper distasteful. He saw him as emasculating and cuckolding the sheriff, and making the sheriff as vainglorious as he was. Benchley, already writing the screenplay, didn’t agree.
Zanuck and Brown were so depressed by these conflicts that they contemplated ditching Jaws entirely. During a meeting with Peter Gimbel, the documentary producer whose Blue Water, White Death had shown in graphic detail the dangers of filming sharks, Gimbel offered to direct the film, and Zanuck and Brown, in a moment of frustration, invited him to buy them out. Fortunately for the team, Gimbel declined.
The partners finally convened a make-or-break conference with Spielberg, to which they pointedly wore their Jaws T-shirts, a reminder of his earlier commitment. Sidney Sheinberg also urged him to make the film and, with ‘Watch the Skies’ still lacking a script, Spielberg accepted at last. His deal gave him, on top of his salary, a meagre 2.5 per cent of net profits, against Zanuck/Brown’s 40 per cent and Benchley’s 10 per cent.