Hands-off decisions saved “Jaws” and “Titanic”

In Hollywood history, some big moments came when wise souls chose to do nothing.
Consider two blockbusters that almost weren’t:
–In 1974, “Jaws” (shown here) veered wildly over its budget and beyond its schedule. “I was terrified I was going to be fired,” Steven Spielberg recalled. Sid Sheinberg, the head of Universal Pictures, flew to Martha’s Vineyard, had a gentle chat with his young director … and decided to leave him be.
— Two decades later, “Titanic” was in the same sort of trouble. Bill Mechanic, head of Fox, drove to the film site to talk to James Cameron.
This talk didn’t go as well. Cameron fumed and argued. As Mechanic drove home, he considered stopping the project and taking a $100 million loss.
He might have done so, he said later, except for two things: He’d already seen the Leonard DiCaprio/Kate Winslet scenes, which were splendid; also, Cameron called to apologize. Mechanic decided to let the movie finish.
Those decisions changed everything. “Jaws” eventually topped $260 million in the U.S. and Canada (more than $1 billion when adjusted for inflation); “Titanic” topped $670 million domestically and $2 billion worldwide.
Each was, for a time, the best-selling movie ever. Each spurred the industry:
— Cameron’s “Avatar” films later rescued Hollywood from a low point.
— Spielberg launched the summer-blockbuster era. Now his “Jaws” celebrates its 50th anniversary. The “Jaws@50” documentary (where the quotes in this story are from) airs at 9 p.m. Thursday (July 10) on National Geographic; it’s already on Peacock, alongside the four “Jaws” movies.
At 26, Spielberg had already directed five shorts, eight TV episodes and four movies — three for TV, one for theaters. Two of the films (“Duel” and “Sugarland Express”) had drawn strong praise. Now he was handed Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel.
Then, it seems, it took a village to write the script. Benchley tried a couple drafts. Two others then turned it down, before playwright Howard Sackler wrote a full script. Spielberg asked Carl Gottlieb to “add some humor”; instead, Gottlieb stayed for the whole shoot, playing a role (the local newspaper editor) and rewriting the script before each day’s filming.
There was more. Spielberg liked Sackler’s notion that a key character (Quint) was a survivor of a real-life shark disaster during World War II. He asked John Milius to write a monolog; when actor Robert Shaw saw the seven-page result, he wrote the final, shortened version.
For authenticity, Shaw tried to do the scene while drunk. (“He was becoming much more like Quint,” Spielberg said.) That failed; the next day, cold-sober, he did it perfectly.
Others also added things. Spielberg suggested the most famous line, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” His “Sugarland Express” writers came up with the way the shark would die. And some other lines came from actors.
That was particularly true of Craig Kingsley, considered a local character around Martha’s Vineyard. He was cast as fisherman Ben Gardner, improvising most of his lines.
Other locals were also cast. Spielberg only brought eight people from Hollywood; the rest were islanders, adding to the authenticity.
One of the Hollywood people was stuntwoman/actress Susan Backline, whose role as a nude swimmer had a quick and bloody ending.
Spielberg filmed lots of gory moments for the film. Later, he said, “I was able to come to my senses” and moderate them. He emerged with a PG rating, in the days before PG-13 existed.
In the final version, much is unseen. At first, the shark was mostly underwater, invisible but signaled by the music.
That was from John Williams. He said he was “composing for “a very young man who I’d only worked with on one other picture, ‘Sugarland Express,’ and I liked immensely.”
Thinking of the music cues in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Williams created a two-note theme that capsulized terror.
It’s good that Spielberg wasn’t using the shark much at first, because the mechanical creation often didn’t work. Tested in regular water, it quickly corroded in salt water.
At one point, the shark was supposed to rise triumphantly from the water. Instead, it somehow came up tail first.
As problems persisted, “Jaws” went 100 days beyond its schedule. When filming in Martha’s Vineyard finally ended, Spielberg had an all-out panic attack. “I couldn’t breathe; I thought I was having a heart attack.”
There was still two months of Hollywood filming, plus lots of editing. Then “Jaws” was ready for its release on June 20, 1975.
Some critics considered it just another action film; others liked the sub-plot about the mayor who wanted the beach open to boost business. Fidel Castro praised the book as “a moral metaphor about the corruption of capitalism.”
Gradually, people noticed its cinematic skill. The American Film Institute lists “Jaws”as No. 56 on its all-time list. “Jaws@50” is filled with directors who say they were influenced by it — J.J. Abrams, Jordan Peele, Robert Zemeckis, Guillermo del Toro and more, including Steven Soderbergh, who saw it 32 times in theaters.
Then there’s Ariana Grande … who had a “Jaws” theme for her second birthday.
Spielberg would go on to be a budget-conscious producer-director, proud of the fact that he made “Jurassic Park” for $59 million, at a time (1993) when some movies were costing twice as much.
Now a new Jurassic film is in theaters, while the old ones are on cable … and are on Peacock, alongside the “Jaws” trove. And now Cameron’s “Avatar” films are on Disney+, with more on the way. Sometimes it works well to just let a director continue a difficult project.